Rework

One of the magazines that we get is Real Simple, aka Martha Stewartless Living. I like it enough that we got it for several months before I realized that it was a chick magazine (Articles about how to choose the proper bra were a big hint). And even now, I still read it, because I like its feeling -- not quite as yuppy as MSL, but with much of the same style. (Though, truth to tell, I think Martha's crew has a better touch when it comes to things like decorating and recipes. It's a trade -- RS doesn't ever waste your time with a chirpy article about how to carve a yam into a darling Christmas ornament.)

The current issue has an article tucked in the back (guess its not considered as great a draw) about three women who overcame significant financial obstacles -- one, because she was surprisingly divorced after twenty five years, with no experience in earning her own living. I mentioned it to my wife, and she told me that she knew of someone who worked as a service project with an organization that is aimed at getting women in that predicament into productive, for which read 'more than minimum wage', jobs. I would think that something like that would be very difficult. To my mind, the world is divided into people with marketable, desirable, portable skills (must have all three); people with desirable and marketable, but not necessarily portable, skills, and people who are headed for careers involving uniforms and asking if you want fries with that. The first group is professionals (not all, but a vast majority); people whose organizations need them more than they need the organization. A doctor, for example, can practice medicine virtually anywhere; a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, ditto. The second group is skilled but requires a support environment that they might or might not (usually not) own. For example, me: I'm a computer programmer (well, not really, but close enough; the field is pretty broad). I can take this skill anywhere that needs it, but the environment has to exist. I'm unlikely to set myself up as a free-lance for-hire computer programmer unless I'm at a significantly higher skill level than I am, in fact, at. And the third range from people with decent nine-to - five jobs to people who are doing the jobs that are just slightly out of the reach of people without green cards. My cousins, for example: one works in a super market, and has for years; another, divorced after several years, now works as a part-time nanny and on weekends she oversees a local laundromat. They're neither of them struggling, but it wouldn't take much to put them there.

I tend to put the newly divorced and relatively skillless (that's not a slam; I'm talking valuable, not whether its valued) woman in the third category. And I wonder: how do you get people new to that category started? Where do you start? Do they have to effectively start at the absolute bottom, doing the most mind-bending, back-breaking work? Because these people, apart from everything else, don't have the twenty or thirty years to work out of that category and into the better - paying ones. They need to be able to start getting that financial foothold now.

How do you do that?

Certainly, the first step has to be simple categorization -- to lift that great line from Aliens ("Is there anything I can do? " "I don't know -- is there anything you can do?"), what can you do? And you can't be too precise with that. A skill in getting a house organized and running can be translated into a skill for organization; the ability to sew your own clothes can become the ability to create fabric coverings for furniture. But what's next? How do you tease out the skills that perhaps don't have a clear use? I'm thinking of the people who 'always had an eye for color' but never worked at it at all in any way; it was just 'something they noticed'. How do you turn that into something that someone -- not a charity, but a real employer -- would value and pay for? I love the line from the movie Dave -- "It's Thursday -- Everybody Works on Thursday", which was his way of revving up the people who came to his employment agency into thinking that they were marketable, they were not hopeless, someone did need them -- they just had to find out who.

That to me is the key -- eliciting that skill, hooking it up with someone who perhaps right off the bat might not appear to be a match. And the people who can do that, who can make it happen -- to me, they're magical people.