To both my surprise and disappointment, career-planning procrastination appears to be in the DNA of most golf course superintendents. This truly amazes me because golf course superintendents’ day job requires them to plan ahead and to meet deadlines year round – which they do routinely well. Yet, all evidence suggests that superintendents consistently fail to pre-plan when it comes to career and family welfare issues. For example:

• Roughly 90% of the hundreds of resumes that I have been asked to review through the years have been received within the one to three-week period immediately prior to these candidates submitting an application for a vacant job/position. More superintendents than not prepare/update their resumes the same week they apply for a new job. Last minute, hurried resume preparation produces an inferior product that negates job opportunity.

• Knowing that roughly 60% of all job interviews are assigned to candidates with personal web sites and that approximately 70% of all new jobs are being awarded to candidates with personal web sites – less than one in five superintendents has a personal web site today.

This situation gets further aggravating once we note that despite my February 25th blog message advising that high quality personal web sites can be prepared through Playbooks For Golf for highly affordable fees – only eight superintendents have availed themselves of this unique opportunity to date.

Applying for a job today without a personal web site is tantamount to surrendering before the battle begins.

• Superintendents are slow in taking the initiative in this dire economy to voluntarily cut their operating budgets and tie their salaries to these same declining budgets. Instead, they wait for their employers to tell them what to do (thereby forsaking all ‘brownie point’ opportunities) and, accordingly, whether they will be able to keep their jobs.

With ‘hurricane’ job warnings in the air, superintendents and their families are not running for cover; rather, they are naively staying at the beach playing with their children.

Again, it is time for leaders to lead before an entire profession is compromised.