The crisis obliges employees to change. Mihaela Feodorof, Executive Coach & Business Consultant with over 30 years of HR experience, explains why professional conversion is the key to a safe future on the labor market.
75% of Romanians want professional conversion. Pixabay photo source
The latest ejobs survey shows that 75% of Romanians employed are ready for professional conversion to make it easier to go through a difficult economic period. In a new edition of the Interviews Adevărul, Antoaneta Banu discusses with Mihaela Feodorof, Executive Coach & Business Consultant with over 30 years of HR experience, on how the crisis forces employees
Why more and more Romanians choose professional conversion
Antoaneta Banu: The latest eJobs survey shows that 75% of Romanians employed are ready for professional conversion to make it easier to go through a difficult economic period. Are we in the most complicated moment of the Romanian labor market?
Mihaela Feodorof:
It can be classified to the most complicated. But, looking back, from the perspective of my experience I can say that it is the most complicated moment we have not learned our lessons, of all the crises we have gone through. Each difficult process we cross would be healthy for us, as individuals, to remain with some lessons.
This theme of professional conversion has become hot since 2020, with pandemia. Many people who look at how they do their job and how they still bring their value, have considered this aspect: professional conversion.
The pandemic was also for us an opportunity, from a consulting team to put on the table a product that is exactly aimed at, professional conversion. How does he help? Shows us if we missed a vocational profession in the first or second attempt.
Well, 5 years have passed since Pandemic, we returned very quickly to the less healthy habits and now it hits us, economically, the reality.
Antoaneta Banu: Can we discuss overlapping crises? Is the Romanian specific what is happening?
Mihaela Feodorof:
From the experience I have with customers from outside the country, the topics are the same, the themes are the same, the restlessness, they are the same. Discounts, efficiency, all these processes that are necessary anyway and in healthy times, when the economy works, the more now they are everywhere. However, CEE happens to us is mapped on our culture, with this more relaxed approach, “let us handle, we went through these and we do”
I think this time will be at the advantage of those who have made their plans in advance, two years ago, because they are industries that are already affected or have been affected and have been forced to take some measures.
If I look around, my colleagues, homologous in the HR area, the rhythm of the employment has slowed down 2 years ago. Or, this was a very clear signal that efficiency was already taking the first steps.
If you were careful about what was going on, you could do something, 2 years ago, you could go in parallel, you could work on a market that still had availability. You could reposition yourself, do this conversion. You haven't done this, now you are forced by circumstances, you have to be much more vigilant, because you have no place.
Reconversion or Religification: Where the confusion occurs
Antoaneta Banu:What does it mean and how do we understand professional conversion?
Mihaela Feodorof:
Reconversion is a more complex process, more than covering a need. First of all, for me to do reconversion, I have to relate to the only element that stays standing at this moment: what I know and what I can do.
If I can add here and what I like, then yes, I will make the difference and I can, from a population seeking other opportunities, be the one chosen.
Reconversion is primarily in vocation, then my capabilities, my personality traits. For example, if I believe that in the medical field the nurse is a very sought after person, I have to ask the question: if, after learning some procedures, I am able to do these maneuvers, I have manuality, do I enjoy helping people?
I have to calibrate their capabilities, their knowledge and practice, that is, skills and vocation. To please me, to be interested in the field in which I want to work.
Antoaneta Banu: This 75% percentage sees this professional conversion as a solution to a crisis state from which it has to go out quickly. Is this reactive behavior useful?
Mihaela Feodorof:
We only learned to extinguish fires. When something happens to us, we quickly put patch, repair, cross the period. With such behavior we do not go better and learned, but we are exhausted, unhappy. The concern is seen in the way you do your job and you get results. We, through vocational tests, find out when you choose a job, a job you are concerned about. Your results are better than a person with an IQ may be higher than yours.
The IQ has passed in the secondary plane, but the vocation comes and propels me, in a field, because I feel like fish in water. I am open to learning, I am willing to make extra effort. And I can make the difference, being assured that I will not be on the list of dishes.
Age not a barrier to change your career
Antoaneta Banu: How old can professional conversion be done?
Mihaela Feodorof:
Whenever, provided you are open and want this, without a need to push you, that you were out of work. If you have decided on a pro-professional conversion, do it like the world, your head. You can do what you could not, or did not have the break, understanding at 20 or 30. But you can learn it at 40-50 years old.
Antoaneta Banu: Is it still valid, that the first on the list of redundancies are the ones passed by a certain age?
Mihaela Feodorof:
Not age or experience are related to the budget. If my experience has a financial correspondent that hangs quite a lot and plus my value does not exceed the expense, the investment of the employer, then yes, I reach this extreme.
If I have 30 years of experience, obviously I will not have the salary of an entry-level, but it is assumed to plus my value, my performance indicators justify the investment that the employer makes.
Because we are not talking about Tanda on Manda from one month a month, we are talking about budget exercises, annual financial year and so on. And if the disinterest or a lot of factors put their mark in this age area, then you can be on the black list.
Antoaneta Banu: Is people captive in a cliché: is professional conversion the same as re-qualification?
Mihaela Feodorof:
It's a confusion, for sure. There was also an experience that somehow marked society. When the IT was the most desirable industry, many, especially young people were very easily re-profiled. We had customers, companies where they wrote the Code of graduates of sociology, of medicine. Only who did not want to write the code.
Young people understood that from there, in the short term, substantial revenues will come. The need was very large and they were attending recalification courses.
Recalification with reconversion has a common ground, but reconversion is primarily about me and my map with the need for market and my professional life. There it is important to look.
I just look at the need for the market and I don't look at myself. The meeting with us has been gone for a long time. We with our vocational evaluation tools, we try to help young people choose, before going to the academic or professional environment.
How do you find your right place on the labor market
Antoaneta Banu: We return to this acute need to solve the situation. People will say they don't have test time. How do I do?
Mihaela Feodorof:
Not to panic, to allocate a few days just to think very well what I know how to do. There are a lot of aspects of society that identify as needs and we do not see.
Yes, the situation is complicated, but I think this complication requires our clarity, not to walk darkness and to throw CVs everywhere, to fill databases we do not pass, because the filters are very well set there by specialists and only frustration that I have hundreds of CVs sent me and I do not look for me.
If you send CV in the same form in all industries and for all jobs, maybe just a chance would find the elements to get you out of the crowd.
First of all, finding a job is a job itself. It takes you time, months when you have to be clear, to have coherence, and consistency. All the time we return to: what I like, what I know how to do, what can I do, what are my personality traits, what are my capabilities.
Follow the edition in full and find out all the details that can help you in professional conversion.
