stand out in the crowd

stand out in the crowd, a photo by emerson12 on Flickr.

The Importance of Labeling Yourself a Specialist or a Generalist

Want to know my biggest pet peeve when job candidates apply for experienced-level roles?  Generalist resumes. Bland, mediocre CVs that portray these individuals as masters of everything and specialists at nothing.

Listen--it’s okay to be a Generalist or a Specialist. They key is how you position yourself in the job-hunting or freelance marketplace. But first: what does it mean to be a Generalist or a Specialist?

Generalists see their chosen field from a variety of perspectives. They dig into any need that arises in their industry and out of necessity, learn to wear many hats. They see the big picture. Generalists thrive better in economic uncertainty. But they are one of many in the throngs of other Generalists. If you’re a generalist Healthcare Consultant today, for example, you might have experience working in Health Reform, ACOs and Informatics.

Specialists dig deep into one or two areas of expertise. They might, for example, be Healthcare Consultants with a deep understanding of Diabetes research, adding value to the disease management  department of a healthcare organization. The Specialist is perceived as memorable and talented—and he or she would be difficult to replace.

But Specialists thrive only when their timing is perfect. They study and perfect their expertise and enjoy the rewards of working with an idea whose time has come.

I think you can wear two personas in today’s job marketplace. By day, you can be a Generalist—mild-mannered, well-regarded by many leaders in your company, willing and qualified to take on a variety of assignments that are asked of you.

By night (or by moonlighting!) you can become a Subject Matter Expert Superhero. With a highly-developed area of expertise (your superpower), you are ready to take on special missions in a single bound.

In his book for application designers, The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelley identifies what he calls T-Shaped people. These folks enjoy a breadth of knowledge in many fields, but they also have a deeper knowledge in one or more areas. These are the employees and freelancers that are  defined as successful.

If you’re a Specialist, it makes sense to stay fresh in areas that complement your specialty; enough for you to be memorable so that if your company downsizes, you’ll still be asked to stay. If your specialized field dries up, you are still in the game.  If you identify yourself solely as a Specialist, you become vulnerable to the disruptions of a changing marketplace.

And what if you decide you’re a Generalist?

The beauty of job-hunting these days is that you can tweak your resume and gear it toward the targeted job. You can extract projects from your years of experience that are part of that job’s description and let them shine as the first bullets on your resume. These will also become your talking points during your interview.

Just don’t market yourself as a Generalist. These days, recruiters don’t have time to sift through every accomplishment on your resume to figure out if you fit the job they have to fill. And Hiring Managers don’t have time to train you to be a Specialist. They expect you to already be one and hit the ground running.

Specialist vs. Generalist. Careers are rarely that black and white. It’s okay if you want to think of yourself in black and white terms, so long as you don’t appear gray to the people who are looking to hire you.

Rediscover The Value of What You Do

The Immortality Imperative, a photo by jurvetson on Flickr.

When we start out in our career, we get exposed to all kinds of questionnaires that supposedly help us choose a livelihood. But they ask only half the story. They consist of items like this:

·      Do I want to serve others? (hint: every job should)

·      Do I enjoy creating infrastructure?  Policies?

·      Do I enjoy creating beautiful works of art?

·      Do I prefer a flexible environment or a structured one?

Others address our preferences for solitude vs. collaboration, wealth vs. a simple lifestyle—the questions go on and on.

Maybe you’ve been in the workforce for a while. When you chose your career path, you entered into a partnership with the marketplace. You invested years into education and paid your dues--and now you have tenure in your chosen industry.

But suddenly the shine wears off and you’re ready to throw in the towel. If you’re disenchanted and ready to quit, it might be because you don’t share the values of the customers you serve.

In addition to the questions above, ask yourself this:

·      Am I like-minded with the people I serve?

·      Do I feel a connection to their lives? Would I want to share a meal with them?

If you answered no to these questions, you might be ready for a career change. I believe this is why most people sabotage their careers. We don’t work in a vacuum. And without that personal connection or common mission, you start showing up late for work. You get angry all the time. You slack off. (Insert the monkey wrench of your choice). 

And you eventually quit.

But you want to get ahead and it's a tough job market. You know that your best chance for a raise and a better job is to leverage the skill set you’ve being practicing for a while. 

So before you decide to reinvent your career, try shifting your perspective.

Maybe your perception about your worth is off.

Let’s say you teach fitness to adults. After years of seeing some of your students return to their bad habits and gain the weight back, it makes you question the value of what you do. But have you forgotten all the students who thanked you for your help? All the testimonials and success stories you heard? And have you ever reverted to old bad habits yourself?

Or you're in Project Management for a big company’s systems team for years, and you’re unhappy with the lack of promotions offered to you. Can you apply your skills to a department or a new market that rewards accomplishments in a way that resonates better with you? Could you inspire others by teaching what you do instead of doing the work itself?

If you’re disillusioned by your non-profit organization, can you commercialize something noble you’ve been doing in the private sector instead?

Don’t take your expertise for granted and throw it away.

You may feel like a hack because you don’t find value in your work any more. But others might think you’re a genius.

Maybe you don’t need to completely reinvent your career at all. Just align yourself to people you share a common mission with.

Here's the ugly truth. You'll be able to keep up the charade of working just for the paycheck for only a little while. Sharing the values of the people you work with is the only way to sustain any enthusiasm for your job. You might be great at what you do, but without a few shared beliefs with your bosses or clients, you will not last.

These collective values—the drive to inspire, create, teach or lead, or a shared love for animals, widgets or saving mankind--are not just bullet points you add to your resume. They are the unspoken, unwritten connections you have to share with the people you serve. And they are what sustains you and keeps you engaged in a career.

Zig zag

image courtesy of Flickr's chispita_666

Welcome The Zig-Zags

My 17-year old son was stressed about what college to choose. He explained why—some day he wants to impact government policy, but he doesn’t think he can achieve his goals. Because he doesn’t know if he’ll secure a spot in a particular Ivy League school. Because that would be necessary for networking and securing internships. Because it would lead to the few jobs in policy-making that would determine his success.

What’s wrong with this picture has no bearing on the fact that he is a gifted student with an excellent chance of getting into the school of his choice. I know that he'll be successful in whatever he does. The real problem was the linear vision he insisted on using to define his career path and his life.

Most adults realize that we arrive at our careers through a series of zig-zags rather than through a straight line. But after all, we mid-career adults have the benefit of hindsight. We might have gotten a degree in Engineering but wound up in Sales. Or our interests in Physical Therapy may have somehow morphed into a decent career in academia. For better or worse, we arrived at our career destination.

But let’s not confuse those of us who have changed our minds, or zig-zagged our way through our careers, with someone who lacks focus.

Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller Outliers touts putting in 10,000 hours of practice into achieving mastery in the field you choose. I’ll admit that the current job market rewards subject matter experts who care enough about their field to develop a specialty; not those who become generalists.

But first you have to figure out what you care about. All the focus,  passion and intensity you pour into your livelihood has to start with discovery. And when your passion intersects with what’s needed to solve a problem in a company or a cause, then you’re on to something.

But here’s the thing. You’ll be productive in your job only if you immerse yourself in that kind of intense emotion and practice. You can’t design a curriculum or a skyscraper or a kite without the passion needed to put in those 10,000 hours of practice. Without it you’ll get too distracted. And unless you're unusual, you have to sample different careers to find what really floats your boat.

Of course, the best time to try out careers is when you are young and unencumbered by family or financial responsibilities, like my son. But those zig-zags will creep up on us at any age or career stage. Just go with it.

Flexibility and open-mindedness on the crooked road to your career is a good thing. Just thinking about new options stimulates the synapses in your brain. The logistics might be stressful to plan, but the process as a whole makes you enthusiastic, even optimistic—the very traits you need to get the attention of a Hiring Manager when you interview for a job, or to find investors in your new start-up.

It’s one of life’s paradoxes that as soon as you get really good at your career, you become bored with it. That’s exactly when you want to try something new. Depending on how much money you’ve saved, the new career path could be something you plunge into head-first, it can be a side job you do in your spare time, or it can end up a recreational hobby.

But one thing’s for sure—a straight line to your ideal job is a fantasy very few will realize. Please tell your kids it’s okay to teach ESL in China for a year, or spend the summer interning in a completely random field outside their major. Tell them to welcome the zig-zags.

The Day I Told Myself The Truth. Are You Ready?

I remember sitting in the interview chair of a prestigious Executive Search firm in Manhattan, around twenty-five years ago. Behind her grand oak desk, the interviewer didn’t know that the dull thudding sound she heard was the sound of my knees knocking together.

 I’d been a headhunter for a few years by then and I was good at it. I worked for a boutique firm that migrated from Manhattan to a New York suburb, where my colleagues and I were all new to the industry. We gloated over filling Wall Street jobs and making gobs of money-- matching candidates we’d never even met in person to Hiring Managers we’d also never met. The money flowed easily as long as I worked the phones hard, back when paper resumes were faxed or mailed and the internet was a twinkle in some Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s eye.

So why was I squirming uncomfortably in the interview hot seat of a fancy executive search firm, when I was usually on the other side of that desk? And why was I so scared?

It’s human nature to want more __  (you fill in the blank) when things don’t feel perfect yet in our lives.

 When you’re dating, you gaze at your boyfriend and wonder if there’s a guy around the corner with bluer eyes, better prospects or one who’s less inclined to cheat on you. Or suddenly the second floor apartment you snagged last year has lost its panache--and wouldn’t the two-bedroom on the sixth floor with the view of the park be a truer reflection of what you envisaged for yourself?

It’s also human nature to want more when things are going really well. Like myself in the late 1980’s—making more money than I ever thought I could earn without needing to climb the corporate management ladder  or wear a suit to work everyday. I’d convinced myself that after honing my recruiting chops in the scrappy agency that gave me my start, I’d already learned everything I needed to learn. 

I’d decided that the grass would be greener at a company where the brand was well-known, and that a company with large, gold letters on their double doors was the place where I should hitch my star.

Only it wasn’t. Guess what? I didn’t get the job. And years later, I’m glad I didn’t.

We need to use our personal yardsticks to measure success on our own terms. But we often trip over them. How you define a successful career is crucial:

·      Does the work you’re doing contribute in a way that utilizes your own special talents? Are you able to do your best work in the environment you’ve created for yourself?

·      Does your job offer you stretch opportunities—allowing you to contribute to exciting projects, partner with a variety of people and learn new skills at the same time?

·      Is your job in synch with your personal value system so that you can work with integrity and sleep well at night?

Getting better at figuring out what you should do with your career is like figuring out if your best friend really is all they claim to be.

Your best friend should be a good listener. Does yours disrespect your wildest dreams? Are they unreliable—finding excuses to put off supporting you when you need guidance or when you just need someone to lean on? Do they dump too much drama, passive-aggressive behavior, moodiness or tantrums all over your best-laid plans?

Maybe it’s time to let that person go from your life. Even if it’s you.

You may have manufactured an image of an ideal career that delighted your parents, your college professor, your spouse or your friends...but it may no longer serve you. And the sooner you purge this inauthentic image, the sooner you can get at your own truth. The truth of why you really show up for work, other than just to pay your bills.

Years later, I realized that I interviewed at the search firm because my interior dialogue  whispered in my ear that I should align myself to a company that was bigger, brighter, more well-known for me to be happy. Turns out I wasn’t really built that way. At that point in my career, smaller was better. 

Besides, I hated the idea of wearing suits and wasting all that money on dry cleaning.

Telling the truth feels good. Are you ready to have that conversation with yourself?






image courtesy of flickr's Bender.SecondLife