Footnote: The Employee-Plus Approach

For too long I had failed to get work either as an employee or as a self-employed service provider. I therefore decided to explore a new approach which I am given to understand has worked well in America for older more experienced people. This ap­proach is to offer the prospective employer not only a new employee, but a com­plete package comprising:

• A new innovative product design.
• A project plan for realising its development, production and marketing.
• A commercial proposition for financing and carrying out the above plan.
• A skilled and experienced key employee to set it up and run it.

It was hoped that the opportunity this offered a prospective employer to diversify into a new market with a new product would prompt him to take me on.

Research

For my first attempt at obtaining work by this approach I chose to use my know­ledge and experience of air navigation. I therefore spent 4 weeks in February/March 1993 formally documenting my air navigation knowledge. I then decided to use this knowledge to design what I thought would become a commercially attractive prod­uct for the nineties. I therefore spent the rest of May 1993 designing an innovative navigation product which I decided to call Nomad. For it I produced a:

• Technical Outline which defined and specified the product.

• Commercial Outline for producing and marketing it with me as a key
  employee.

• Project Outline which specified the product, how it could be realised
  through appropriate commercial liaisons, and how its entire life-cycle
  would be managed.

Action

During June 1993 I contacted the following organisations whom I thought could help me present it to the right people:

• Hertfordshire TEC (Training & Enterprise Council)
• The Local Authority
• Hertfordshire Development Organisation
• Hertfordshire Investors in Business
• Virgin Airlines
• Other relevant individuals and consultancies

Also during June 1993 I produced a small program which ran on Microsoft Windows to demonstrate one of the functions of the proposed product. [I later rewrote and extended this as a Java applet.] July and August were spent developing and main­taining contacts. My most extensive and encouraging contact was with the Hert­fordshire Development Organisation.

I spent September and half of October going through the same process for another product. This was a database-driven communications system which I code-named Nexus. However, six months later, when I had completed about 80% of the Tech­nical Outline for Nexus, it became obvious from the organisations I had contacted that nobody was interested in Nomad. I therefore decided to halt work on the Nexus documents.

I later discovered that a less ambitious version of Nomad was about to be launched by a well-known American avionics company, so I can't have been too far off target. That is intellectually comforting but it does not feed the kids. My conclusion is therefore that this 'employee-plus' approach to finding a job is also futile. It re­qu­ires far too many resources for a long-term unemployed person like me to muster.

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Parent Document | © May 1998 Robert John Morton