Recession-proof strategy 2: Dig in

- There's an old song line, "If you can't be with the one you love, "love the one you're with." And if you're limited by geography or industry during a recession, in other words you can't move or change careers, then you need to love the job you have and make your employer love you above all others. This is what it takes to dig in during a recession. It's still possible to brace yourself against a downturn without packing your bags for an unfamiliar city, without changing industries and without jumping ship to another company. You may even be able to do it without changing your job title. And this is the strategy to dig in. There are three rules for this strategy. First, just don't get fired or laid off; second, become indispensable; and third, keep making yourself more valuable. The first thing you need to appreciate is that in a recession jobs don't just vanish unintentionally. Somebody decides to downsize the company. Somebody decides to ax certain jobs and certain people, while keeping others. If the high up corporate strategy people at your company are feeling nervous, it's gonna be bad. But even if they're scared out of their minds, it's not as though they're going to lay off the entire workforce. They're going to be choosy, and you want to be on the right side of that choosiness. You need to make sure you keep your job, and just don't fired or laid off. The second key strategy to keeping your job and digging in, is to become indispensable. You need a million skills on your resume to get a job, but you only need one missing skill to lose it. The trick is to make sure you have that skill, the skill that no one else has, the skill that makes you indispensable, the skill that makes you unfirable. These could be hard skills, like being the Excel or Python guru at your company, or soft skills like being a master negotiator or project manager, or maybe you just instill confidence in the people above you to the point that they cannot live without you. Is there something no one wants to do? Learning how to do that well is something that could make you indispensable. Another key strategy to dig in is to always add value in your job. Maybe you can't make yourself indispensable, maybe there are a lot of people who have or could do your job, in that case, always adding value is something you should focus on, as well. This means learning new skills that help you add value in your job, and it's not about what you do when layoffs are happening, it's about what you do during all those months and years leading up to a recession. You're never done adding new skills, both hard and soft skills, to your skill set. The more value you can bring to your job, the more value you will bring to your employer. This will make you someone the company wants to keep around, even if heads are rolling. Does your employer offer a budget for ongoing training? Use it, milk that cow. Take full advantage of any skill building opportunities that your employer pays for or subsidizes. It has a great ROI, return on an investment for you, and you'll carry that with you in your career, whether you dig in at your company or end up leaving. And you should do it, even when your company won't pay for it. What skills could you add to make yourself a more valuable worker for your current employer, or for a future employer?