Working World

David Comp got the same email I did: an alert that the 2009 International Education Week website is up and running. Start planning your activities for November 16 to 20. I’ll be going to Tulsa to talk about careers in international affairs. More on that to come.

Average Americans, in their natural state, are the best ambassadors a country can have.

So says “The Ugly American,” the 1958 novel by Eugune Burdick and William Lederer, with a film version starring Marlon Brando following in 1963. When I was an intern at NCIV in the summer of 2004, one of my assignments from Sherry was to read “The Ugly American” in its entirety and pull from it ideas that might be crafted into an op-ed extolling the virtues of international exchange. Brando had just died that July, and Sherry’s thought was that recalling one of his lesser known roles might make for an interesting article hook. 

Our finished article (I thought it was pretty good) didn’t get picked up by a paper in the end, but it was still a useful exercise—not only for the chance to write with Sherry but also because I got to read a book and get paid for it. And “The Ugly American” is a good read, quick but incisive, and still highly relevant. Yes, it provides fodder for us exchange types and our argument that it’s only through direct contact that barriers are broken down and misunderstanding conquered. But the book’s real contemporary value lies not necessarily in its recognition that Americans must engage the world (in many ways this has become a foregone conclusion, especially among the younger generation) but in its understanding that this engagement must been done thoughtfully, respectfully, and (not to put too fine a point on it) well. 

In other words, “The Ugly American” recognized in 1958, when it lambasted its diplomatic characters who never bothered to learn Sarkhanese, the language of the fictional country it portrays, what is still imperative today: when engaging the world, whether through our post-college year abroad or our official foreign policy and aid programs, it’s not enough to just show up. We’ve got to put in the time to learn the language too.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

[...] A big draw of working in China, many young people say, is that they feel it allows them to skip a rung or two on the career ladder.

The Times profiles a bevy of young Americans who shipped out for China, both because of the lack of jobs at home as well as the feeling that China affords faster career advancement.

Not to be overlooked as well is the idea of China as a place that affords tremendous opportunity for personal and professional growth:

That said, Mr. Woetzel added, someone who has been able to make a mark in China is a valuable hire.

“At McKinsey, we are looking for people who have demonstrated leadership,” he said, “and working in a context like China builds character, requires you to be a lot more entrepreneurial and forces you to innovate.”

Most experiences living and working abroad build character, self-reliance, confidence, etc. (also see: How to convince your parents that studying and living abroad is good for your career). And not to take away from the virtues of living in any other country, but after having lived and worked in China myself, I can attest that the Middle Kingdom in particular provides character-building experiences in spades.

This woman is suing her alma mater because she hasn’t been able to find gainful employment. I’m not even sure what to say.

Thanks to La for the tip.

UPDATE: The Atlantic is on to this story too. Daniel Indiviglio gets all over the plaintiff:

Who wouldn’t hire a 2.7 GPA (B- average) from the renowned Monroe College? Especially when those credentials include the attitude of someone who would sue her college. [...] This story illuminates a larger problem in the generation of instant gratification. Many young people in their 20s today are having trouble in employment due to short attention spans and the need for immediate recognition and advancement. Unfortunately, that’s not how the real world works.

Meanwhile, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers is sympathetic to her plight:

If you read the actual court filing, it says: “[T]he Office of Career Advancement Information Technology Couselor [sic] did not make sure their Monroe e-recruiting clients call [sic] the graduates that recently finished college for a [sic] interview to get a job placement.” This is a very specific allegation. If the school promised to do something to assist graduates such as her in finding a job and they didn’t do the things they promised to do, they are in breach of the agreement. Now, she might not win the case, and she almost certainly won’t get the $2,000 she is looking for related to her stress. But she could easily have a valid claim and she doesn’t deserve to be mocked for asserting it.

Regardless of the validity of her claim or the reasons behind it, it would seem that she could be spending her time in infinitely more productive ways.

As I look back, I think that sometimes you can’t have the five-year plan for yourself. If you’re doing something well, you tend to keep doing it. That’s how you fall into careers.

So says Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group. Every time you start to worry about where you’ll be in the next few years or whether you’re on the “right track,” remember that even the most successful professionals didn’t have it all planned out.

Last week I highlighted an international job seeker (a recent college graduate) who I felt was making some great moves when it came to her job search (moves, it turns out, that got her a job about a week after we met). What impressed me was the fact that she was getting out there and meeting people rather than relying solely on the Internet. She was contacting people directly and doing informational interviews rather than simply hoping that an application submitted blindly would be enough. (And I should note that I singled out Idealist in that post not as a slight but rather because I highly recommend it as an online job resource).

Anyway, following that post, a few readers inquired about the specifics of said job seeker’s tactics (apologies, by the way, for the mysteriousness created by calling this person “job seeker” rather than by name—nothing deep intended there, only caution). The gist of the readers’ questions were: How did this job seeker get these face-to-face meetings and informational interviews? Did she have a contact in the organizations? Did she simply call/email and ask for the meetings? Did she make a phone call and ask to see the person in charge?

Rather than speculate, I decided to ask our job seeker how she did it:

Before my move, I narrowed down where geographically I wanted to be (Washington, DC) and in what area I wanted to work (international exchange and global education). From there, I made a list of interesting organizations and located as many contacts of those organizations as possible. I emailed these contacts my resume and an explanation of my professional background and my future goals (working for an international exchange organization).

I received a reply less than 1/3 of the time. I kept in contact with these repliers and eventually met with them in person when I was in Washington, DC. These contacts also referred me to other employees of interesting organizations. I also kept in contact with individuals from organizations where I had been granted an internship/ job interview but was eventually turned down. It was a bit hard to keep in contact with an organization I felt did not want my skills, but I had to remember that they had an overabundance of applications and it was nothing to take personally. [My emphasis.]

From keeping contact with one of these individuals, I was granted admittance to an exclusive meeting with the president of the international exchange organization. I feel it was imperative to be organized in knowing what sort of job I wanted, as well as be perseverant in contacting individuals of interesting organizations.

And how exactly did she find those organizations that comprised her list at the beginning? Certainly searching via Google and Idealist is a good way to get started. Our job seeker also had other strategies for focusing her search:

One way was looking at an [interesting] organization’s partners, affiliates, etc. listed on that organization’s website. I then researched them and weeded out what I thought was interesting. I also consulted career books specializing in international affairs and jotted down the most relevant to international exchange. Rarely, I was given recommendations of organizations.

I was even more impressed by her moves after hearing these specifics. She set herself up in just the right way to hit the ground running once she moved to DC. And her tactic of first generating email contact with people and then, only after introducing herself and perhaps engaging in some email back and forth, asking for an in-person meeting was very well done. When job seekers ask me how they can generate informational interviews at organizations where they have no contacts, I’ll often tell them to do some research, find a contact at the organization doing a job that looks interesting, and then email that person asking for a meeting. And while I still think this can be an effective tactic, I’ll also admit that it can be odd to receive an email from someone you’ve never met asking if she can come in for a meeting and, by the way, can you advise me on my career? (And no, that’s not a veiled reference to not email me—by all means, keep them coming!).

But our job seeker’s method is much better. It still involves sending a random email to someone you don’t know, but it’s a way to start off slow. Instead of barging right in and saying, “Hi, you don’t know me but can I come meet with you so you can help me get a job?!”, our job seeker’s method allows you to ease in. Do what she did and start by emailing an introduction of yourself—your resume and your professional interests—and then perhaps asking one easy question to which that person can respond quickly and easily (such as, “Can you recommend a partner organization that I should also look into?”**). If the person responds and seems interested in helping you, follow up and when it feels comfortable, ask if you might meet with him or her in person.

This whole process might seem much more time intensive and like much harder work than simply Googling for jobs, finding them, and then applying online—and that’s because it is. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve always done it right or that I’m good at it, but ask any professional who’s been in the field for a few years and I’m sure they’ll tell you that our job seeker’s tactics are far more effective than exclusively relying on the Internets.

Because the economy inside the Beltway is better than most:

At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate in the D.C. metro region is lower than in any other major metropolitan area in the country — and far below the 9.5 percent national average.

Which is great and all, though I was struck by a sobering fact buried amidst the happy talk of DC as a recession-resistant city:

A 2007 study found that more than one-third of the District’s residents are functionally illiterate, and a large portion of District residents are among the most vulnerable to recession, holding retail and consumer service-type jobs that suffer most.

You often hear DC residents talk about how “no one is actually from DC.” While this does speak to the undeniably transient nature of the city—you can run into people from everywhere in DC—such a statement would only ever be made by those well-to-do professionals who themselves came to DC from somewhere else. It’s easy to forget, when inside the Capitol Hill-K Street-NW professional bubble, that there is a large population of DC residents who in fact were born and raised in DC. It’s even easier to forget (or maybe ignore is the better word?) that too many of those residents haven’t had even close to the same advantages as the highly-educated and well-to-do professionals who migrate to the city.

UPDATE: The Atlantic confirms: DC is the place to be for jobs.

A good friend recently quit a stable position at a well-known and reputable organization because his heart just wasn’t in it. He described it to me this way:

I resigned because it doesn’t fulfill me, but I realize, despite my insistence on courage and faith and confidence, this may be the dumbest coherent decision I’ve ever made.

It’s impossible to say whether this was the “right” thing to do. In a similar vein, it’s impossible to say whether passing on a job that won’t completely fulfill you to wait for one that will is a wise move, in a practical sense. But regardless, and despite his own doubts about the decision, I greatly admire his courage to pursue that which will fulfill him the most and thus allow him to make the greatest impact—to go balls out in a way that I don’t know I ever could.

I recently met with a recent college graduate seeking a job in the international world. I was struck by this young woman’s approach to her job search—namely her insistence on pursuing face-to-face contact. While she relied heavily on web resources and email contact while still in school, once she moved to DC, she set about contacting people directly and doing informational interviews rather than relying solely on Idealist and other sites. This seemed to be an incredibly effective strategy since, by the time she met with me, she’d already interviewed for two jobs and had two more on the horizon.

Her strategy reinforced for me the notion that simply searching for jobs online, and then applying for them, probably isn’t going to cut it (especially in a down economy). Getting in front of people and making yourself a “known quantity” will prove to be much more effective.

UPDATE: I just got an email from this job seeker and she got a job! Persistence, and face-to-face contact, does indeed pay off.

A senior at Penn State put himself, and “the right to interview and potentially hire” him, up for auction on eBay, says the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

As a finance major, [John] Pereca had taken a course in marketing and knew that if he wanted to stand out to a potential employer, he would need to differentiate himself from the crowd. So he took out a $60 ad on eBay, starting at a 99-cent bid for “the right to interview and potentially hire” him.

“Things like this get noticed all the time,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could work.’”

He posted pictures of himself and of his résumé on the Web site and included a link on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Realizing that celebrities often have hundreds, if not thousands, of fans checking their Twitter pages, Mr. Pereca started to post on the walls of Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Fallon, and Shaquille O’Neal, among dozens of others.

“I graduate in 3 days from PENN STATE! My Auction ends on Friday!,” he wrote on several celebrities’ home pages, with a link to the eBay listing. “Help me out!” Kevin Spacey’s account responded, encouraging Mr. Pereca and his unique idea.

The experiment yielded a few offers—photographer in Ocean City, Md., a sales job in Atlanta, and an offer to be in a porn film—though he accepted none of them. eBay eventually pulled his auction from the site, as it violated their terms of service.

Pereca’s experiment reminds me of this guy job hunting outside the DC metro with a sign around his neck. Doesn’t look like these outside the box methods have netted either one a job, but you’ve got to give them credit for pulling out all the stops.

This is a question that Sherry continually challenges those around her to consider in their career discernment. What she means is that you’ve got to think not only about what organization you want to work for and the kind of cause you want to serve, but the more specific, mundane stuff too: What sort of daily tasks do you want to do? Do you want to work in the U.S., or abroad, or be based in one place but regularly travel to many others? Also important is: What sort of environment do you want to work in? Are you more comfortable with a small nonprofit that has few employees and no bureaucratic structure? Or would you prefer a more “corporate” environment, in which things are much more structured? Perhaps somewhere in between?

Case and point of Sherry’s mantra: a friend and former grad school classmate has been with the same major international consulting firm for four, going on five, years. He has already received several promotions, but has now reached the level of needing to land the “big” promotion, or else his time there is short. Basically, there are 10 employees, including him, at his level. Only three of those 10 will receive the next promotion. The other seven are then expected to move on. He called it a “rank-and-yank” model. I’ll let Wikipedia explain more:

Rank-and-yank-like models are common amongst management consulting firms, often referred to as an ‘up or out‘ approach to evaluations. Specifically, Accenture [the huge international consulting firm---you see ads featuring Tiger Woods in every airport ever] uses an ‘up-or-out’ model with its staff: if employees do not get promoted after a certain length of time at their existing career level (usually no more than 4-5 years), they are ‘counselled out’ of the firm (shorthand for being fired – but on generous terms)…

This system promotes vitality in the firm, theoretically allowing only the strongest performers to reach leadership positions. In practice, however, this system has a tendency to dilute leadership, as individuals who may be better oriented toward upper management and executive positions leave the firm before promotion to those levels is possible. Additionally, due to extraordinarily high levels of employee attrition, Accenture is built on the need for enormous recruitment, particularly at the entry level. If, for some reason, the firm was no longer able to recruit the enormous number of graduates it requires each year – or was unable to attract a high quality of graduate – this model would falter.

My friend was frantically busy for several weeks pulling together the necessary documentation and support for his rank-and-yank evaluation. Soon after turning in his supporting documentation, he was called before a panel to do an oral evaluation of his performance (sort of like defending your thesis, it seemed).

This all stressed me out more than it did him. As much as I’ve bitched about the lack of clear advancement structure and salary hierarchies in nonprofits, I realized that at least nonprofits are the devil that I can deal with. Hearing these intimate details about the stresses of what a “corporate advancement structure” actually comes to mean made me want nothing more than to never, ever be involved with a rank-and-yank promotion situation. While my friend reveled in that kind of competition and pressure, just hearing about it made me break out in a cold sweat.

All of which reinforced to me the point that an ongoing consideration of how (and where) you want to spend your days is a vitally important part of your career.

Parents won’t be much help with your career in global health, says Alanna—a point which I think can extend to international careers in general.

My parents love me like I am still 9. They can’t offer career advice.

Hilarious, and right on. I’ve often wondered why my dad, who stumbled from being a poli sci major to working as a car salesman with a mustache to finally finding his career in marketing and sales, couldn’t better appreciate that my own wanderings and stumblings were a natural part of growing up and discovering who I am, in a professional sense. I took the exact same roundabout process of discovery that he had 40 years before. But I guess why he couldn’t recognize this was for the same reason he told me to make sure I “had a resume” and “wore a suit” to a post-college job interview and for the same reason Alanna says her parents can’t help her with her career: because he still sees me, in some loving way, as just a kid.

For Alanna, global health as a specific niche international career is so unique that anyone (and especially parents) who are unfamiliar with its intricacies will have a tough time relating any kind of useful career advice. But from a broader international careers perspective, parents often have a tough time with their kids’ global aspirations not just because they don’t understand the details of the industry, but also because they have a completely different mindset and frame of reference.

Take my family, for instance: very typical, American Midwest, with no tradition of international travel or foreign affairs engagement. Thus, an interest in international work illicited the question of: “Why the heck do you want to get involved in things so far away when there’s plenty of perfectly good opportunities right here in the U-S-and-A?” I’ve heard from many young international job seekers who find themselves frustrated and even dismayed at their families’ unwillingness to accept and support their desire to travel and work abroad (many even canceled plans to do post-graduate fellowships or volunteer programs abroad because of family pressure). I can relate: when I announced to my family I was off to northeast China for a year, they were none too happy.

I can report, though, that usually, eventually, they come around. But that doesn’t make it any easier when starting your career, to go against the wishes of your family to do what you know you want to do. Yet that might be what you have to do. If I took my parents’ advice not to go to China, I’d be a real estate procurement broker at a national grocery store chain, which sounds not unlike a trip to hell (no offense to real estate procurement brokers, of course).

This is not to say that parents aren’t (or can’t eventually be) supportive of our international careers (mine are now, very wholeheartedly). It’s also not to say that a parent’s differing professional perspective might not be valuable at times. My dad’s business acumen has been incredibly helpful in certain situations throughout my career, such as during salary negotiations for a new position and difficult management situations. But when it comes down to it, even if parents still think we’re 9, we need to be confident in our knowledge that we’re not.