Follow Your Vocation, Not Your Bliss

There's a inspirational piece going around that got my hackles up. An artist did a Bill Waterson-style cartoon to illustrate a speech which Bill Waterson gave. Click on through, it's a quick read, and the artist does a good job of imitating Waterson's visual style, which is certainly one I have a great affection for having grown up on Calvin & Hobbes.

The message of this inspirational cartoon, leaves something to be desired. (And really, it's the cartoon much more than the speech that has be annoyed.) We see a dreamy illustrator, oppressed by using his skills to draw things such as Jeep advertisements. Finally, he quits his job, goes home, and paints dinosaur models instead. His wife gets pregnant, they have a child, she goes off to work to support the family, and he stays home drawing and watching after their child. His old boss shows up one day to offer him a new job, but he turns it down because he'd rather stay home with his daughter and draw.

Really, there are two different things that bother me here. One is entirely related to the story layered on by the cartoon. The reason why the artist shown is able to do whatever he wants is because he has a wife who is going off and making the living to support the family -- doing what he is not himself willing to do. He thinks that it's degrading to work for a living, luckily, he can skip out of that and make his wife do it for him instead. Now, there's nothing inherently selfish about being the stay-at-home half of a single income family. This is, of course, the way that MrsDarwin and I live. But the cartoon doesn't really show staying home to take care of your children as being needed work -- something that is worthwhile for its own sake but also (like any form of work) often keeps you from what you would most like to be doing if pursuing the "follow your bliss" creed. In real life, there would be a lot of days when taking care of his daughter and keeping the house in order and making sure that there was something to eat when his wife got home would keep the artist from being able to sit down and draw like he wants to. Because parenting and keeping house is also work -- not a vacation.

And, whatever any feminists may say, I would also add that the configuration shown here is harder on both spouses, but particularly on the wife. There are couples for whom it has to work, but all other things being equal it does not work as well to have the wife working and the husband staying home. When we have a baby, I'll take a week or two of personal time, work a bit from home while I'm doing it, and then head on back to work with nor more difficulty than a bit of tiredness from sleeping a little less well than usual with the tiny new member of the family in bed with us at nights. Two weeks after giving birth, MrsDarwin still has trouble walking for long, and she'd have an incredibly hard time going back to a full day of work. When we see the smiling mom heading off to work to support her stay-at-home-husband in the cartoon, we don't see the bags under her eyes from being up nursing the baby at night. Nor is there any easy way to show that mothers simply have a stronger desire to be with and bond with very small children than fathers do. That's not to say that fathers don't care about their children, but it's not the sort of bond that being gone for ten hours at a time strains at all.

The second thing that bothers me here has to do with how one reconciles one's desires and aspirations (following your bliss, in the oft quoted feel good phrase) with the need to make a living. Your job's function is not to allow you to fulfill all your dreams, provide your primary intellectual and artistic stimulation, and give your live a deep sense of meaning and purpose. And let's be honest: for most of us our jobs will provide none of those.

I feel that I'm very fortunate in my job. It pays well, it's relatively challenging and interesting, and I work with fairly nice people. Is it what I most want to be doing in the world? Is it what I would do if I didn't have to worry about earning a living? Of course not. But that's okay. Your job doesn't have to provide your main sense of excitement and meaning in life. It has to pay the bills and allow you to fulfill your real vocation, which for most of us means: supporting your family.

Sure, I'd love it if I could read and think and write full time about whatever I wanted. But a whole lot of people would love to do that, and very few people want to pay for it. I'd enjoy it if someone offered to pay me to work full time researching and writing a novel about World War One -- but as it stands I'm very happy to make a good living for my family doing pricing analytics and research and write in my spare time.

Yes, there are those rare people who have talents and desires (and opportunities) such that they can do what they most want to do and also make a great living at it. If you are Steve Jobs or Bill Waterson: Follow your bliss.

However, most of us aren't Steve Jobs or Bill Waterson. And I kind of doubt that there's anyone whose great dream and passion is plumbing or cost accounting or working register or supply chain logistics. And yet we need all these things, and they're not ignoble things just because they aren't the only thing someone wants out of life. It's okay (indeed good) to work to pay the bills while being primarily focused on your family and your hobbies.

Actually, at times I'm very glad that my job doesn't look too much like a vocation or a dream. One of the temptations that people seem to face in that situation is to let the job start to crowd out one's other (often more important) needs and aspirations. If I had a job that looked more like "my bliss", I'd be tempted to stick with it even if it wasn't providing my family with the income and security and time with them that they need. I'd be tempted to string things along miserably year after year of just barely making it (or not) on the conviction I was meant to do this.

As it is, one of the great things about my job is that my boss says, "Look, at the end of the day, we're just here to earn a paycheck. It's what we go home to that matters."

Initial Thoughts on College

I've caught up on reading Bearing's series on post-secondary education, and having done so I'm eager to start formulating some thoughts on the topic in general and on Mark's guest post "Why College Is a Bad Deal for America" in particular. I feel the need to sidle up to the topic and lay some groundwork, not just because I'm too short on time (trying to finish the novel, as I should be doing right now) to write a single exhaustive post, but also because I'm aware that this is a topic on which I have strong feelings influenced by my own history and the limited data set that personal experience provides.

Let me start by outlining my own personal background on the topic. I've written in the past about my own progress from a Classics degree to working in Marketing (and now, Finance -- pricing is one of those disciplines that can end up on either side of the divide.) What may or may not come through from that is the extent to which my personal pride ended up becoming wrapped up in proving that I could "make it" as a provider despite having a humanities rather than a technical degree. Many of the guys I hung out with socially in college were in business or computer science, and so I got a lot of "now you'll know how to say 'would you like fries with that?' in Latin!" ribbing. It was good natured enough, but I had (and have) more than my fair share of pride, and it tended to make me angry. Thus in addition to the need to provide for a family right out of college (MrsD and I married at 22, had our first child at 23 and our second at 24) I had a strong personal determination to prove that in the long run I could make as much or more than people who'd gone into fields like business, engineering and computer science.

So when I hear someone arguing that getting a college degree in general, or a non-career-oriented college degree in particular, is a bad investment, my first reaction is an entirely emotional competitive urge to respond, "Oh yeah? Can you match this?"

Secondly, my personal experience is very much formed around corporate office environments (in marketing and finance) where college degrees are almost a must. Yeah, sure, there are the famous college drop outs like Michael Dell and Bill Gates, but the companies those men founded employ almost exclusively college graduates when it comes to well paid salaried jobs. (If anything, I'm on the anti-credential side of the corporate spectrum, since I'm one of those who considers MBAs mostly useless degrees.) So when I look around me at the type of success that I'm most familiar with, purposely not going to college seems like a bad idea, because it mostly locks you out. (There are exceptions, but it's tough.)

Alright, so with those preliminaries out of the way, so that people will understand where I'm coming from and be able to contextualize what I'm saying accordingly, the approach I'd like to take is to lay out some thoughts in broad outline, and then delve into those points individually in further posts. Since these points are necessarily brief, I'll number them for easy reference in discussion. The ordering means nothing in particular.

1) I think that people are right to be concerned with the rapidly escalating cost of college education (undergraduate and graduate) and with the extent of student debt that people are getting into in order to finance their educations.

2) A great many people go to college believing that college guarantees them a job, or even a "good job". In our current economy, this is clearly not the case. Even people with degrees that are very job focused are having more difficulty getting jobs right now, and for those with less job focused degrees, things are even harder. That said, if things are hard for college graduates, they are even harder for people without college degrees and hardest of all for those without even high school degrees.

3) While one can argue that this maybe shouldn't be the case, a four year college degree is generally considered to be the minimum threshold for being a "well educated person" in our society at this time. As such, if you don't have a college degree, you're going to end up having to answer the question "why not?" to one extent or another (clearly, this will vary depending on your professional field and social milieu) and you will have to deal with people's unspoken assumptions based on your lack of degree.

3) All of that said: College is not a good deal for everyone. People who go to college but don't finish end up with debt and lost time, but don't have appreciably higher income or lower unemployment than those with only high school degrees. (Whether they learned and grew a lot is, of course, another matter, but I'd assume that dropping out isn't a great sign in that regard.) Further, some of the data out of the Academically Adrift studies suggests that among those who finish to college, unemployment is three times higher (and pretty similar to the rate for those with just a high school diploma) for those in the bottom 20% of academic ability as compared to those in the top 20% of academic ability.

4) On the other hand, we have a strong tendency to take a finding about society in general "college is a bad deal for some people" and apply it to each individual person regardless of circumstances. I'd argue that someone who has a lot of academic ability, and a strong desire to pursue a four year degree in some field, should not be dissuaded with the general observation, "College is a bad deal for some people." It's people who excel at and appreciate academic study who will get the most out of college both personally and professionally. Further, given that your children are more likely than the average member of the population to be like you (both as a matter of nature and nurture) while you shouldn't unduly pressure your children to follow your path, you probably also shouldn't assume that they should look like the general population. So if you and your spouse are both college graduates who did well in college and have gone on to successful careers, don't look at the overall population and say, "Well, 40% of people are graduating from college now, and many of them aren't doing so well, so probably most of my kids shouldn't go to college." If your kids are like you in ability and inclination, urging them to skip the college degree they want and get a certification in some skill like plumbing or welding instead is probably not a good a idea. (If they want to pursue one of those fields rather than college, that's a whole other situation.)

5) I think it's important to come to a broader understanding of the "liberal arts" as those arts and sciences appropriate to a free person. This means encouraging "liberal arts types" to study a bit of more hard-edged topics, and also making sure not to relegate more technical subjects strictly to training as opposed to education.

6) While I'm sympathetic to the search for "third ways", part of what made college such a valuable experience for me was living for four years with other people who where also studying academic subjects in depth, and the "community of scholars" feeling that creates. Goodness knows, it was imperfect, but I had a fairly intensive liberal arts education in high school and I've tried to do a fair amount of self teaching since, and I don't think either one is remotely comparable to the college experience.

7) While I'm a very big advocate of people getting an undergraduate college degree if they have the ability and inclination, I think people should very carefully weigh whether going to grad school is something really ought to do. It's often very expensive. If your hope is to get into academia professionally, it's an incredible career longshot. If you are doing it for more general professional advancement or benefit, I think you need to think hard whether the time and cost is going to have a sufficient return on investment. And if you're doing it because you don't know what else to do (or because it's just fun) I think you need to be very hesitant unless you can pull it off without incurring debt. Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to avoid making decisions.

How I Got Here From There: Classics to Marketing

Things have been moderately absorbing at work lately, and since this has had my mind running in a work mode even in off hours, I thought I'd put this to use in writing on a topic I'd been vaguely meaning to get to for a while: How did I get here, career-wise? I wrote about a post on this theme six years ago, but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, both in regards to my career and also in how I write, so I wanted to do a follow-up and expansion of sorts.

Previously I wrote in the form of tips. This time I'm going to be more autobiographical, though I'll try to draw out any useful applications as I go along. I've always been somewhat over-interested in how people progress through their careers, perhaps in part because (with my parents and many of their friends in semi-academic careers or very, very stable careers at one company) I have often felt confusion as to what to expect when, and thus a lot of curiosity as to how other people's careers have worked out. Now I begin to have enough history, though still rather little, to satisfy the curiosity of my younger self, so this is, in a sense, written to the twenty-two-year-old me.

College
Going into college, I was sure of three things:
- I wanted to major in one of the liberal arts (I started out in History and switched to Classics after a year for a bit more of a challenge), both for the experience of studying something that fascinated me and because I couldn't stand the thought of studying "business" for four years.
- I did not want to go on in academia.
- I did not have specific career plans, but I was determined to "go somewhere".

Throughout high school I'd written a lot of fiction, and I had vague ambitions of trying to get into some kind of creative work. I looked into taking a professional program in film editing back in LA after graduating. However, I wanted to get married right out of college and with the looming likelihood of children to support, I didn't think I could afford to get more education or try to get into an industry that many people were eager to work in but only a small percentage "made it". A solution suggested itself when a web hosting company set up offices in town and I managed to snag an entry level job in their sales office the summer before my senior year, with no more qualifications than being well spoken and knowing my way around office software. For six months I proudly talked about myself as working for a dot-com, until it did what a lot of dot-coms were doing in 2000 and landed itself on the rocks financially. Thus, I got the experience of being laid off before graduating college. With six months to go and the need to pay rent, I hunted around for another job in the Steubenville area that I could talk my way into based on six months experience in sales. Next thing I knew, I was making the princely sum of $10/hr (more than I had before) across the river in West Virginia as one of the managers in a telephone call center. The best thing I can say about that experience is that it taught me that I could soldier on through a job I really didn't like.

First Job Out of College
The plan was that upon graduation we'd move out to Los Angeles, where my family lived, get married, and live there. But although I'd spent my whole life prior to college in the LA area, I didn't have any connections who would be useful in finding a job, and I needed one fast. So I went down to a temp agency, talked with one of their placement agents for an hour, took a few tests on computer usage proficiency, and was fortunate enough to get sent out on a job interview two days later. I did the interview and got the job: working as a sales assistant in a small company selling chemicals to the manufacturers of personal care products (lotions, shampoos, etc.) The job did not pay as much as I'd hoped (my salary out of college was $28k/yr) but I had got it in less than a week and it allowed us to sign the lease on an apartment for MrsDarwin to live in until the wedding.

The sales assistant job was relatively undemanding. I'd take calls from customers who needed chemical samples, pull all the data they needed on the chemicals they were interested in, xerox the data sheets, and send both samples and data off to them via UPS. Aside from that, I was supposed to type up sales call reports (and anything else needed) for the four salesmen, and cover the switchboard during the receptionists break. The work wasn't hard, nor did it take my whole day, but I quickly got frustrated with having to pull studies and data sheets out of badly organized file drawers. I told the owner this and advised him that the data should all be in a database. He pointed out that I had MS Access on my computer, handed me a company credit card, and said I could go to Barnes & Noble to pick up some books on how to use it.

I picked up two brick-like tomes on Access and over the course of the next few months I built a database which listed all the products. Once it was done, anyone in the company could pull up information on the products and email relevant data off to customers without leaving his desk.

Frustrations
By now, I was 23 and we were expecting our first child. Quick financial calculations revealed that although MrsDarwin hadn't been making much money, we would no longer be able to pay the bills once she stopped working. My six month review came up and I got a raise of $0.75/hr. Meditating on how built a database for the company's benefit, and that my friends who had majored in Computer Science and now held tech jobs made twice what I did, I was furious. I started looking for another job. There were better entry-level jobs than the one I had found out there, but I needed to plug a $10k hole in our monthly budget and none of them paid that much more than I'd been making. Getting desperate, I took a sales job which promised to pay lots of commission if things went well. I went in to my boss and quit, telling him that since they couldn't pay me more I was taking another job. He asked me how much I was going to be making. This felt like an attack on my pride, so I quoted the number which I'd been told I might make in commission "if things went well": $40k. "Well, don't tell anyone you're quitting yet," he advised. After talking with the owner he took me out to lunch and asked if I'd stay if they matched the $40k.

I'd spent so long being angry that the company didn't appreciate me more for the work that I'd done thus far, that I was strongly tempted to leave anyway. But sanity and self interest prevailed. I became a "Marketing Manager" (which meant I continued to work with my database, but also took over responsibility for all the company's own brochures, catalog, etc.)

Starting a Business Young
I'd been working on a side-plan to get myself into a better job -- trying to start a web-application business with some college friends. Originally, I was supposed to just be the marketing and sales side of the business, but since what we needed at first was lots of web work, I picked up a couple more books and taught myself how to write HTML, MySQL, and PHP.

It was to try to get things off the ground with this business venture that, when we had been married two and half years, we moved out to Austin. There's a lot that could be said about the start-up itself, but that would be a post until itself. We learned a lot. I in particular learned a lot of technical skills I hadn't had before. We also repeatedly found ourselves in over our heads -- not so much technically, but in regards to running a business. Good clients seemed to keep passing us over. Looking back, I can see why a group of guys in their mid-twenties wouldn't seem like a good bet for your expensive development project. As a result, we tended to win the customers who had big plans but very little money, and we did so by coming up with highly optimistic estimates, that we bound ourselves to rather than charging hourly. So while we learned a lot and managed to make a little bit of money, in the end we found ourselves burnt out, discouraged, and having lost our start-up capital. What I know now, that I didn't know then, is that optimism and the willingness to work unlimited hours are not sufficient foundations for founding a successful business.

Second Job and Moving Up
In Texas, I wanted a steady paycheck to supplement the money I was earning via the business. I looked at the ads and sent resumes out, but the way I actually got a job was by looking up the staffing company that filled temp-to-perm positions at the big computer and consumer electronics company that was located very near our house. This landed me a contract job that at an hourly rate paid a little less than I'd been making in LA, but since it was hourly I made a point of making up the lack by trying to squeeze in a couple hours of overtime each week. Time-and-a-half does wonders for the paycheck.

The job I'd got was on a team that audited calls at overseas call centers and then provided ratings and feedback to the call centers. Determined to stick out somehow, I built a database to store all the audits in. This worked so far as it went, but the group in charge of call center quality like the idea of having "third party" auditors, so were were stuck as contract workers indefinitely.

I had been spending my spare time helping out a woman who had moved into the cube across the aisle from me. She had just been transfered into a job that required a lot of work in Excel, and she was struggling with it. When things completely fell apart for her, she asked her manager to hire me on an hourly basis (since I was a temp) to get a big project done. A couple weeks later, she managed to get transferred to a job that was a better fit for her skills, and I was offered her job as a permanent employee.

I spent the next couple years working as a marketing analyst and gradually accreting responsibilities. I was working within the marketing organization, and it turned out that in marketing there were a lot of people who wanted to run tests or promotions or compile mailings lists or measure the effectiveness of advertising, but very few people who actually knew how to do the data analysis necessary to support that work. I found I was able to pick up how to do this kind of work on the fly, while many couldn't or were afraid to try, and in the end it proved to be a better way of getting notice and promotion than being one of the larger number of people struggling to get hold of the few "sexy" jobs managing high profile brands or dealing with advertising.

Finding a Specialty
They say that connections are essential to career advancement, and I used to think on this with great frustration since I felt I didn't have any. One thing I have learned since is that "connections" aren't necessarily "rich guys your Dad knows from the country club" or "people you met at your ivy league college". The connection that made my career what it is today formed when one of the constant moves that occur in the cubicle lands of a large company brought a new neighbor into the cube next to mine. As I was watching him unpack I saw him set up framed pictures of four young kids on his desk, then add a framed ultrasound to the end of the line. Immediately I thought, "This guy and I are going to get along."

We did. He was Evangelical rather than Catholic, but we had a number of things in common religiously and culturally. He also proved to be of like mind in that he had a background in the liberal arts but had become adept at data analysis. He built statistical models in Excel that allowed him to predict how many products could be sold in a week, based on what price the products were sold at. We shared tips and tricks in the way that Excel gurus tend to, and although six months later the endless shuffle or re-orgs and moves put us in separate buildings, we kept in touch. A couple years later, he was put in charge of a whole team of pricers, and he was able to offer me one of the open positions on the team.

This provided me with a welcome raise and an increase in responsibility.  It also provided me with the opportunity to become a specialist in a field (pricing) in which there are a moderately small number of people with extensive experience. Pricing analysis has boomed as a discipline just in the last decade, so having five or more years of experience puts you in a relatively strong position. I discovered this more or less by accident. During one of the recurrent lay-off scares, I had put together a fairly detailed LinkedIn profile, which among other things showed that I'd then spent just over five years as a pricing analyst and pricing manager. To my surprise, I started getting emails from recruiters every couple of months asking if I was interested in pricing related jobs at other companies.

One of these caught me at a particularly frustrating time (re-organizations, layoffs, manager I didn't like, etc.) so I said I was interested, and for good measure started a full-on job search.  Two months later, after various ups and downs and trips out to interview at different companies, the call that had started my search resulted in a job offer in Ohio and I took it.

Where I Am Now
While my title at my new company is similar to that I left at my old one, I'm the only person who does pricing analysis for the company, so the responsibility is greater.  It's also been a huge learning experience setting price in a thousand individual brick and mortar locations rather than on a single, nationwide website.  In the process, I've had the chance to use the products of some very good companies producing pricing analysis and test/control analysis software, which has been by turns interesting and frustrating after the build-your-own environment at my previous company.

From this vantage point, some things which worried me a lot when I was starting out on my career are no longer an issue.  My undergraduate major is now just an interesting conversation point at work.  No one worries about whether a Classics degree makes me less qualified for my job because I've got a track record in a fairly specialized niche.

As I look towards the future, I wonder if my lack of an MBA will eventually become an issue.  In my current job I report to a director (I'm technically a manager, though I don't actually manage anyone) and a logical career progression would be to try to become a director myself someday.  Most of the directors I know and virtually all the vice presidents have MBAs, a degree that I've long been prejudiced against, and I haven't got close enough to that point to know whether it will become necessary for me to look at getting one if I want to keep moving on, or if I'll be able to push on through on the basis of experience.

The other big career change that would loom if I attempt to move higher would be the need to generalize again.  Specializing has been a big advantage to my career over the last few years, but to progress higher I'd have to generalize again.  I still often feel like I'm working without a pattern.  I never like it when I'm asked the "where do you plan to be in 5 years?" questions at work, because looking back I know that at each point in my career my prediction would have been wrong.  But I can't complain.  Indeed, I feel embarrassingly fortunate.  Thinking back to the post I linked to at the beginning, to which this is a long winded reply, I wish I could read the sort of post a six-more-years-older me would write to the current me.

While I realize that crime of publishing such a long-winded post on a Friday afternoon is nearly inexcusable (this is what happens when I indulge in writing a post over multiple days), if any readers have actually survived reading it and feel inclined to share their own "how I got here from there" stories, please do.  Verbosity is not required, though I would be the last who could disallow it.

John Wilkins on Higher Education vs. Professional Training

John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts has a post up about credential inflation and the tendency to create university programs to support careers which is the more interesting for the family history examples it provides:

When my grandfather was a boy of 14, he started a career as a fireman that led to him being the chief of the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade in the 1930s. While he did this he gained an engineer’s certificate, but he was working, earning and building a career. He was not unusual at the beginning of the 20th century.

My father, who managed to get himself ejected from the MMFB for conducting unauthorised and explosive chemistry experiments in the West Melbourne station, worked in radio from the age of 16. He never got a post-secondary qualification so far as I can discover. I left school at 16, and worked in a newspaper before I became a graphic artist and printer (without qualifications). I could have become a journalist if I had shown the determination, through a cadetship at the Herald and Weekly Times, even without matriculating.

However, now, students are expected to complete not year 10, or even 12, but a Bachelor’s degree, in order to even enter the professional workforce, and to have at least a Master’s degree to get ahead. This means that the very earliest one can start earning in full is around 24, a full decade later than my grandfather’s day, and if you continue to study, you might not begin to earn properly and start to even pay off your education debt before you are in your 30s.

This is something I tend to grouse about myself, as I now work in circles in which MBAs a very common (My current and previous job were both advertised as "MBA strongly preferred") while I have a BA only and that in Classics not a "professional" field.

I also have to wonder how sustainable the increasing credential inflation trend is as we get into generations in many Western countries which will be smaller than the previous ones. Having an increasingly small number of workers to support retirees seems unsustainable enough, encouraging those workers to not do much of anything until their late 20s or early 30s seems like an even worse idea.

Changing Jobs

So I'm leaving my job and heading for a new one.

Getting to this point has taken so much work, that it's only now (as I start writing up "everything I do" for my manager to make what I expect will be a futile attempt to get someone to do it in India, as goodbye parties are scheduled and people drop by to ask in hushed tones, "Are they hiring any other positions?", as I find myself doing monthly tasks and thinking, "This is the last time.") that I find myself gradually adjusting to the idea that in two more weeks I won't be here anymore.

Although I've changed roles a number of times, I've worked at the same company (mostly in the same building) for almost seven years now. At thirty-one, that's a rather major portion of one's life. When we moved out here and I started at the company, I was 24 and had two kids under two. A lot has changed since then.

At least in our modern world, a job is seen as a pretty transient thing. My employer could have told me I was out of a job at any time. Although the company tends to give a couple months' severance, that's not at all required. And similarly, while I've given them the traditional two weeks notice, in theory I could have simply said, "So long and thanks for all the fish," and walked out the door immediately.

And yet, for all that either could have, in theory, walked away with no notice at any time, in fact the bonds between employee and company run deep, perhaps oddly deep given that it is "only a job". Work friendships may not always be the deepest, but we spend far more time with co-workers than with most other friends. And even when a job seems three parts drudgery to one part interest, it becomes part of our daily mental landscape. The longest I'd worked at any one company prior to this was about three years, and even there I to this day remember a great deal about personalities, products, and daily routine. I have the feeling that this company has sunk even deeper into my consciousness.

As a result, the whole thing still has a certain air of unreality. It often throws me when large changes in life come quickly. Somehow, the fact that the offer of the new job came so quickly, a ten minute call outlining compensation, start date, etc., makes it seem much less real than the long process of talking to various employers, interviewing, etc. It probably won't be until several seeks into the new job that it finally sinks in that this really is where I work now.

How to Get a Job

One of the things that's been keeping me busy lately has been hiring. Contrary to the overall economic environment, the particular segment of Large Corp. Inc. that I work for has been growing rapidly, and the team that I work on has been hiring for five slots over the last couple months. So much of my time has been spent looking at resumes, doing phone interviews, in-person interviews, and discussing who fits what role.

I hope none of our readers will find themselves involuntarily in the job market over the coming months, but on the off-chance that you do find yourself writing a resume in the near future, a few thoughts from someone who's just finished reading a lot:

- Keep it short. I've received resumes of up to six pages, and in no case has there actually been enough valuable information there that it needed to be more than two. Try as hard as you can to stick to two pages or less.

- Bullet. Like many others who love prose, I weep for the powerpoint-ization of modern communication. However, think of the poor soul sitting reading a stack of resumes and trying to grasp them quickly while keeping up with his other work. 3-4 well written bullets for each past position (plus bulleted sections on your skills and your highlights) makes for much easier reading than big block paragraphs.

- Pick one or two themes for your overall resume and focus everything you say around them. One good friend of mine who recently landed a job told me he was writing his resume with an eye to emphasizing "resourceful" as his primary quality. When I ran the finished product by my boss, literally the first words out of his mouth were, "He certainly sounds like a resourceful problem solver."

- Don't "google bomb" your resume. As at many large companies, we get submissions through an online interface. One person who was "resourceful" in the wrong ways took a dozen keywords and phrases out of a job description we posted and simply included the phrases as bullets at the top of the resume as "core competencies".

- Sound good, but don't lie. If you say that you were "responsible for a project which saved the company $15 million in annual expenses" and in an initial interview it becomes clear that you were a minor player on the team that achieved this and can't even describe the project all that clearly, you end up looking rather bad.

- Don't get too cute. Use a normal, readable font for your resume. Don't print on funky colored paper or put it in a special binder. Don't include letters of introduction or samples of your work (especially lots and lots) unless you're asked to.

- Personality can help. If there's something genuinely fascinating about your history which can be stated briefly, that will sometimes provide the hook which gets a second read or lands you in the interview pile. "Spent one semester in Rome where all classes were taken in Italian." "Hobbies: I am an expert cook, play the drums, and have five children." "Spent a year as a one room schoolteacher in an African tribal village." It won't get you hired if you're not qualified, but if there are a lot of basically qualified resumes it may get you brought in simply because you sound like an interesting person to meet.

When interviewing:

- Try to be as concise and linear as possible in answering questions.

And yet at the same time:

- Make an effort to explain clearly in terms that your audience will understand what your past positions involved and why they were important to the company. If you simply say something along the lines of, "A lot of it was insurance industry stuff, it's pretty different from what you do." the interviewers will take away from this the impression that you either didn't understand what you were doing very well or didn't care about it very much. We can't understand every detail of another industry, but being able to explain things in broad terms (especially if you can explain how it might be similar to what we do) is much more impressive than not trying.