Keeping Job Current

I was doing some reading on the internet and came across an article by a career consultant in Cincinati named Andrea Kay, entitled, Evolve Your Skills to Keep Your Work Relevant. I thought she made some great observations and offered some helpful suggestions. Fits well with what I've been thinking about trying to keep current, especially regarding technology, and avoid being a "Blinking 12:00 Generation" member. She wrote:

At some point you really need to sit down and figure out how to keep yourself employable. If you don't, you will constantly be trying to figure out how to stay merely employed. Here's the difference: When you only wonder, "where are the jobs?" you've focused on merely staying employed. But when you focus on discovering new ways to apply your talents and interested to the megatrends shaping the world, that's thinking about staying employable for the future. Doing the latter will keep you relevant, which means you're less likely to be in that constant state of asking, "where's my next job?" You should be looking at trends that then leads you to, well, a way to stay employable the rest of your career.

That's not only true for your next job, but true to stay relevant in your current position or with your current employer. Throughout her article she encourages the reader to start asking three main questions, sooner rather than later, and often. According to Kay, we should keep asking,

How can I:

• Retrofit my skills to remain relevant?
• How do technological trends and social changes apply to my career?
• What new skills and knowledge can I add to my line of work to support those?
• Can I incorporate new trends into my current work, and if so, how?
• Blend two careers to make a new specialty?
• What skills, interests and talents do I have that I can blend into a new speciality that fits a growing need?
• Create a job that solves a growing problem?
• What problems are people facing and how can I come up with new roles and functions to help solve them?

I've got some thinking to do....

Ik spreek heel weinig Nederlands

"I speak very little Dutch." That's the title of this post. I knew some Dutch words growing up, like broek (pants), op Zontag (on Sunday) and preutse (prude). They were words I heard family members and neighbors use. My grandparents emigrated to west-Michigan from the Netherlands in the early 1900s. I heard them speak Dutch when we would visit them, especially at Christmas when they would read about the birth of Christ from a large Dutch Bible.

I wish I would have learned Dutch growing up. Being bi-lingual would be so cool. I had the opportunity to be in The Netherlands for a couple days in 2011 -- and hope to be there again in 2012 for a longer time. Maybe for five weeks in mid-May to early-June for a mission trip? My PhD work in worldview theory can help Dutch and American Christian students better understand post-modernism and becoming equipped with effective ministry philosophy and skills.

I bought the first Dutch Rosetta Stone language software and have been spending 30 minutes most days. I think I know 300+ Dutch words and can form simple sentences. I'm amazed how many words are the same in English or sound so similar. Makes it so much easier to learn and speak. (Same word in Dutch and English: park, restaurant, computer, plastic, kat (cat), is, man, vingers (fingers), and many more.)

I can hardly imagine what it takes for International graduate students to come to the University of Michigan and do Master and PhD work not in their native language. I've got a long way to go even to speak Dutch at a kindergarten level, let alone do graduate work.