It can be frustrating. You know you’re the right person for the job. You know that if you could speak directly to your potential new boss, she would understand that. Yet there are all these ‘middle men’ in the way: the recruiters. And these people, usually either recruitment consultants or in-house human resources people, are often so hurried and distracted that they don’t seem to see your strengths. What to do?

Dealing with these middle men (and women, of course) is a reality of job search. And you’ll find that doing so can be particularly challenging in times of economic downturn. The current global financial crisis sees many more people applying for fewer and fewer jobs. This puts pressure on everyone.

Recruiters are busy people. They spread their time between trying to understand their clients’ fuzzy and sometimes unrealistic requirements; writing ads and job descriptions; sifting through hundreds of applications; organising and holding interviews; and managing candidates to the point of a final job offer and then further, once they are in the job. They usually have a number of assignments on the go at once, all at different stages. And they often don’t get paid until the whole process is complete – which can take months.

Technology helps a little but make no mistake: this is a people game. The bulk of the work, and stress, comes from dealing with people and all their weird and wacky ways.

As a job seeker, it follows that the best way to get past these middle men and in front of the employer is to make their life as easy as possible. Here are five things you can do:

Only apply for jobs for which you are qualified. Few things frustrate a recruiter more than having to sort through the CVs of hundreds of first-year-out accounting graduates to fill a senior financial controller position. You are applying for a job – not entering a lottery. So don’t waste your time and theirs with lucky dip applications.

Have a clear and easy-to-read resume. Include only relevant information in a concise and well-written style. Use bullet points where you can and use simple formatting – like bold headings – to make your employment and work history stand out.

Customise your cover letter and resume for the job. Never apply with a form letter and ‘off the shelf’ resume. Customise both to show you have understood the job’s requirements and that you think you can meet them.

Be courteous in following up. Whether by phone or email, never be pushy in your following up. A bit of patience and understanding is much more likely to have you remembered for the right reasons. It might even help keep you front-of-mind for the next job if you miss out on this one.

After your interview, keep in touch. If you’re lucky enough to get an interview with the employer, call your recruiter and let them know how it went. It allows them to be on the front foot when they call their client. They like that! Similarly, take the initiative to keep in touch after you start the job.

No matter how bad things get, there are always plenty of jobs being advertised. If you keep searching you will find the right one eventually. Seeing the recruiter as a partner in that search, rather than as an adversary or as an inconvenient hurdle, will make the process much more fruitful for everyone.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au

It is the first question we ask when we meet someone new. And it is the last question we want to be asked when we are out of work: “What do you do?”. It is a strange quirk of our society that we define ourselves first and foremost by the work we do. Being unemployed can leave us feeling out-of-place and uncomfortable, and can even lead to avoidance of social gatherings and, therefore, networking opportunities.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people who find being out of a job a real social challenge. This is particularly the case amongst those who are in their 40s or 50s and have only had one or two jobs. People in this group have often defined themselves both by their career and by the company they used to work for; leaving a long-term job can be a double-whammy and a real blow to the confidence.

But there are ways to deal with this awkward situation, and even to turn it to your advantage. Here are five ideas:

Get creative

A good way to lighten the situation is to be creative in the way that you describe your situation. There are the old favourites like ‘between jobs’ and ‘extended break’. But perhaps you can come up with a fresher approach. ‘Mr. Mum’ (where relevant), ‘my own boss’, ‘dealing with a mid-life crisis’ or ‘studying poverty’.

Be honest

If you are honest about your situation you might be surprised where the conversation goes. Many of us have a perception that we are the only person to have been made redundant, when in fact most people will lose their job at some point in their career. So explaining that you are an out-of-work accountant might prompt a frank – and useful -  sharing of experiences.

Focus on your skills

Remember that conversations like this are, in fact, networking opportunities. You never know how the person you are talking to might be able to help you. So rather than simply saying that you are an unemployed engineer, see if you can drop some of your skills and experience into the conversation. ‘Project management’, ‘advanced computer skills’, ‘mechanical wizard’. This makes it easier for the person you are talking to recognise how you might fit into an opportunity they are aware of.

Be open to new ideas

A trick to effective job search is to open your mind to a broader range of opportunities. We can easily get stuck on finding another job very similar to the one we have left, but this is very limiting. So steer the conversation to what other people do, how their industry works, what other sorts of people they work with. Any of these things could prompt a possibility in your mind.

Talk about other stuff

If you’ve really had enough job talk, then simply steer the conversation in another direction. “I’m not working at the moment, but I did go to the football on Saturday. Do you follow football?”. “I’m unemployed, so I’m going to lots of movies. Have you seen the latest Star Trek?”. Or get your new acquaintance to talk about themselves – most people like doing that.

When you’re job hunting, any opportunity to tell others about your situation is a chance to gain some information or to make a useful connection. Networking like this  leads many people into new jobs. So whatever you do, don’t avoid social situations. Rather, keep experimenting until you find a comfortable way of describing your situation.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au

In the world of job hunting, there is nothing more daunting than the job interview. Everyone gets nervous when faced with being put on the spot. With all the build up to an interview, many people go in feeling like one misplaced word will be enough to lose them the opportunity. It doesn’t need to be so hard.

Here are seven things you can do to improve the impression you give in an interview situation. These apply equally to agency interviews and interviews with the potential employer.

Be prepared, but not over-prepared

There is often a lot of emphasis placed on the need for interview preparation: research the company, research the people, research the favourite colour of the boss. In truth, while some research is a good idea, going to excess can be detrimental. The interviewer is more interested in you than in what you know about the organisation, so consider spending more research time reminding yourself of your own background, and particularly achievements you may have forgotten about.

Get the simple stuff right

There is no point doing any research if you don’t do the simple stuff right. Present yourself smartly – with clean shoes. (I’m amazed how often the shoes are overlooked.) Be on time. Introduce yourself with a confident handshake and look the interviewer in the eyes. And smile! A smile can really set the interview off on the right track.

Listen to the questions

This is one area where over-preparation can be a trap. It is easy start waffling on in answer to a question you anticipated rather than the question that was actually asked. This has the same effect on the interviewer as sending a form letter: it leaves them wondering if you really want this particular job or would be happy with anything.

Pause. Think before you answer

There is nothing wrong with taking your time to answer. Again, in preparation, we can convince ourselves that unless we have the right answer on the tip of our tongues, we will look unprofessional. In fact, taking the time to think looks far more professional than shooting with the first thing that comes to mind. After all, in most cases, the ability to think will be a requirement of the job.

Treat the interview as a conversation

It will be easier all around if you can play your part in making the interview a conversation rather than an interrogation. So think about it as that – a conversation – before you go into the interview room. Remember that an interview should be about you testing the suitability of the job to you as much as it is them testing the suitability of you to the job. It’s a two-way street.

Be yourself

We sometimes get so caught up trying to present ourselves as what we think the interviewer is looking for that we forget to be ourselves. Don’t fool yourself: interviewers can see through this and they will quickly discount you if they don’t feel they are getting to see the real you. In the end, if you can’t get the job by being yourself, why would you want the job in the first place?

Forget the opposition

Another trap is worrying too much about the other applicants, especially towards the end of the interview process when you know you’re down to the last two or three. This can be hard to avoid but it is essential. If there is a better candidate than you, there is nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, if you are the best candidate, the only way you’ll miss out is if you don’t make that clear. So focus on your own achievements: not the achievements you imagine others might have.

Interviewers see a lot of people every day. They are often disappointed by well-qualified people who forget some of these basics in a vain attempt to present as the perfectly prepared candidate. This makes these people very hard to consider seriously. Don’t make the same mistake yourself.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au

Losing your job is tough. Even those who for whom redundancy comes as no surprise, and who receive a good package, tend to feel a sense of loss and at least a small hit to their self-esteem. For those who are laid off at short notice and have little to fall back on it can be much harder. Aside from the self-doubt this situation can bring, there is the obvious pressure of money.

While nothing can magically make things better, there are some things you can do to make the situation more manageable.

Acknowledge the frustration

Psychologists tell us that denying our feelings and emotions has a negative effect and is more likely to lead to those feelings lasting longer. It is quite normal to feel angry, negative, disheartened, undervalued and generally rotten after losing your job. Given time, these feelings will usually diminish as you turn your attention to the future.

If you are feeling worse than you expected, or your looking back with regret continues to stop you looking forward, get some help. Seek out a counsellor or psychologist who can help you: your doctor should be able to refer you to someone. There is no shame in seeking this sort of help as the feelings you are experiencing are quite normal.

Plan your finances

Even if you have received a good pay-out, and especially if you haven’t, it is worth thinking about your financial situation early on. Adjusting your standard of living can be hard to do: we condition ourselves to spending at a certain level. At the very least this usually means creating some sort of budget.

In my years as a recruitment consultant I met a number of people who had been made redundant on good packages, but who had allowed those packages to be completely spent before they started looking for a new job. It is for this reason that I often suggest that people in this situation look for some financial advice early on in order to make best use of their pay-out.

Reassess your goals

When I was made redundant for the first time (it has happened to me twice), I found myself being surprisingly upbeat. I realised later that I had been wanting to reassess the direction of my career but being ‘stuck’ in my job was holding that reassessment back.

Being ‘between jobs’ is one of the best times – usually one of the few times you will get – to rethink where your career is heading. Is it time to work towards a change? Do you want more balance in the next job, or less travel? What are your family, spiritual, learning, social, financial and physical goals and how can your next job help you meet them better?

Plan your time off

Similarly, being between jobs can be a valuable time to do some of the things you’ve long wanted to do, money-permitting of course. I’ve met people who have travelled, renovated their house and taken up a new sport during a period of unemployment. Take advantage of the fact that you don’t need to worry about how things are going at work while you’re away. You won’t get that chance very often.

If you are actively job hunting, it’s a good idea to balance the ‘job’ of job hunting with some other activities. I don’t agree with the common saying that ‘finding a job is a full time job’. The reality is that there are only so many jobs you can apply for and in between there is a lot of waiting time as well. At best, finding a job is a part time job. Better to dedicate, say, your mornings to the task and then take the afternoons for yourself – or whatever combination suits you and your circumstances.

Stay in touch with others

Finally, don’t lock yourself away after losing your job. It is important to keep talking to people, whether recruitment consultants, fellow unemployed people, your friends and family.

There is no denying that losing a job and the subsequent job search often tests the mettle of even the strongest personality. But you aren’t the only one: in fact in the current climate you are far from being the only one. Stay as positive as you can but don’t fail to seek help if you need it.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au

Do you hate your job? I did, fifteen years ago. Stressed, poorly rewarded and unappreciated, I found that simply packing my bag and leaving for work gave me a headache. It wasn’t just the company I was working for that was the problem. I was simply in the wrong career.

Trouble was, at the time, I really had no idea what else I might do. The internet was in its infancy so browsing the web for new opportunities wasn’t an option. It was very difficult to think outside the narrow bounds of the career I had more or less fallen in to.

Thankfully I did manage to turn things around. I have now found work that I can get paid for and enjoy. But looking back over those years has prompted me to rethink the way we go about choosing jobs and careers, and in fact the way we go about setting ourselves goal more broadly.

Goal Setting has become to Complex

My main conclusion is that goal setting has become too complex and scientific. Importantly, the idea of the ‘dream’ has become lost.

Goal-setting books and websites – and there are many of them – tell us that, as individuals, we should be making detailed career plans in order to achieve our goals. They advocate  the steady rung-by-rung climb up the ladder to the position ultimately sought after.

This ‘orderly approach’ thinking has a place, but it needs a context.

Back in that unhappy period, I struggled to set meaningful goals for myself. I remember being encouraged to write my goals down. To plan out 1 year, 3 year and 10 year goals. But I felt so trapped in the job I disliked – and so unclear about what I wanted to do as an alternative – that setting specific and measurable goals was impossible.

Having a dream is a starting point

What I did have was a dream: a very fuzzy idea of what I might want to do. For many years – since very early in my career – I had felt that I wanted to make a difference. To be in a situation to have a positive influence on peoples’ lives. I also knew I wanted more variety (I hate routine). And I had always admired genuine ‘experts’: those who not only knew their speciality really well but also knew how to put it into practice.

Deep down I knew these were things I wanted. Trouble was, I couldn’t get them in my career at the time and no amount of goal setting would see me move towards them. I just didn’t have enough detail to build a detailed plan on. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that this dream was fundamental to giving me the courage to break out of the bind I was in.

It was the dream that helped me see obscure opportunities when they came my way. And it was the dream that gave me the courage to take risks and actually pursue jobs which some others thought a bit mad.

Building a satisfying career takes time

It has taken many years, and there have been twists and turns along the way. But I am now working from a solid foundation. As my dream has gained sharper focus, I can more readily work on more concrete, ‘by the book’, step-by-step goals.

Goals are important – both for you as an individual and for your business. But goals are like the frame of a house. They need to be built on a solid foundation. Your dream is that foundation. Your dream is the simplest goal.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au.

The job hunting world can be a lonely place, particularly if you are ‘between jobs’. 
It can be very dispiriting and, paradoxically, distracting when everyone else has left the house for the day and left you on your own. These are not feelings you want when trying to stay focused on your search for a job.

A good way to avoid isolation is to keep in touch with the people in your network, including any recruitment consultants you may be dealing with. Apart from reducing loneliness, doing this helps you remain ‘visible’ and more ‘front of mind’. This, in turn, improves the chances of people recognising opportunities for you.

Balance is needed, however. It’s one thing to stay on your network’s radar. It’s quite another to become a constant annoyance. You need to remember that while you are not particularly busy at the moment, a lot of other people are. They are grinding through hours of meetings, sifting through hundreds of emails and trying to get some work done in what little time is left. Your keeping in touch efforts need to take this into account.

Here are five ideas for keeping in touch without becoming annoying:

1. Use email and the phone sparingly

There is nothing worse than being badgered when you’re busy. So while it can be frustrating for you to sit around and wait for the phone to ring, avoid the temptation to call or email every day for an update on that job you’ve just applied for. Be patient. Rest assured that if a consultant or company is genuinely interested in talking to you, they will do all they can to contact you. So leave your mobile on … and do something else. Follow up once a week at most and when you do so, be polite and brief.

2. Provide updates of your progress

It is good to have a reason for contacting a recruiter – a better reason than “have you heard anything?”. Once such reason is to keep them in touch with your progress. If a recruitment consultant sends you for an interview, ring them straight afterwards to tell them how it went. If you are being considered for one job and get invited for an interview for another, send the first recruiter a brief email to tell them what’s happening. And when you get a job, let everyone know!

3. Share inside knowledge

Always remember the golden rule of networking: givers gain. In other words, keep an eye out for opportunities for others – especially recruiters. As a job seeker, you might have more information than you think. You might, for instance, know someone who would be well suited to another job the recruiter is advertising. Or you might hear of a job that someone else is having trouble filling. Any information like this could be useful to your recruiter and is worth passing on.

4. Use Social Networking productively

Newer networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are excellent ways of keeping in touch with people without appearing to hector them. You post your updates and your network read them in their own time. Obviously these don’t replace other sorts of networking and keeping in touch, but you would be wise to use them as part of your formula, especially as they can expose you to a wider ‘audience’.

5. Be Brief

In all your communications, be succinct. For instance, if you can get the main point of your message into your email subject, that’s a good sign – and it increases the chances of your message getting through.

Ideally you will use a mixture of these approaches to keep others in the loop about your job search progress – and keep yourself sane at the same time.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au.

When applying for jobs, your resume is your weapon of first resort. It has one primary purpose: to get you an interview. As such, it needs to present you to the world in the best possible light. Occasionally, this means you need to bend the truth a little.

Now, before we get down to details, let me make myself clear: it is NEVER okay to tell straight out lies on your resume. DO NOT create jobs or positions you never had. DO NOT manufacture qualifications you have not earned. DO NOT change dates to hide awkward gaps in your work history. Lies are lies and eventually will bring you unstuck. And don’t kid yourself: after years of reading resumes, I can assure you that any good recruiter can spot a piece of CV fiction from a good distance.

That’s the parental lecture out of the way. What about ways you CAN, legitimately, bend the truth on your resume to improve your chances of landing an interview for the job?

Don’t tell them your age

There is no reason to provide your age or date of birth on your resume, particularly if you are concerned that it might work against you. Simply leave it off. If they really want to know how old you are, they can deduce it from your career and education background anyway. But you want those things to be read before such a conclusion is drawn. You don’t want (and this does happen) the recruiter to discard your resume without reading it simply because they see your date of birth as 1962 on the first page.

The same applies here to any other thing you fear might cause you to be discriminated against: gender (if you have a non-gender specific name), disabilities, ethnic origin and so on.

Clean up your position titles

Ever had one of those wonderful modern job titles that hardly fit on to a business card? You know the ones: Senior Client Satisfaction & Outcomes Manager, People Capital Executive Personal Attendant, Vice President: Housekeeping and Bathroom Hygiene. These might make you look grand to your clients, but they make no sense to people trying to learn about your past.

So simplify them: Customer Service Manager, Human Resources Assistant, Cleaner.

Provided you are not presenting yourself as something you are not – providing your duties are consistent with the more ‘traditional’ title used on your resume – there is absolutely nothing wrong with this sort of truth bending. You are simply making your background clearer and, as a bonus, more database friendly.

Leave off reasons for leaving

There are mixed views on this one, but in my experience it is cleaner not to state the reasons you left your previous jobs. There are only really two reasons for leaving a job: because you wanted a change, or because you were asked to leave. In these heady days of financial crisis and uncertainty, both are perfectly valid. And both are best discussed at interview, so let them wait until then.

All of these guidelines apply as much to application letters as they do to resumes. And, of course, feel free to ignore them – especially if to do so would be to paint you in a negative light. If youth is likely to be important, and you are youthful, then there is no problem leaving your age in.

Bending the truth on a resume is not about telling porky pies. It is about presenting your background in the best possible light, even if that means being a little creative.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au.

You’ve been thinking for a while about changing jobs and finally the perfect opportunity has come up. Great pay, great location, great organization. Now to put a resume together. Before you put fingers to keyboard, give some thought to what you should leave off your resume.
There are two important things to keep in mind about resumes: First, by producing a resume, you are not aiming to get a job – you are aiming to get an interview. Second, your resume will be read by a busy person: it needs to be clear, concise and clutter-free.

With those points in mind, the following are ten things best left off your resume:

• Your photo. Unless you are applying to be the new Elle, Kate or Gisele, a photo on a resume is unnecessary. A poor photo (which most are) is might generate a few laughs around the recruiting office but it won’t strengthen your position as an applicant.
• A ‘Personal Mission Statement’. Generic statements which tell the recruiter that you aim to benefit mankind whilst maintaining a healthy and sustainable lifestyle have no place on a resume. The CV is about what you’ve done, not what you aim to do. Save your hopes and dreams for the interview.
• Generic skills. Do you have ‘excellent communication skills’ and the ‘ability to work as a team member’? Great. So does everyone else. Listing these sorts of skills does nothing to make you stand out from the job hunting crowd. Instead, demonstrate your skills when you describe your achievements.
• School jobs. Unless you are very early in your career, the fact that you successfully flipped hamburgers for three years as a teenager is unlikely to be relevant to your application for an accounting position. Leave it out.
• Details of really old jobs. Along the same lines, if you are well into your career and applying for your tenth job in 25 years, you can safely condense your early jobs down to a single line: who you worked for and what your position was.
• Gaps. Never leave a gap in your job history. If you travelled for three years early in your career, then make this clear. Likewise if you were unemployed for a period. Leaving out these sorts of things simply leaves the recruiter to draw their own conclusions, and they generally won’t be positive.
• Lies. Never, ever, make up qualifications, jobs or positions, nor attribute yourself with skills that you don’t have. You will be found out eventually and the consequences could be dire.
• Your age. Not telling lies doesn’t mean that you have to tell everything. In most cases, it is perfectly okay for you to leave your age and date-of-birth off your resume. Discrimination on the basis of age is illegal but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And in any case, if the recruiter really wants to work out your age, your education and job history will give them a fair idea.
• Irrelevant qualifications. You may still be proud of your bronze swimming certificate and responsible serving of alcohol qualification, but if they aren’t relevant to your aspirations as a computer programmer, keep them to yourself.
• Long-winded job descriptions. Don’t write long, unbroken paragraphs describing each of your jobs in great detail. Focus on your responsibilities and specific achievements, use bullet points and be succinct. You can’t impress if no one bothers to read what you’ve written.

Of course, every rule is made to be broken and there are exceptions to all the above. If, for instance, a job advertisement specifically asks for you to include a photo, then include a photo – a good one. If your school job as a junior manager at McDonalds is relevant to the management job you are applying for, leave it in. The magic question should always be: “Is it relevant?”.

This article was written for Classifind.com.au.

What’s a bandwagon if not for jumping on? So it is that I’ve found myself quite regularly tweeting, retweeting and even twooshing over the last few weeks. So it is that I find myself joining nearly every magazine and newspaper in the Western world and writing about the newest kid on the internet block: Twitter.

What’s the twhype all about?

Twitter is so simple that it almost defies description. It is a website on which you can publish short public messages of no more than 140 characters. Ostensibly the idea is to post updates – ‘tweets’ – about what you’re doing. Other users can follow the progress of your updates and you can follow theirs.

It’s trumpeted as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family without the need to write at length and without expectation of a reply. So, for instance, the travelling business person might send updates over a day like: “plane arrived on time – remarkable!”; “meeting went on and on but we got what we wanted”, and “why are Melbourne taxi drivers always lost?”.

While all this drama is unfolding, this person’s friends and family – ‘followers’, in tweetspeak – can visit the Twitter website at any time and check on their loved one’s progress.

Twitter is a bit of a cross between text messaging, instant messaging and blogging, while not really being any of those. The jargon is ‘micro-blogging’.

Just another source of information to add to our already info-crowded lives? Possibly. Yet, provided tweetcrastination and tweetaholism can be avoided, Twitter has intriguing potential as a communication tool.

Like so many internet ideas, including the web itself, Twitter has quickly outgrown its developers’ original intentions. Innovative users, mobile friendliness and a free programming interface have propagated a cornucopia of new applications for Twitter.

Twitter has become a networking tool, a customer service tool and a word-of-mouth tool. Twitter users are breaking the news before the media hears about it. Twitter can help you find a job or fill a job. Twitter can help you sell your products or your politics. Twitter can help you stick to your diet or quit smoking. The list continues to grow…

Yet it is still early days. Twitter may be no more than another bubble floating over the internet landscape, ready to burst at any moment. Like many, I was suspicious at first. But Twitter is different. Its simplicity, its brevity and its inherent informality (there isn’t much room for spin in 140 characters) all work to support an interesting new way of communicating.

It might work for you or it might not. The only way to find out is to get out there amongst the tweeple and give it a twy!

“I am constantly amazed at how stupid I was two weeks ago.” This is a wonderful comment on lifelong learning from American consultant and writer Alan Weiss. It holds a lot of truth. It is incredible how even a small experience or lesson can make our world look quite different from what it did only yesterday.

I can tell you that this is certainly true for me. After what is now six years of writing about simplicity, management and business, I sometimes feel like I’ve only just started. I know I have contradicted myself more than once. Every client I work with gives me a new perspective that can send my thoughts on a new journey.

Take complexity. We’ve identified many sources of it over the last six years. But there are probably only two that I could hold as anything close to absolute. And they aren’t processes or people issues or PowerPoint points. They boil down to managers – at all levels – trying to do what someone else has told them is the right thing.

The first is a misplaced assumption that because an action or strategy has worked for someone else, it will work for us too. This is the organizational equivalent of thinking that because the coat on the person next to me looks good on them, it will look good on me too.

This assumption is widespread and is reinforced by a frequent emphasis on case studies in management education and literature. It doesn’t hold up because everyone’s context is different. I might be able to force myself into the coat, but chances are doing so will be hard work and leave me feeling uncomfortable.

The second source of complexity is another misplaced assumption: that there is one set of ‘right things’ to do that will make an organization ‘perfect’. It’s the organizational equivalent of thinking that the right combination of cosmetic surgery will make me look like Brad Pitt.

This assumption is reinforced by frequent stories of ‘superhero’ CEOs who turn companies around with just the right set of decisive actions. Unfortunately, there is no ‘perfect’ organization – not for long, anyway. Today’s ‘perfect’ organization is tomorrow’s basket case. So there can be no one right way of achieving ‘perfection’.

These two assumptions drive complexity by distracting organizations and their people from being themselves and doing what it is they do best. Paradoxically, they rest on a further assumption that business is more simple than it really is. And they share the misconception that at some stage it will be okay to stop learning.

If you want to simplify your business, the only real way of doing so is to accept that your complexity is yours alone. Reject ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions and find your own best way of doing things.

In short, never stop learning.