What Color Is Your Parachute? (36 page)
Read What Color Is Your Parachute? Online
Authors: Richard N. Bolles
www.cehandbook.com/cehandbook/htmlpages/ceh_main.html
This is an immensely useful handbook, covering every facet of doing temporary or contract work. The site also has a contract employee’s newsletter. It’s sponsored by the Professional Association of Contract Employees.
www.staffingtoday.net/jobseekers/find_company.cfm
Best way to find a temp agency. Indicate your area, the kind of work you want, and it kicks back a list—sometimes a very
extensive
list—of temp agencies near you.
Part-time, restaurant, hourly, summer jobs…listings, resources, guidance, advice. Youth oriented, but not exclusively.
Advice on resume writing and such; also a jobs database.
www.cjhunter.com/dcsf/view_some.html?SearchType=complete
A
huge
listing of firms that hire consultants and contract employees.
This site (and the book, by Michael Landes, from which the site takes its title) is mostly aimed at young people who are looking for summer situations, temporary jobs, maybe something outdoors, maybe something overseas for a little while…jobs are listed, and there is a sampling of advice from Landes’s excellent book,
The Back Door Guide to Short-Term Job Adventures
(published by Ten Speed Press). Basically, this site wants you to buy his book (and it’s a good book), but along the way, there’s a lot of useful information and news of opportunities online.
www.summerjobs.com/jobseeker/resources
This is the links page at
SummerJobs.com
. There are a number of really useful resources here, including Travel and Adventure, Immigration and Visas, and job sites for overseas and resort employment.
Finding clients or customers:
With the Internet, came globalization. And this changed everything for the self-employed. You now have a much larger market at your disposal where you can sell your skills, knowledge, services, and products, worldwide.
Finding employees or vendors:
In this global age if you’re operating on a shoestring, and you need, let us say, to have something printed or produced as inexpensively as possible, you can search for an inexpensive printer, vendor, or manufacturer anywhere in the world, and solicit bids.
At
www.virtualecommerce.com
, for example, you can list your talent needs or the services required, plus your budget for this task or project, the time by which you need to hire, and some insight into your style or tastes (e.g., your five favorite websites). Vendors from inside the U.S., as well as outside, can bid.
Alternatively, you can type the name of the skill-set you need, plus the word “overseas,” and the word “jobs”—and see what you can find. For example, if you try “overseas cartoonist jobs” this will turn up a list of sites to try.
It takes a lot of guts to try ANYTHING new
(to you)
in today’s brutal economy. It’s easier, however, if you keep three rules in mind:
There is always some risk, in trying something new. Your goal, I hope, is not to avoid risk—there is no way to do that—but to make sure ahead of time that the risks are
manageable
.You find this out before you start, by first talking to others who have already done what you are thinking of doing; then you evaluate whether or not you still want to go ahead and try it.
Have a Plan B, laid out,
before you start
, as to what you will do if it doesn’t work out; i.e., know where you are going to go, next. Don’t wait,
puh-leaze!
Write it out, now.
This is what I’m going to do, if this doesn’t work out:
______________________________________________________
If you’re sharing your life with someone, be sure to sit down with that partner or spouse and ask what the implications are
for them
if you try this new thing. Will they have to give up things? If so, what? Are they willing to make those sacrifices? And so on. You have a responsibility to make them full partners in any decision you’re facing. Love demands it!
