Christmas Minisode: THANK YOU & Previewing 2024

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00
Alright, Career Warriors, for this short and sweet minisode, I wanted to give some words of encouragement. It’s been a really tough and crazy year out there, as well as say, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I’m going to talk a little bit about what is coming up for the new year. And I’m just so excited for everything, so I couldn’t not release an episode today.

First of all, it has been a wild and wacky 2023. With AI absolutely exploding this year, it seems like every time I turned on LinkedIn, at a certain point, all I saw was references to artificial intelligence and OpenAI, ChatGPT, things like that. We also saw more than 305,000 employees in the US who lost their jobs, as US companies continued to lay off throughout the entire year. This started in 2022 but we just saw it for the majority of pretty much this entire year.

We also saw a  significantly tighter labor market and this is definitely true by comparison. When we look at the post COVID Hiring boom in 2021, when we look at the numbers, things just a way different. So looking at the BLS data we saw in the last three months, there were 611,000, non farm job additions. And when you compare it those same exact months, September, October, November, in 2021, that number was 1.1 million, the exact number was 1.135. So just things are different now. And even though that’s not bad, overall, I’d say that things are looking okay, we have an unemployment that is below 4%, which is pretty darn good. Things just feel weird and different, and it feels like it is harder to get hired out there.

So when to offer some words of encouragement to job seekers, there are some really great things coming. I don’t mean that in the sense that I’ll eat my words in a month from now and they’ll be more layoffs, coming, things like that. But there is great things, there are great opportunities that are out there and available for you. I’ve seen it people are hiring people or hiring for great roles, it just takes some grit and determination. And I promise you, we’ll get something out there resumes.

I know, we’ve been reviewing a lot of resumes this year and I’ve just noticed that more job seekers are focused on you know, getting past the applicant tracking systems or just sending out their resume a bunch of times and not getting noticed like they wish they could. But again, it just the persistence that it will take I think to get these jobs is going to be so worth it. And don’t just send the darn thing out to online job boards actually physically get that resume in the right hands, get some feedback from people in your industry. And you never know where it might take you.

I wanted to give a really candid thank you to everyone listening to this podcast, we had an awesome year trialing or I should say LinkedIn trialing us with a six month LinkedIn Podcast Academy, we released a newsletter through LinkedIn. So I was able to engage with all of you listeners and hear what content mattered with you. I had a lot of you send me LinkedIn connection requests, emailing me favorite episodes and things like that. So this was a really special year, I think, for the podcast, because it just taught me the value of those comments in those meaningful messages. So I hope that not only continues to 2024, but I hope it absolutely explodes. And I’m just all ears, I want to give you the stuff and the episodes that matter the most.

So my call to action, that’s a good segue, I would like to ask anyone listening to this episode who has something on their mind on their heart to send me a connection request on LinkedIn. Of course, in that connection request, let me know you are a listener. Otherwise, I will not accept it. And let me know what you would like to hear what type of content you would like to hear for 2024. Is that LinkedIn stuff? Is it Job Search Strategy? Is it related to career change? Is it related to some random weird, funky feature that came out on LinkedIn that you want to hear more about? No idea is out of the scope of what who would consider so I would love to hear from you on LinkedIn. If you already are connected, of course just send me a message and I’ll we’ll read it as soon as I can.

Preview coming up. We have a New Year’s Day episode that is going to release where it is essentially grandma’s checklist. Let’s Eat, Grandma has a quick checklist of things to look over for your resume for 2024. I want to make sure you have your resume in tip top shape as you get those applications sent out. And also, we have a hidden episode about changing jobs versus changing careers know the difference between each on your resume. So to talk about the implications of some of these changes we’re making in our lives, we want to make sure our resume reflects those changes in that we could land wherever it is that we’re headed next. It’s, it’s all about being future focused, and I’m really excited to bring you both of those.

Alright, Career Warriors. Thank you so much for tuning in and Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. It was one heck of a year, and I can’t wait to see it in 2024.