Letter from Lhasa, number 218. (Geary 2010): Your Next Career. Do What You've Always Wanted to Do
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Geary, G., Your Next Career. Do What You've Always Wanted to Do, Jist Works, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 2010.
(Geary 2010).
Gail Geary
If you carefully read this book, you may see that it is not impossible although it not be so easy to do what you always wanted to do. You have to work on it and to find a way.
Contrarily to what claimed from the author, do not give too much importance to macro-trends and macro-opportunities in the labour market. Although they may be relevant, always think that you are not millions of people but only one person. Macro-trends and -data are more relevant if you are a big investor or you are in a position needing that. People works even in phases of stagnation or recession. Single opportunities always open. It depends on what you intend or are available to do, where, at which wage, either forever or until you have built your new profession. If you are unemployed and broken, you may need a transition phase if you are not so lucky to immediately find the dream of your life.
Your résumé is frequently presented as the key for a new profession, while I am not so sure that it be so relevant. People do not read résumés if not for you name and address and for deducing your age if you live where there is a legal frame banning [open] age discrimination.
In addition, résumés depend on the specific job you are applying for. If you are applying for a position as a dishwasher, do not write that you have attended seven universities. If you are applying for academic teaching and research, do not write that you have worked as a dishwasher or as a clerk and, instead, send to the websites with your intellectual works, overall if you have never published in the academic press. Unverifiable information you may have used for filling your past, may be believed as truthful. What is relevant is that you can really do what you are applying for. Cheating would be not only immoral but useless because you would be rapidly discovered. If you are an expert programmer, it may be irrelevant if you have a formal education in different fields and if you have never really worked for IT companies. Obviously do not write that you have degrees you have not, because that would be easily discoverable. Instead, if you claim a free lance consulting or informal work as programmer, it would not be immoral and counterproductive, if you really are an expert programmer and fit for the advertised position.
Résumés are frequently pure deception, too long, not believed if truthful [overall for extraordinary people, their real lives cannot be really believed when put down in a résumé], not really read, not verified overall for low positions.
There is a really genial thing called “transferable skills”. The most apparently different positions are basically similar if one sees them from the point of view of the required skills. However, you if write pages and pages, or only a synthetic list, of your transferable skills, either nobody reads them or they are perceived as pure and unreliable vanity.
What is only asked, from a potential employer is whether you can do the wished job and if you have experience. Even the best of the interviews may not verify anything, if the interviewers do not put you down to work or if they do not submit you some practical or theoretical exercise, what is rarely done, at least for the large majority of positions. Just hired, or provisionally hired, they may rapidly verify whether you can do the job, when there are specialized and high-specialized tasks. It may be irrelevant if you really have verifiable experience in a previous company. While, for many positions inside big organizations, at whatever level, it is a mystery how people be really hired and, for a successful career, one has to show an average stupidity constantly reassuring about one’s consistency with the big bureaucracy. If an electrician cannot set or fix a connection, he/she may be rapidly fired. If a generic manager cannot really do his/her job, that may lead to a successful career.
A generic and all purpose résumé to put on a website (or to bring with oneself) for whatever position or for a certain range of positions or even for a specific position, but not for a specific company having advertised it, does not exist. If a company wants a 5-year experience, you have to claim it, even if you have not, if [you think] you can do the advertised job. While, if one company wants an inexperienced employee, you have to hide your eventual experience.
Perhaps your résumé needs some impact, without negatively shocking the reviewer, if he/she is browsing 1’000 résumés for selecting 10 people to interview. In such a case, the cover letter is a kind of pre- résumé. How to have a positive impact on a specific person you do not know?
Canonical cover letters and résumés are probably only for at least one hundred thousand dollar a year positions.
Geary, G., Your Next Career. Do What You've Always Wanted to Do, Jist Works, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 2010.
