If you are an academic who wants a career,you are likely to feel at a
disadvantage. After all, your competitors in the job community
are "insiders." They know how to hunt for a job and win it.
Still, your competitors don't really have an edge over you. If
anything, the job-hunting protocol they follow -- want
ad/resume/interview -- hobbles them. It's a rare person who knows how
to walk into an employer's office and demonstrate his ability to do
the job profitably.
Whether you're an academic or a professional person, your edge lies
not in how well you follow the rules, but in proving your worth to an
employer. That's what a good faculty coaches his candidate to do.
Focus on skills, not myths.
There is nothing mysterious about this approach. You can be your own
interviewer, if you can get past the myths of the employment system
and understand the fundamentals of how to select the right
employer,"map" your skills to the employer's needs, and present
yourself as a person who can do the work.
As an academic, you already grasp the essentials of the business
world: You know how to research a subject (in this case, a company
and the work it needs to have done), you know how to organize a case
to make a point (map your skills to the work), and you know how to
present your case in a way that compellingly proves your point
(interview like it matters).
Start thinking like a interviewer : research, prepare, research,
prepare, and damn the rules. All that matters is that when you get in
front of the employer, you are right.
Get ready to demonstrate your value.
Still, you are very likely to make mistakes as you change careers,
just as I did. When I left my first job ,I started replying to ads
that sounded interesting. What was truly interesting is that I
expected the interviewer to do the hard part for me: fathom my great
skills and apply them to the work he wanted done. I failed in
interview after interview not because I lacked relevant skills, but
because I couldn't articulate them properly. I wasn't doing my
homework.
Years later, when I applied for a job in a computer company (having
no corporate experience), I went to the whiteboard and outlined a
business plan for doing the job. It wasn't perfect but it showed the
manager that I had thought long and hard about how my skills would
pay off if he hired me. He made me an offer on the spot.
Here are five job-hunting mistakes that are very common among
academics. I'll try to show you how to avoid them.
1. You will pursue the wrong job.
Having never worked in the corporate world, you haven't a clue what
certain jobs involve. This simple truth leads most academic job
seekers to pursue only what seems familiar to them.
Forget about your skills. Pick your jobs by focusing on the work an
employer needs done. That may sound odd, but it makes tremendous
sense once you realize how important it is for you to understand the
work before you pursue the job.
Never start a career change by focusing first on your skills and
trying to map them to a job. Start instead with companies, that
you'd like to work in. Study them in excruciating detail. Learn what
makes them tick and what makes them profitable. Learn what tasks are
performed in various departments, and then start thinking about which
of your skills you can map to those jobs.
As you prepare, odds are good that the skills you start mapping to
various jobs will be fundamental ones, not ones necessarily related
to your area of academic study. What will come into play are these
skills:
Defining problems
Creating processes to solve them
Exploring options that might yield efficiency
Communicating progress to management
Testing options
Choosing on a course of action
Assessing the outcome
Learning how to do it better next time
If you can apply these fundamental skills, which you honed in your
academic career, you could just as well win a job .
Career change is daunting only when you don't know enough about the
work you think you want to do. Learn about the work first, and you'll
be better able to marshal the skills to do it.
2. You will reply to want ads or job postings on the Internet.
Ever play the lottery? The want ads are the lottery. How are you
improving your odds of landing a job when you add your application to
a stack of 7,000 others? (That's how many applications one company I
work with received in response to an ad it recently ran.) As
an "outsider" who needs to go a few extra steps to show how his
skills can transfer to a business job, do you really want to trust
your next job to an essentially blind review process?
Try this. Write what I call The Working Resume. Don't list your
academic credentials, past job titles, or work you've done. Instead,
describe your understanding of the need of your target employer;
outline how you will do the work he needs done.
In producing The Working Resume you will have talked with (and gotten
to know) the people who can get you in the door without a resume. You
will also have produced the perfect script for your interview, and
you will have so many useful things to say about the company, the
job, and your potential contribution that your palms won't sweat when
you walk in the door for your interview.
3. You will use a resume.
When you mail a resume to someone who doesn't know you, you are in
the junk-mail business. Kevin Brennan, a former human-resources
manager at Sony Corporation, received over 100,000 resumes from
applicants in one year. Only about 8 per cent of the people his
division hired came from those resumes. Where did he find his new
hires? "I call people I know and ask for referrals. That's how you
find good people."
Rely on people to introduce you to the manager you want to work for.
Don't know the right ones? Invest the time you'd spend mailing
resumes in finding and getting to know people who know the company.
Start with your friends and track down someone who works at your
target company. Talk with the company's customers, read industry
publications, and ask everyone you meet for the names of people who
can give you more insight and advice about what it's like to work
there. (Never ask for a job lead; that turns folks right off.) Build
your contacts until one of them helps you get in the door. Does that
sound like a lot of hard work? So is that special job you want. Start
working hard at this now.
4. You will trust the human resources department.
When you approach a company through its human resources office, you
submit to an administrative process that is once removed from the
hiring manager. While you're being processed by that first-year
personnel clerk who has zero expertise in the work you want to do,
the candidate I referred directly to the hiring manager is already
having his second interview.
Human resources is a graveyard of job applicants. Never let human
resources be the main conduit of information between you and the
hiring manager. You will lose control of the process, and the
likelihood that you will be dropped from the running increases
dramatically when human resources is in control. Insist on dealing
with the hiring manager directly. Remember: The goal is to avoid the
competition and the "process," not to get stuck in it.
5. You will act like an applicant in the interview.
After interviewing five candidates in the course of a day, managers
commonly cannot recall much about any of them. That's because the
interview protocol is the same for everyone, and the questions and
answers are repetitive. Most job candidates sit like a polite bump on
a log and try hard not to say the wrong thing. When you're coming
from academia, there's an even greater tendency to adopt a meek
demeanor -- you feel like the odd man (or woman) out, anyway. The
protocol is so comfortable, you stick with it.
Don't act like an applicant. Act like an employee. Do the job in the
interview.
When the employer asks questions, answer them, but then offer to
demonstrate how you'd actually do the job. "I'd like to ask you to
lay out a 'live' problem you're facing in your work -- work you'd
want your new hire to do. I'd like to give you a chance to see how I
tackle problems and how I work. When I'm done, I'd like you to review
me the way you'd review an employee. I can take it; please don't hold
back. My goal is to make sure you know what it would be like to have
me on board."
Why should you make the interview so tough for yourself? Because
other candidates won't. If you want a profound chunk of "professional
wisdom", this is it. Your challenge is to help the manager see that
you are focused on the work, and that you are ready to stand and
deliver. That's what will set you apart even from "experienced"
applicants.
Don't make the mistake of acting the way companies expect academics
to act. Don't make the mistake of relying on archaic "interview
skills." Break ranks with other academics, and break the rules of the
employment system. Apply the considerable work skills you've
developed in your academic career. Focus on the company you want to
work for, do the research, prepare a presentation, walk in the door,
and do the job to win the job. It's what you've been trained to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment