Up In The Air
We saw the new George Clooney film, Up In The Air, this weekend. It is a forgettable film but it intrigued me because it is apparently about an outplacement company in the United States. And it seemed to highlight glaring differences between the way outplacement is conducted in the United States and in the UK. Until I looked into it more closely.
The hero of the film is a hatchet man. His job is to go into companies and tell the staff that they are fired. He does this, so it seems, because the management of the company are too weak, too scared or too incompetent to do it themselves. He gives motivational lectures encouraging people to cast off their commitments. He lives his dream by spending the vast majority of his life flying from city to city; no ties, no commitments, just endless travel and firing. Like the murderer Cain, the hatchet man is a wanderer and an outcast in the land.
Watching the film I assumed that this way of doing things was the norm in North America. Until I got home and logged in to LinkedIn’s Outplacement Professionals Network. My American colleagues appeared to be as perplexed as I was. Of course we have all had occasional episodes where a weak manager has only told half the story to someone he is making redundant, and we have had to put the poor employee out of their misery. And we all support and sometimes train HR staff who are going through the unpleasant process of making people redundant. But in the real world there is no such thing as someone who clocks up hundreds of thousands of air miles a year firing people. And if there was, he would not be working for an Outplacement company.
So how did the film makers get it so wrong? I think that it illustrates perhaps the greatest weakness that the emerging career profession faces. Career professionals help their clients to create better careers for themselves, to understand their strengths and what they are looking for in a job and to succeed in the job market. But because we are an emerging profession, most people have never heard of what we do and even fewer understand it. Worse still, although any career professional worth their salt is qualified and experienced, there are no barriers to entry. Anyone can claim to be a career coach or consultant, and do tremendous damage to our profession.
The challenge facing career professionals is to educate the world in what we do. We are as essential to the wellbeing of every working person as doctors, lawyers and teachers. But most people understand what they do, and why they are needed. They are only just beginning to understand what we do and why they need us .
It is very exciting being at the forefront of an emerging profession. But it is also a tremendous challenge. We need to rise to it. We need to make sure we are outstanding at what we do, and we need to educate. Unless we want to sit through more nonsense like Up In The Air.
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Tags: Career Professionals, George Clooney, Job Loss, Redundancy, Up In The Air
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