In the previous post of this series, I mentioned how you should focus on two main areas. Technical Skills and People skills. In this post, I’m going to get a little more into the weeds of the technical skills. We are going to get tactical, and I really do believe that the methods I discuss will work regardless of what profession you choose to work in.
I believe that most of what you need to learn is online; however, it would be a disservice to not pound the table for learning in person.
I’m not talking about learning in a school. I assume you have obtained the initial schooling necessary to enter your career of choice. However, the number one mistake I made was believing that I learned everything I needed to succeed from my school. Looking back, I only had 50% of my education at that point in time. Crazy! I’ve gained just as much knowledge in the workforce as in school, and it has started to make me really question a lot of what schools are doing, but this post is not about education reform. What I want to emphasize is finding what to learn after you leave school or while in school. Social networks are not a new concept, but there is real value in making them happen in person.
I’ve moved multiple times in my life, and I always used meetup.com to find professional networks locally. This website is invaluable. I could always find local groups that have similar interests to me. This could be my professional career, my favorite outdoor activities, and more. If you are thinking of moving somewhere, you can look at how large the professional groups are for determining market size for what you do. I found the meetups useful for getting a better understanding of how mature the profession was locally. In general, I learned that a data scientist in California is very different from a data scientist in Missouri. As such, the most popular skills in a local area can actually vary quite a bit in less mature fields. Being a part of these groups helped me learn more about the realities of my field in the local area. Remember “average” is usually a national “average”. You would be surprised how wide the standard distribution is. Last thought on going to meetups is the ability to network and develop relationships for the future. I’ve personally seen the old adage “It’s not what you know but who you know.”
Now hang with me for a bit. That old adage should change how we think about learning online. I was chosen for one of my first jobs before the job became available for others to apply. I was selected primarily for who I knew. Due to government incentives the company had to make the position publicly available and acquire a minimum number of applications including workforce office applications. My future company had no intention of seriously considering any of the applicants because they already chose me. In the meantime, I had to wait for a month as they went through a completely manufactured process to comply with the government. This experience changed me. I learned what to learn by job hunting. I created a routine of job hunting periodically. I could see what all the companies were asking for in their job descriptions. If I saw an item that was regularly mentioned across multiple jobs and I was not strong already in that area, I would add it to my list of things to learn. From this list, I would go online or talk to people at my meetup about great resources to learn more on this topic.
Now for the controversy! Since I had reasoned that companies often know who they want to hire, and they had to meet a quota in order to hire that person. I figured it would be acceptable to help that individual get their job faster while providing me with some much needed feedback on resume writing and interviewing. As such, I actually started applying to jobs that I had no intention of taking. The company had one more application for their quota, and I was getting to test different resume styles to see what really works in my industry. If a resume is meant to get your foot in the door with an interview, I figured I would run a real life A/B test. Eventually, I honed a resume that was able to get me into almost every interview. Once I had my foot in the door, I started my second set of tests with interviewing style. I eventually found the ability to read the interviewer and get to the negotiation phase. My experience helped me realize that I could tell when I was the candidate and see that negotiations often subtly started during the interview. As such, I felt it inappropriate to negotiate for a job I didn’t want. I started to politely decline interviews once my skills were honed. Periodically, I would see a really great job, and I would go through the process and provide an asinine set of conditions for my employment. I mean who wouldn’t consider a job that pays 175% of industry standard. Note, you have to be careful with having an extremely high paying job. It can actually put a target on your back for layoffs and poor performance reviews if they view you as excessively expensive. In many ways, making too much money can lead management to feel like you got one over on them. They will look for a reason to cut you in some situations.
Also note, there have been studies that show it is a lot easier to get a job when you have a job. I often feel bad for people who lose their job after their skills have gone stale for 10 years at one company, and they have out of date resume styles and interview anxiety. Finding the next job can be super stressful and take far longer than anyone would imagine. As such, I have a policy of applying to jobs periodically. My resume doesn’t get too far out dated from what I’ve done recently, and I never have interview anxiety because I have nothing to lose. I already have a great job. There is only up side to accidentally finding an even better job!
Let’s put this puppy to bed shall we? The final step in any learning process is to go beyond book knowledge. A person who has been through real application of knowledge learns some pretty big lessons that reading a website, listening to a book, or watching a video doesn’t teach. These lessons come from real world experience. And here comes the thing that many fail at. Writing about a project that was included in a course be it in school or online doesn’t really impress like delivering with your knowledge for a real customer. I would much rather have my resume explain how I delivered for a customer with actual metrics on amount of money made or saved, increased customer retention, or other real world metrics. Saying I completed a realistic project in a boot camp doesn’t cut it. The main reason in my opinion is that teachers are not customers. Completing an assignment for a teacher is nothing like finding and providing value for a customer. It is all too often that I find students coming out of a technical program focus their energy on the technology without ever understanding the value to the customer. I’ve literally had new hires tell me the value of their HR software was the speed of their technology. Don’t get me wrong. If it is too slow, it will flop, but customers don’t buy your product based on technical specifications like size of ram or cpu speed.
All of this reasoning leads me to take the items that I find in job descriptions as stretch goals or projects at my current job. I routinely add one item to my annual goals and objectives that is a skill or project that other companies want their applicants to have. Now, I can’t do this without finding a valid use of the skill or technology for my company. This is an exercise in making the connections in the business we discussed in the previous post. I view this as an opportunity to make myself a “hub” of the business. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this also takes some convincing to get my management onboard with making this project one of my goals for the year. If you have not noticed, the people skills we discussed in the previous article are woven through this whole process from networking at meetups to interviewing to convincing your boss to add goals you secretly want on your resume. This leads to a killer resume full of real world projects with measurable outcomes that I can directly point to in my resume and pontificate about in interviews. At this point, I have to plug one of my favorite books of all time. If you have not heard of or read “The Lean Startup” by Eric Reis, you are missing out. Eric provides the framework for successfully learning which he posits is the number one things that startups do. Startups have to Build a product, Measure it, and Learn from it. The secret to this process is that you have to plan it in reverse. First, you have to figure out what you need to learn. Next, you have to figure out how to measure for what you are trying to learn and not get stuck in vanity metrics. Finally, you have to figure out what you need to build in order to capture the measurements you need to learn. If you complete a project and you can’t clearly measure your impact, how can you even tell that you have learned the correct thing? Welcome to real world learning. It’s not just for businesses. It’s for every single one of us.
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