“How Are You Re-Tooling?”

The October 20, 2008 Times Magazine edition article “One Bright Spot on Main Street” caught my eye when noting the first paragraph addressed Pittsburgh, PA.’s experience at handling a recession.

My corporate career with Westinghouse Electric Corporation was initiated in Pittsburgh in 1979, and I vividly recall seeing my first “smoke-stack” steel industry plants while driving on the Parkway East. The impressions were most  colorful during the evening when  flames rose up from the stacks like birthday candles on a cake.

I also witnessed Pittsburgh’s identity struggle as steel manufacturing began to move overseas and the native Steel City worker was  faced with having out-dated skills.

Fast forward to February 2007, and now it was me who had to face the harsh reality of being out-dated as a 50 year technical sales engineer who elected to leave Eaton Corporation (they had purchased $1.1B of Westinghouse’s operations in 1994) after 28 years of service. While in the act of searching for meaningful work in other industries, it also became clear that while I knew how to e-mail and search the web, I did not have clue to what Web 2.0 and its tools were about.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs were a foreign language, but fortunately the San Francisco business climate offered conference and other net-working events “to decipher the code.”

Today I enjoy being familiar with these cool tools, and having met other knowledgeable people who use them too. But, more importantly I derive meaning by helping other Baby Boomers “break the code” to utilize these powerful social media networking tools in their job/career search.

How are you re-tooling?

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