Twitter for the Gainfully Available and Actively Under-Employed

How can Twitter help the Gainfully Available and the Actively Under-Employed?

Do the terms Gainfully Available or Actively Under-Employed apply to you?

If either of these terms describe you, it’s OK. There are LOTS of us in the same predicament today. As you may have seen on a previous post – I was RIF’d as part of the Open Text acquisition of Captaris.

What I have found is that there is a tremendous opportunity for people to use/leverage Social Networking to see what’s going on out there. And contrary to what you might be seeing in the news --- there ARE things going on out there. There are enlightened companies that are investing now to take advantage of the current market conditions and prepare for the inevitable uptick in business.

So, can you give me an example?
Sure, last week a Tweet was created by Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) referencing the recent layoff of a fellow Twitter’er @Warrenss. This one Tweet caused me to look up Warren and see that he is local to Seattle – not that location is all that important, but in this case I had local knowledge because I was going thru the same thing. I Tweeted Warren and we connected initially over the Twitter, then because we established an initial level of trust, we connected over the phone. We spent some time on the phone and found out we know a lot of the same people (@lliu and @seanodmvp among others). This was not too surprising, but the key point is that we would have never connected without that initial tweet by @ScottMonty. This led to an introduction of Warren to a local company I know of that is still growing and still investing to handle the current workload and the expected workload in the coming quarters.

Source: www.lumaxart.com/

Another great example I love (and may take to “borrowing”) is something I saw from @dcrblogs where he gives a shout out to people. I’m not sure how he picks the people, but I was one of them today (Thx @dcrblogs). While this may not lead to something tangible to those that are Gainfully Available or Actively Under-Employed it highlights one of the other key benefits of Twitter. That there is a whole world of people out there that might, just might, be able to help.

If you have an example of how Twitter has helped you work thru your layoff / RIF I’d love to hear about it. Comment below, e-mail me directly, or follow/DM me on Twitter (@jshuey).

Full Disclosure - The Gainfully available comment I borrowed from a fellow Twitter’er --- Owen Greaves @OwenGreaves