Working World

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.

A colleague of mine (the head of an international nonprofit) got a call this week from the office of a foreign Ambassador in DC. The Ambassador needed to see my colleague immediately, the Ambassador’s assistant said. Could he come in for a meeting tomorrow? My colleague, unsure as to what exactly the Ambassador wished to discuss but knowing that you don’t refuse such a request, said “Of course.”

As it turns out, the Ambassador wanted to talk about his career. His appointment in the United States would soon be coming to a close, he said, and he wanted to discuss his options for a post-diplomatic career.

You’d think that once you’ve become an ambassador, you’ve got it all pretty much figured out. But I guess even they need career advice sometimes.

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, keeps it real when discussing how she built a career as one of the most innovative and influential social entrepreneurs around:

I was so lucky. The way I got to this was that I was in a desperate funk my senior year in college — when I realized somehow for the first time, in October, “I have to figure out what I’m going to do next year.” I just thought, “Well, I’ll apply for jobs.” But it hadn’t really clicked that I was actually going to have to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

And I was just uninspired. I just couldn’t find the thing that I really wanted to do. And that led me into a funk for the first time in my life.

And that’s what ultimately led me to this. Because I thought, “You know what I’d want to do?” Having never previously even contemplated teaching, I thought, “I’m going to go teach in New York City.” And I started exploring it and realized what a maze it was to try to teach in New York City.

That’s what led me to realize: You know what? We should recruit people to teach in low-income communities as aggressively as people were being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street.

I’m glad that I somehow landed on this thing that I became so passionate about. Because I’ve spent not one bit of energy for 20 years trying to figure out what I really want to be doing.

You just never know how one thing might lead you to another.

I met with a young woman yesterday who is seeking a career in international education. She has quite the impressive resume—several years of work experience, including two overseas with the JET program, and a Masters in International Educational Development from Columbia—but has struggled to find a position. She told me how, upon her return from Japan, she’d initially pursued jobs as a university study abroad advisor and was having good success getting interviews. She was struggling, however, to secure the job: she made it to the final round of interviews for three different positions, only to be passed over for two and see the funding for the third pulled at the last minute (a particularly painful kick in the pants).

Still, she was optimistic. In fact the difficulties she faced finding a university position prompted her to look deeper into the world of nongovernmental and nonprofit international education and exchange. Even though she has yet to find a job in the fields, she said she is very excited about the possibilities and her prospects, and even sees these fields as a potentially better fit for her than university study abroad.

“It’s almost a blessing in disguise,” she said of the fact that she got passed over for so many jobs, “failures” that have ultimately pushed her in unanticipated and exciting directions.

I was extremely impressed and heartened by this young woman: not only by her optimism and resolve in the face of job hunting hardship, but also by her ability to see that even the best-laid plans have a way of steering us in directions we could never have foreseen.