>> Five Commandments for Employee Survival

Top Five Commandments to stay in demand.....

Thou shall be tech savvy: Technobabble no longer impresses. The new rule of hire is: Domain, domain and more domain. Substantial investments in specific technology skills hold unfailing promise of a stable run in the meanest economic phase. Rather than taste, sample and experiment every new technology off the block, zero down on a specific area of interest and dig boots deep. The critical operative term is relevant years of experience.

As a corollary, thou shall not use the hop, jump and skip mode to advance careers. Companies with fluctuating fortunes in the marketplace want rock-steady employees to prevent disequilibria.

Thou shall not be tech savvy alone: That's not an anomaly; nor does it contradict the need to be a technocrat rather than a techno-babbler. In an era of tectonic upheavals in the marketplace, techies need be add market analysts to their skills. The first rule of market savviness entails: thou shalt not engage in long-term transaction with a company, without checking on its market credentials. Its not a foolproof method but an ability to analyse organisational policy and response to market conditions improves survival chances.

• Sift through every piece of available information: your company's area of operations, its long-term viability. If you are a WLAN engineer, for instance, how many WLAN news sites do you visit on a daily basis.
• Follow media reportage on your company
• Know the company's financiers and their track record
• Follow the company's share price, understand and analyse the figures quoted on the balance sheet
• Know companies partners and alliances
• Know the company's client list and how the clients business is doing.

Thou shalt not see yourself as an employee: In the wildly altered rules of the workplace, the traditional employee mindset is a sure dead street. See yourself as an ideas corporation and behave as though you are in the job for your survival. Failure would result in a crash in personal stock price and migration of business to the next competitor. Hence internalise performance metrics and processes of the company and deliver value quarter to quarter. Be a fixer rather than a finger-pointer. Steady growth in performance quarter to quarter will keep stocks of individual techies from crashing.

Thou shalt not resist change: "Stable times force us to think of our companies as machines. They are finely tuned and easy to copy, scale, and own. We build machines on an assembly line, focusing on how to make them cheaper and ever more reliable. If your company is a machine, you can control it. You can build another one, a bigger one. You can staff it with machine operators and train them to run it faster and faster. In times of change, this model is wrong, says Seth Godin in Survival is not Enough." In a volatile, fast-paced economy, smart companies can ill-afford to function as well-oiled machines with set processes. Rather they are constantly reshaping realigning and innovating on business strategy to fend competition. Employees need to be flexible and adaptable enough to quickly realign to changing company policy. Resisting change and being weeded to an old strategy or technology is a precursor to death.

Thou shalt network: Its for no reason that the new economy is called the networked economy. The three elements on which the economy rest are ideas information and relationships. Smart employees don't wait for a vacancy sign to appear in the window. Rather they researches top companies in their area of interest, meet executive and people working in these companies and build networks. It's a sure-fire safety network in an economy where chaos is the safest bet of all.