I seem to be in that odd place in my career where, when I apply for senior level positions, I’m told I’m not senior enough. But when I apply for junior positions, I’m told I’m too senior. So that leaves me, what? Any positions that reside in the space between electrons? Mid-Junior-Senior-Leads?
Do people not work their way up through a company anymore? Do they not take junior positions in order to break into a market? Or do I need to just teleport into Mad Men?
After many months of interviewing with companies in many different markets, I’ve begun to realize that every business niche thinks that they have it the toughest, and everyone else is just lounging around playing donkey-kong and drinking Purple Flurp. Seriously, they all ask me, “Have you ever worked in healthcare/broadcasting/publishing/retail/entertainment/big companies/small companies? Things are very different here, and very fast paced. Clients are demanding, and you sometimes have to handle fast turnarounds and late nights.”
Sorry to shake any worlds, people, but just about EVERY business is like that, at least some of the times. WIth the sole exception of my job sorting books at the public library when I was fresh out of college, every single place I’ve worked has been like that. Whether I was flipping burgers to updating state Web pages. Since leaving that library job, every place I’ve worked has had those exact same circumstances. Sure, sometimes it was a consulting client making demands, sometimes it was the Governor making demands, and sometimes it was just a boss covering their own butt. But that’s how jobs are. They pay you because otherwise you usually won’t put up with that sort of crap in your hobbies.
On 9-11, I was online at home, after we had been evacuated, updating the state Web portal with breaking news because that was the job. When the Girl Scout Web server locked up, I went online at 2 in the morning to restart the server. When some chowderhead deleted an important file by accident I worked late with senior managers hovering over me making stupid suggestions so that I could find the problem and fix it before any customers realized the home page was gone. When we found out the Secretary of Technology had announced – in the paper – that we were about to release the first personalized home page in government history, and we didn’t even know we were supposed to be doing that project at all, we all worked 12 hour days until it was done.
Because that’s the job.
True, I work in IT, and for some reason every single thing that happens in IT is a big horkin’ emergency, but that’s how it is when you work in any way with other people. Things get crazy really fast.
Don’t get me started about that time I accidentally put that Judy Blume book in the preschooler section…
Chatted with a SVP with NBCUniversal, and she asked me what is now becoming a common questions. ”Who do I know that got me this far with HR?”
I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it tells me my networking skills are just awesome. On the other hand, it also tells me that my legendary UX skills didn’t get me the interview. That sort of sucks.
Anyway, they haven’t yet finished deciding what they want out of the new position. They seem to be thinking of it as a Creative Director position. If it’s a pure Creative Director position, then it won’t be a good fit for me. On the east coast, at least, those are primarily based on graphic artist skills as opposed to UX skills. And I expect they won’t be able to decide what they want before I’m scheduled to move to California.
I was just contacted by my first real executive recruiter (a “headhunter”). Hope that’s a good sign. At least the position is in California. :)
I have a second interview with NBCUniversal. It’s just not clear if the position is in New York or Los Angeles. They’re pretty much the same, right?
Over the last year or so, one of the skills I’ve grown the most has been my networking skills. And I don’t mean networking as in setting up a kicking high-speed gaming rig. I mean people-networking. I hit the magical 500+ mark on LinkedIn at the beginning of the year. Why is it magical? No idea. But it is. As of this writing I’m at 943 connections.
Sure, they aren’t “real life” friends, or anything. But that’s not what I’m going for. I’m looking to improve my career, and to do that I need to have access to people who might be able to help. And in return I could help them at some point in the future.
At first it’s hard, because people don’t really want to waste their time connecting with a nobody, or with one of those “test drive” LinkedIn members with only 4 connections. You can’t even count on those people to log in or answer email. But connections have their own special inertia, and it’s interesting to watch. When I started it was hard to connect to people in my field that I didn’t know. But once you build up a good head of steam, people look at you and figure, “Well, he has x number of connections already, we share common interests, and he already knows 2 people in my network, so I’ll connect with him.”
That’s when it starts to get interesting.
Social media is a funny thing. People I know in real life, who live within 20 miles of me, who I go to church with, see at the store, and interact with in the old ways, they haven’t been all that helpful to me from a career perspective. Few of them will even bother to buy my books (and those of you who have, I am forever grateful!), much less help me with career advice. Sometimes they will, if its a niche or hobby, like comedy or comics. But when it comes to helping me find a way to keep a roof over my family’s head, well, not so much.
But those 943 people who I’ve never met in person? Amazingly helpful. They’ve helped me with my resume, with my networking, with introductions, and with getting interviews. They’ve been great. With their help I’ve managed to get interviews with Amazon, Intuit, NBCUniversal, and several other smaller companies. Not all of those interviews are going to be good fits, but just getting them has been an accomplishment.
I’ve started to wonder if I should try to find a way to make a living out of networking itself, but I haven’t quite figured it out. But if you’re reading this, even if I don’t know you, I have some advice for you. Use LinkedIn. Get more than that small handful of test connections. Create your network. As a Disney recruiter told me recently, LinkedIn is the number one tool used by recruiters these days. It will be worth it, I promise. And if you need help getting started, connect with me and let me know I suggested it, and I’ll accept your connection. And right there you’ve started the ball rolling. And if you don’t abuse the relationship, it will be good for both of us one day.
And I’ll be at 944.
One of the more distressing parts of our upcoming move out of state is the eventual conversation I have with everyone about why. Virginia is such a pretty place, and everyone you know is here. And we have both a Target and a Wal-Mart!
Avoiding, for the moment, the topic of living in a Southern state while not being, emotionally, a Southerner, Virginia is a nice place to live if you want to sit on your front porch sipping lemonade and watching absolutely nothing change. Ever. But I work in IT, and this place isn’t all that into IT.
It’s not just that we really only have one large private employer of IT folks (CapitalOne). That sucks, but it isn’t the worst thing. It’s that no one around here really does what I do. I’m a UX person, and here in Virginia if you say “UX” they think you’re talking about a former girlfriend. ”User Experience” is an afterthought here, if there’s time after the product is finished. No one really cares if their website or application is easy to use. All they care about is that it’s out there.
California, on the other hand, gets UX. There, UX is the product. And there are twenty times more UX jobs in California. We just have to get there.
Sure, there are some on the east coast as well. New York has some good UX jobs. But the numbers just aren’t there yet, and so far most of my interviews have been with companies in California.
Which leads to the next uncomfortable part of the conversation. Although California has more UX jobs, I don’t have one of them yet. We’re still planning to move, we just don’t have a job work when we arrive. Although that’s not completely unheard of, it’s not the way things work in Richmond, where most people never travel more than 50 miles from the place they were born. There’s no safety net. Not optimal, and I sure hope to get a job before we leave, but if we wait around until it’s 100% safe, we won’t have enough money to move. And then we’ll be living in cardboard boxes in the lovely Commonwealth of Virginia wondering why no one comes by anymore.
