Those of you who follow football may have noticed that English Premiership club Chelsea have sacked yet another manager.  This time it was the relatively young and inexperienced Andre Villas-Boas, who is only 34 years old.  Whilst he may have made some mistakes in his man-management and being too adventurous in his team’s tactics, it seemed ridiculous to give someone so young such a short time in the job.  Everyone in football knew it was a difficult job and that the incoming manager would need to do some rebuilding, with the playing squad in a transitional phase.  But patience isn’t a virtue in football these days and Villas-Boas was sent packing.

Now, I’ve heard a lot of people expressing little sympathy for Villas-Boas because he will be receiving a 7 figure compensation.  But I think that misses a very important point.  Whilst the money he receives will be substantial, what damage has this done to his reputation?  Your perceived value is vitally important to your employability.  If Villas-Boas has taken a massive knock, then how much will that affect his reputation and thereby his earning potential in the future?  He’s young enough to hopefully be able to rebound from this and have a successful managerial career.  But this does highlight the importance of your perceived value.  It’s not just enough to be good at your job.  You really need to be able to market your abilities to your current employer and future, potential employers.

So what do you want employers to know about you?  Well the main thing is, they need to know the Results they can get by employing you.  What will you bring to the table.  You need to be able to tell STAR stories.  STAR is an anacronym for:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

Basically, you have to tell employers what you specifically did (not the department, not the team, but you), how you did it and what results were achieved.  Companies want problem solvers, so if you can show that you can solve their major problems then they will attach a high value to you.  If you can’t tell people these stories then your perceived value will be lower.  If won’t mean you can’t do the job.  Just in the employer’s perception, they might rank you a little bit lower than if you could provide evidence of your abilities.

One great side effect of a high perceived value is that it great in combating ageism.  Someone like Lord Alan Sugar will have a massively high perceived value.  Business people aren’t going to turn down working with him on the basis of his age, because they know his capabilities and what he has achieved over the years.

On Wednesday night, during the first Chelsea game since Villas-Boas was sacked, Chelsea fans were chanting the name of “Jose Mourinho”.  Now there is a man who has got some major results over his career....and is not afraid to promote them!

I’ve yet to meet someone who didn’t care what other people thought about them.  In fact I sometimes think that the more that someone insists they don’t care, the more they actually do!  “The Lady doth protest too much”.  The advent of new technology has brought with it new methods of communication.  And new places where people can congregate, in virtual worlds.   People are communicating with other people on online forums, never having met each other.  And with anywhere that people congregate, there is the issue of people’s reputations.

When you google your own name what comes up?  I google my name regularly.  Not because I’m a narcissist.  But if people are searching for me online, then I want them to see decent content come up that I believe will reflect me in a good light.  So if you google “Alistair Miller”, then my career coaching website comes out right at the top of the first page.  Virtually all the other google entries that come up in relation to me are career related.  But I constantly monitor this as my online reputation is important.  If a potential client is to google my name then I want them to see information on me that makes me look professional and an expert in my subject area.

So I go back to an earlier question.  What happens when you google your name?  Do the entries that come up portray you in a professional light?  Or do some of the search results come up with things that you’d rather people didn’t see?  This is where restricting access to sites like Facebook is so important.  If you’ve got photos taken of you having fun at a party, would you want everyone to see those?  If you’ve been snapped looking drunk in a bar, then is that something you want a potential recruiter to see?  Because, make no mistake, more and more recruiters are checking people’s online profiles.  Take a look at this article by Erica Swallow on Mashable for some statistics - http://mashable.com/2011/08/28/social-media-recruiting-infographic/

So if you do have any undesirable content coming up, could you restrict people’s access to it or delete it all together? 

But don’t just focus on what you don’t want people to see.  Think about what you do want people to associate with you.  What is your area of expertise?  Which industry are you a specialist in?  Once you’ve decided on what you do want people to see, it’s a question of getting the information out there.  These days there are so many ways for people to broadcast online.  You can deliver quality content through these channels:

• Writing a Blog

• Having your own website

• Writing articles for websites such as Ezine, which they publish online

• Publishing content on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook

• Producing videos which you can upload to sites such as YouTube and Vimeo

• Submitting articles to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon and Delicious

• Submitting articles to social news sites such as Digg and Reddit.

You can reach a potentially mass market audience relatively easily these days.

Another aspect of managing your online reputation is broadcast the opinions of your fans.  If you have a Linkedin profile, then having Recommendations on there is extremely important.  It’s an endorsement of your quality that someone else is prepared to publish how good your work was for them.  And there’s nothing like good word of mouth PR, Recommendations and Testimonials for you to leave a good impression with people who come across you online.

So don’t just leave it to chance.  Make sure you follow this simple plan:

1. Regularly monitor your online profile
2. Do damage limitation for any undesirable content
3. Promote worthy content that you do want people to see

One of the biggest losses people can have in their life is when they lose their job.  When someone is made redundant, their experience is normally more than just “they used to be employed at Company X and they no longer work there”.  Like anything in life, there are the bare facts of a situation, and there is the emotional side.

People’s negative emotions can flow from worries about how they fear they might cope with the situation.  Will they be able to survive financially if they don’t quickly find another job?  If they are above 50, they might have further worries that they will be considered past their prime and that hiring companies will look past them and go for younger candidates.  What about supporting a family?  How will they cope with that whilst they’re out of work? 

There is also the sense of identity that a lot of people feel with their work.  If someone is a high flying executive and then they are laid off and are struggling to find work, then that may really hit their self-worth.  But you don’t need to be a high flier to associate a lot of your self-worth with your job.  Many people feel a pride in what they do and to have that taken away from them, against their will, can be quite hard for them to deal with.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s not just a case of looking at the bare facts.  What someone’s job means to them and how much they link their personal identity to it is an individual’s choice.  There is the question of whether it is wise to link your self-worth to things outside of you but the fact remains that many people do this with their job.  So coping with the knock to their sense of identity can take some time for them to come to terms with.

The circumstances in which someone left their work can also play a part in their emotional state.  In quite a lot of cases bosses use redundancies as an excuse to get rid of staff that they don’t personally get on with, rather than strictly looking at it in terms of who are the best performers and should be kept on.  If someone feels, whether rightly or wrongly, that their bosses used redundancies as an excuse to get rid of them, then they may be feeling quite a lot of bitterness.  Going straight back into another job may not be that straight forward, if they haven’t come to terms with their intense feelings of anger and frustration.  Their emotional issues may need to be dealt with first, before they can move back into the workplace.

Considering some of the intense feelings that people may experience when they have been made redundant, it is always a good idea to look for support.  Trying to deal with all this on their own is probably not the best idea.  Depending on how someone feels their friends or family would react to their need for emotional support, it may be a good idea to talk these issues through with someone who is outside their usual family or social circle.  Whatever works basically.

There is also another angle to emotional issues brought up by redundancies.  And that is with the people who have been kept on at work and survived the redundancy chop.  They may be feeling some guilt that they have been allowed to stay, whilst some of their friends and former work colleagues have been shown the door.  They may also have bigger workloads as a result and this can increase their stress levels.

So you can see that redundancy is more than just another job statistic.  There is an emotional side to it that can affect the person laid off, their friends and family, and their former work colleagues who are still working at their former workplace.  Which goes to show the importance of work to us and how much it means on a personal level.