I attended the credit crunch event organized by UPA last week, and Gerred Blyth gave a brief presentation about the recession in general and opened the floor to another speaker (I can’t remember who) who spoke from his experience in previous recesssion.
Gerred kinda went through a list of industries which were benefiting from the recession and industries which were clearly losing out. Though not entirely revelational, it was good to get us started thinking about the topic.
Recession is bad news for:
- Housing
- Financial
- Financial
- Automotive
- Retail (there are exceptions, as you will see below)
- Advertising Expenditure
- Venture Capital
Good news for:
- Poundland, Morrisons
- UK tourism (£ is cheap)
- Do-it-yourself
- accountancy/law
- adult industry (not sure about this one)
- church?
- online retail (big one here)
- mass merchandising (related to online retail)
- beauty
- home and garden (people staying at home?)
- business software services
- online advertising
It seems the message seems to be that online is good, and that traditional biz is bad. But both good and bad reports are coming from usability professionals regarding the recession. Perhaps it may be that less projects are being awarded these days. Who knows.
The point of it is that the recession is apparently here, and so in order to “make” it relevant to us, we broke into three teams to brainstorm ideas about how to combat the recession. The teams consisted of:
- agencies
- in-house
- freelancers/individuals
Since my classmate and I were not part of any group, we decided to go into one we thought we’d best fit in – individuals. Ms. Be facilitated our session well as we brainstormed all the different ways in order to stay relevant in the business.
Of all the different things we shared, portfolios seemed to come up quite a lot, as well as networking. Staying professional and being on time was another. Another one you’d think would be difficult to do during a recession also appeared – smiling. I guess everyone around the table was maintaining a postitive attitude, a good reminder that we’re all human.
The speaker whose name I can’t remember said that if you’re good, you’ll get hired eventually if you do get fired. So, what about the not so good ones? Well, that will probably lead to other questions.
Some people mentioned that companies do hire graduates, for whatever that’s worth. Then I heard a blurb that it’s not easy for graduates to get freelance jobs. Either way, I think the signal is that it’s not impossible, but it’ll take some work.
However, I kept thinking to myself – there must be something we’re missing. People are still spending money, just in different ways. And if it’s not folks here in the UK, then there are people who are outside the UK spending that money.
And I even suppose some work wouldn’t even require money. Favors, perhaps. Who knows. I’d be interested to hear success stories.
As for me, I think knowing yourself is key to getting the job you want. I don’t think all jobs are made alike – so there’s no real competition here, and it’s always good to know what you want anyway.