The Fast Track 50: The Get-Ahead Guide for Temporary Employees - Softcover

Whitney, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610880420 ISBN 13: 9781610880428

Publisher: Bancroft Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Fast Track 50 is a simple system, designed by an in-the-trenches procurer of temp services, to substantially improve a temp's chances of achieving a full-time position. The 50 tips are designed to help any temp get quickly up to speed on any employer s basic team-building requirements. These 50 steps are considered minimum requirements by many of today's employers.

About this title

About the Author

"Tim Whitney grew up in South Portland, Maine and now splits his time between Plano, Texas and Whately, Massachusetts. He completed his undergraduate degree in Business Administration at Northeastern University and has an MBA from Western New England College. He works as an international manufacturing consultant and Vice President of Operations for a growing company in Garland, Texas. His interests include staying fit, travelling, visiting art galleries, fishing, camping, and spending time with family and friends. Thanksgiving at the Inn is his first book."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Fast Track 50

The Get-Ahead Guide for Temporary EmployeesBy Tim Whitney

Bancroft Press

Copyright © 2011 Tim Whitney
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61088-042-8

Contents

Chapter One

What Makes Me Qualified, and How I Know This Works

All of my working life has been spent building a career, continuing my education on team-building, and compiling hands-on research for this book. During my 22+ years in manufacturing, I have been continually promoted, flourishing as a Production Supervisor, Superintendent, Manufacturing Manager, Plant Manager, Quality Manager and, most recently, VP of Operations for three different companies, all while running my own international manufacturing consulting company.

I have hired, fired, coached, and worked side-by-side with thousands of temps looking for a permanent job. I've also worked hand-in-hand with more than two dozen temp services.

I know first-hand what temps are going through and how challenging and stressful it is to transition from temporary to permanent employment. I started out as a temp with my first employer and, within three months, became a full-time employee. Less than nine years later, I'd advanced with the same company through seven positions and was successfully running a multi-million dollar, 200,000 square foot manufacturing facility by the age of 34.

With the birth of my first daughter, I decided to move back to New England to be closer to family, and my employment search started all over again. I spent the next six years with my second employer, advancing through five positions while going back to school at night to obtain a Team Building MBA in 18 months. For my efforts, I was rewarded with promotions, well-above-average raises, and stock options.

I spent over three years traveling back and forth to Guatemala consulting with manufacturers, and working side-by-side with companies exporting to the U.S. All companies—whether in Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, or the United States—face the same challenges when it comes to hiring quality full-time employees.

As a successful executive and international consultant, I've been extensively involved in the hiring process. I've worked with more than two dozen temporary staffing services over the years, trying to select the best temporary employees for permanent positions. I've also been actively involved with acquiring new companies, succession planning, cooperating with executive hiring committees, interviewing and recommending the best candidates for leadership positions.

Over my entire career in manufacturing, both domestic and international, there are two significant things that continue to amaze me about the hiring process of entry-level employees:

1. How little time temp agencies spend making sure temps understand the basic rules of employment before they begin their assignments. As a temp, you need a competitive advantage to stand out in a crowd and be considered for permanent employment. There is a growing pool of intelligent and hard-working temporary employees who are rarely, if ever, provided the basic tools and guidance required to obtain permanent employment.

2. Today's managers are maxed out with their workload resolving conflict and managing change.

No one is set up for success! If a company tries to get the job done with a workforce lacking the proper tools and guidance supervised by an overtaxed manager with no time to provide those tools and guidance, how will consistent productivity ever be maintained? The teaming tips found in The Fast Track 50 provide that workforce with the necessary tools for success, leaving managers with more time to work with an already capable group of team-oriented employees, thus reducing unnecessary turnover and increasing productivity.

During my career, I've used a set of basic requirements to hire the best and brightest. I've observed these same basic requirements with manager after manager, company after company, and even country after country.

The Fast Track 50 includes the proven set of rules that sets temps up for success starting on day one. The Fast Track 50 list, based on team science, is a list of basic attitudes, behaviors, and actions designed to enhance your chances of quickly morphing into a member of an existing team in an established work environment.

Think back to your days on the playground when you had a pickup game of kickball, soccer, baseball, or basketball. Which kids got picked for teams? The kids who knew the rules and knew how to play the game! Time is limited. If you have 30 minutes to pick teams and play a competitive game, you're not going to pick the new kid from out of town who doesn't even know how to play. You pick the people who can play the game without wasting time. Managers do the same thing. They are simply too overloaded to waste their time trying to get temps up to speed.

Additionally, downsizing is rapidly becoming a means of economic survival, so most companies have fewer full-time employees and a growing temp workforce, resulting in more qualified people out on the street looking for work and competing for the same jobs.

As the workforce becomes more competitive, managers are forced to save money and improve performance. While they need temps to augment their workforce and to flex with the needs of the business, the end result is they have less time to orient, train, interact, manage conflict about, direct operations of, and fully evaluate temp employees for permanent employment, or even long-term temporary employment. In order to succeed and find permanent employment, you absolutely need to have all the right basic tools and know the rules of today's competitive work environment.

If you are one of the millions of temporary employees searching for permanent employment in manufacturing, logistics, or even an office environment, this is the book for you! By purchasing Fast Track 50, you've made a great investment in your future!

Tim Whitney, Team Building MBA Author of The Fast Track 50, founder; tipsfortemps.com, creator; SafeTemps Certification Owner, TCW Consulting LLC. Vice President, Naturich Labs, Inc Vice President of Operations, International Products Group, LLC Founder, A Play For Food (www.APlayForFood.org)

Temps Treadmill or Career Escalator?

Many temps are stuck on what I call the "temp treadmill." They lack team- building skills and regularly bounce from job to job hoping they will get lucky. They must live a life with an uncertain paycheck, inconsistent assignments and pay, potential risk of and times of unemployment, limited hope for benefits, and continual job insecurity.

Then there are the temps who are ready to take the first step on the career escalator. They want a career so strongly that they follow The Fast Track 50 and change their actions, attitudes, and behaviors to quickly fit in with any team. When they do, they achieve a higher level of security, which means a regular paycheck, a steady pay rate, possible benefits, and a reduced level of stress.

If you are ready to step off the Temp Treadmill and take the first step on the Career Escalator, read my Fast Track 50 and realize that every assignment is an opportunity to show your team skills and obtain a foothold on a full-time career.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Who needs this book? This book is for temporary employees working in manufacturing, shipping, warehouse, construction, retail, or office-type environments who want to make the transition to permanent employment.

2. What is The Fast Track 50? It is a simple list of tips and suggestions that anyone can follow. Made up of fifty specific actions, attitudes, and behaviors, The Fast Track 50 provides the most basic tips for obtaining a job, retaining that job, and developing a career. The Fast Track 50 can be adapted to any work environment, from retail to the restaurant, medical, and service industries, and applies to all levels of employees.

Each tip involves an action, targets a specific attitude, or explains a desired behavior, and has three essential components:

  WHAT you need to do.

  WHY it's important to the employer, team-building, and the hiring process.

  MEMORY TAG explaining why this will remain in your manager's memory as a positive quality.

3. What is the purpose of The Fast Track 50? It has been designed and written with one clear purpose: to prepare temporary employees with the basic team-building foundation and insider information required to obtain long-term, and potentially, permanent employment.

4. Why do you need The Fast Track 50? There are three major reasons why every temporary employee seeking permanent employment needs these tips:

• To play by the rules, you need to know the rules. Whether you realize it or not, there is an unwritten set of rules by which every single temp is evaluated, consciously and subconsciously, by their managers. If you follow these tips, you'll already be playing by the rules of the game while other temps don't even know the rules. You'll stand out like a diamond in the rough.

• As that famous deodorant commercial once put it, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

• By quickly adopting the company's requirements, you become the "go-to" team player that management can count on.

As the pool of temporary employees continues to grow, it becomes more challenging to look like a "diamond in the rough" unless you know how to shine like one. If you aren't smart about the impression you leave on your manager the very first day, you may never get the chance to press the reset button and start over.

In today's competitive and fast-paced work environment, managers spend the bulk of their time handling change, answering emails, attending meetings, managing conflict, and working overtime to complete the countless "side" projects necessary to increase company productivity and reduce costs. Managers simply do not have the time required to fully evaluate the skills and potential of each temp who comes through the door.

5. Are there any guarantees? Nothing in life is guaranteed, but these are the 50 actions, attitudes, and behaviors which the vast majority of successful employers require when they consider temp employees for permanent positions.

6. What are the four stages of team-building, and why are they important to every temp and every company that uses temps? In 1965, an American psychologist named Bruce Tuckman was studying small group behavior for the U.S. Navy at the Naval Medical Research Institute. He began by observing a number of groups in different situations and environments. After studying the documents of numerous groups, he was able to determine a series of sequences that all successful groups (teams) transition through.

These four stages were captured in a research article he published in 1965:

1. Forming: the orienting of new people on a team

2. Storming: conflict erupts among team members

3. Norming: the group begins developing cohesion by understanding rules and expectations

4. Performing: developing role readiness and performance

Consider a group of Little League baseball players moving through these stages:

1. Forming: The team is assembled with players of mixed experience levels.

2. Storming: Conflict erupts over who will play each position.

3. Norming: The group begins to develop by understanding the rules and the coach's expectations, as well as by assigning players to positions.

4. Performing: The baseball team performs as a group and wins a game.

There are three main reasons this process is important to every temp:

1. It is essential to understand what happens in each stage, and to understand that all team members transition through these stages before they can become a high performance team.

2. The Fast Track 50 works because temps can skip stages 1 and 2 and enter the group at stage 3 or 4 just by following the tips! Temps who fail to follow these tips end up stuck in the first two stages and rarely get hired, even if they are the best-qualified person for the job, because they cannot evolve with the team past its beginning stages and into the performance phase.

3. The amount of time a manager has to spend working with temps goes down significantly as they advance through the stages. Temps at stage 3 or 4 require so much less of their managers' valuable time, and the managers love them for it.

Think back to the example of the Little League team and put yourself in the position of coach. Would you want to coach a team of kids who don't know the rules, or a team who does? The same is true about EVERY front-line manager or supervisor. They want to coach temps who know the rules. This is why The Fast Track 50 works. The tips outline the rules managers expect you to know and follow so they can focus on team performance.

Typical steps of team building:

Temps who follow The Fast Track 50 can breeze right through stages 1 and 2 and enter the workforce at stage 3, ready to perform.

Temps who follow The Fast Track 50 save a frontline manager's time, money, and effort and are therefore more frequently hired as permanent employees.

Why Do You Need Fast Track 50?

While there are an extensive number of books instructing readers on how to become a successful CEO or corporate executive, the truth is these careers are reserved for a privileged few. In contrast, this is the first "tips" book that explains the basic steps required for a temporary employee to quickly develop into a desirable hire for permanent employment.

No other "how-to" book addresses the specific issues facing millions of temporary employees by providing them with the basic tools, knowledge, and understanding of how to put the right foot forward and stand out from the crowd.

Years of research and experience have yielded this insider's check list commonly used to select the best temps for factory, warehouse, and office/clerical work.

It is a list of WHAT you need to do, HOW you need to act, and WHY you need to do so. It explains a manager's thought process in a simple, easy to follow, and logical manner.

The two main reasons why companies use temps are:

  To have a ready workforce when production demands suddenly increase

  To take potential full-time employees for a test drive

In today's competitive work environment, temporary agencies are flourishing and increasing their employee headcount to record numbers while employers continue to leverage this lower cost, flexible workforce to maintain their competitive edge and keep jobs from shifting to international competitors.

It's great to think employers are leveraging this talented group of employees to maintain a healthy net income, but the unfortunate truth is that, ten to fifteen years ago, these jobs would likely have been permanent positions with better pay, medical benefits, and 401K retirement plans.

While the vast majority of temporary employees have one goal in mind—obtaining a permanent job with a decent company—they are often unprepared for the challenge because they don't know how to begin the transition process. They are hesitant, and their attitudes, actions, and behaviors are not what a future employer wants to see.

Regrettably, this same group of people is either ill-advised or poorly prepared to even be considered to transition from temporary (temp) employee to permanent (perm) employee when the opportunity presents itself. This can lead to a demoralized workforce and lower productivity, costing the employer the profit that using temps should have produced.

It is unfortunate there aren't more common sense tools, practical training, preparatory information, or basic survival guides given to temp employees. Preparing employees to meet the needs of the employer would benefit everyone, save money, and create more jobs.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Fast Track 50by Tim Whitney Copyright © 2011 by Tim Whitney. Excerpted by permission of Bancroft Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bancroft Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1610880420
• ISBN 13: 9781610880428
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96