Avatar photoSteven Savage

Just What Is Sabotaging Your Job Search?

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As is painfully obvious, I know a lot of people looking for work.  Too often I hear people wonder just why they can't find jobs.  If they do have jobs they seem to wonder why their friends and family can't find jobs.  No matter the perspective it's always the question of "person has X trait, that is good for job Y.  I'm sure there are openings in job Y.  Why don't they have job Y?"

I ask myself this question a lot because, as is obvious, I talk to a lot of people looking for work, thinking of looking for work, or who should be looking for work.  Over time I've come to several conclusions about why people qualified for jobs don't have them – despite everything they do right.

YOU HAVE THE EDUCATION – BUT LACK EXPERIENCE: Degrees and training are great, but people want some hard experience in many cases.  Not having that experience can mean that, no matter your degree, you don't get hired – since people want to know you can do the job.

YOU HAVE THE EXPERIENCE – BUT LACK THE EDUCATION: This is where you've obviously shown you can do the job, but you don't get hired due to lacking the formal education.  This could be because of legitimate reasons – that employers want someone with recent academic knowledge or some specific training, or even proof you truly care about the career in question.  This can also be because hiring figures that it's better to hire someone with a degree because if you screw up they can't be blamed.

RIGHT EDUCATION, WRONG COLLEGE: Some people are biased towards certain educational institutions, regardless of quality. It happens.

THE DOUBLE BLADE OF AGE: Know the worry that some people have that they're too old for their jobs?  It's even more confusing as age can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on job, location, and even company.  The age issue is real – but it varies a lot.

TIMEOUT: Sometime the time is just wrong.  You may be looking for work at the wrong time in a company or locations history.  You can give up right before it gets good – or start looking right after a hiring binge ends.

THE EXTRA EDGE: Sometimes a job needs some specific abilities or experience.  If you don't have that, you may be out of luck.  Finding what that is?  There's your problem.

LOCATION, LOCATION: All of the above can change depending on location – things may be different in another state or other country, or even employer to employer.  On top of all the other reasons people don't have jobs it may be simply they're trying with the wrong company or in the wrong place.

Knowing how to get your job is important.  Knowing what might keep you from getting the job equally so.  Diagnosing if these issues are part of what's sabotaging your job search is important.

– Steven Savage

Inconvenience Yourself!

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Are you ready to face the challenges for your career?  For your life's dream?  Are you ready to walk through the metaphorical obstacle course of your perfect job (unless it's not metaphorical)?

Are you sure you're ready?

If you want to face down the challenges of following your profan/progeek/protaku dream job, I recommend practicing dealing with inconvenience by inconveniencing yourself.

The more you work to deal with challenges on your own terms, the more you test and push your limits, the more you'll be able to deal with them when your career throws them right in your face.

Next time you're working to organize your den, go all the way and take that extra hour to really deal with that pile of papers.  Face the boredom and you'll develop discipline.

Next time you've got to go talk to an annoying salesperson to get that new piece of furniture, face it down.  It'll help you deal with challenging co-workers and clients.

Next time you've got to finish that piece of fanart, try out that new coloring technique even if it takes longer or risks failure.  It'll get you used to building new skills even in adverse situations.

Go on.  Inconvenience yourself.  It'll prepare you for the challenges you'll face in the future.

– Steven Savage

You May Have a Job – But Do You Have a Life?

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You have a great job.  A fantastic job.  You love what you do.  You love what you make.  You hate to leave work – and probably don't really leave as much as people may think.

If you're a progeek (such as myself) of course that's kind of a holy career grail – the job you love that embodies all your interests.

However you may have the ideal job – but do you have a life?

This of course is often a massively loaded question for us progeeks and profans – our goal is to turn our hobbies into our careers.  We may not have a life to some people as we're geeks and otaku, but we often have quite a diverse and interesting life – and turning what we love into jobs would seem to make our lives even more, well, lifelike.

That can be wrong.  We get it wrong on scale.

A job is what we do to earn a living and do something we (hopefully) consider important in our society and community.

A career is the path of our jobs, of our professional development.  It's a the arc, the progress, we make in manifesting what we like to do and care about.

A life is the entire big picture, how everything comes together.  It is our past and our future, it is what we care about and do.  It is, in short, who we are.  "Having a life" means having something that matters to us, that has context and meaning, a past and a future.

You can have a "life" and be an introvert off writing code or books or what have you – if that truly is part of an overall, fulfilling life.  You can be a genius on a job you love – but with no arc to your career and no sense of the bigger picture, it's really shallow and meaningless.  The stereotypical nerd off writing amazing code with few friends may indeed be more happy than someone beloved, famous, and facing a meaningless life.

Having a life is one where what we do, who we know, our careers, and our job come together to make something meaningful to us, something that's part of the even bigger picture – of what and who we care about, and of what matters to us.  It's the history of our development and growth as people, where we know why we do what we do and how we'll get where we want to go.

So you may have a job.  But don't mistake it for a life.

– Steven Savage