Beyond 40 WPM - Part-Time Jobs for Pros

Dear friends,

Here is my latest column on LifeMeetsWork.com - a piece about part-time jobs for highly-skilled people. Take a look!

BEYOND 40 WPM - PART-TIME JOBS FOR PROS

Back in 1997, I was pregnant for the third time. But for the first time, I wasn't working. I took the opportunity to attend a Moms & Tots playgroup with my two-year-old son, chatting with the moms week by week as my tummy grew.

The moms were delightful, and our conversations struck a chord. Nearly every one of the Moms & Tots ladies had an issue about work and life. They weren't working and were starting to get antsy. They were ready to do something with their free time — something to challenge their brains and excite their passions.

But part-time, professional jobs were hard to find in '97. Kelly Temps looked like the only game in town, and the women in my playgroup were lawyers and marketing chiefs and experts at a dozen specialties.

Isn't there a way, we wondered, for smart and capable women to plug into the working world for a few hours each week? Isn't there an alternative — something halfway between staying home full-time and working as a cashier at the local deli?

Out of these playgroup conversations, I started an online network for women. One of the goals was to connect full-time working women and talented stay-at-home moms for mutual advantage.

That group morphed into a global women's community, and then morphed again to embrace men. Now, we still talk about work/life issues along with a wide range of career and business topics. And women are still looking for ways to make some money and exercise their brain cells without typing themselves into oblivion.

Over the years, our group has shared ideas and strategies for securing part-time, professional employment. Here are some highlights:

To read the full story, please jump here.

Wait! You Forgot the Kitchen Sink!

Dear friends,

My friend H. sent me this job ad from Craigslist today because it
made her chuckle and it made me chuckle too. Are there a lot of
people out there who can set up computer/telephone hardware, whip up
a new database, knock out a brochure using Photoshop, design a
customer newsletter and then happily refill the breakroom salt and
pepper shakers, make a few dozen phone calls for the Sales team,
call Staples to order Post-it Notes, and end the day with a bit of
filing? Geez Louise, who's scrubbing out the insides of the Mr.
Coffee with Bon Ami? Granted, a small office always has extra work
that can be done, but this multi-skilled person (if s/he exists) is
made of solid gold and worth twice the money this company is offering.

I assume the salary range has a typo in it - if not I know a few
hundred people who want the job!


OFFICE MANAGER
Responsibilities include:

Technical Support
Provide staff with routine technical support, including setting up e-
mail accounts, importing and backing up data, setting up computer /
telephone hardware, etc. Requires basic knowledge of Microsoft
Office, Outlook, databases, networks and an ability to quickly
understand new technology. The Office Manager works closely with our
Network and Database Administrators.

Desktop Publishing
Work with staff to create and print newsletters, brochures,
proposals, etc. Requires knowledge of Publisher, Word, and Adobe
Acrobat. Some Photoshop experience is helpful. Should have basic
graphic design skills.

Office Organization
Order and maintain office supplies, such as brochures, kitchen items,
paper, etc. Should proactively make certain office is well equipped
and organized.

General Administrative Tasks
Mailing brochures / materials to customers, administrative support
for Sales and Account Management teams, document management, filing,
data entry / report creation, etc.

Location: Denver
Compensation: $29,297 - $139,277

Say It Don't Spray It

Women are awesome, but there's something off about a lot of women's business gatherings.

Half the women-in-business events I attend have a fake, air-kissy vibe to them. The worst is that the host is always talking about how women are "fabulous" and "authentic", while the energy in the room feels anything but. (Maybe it's just me.)

I went to one event and sat at a table with a group of nice ladies. I learned that this group has a standard networking activity. They go around the table introducing themselves. They use an egg timer to make sure nobody talks too long. They say their names, describe their businesses and why they're the best at what they do, and mention something they'll be looking to buy in the next month or two.

I wasn't prepared for this exercise. I hate stuff like that. Who am I to say I'm the best at what I do? Networking to me is about people and what they're up to, not a live eBay where we buy and sell one another's offerings.

Once the activity was kicked off,I dashed to the ladies' room. I did the math: one minute per lady, seven ladies: this activity should last seven minutes - 10, to be safe. I chilled for ten minutes in the loo and then peeped out. Hurrah! The exercise was done. I rejoined my tablemates.

A few minutes later, the meeting host instructed us to move to new tables and do the round-robin thing again. I knew I couldn't get away with another 10-minute stop in the ladies' room. I was the speaker that day, so I got up and sidled over to the videographer setting up his stuff.

I said "Talk to me about anything, I beg you."

"Okay," he said, "how 'bout those Rockies?"

We chatted for 10 minutes. Saved! I went back and took my seat. Then someone said, "It's a shame you missed the networking activity, Liz -- go ahead and do yours, now." My goose was cooked.

"Okay," I said. "My name is Liz and I do x, y and z. I'll pass on the 'Why Are You the Best' question, for all sorts of reasons. In the next month, I need to buy, er, um, a whisk broom. My son has a rabbit, and the rabbit leaves pellets in his pen, and I need a whisk broom to sweep up the pellets."

Finally, it was time for my presentation. I talked about networking vs. marketing -- how networking isn't marketing, and how one-on-one communication shouldn't be confused with broadcast-style communication and vice versa. I talked about why it's insulting to geta message from a friend that says "I saw this article and thought of you" and then to hear that everyone on your friend's mailing list got it, too.

I am so allergic to these events that I had to get a cup of coffee afterward and unwind. I didn't get back to my office until 3 p.m. There in my inbox was a message reading: "Dear Liz. Great to hear you speak about networking today. I totally agree, networking is different from marketing. Would you like to try a 30-day free trial of my product? It only takesa minute to sign up online."

True story.

Here's the story on the Boulder Daily Camera website

Nervy Women of the Future

I was in the car with my five-year-old and my seven-year-old. The very left-brain-dominant seven-year-old asked, "Are there actually vehicles that can travel into the future?" I thought for a minute, and said "You know, the thing about the future is, every single minute is the future compared to the minute before. So right now is the future compared to this morning. And tomorrow morning is the future, as we sit here now. So, you could say that this car is driving into the future, this very moment."

The two kids sat and chewed on that for a minute as I turned into the supermarket parking lot. Then the five-year-old yelled out, "Mom, look! It's the grocery store of the future!"

Smart aleck kid. But the kid is right - this IS the future. I used to daydream, when I was their age, about the days we're living in now - it seemed so remote and inconceivable that I'd actually be alive in a different milennium, years that had no "19" on the front of them. How could it be? And here we are. I had no definite mental picture for these days, couldn't imagine being 40. All I saw in my mind's eye was a kind of rosy, pleasantly-colored place where grownups had a lot of fun and read interesting books all day.

When I was in eighth grade, women were pushing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment. I was floored and discouraged when it didn't pass. But I never thought for a second that my chances - to do whatever I might want to do, as I got closer to adulthood - were limited by that setback. When I went out looking for my first post-waitress, post-babysitting job, the papers were full of ads for "Gal Fridays." This seems laughably historical today. But at the time, a Gal Friday (as I understood it then) was a pivotal role in an office, the person who knows what's going on. This was a big improvement over the even more historical, stereotypical secretary job popularized on TV and in movies as a cute blonde thing in a short skirt, being chased around the desk by the boss.

A lot of the rhetoric back in the those days went something like this: You Women Are So Demanding. You Don't Know When to Stop Asking for Handouts. In the sixties, women wanted to be in the workforce, not marginally there as extra office help, or nurses or teachers (not that those aren't incredibly important roles), but as professionals of all kinds, and not just until we got married. And as the sixties turned into the seventies, that started to happen. Then we had the nerve to push for equal pay. Equal pay!?! How can you pay a woman like a man?, was the complaint, Companies will go broke. We haven't reached parity yet, but women's pay is getting better vis-à-vis men's pay, by a tiny bit every year. We were not satisfied, and we shouldn't have been. We want to be in management, we said. We want to be in traditionally male jobs like in the building trades, in technology and in manufacturing. We want to be surgeons, astronauts and senators.

Those changes began to happen, too. Then we said, We want to be entrepreneurs, and we want to have access to funding the way that male entrepreneurs do. Fighting words! For all the mythology built up around the go-go 90's and the dotcom era, there were plenty of rock-hard paradigms that didn't shift one little bit. Women got barely one percent of the venture capital dollars invested during the internet boom. But look - we didn't need those sources of funding to go on our own. Women are launching businesses at a rate never seen before, downturn be danged. And we still aren't satisfied.

Now we say, We should be in corporate leadership, we should be on corporate Boards of Directors. We make the vast majority of family purchasing decisions and our voices should be heard - we should have a say in the way that companies are run. We have requirements that aren't being met. We will blow whistles, we will complain, and we will take our business elsewhere. Nervy! Who do we think we are, half the population or something?!

Not content to have a couple of seats in government, not content have a couple of our own in high-profile corporate roles, now we want even more. We want companies to be managed in an ethical way, and we want to have meaning in our work. Meaning! We should be happy to have a job, for Pete's sakes! When will we be content? When will women stop complaining? Here's when:

When the picture of the future we dreamed up and colored in as children is the one we experience every day. When companies are citizens of the communities they operate in, and people in organizations are respected and their work is valued and their lives outside of work are viewed as high priority engagements. And when women are heard in government, in corporate leadership and in the circles where investment dollars move from hand to hand. We're not asking for that much, the way we see it. Just to be riding up in the front seat in that car going into the future.