Rock and Roll

Careers advice isn’t very ‘rock and roll’ obviously. However a colleague told me had recently advised a r&r star who had been let go by his record label. It reminded me that I too had had such a client who was fed up and wanted to live a normal middle-class life: steady salary decent house, kids etc.

The cost of creativity is very great. We have been discussing the concept of a ‘Dream Career’ this week in the Careers Group. A difficult one; the aspiration to a emotionally and intellectually fulfilling role is surely legitimate, isn’t it?

Well I suppose so, except that i have never believed in a dream career. A career for me has always been an accommodation with the real, with the realities of the job market. And for me personal fulfilment cannot exist outside of the notion of performing a social role – a task which is valued by some-one else becuse it meets their needs.

For me following a purely personal dream is a kind of slavery particualrly if it is a ‘fixed’ dream. Dreams will change. The dream job will not be as attractive once you have obtained it. I remeber meeting a man who had been a successful instrumantal performer who worked in banking. Why the change form the creative to the mundane? Ah well, he said, being a professional musician made me hate performing. My love turned in to my job. In banking i have no such high expectations, and at the end of the working week I can return to my undiminished and liberated passion: – music.

Recovering from the disastrous first job

This was a catalogue article I wrote a while ago. My sons had justdiscovered Morrissey and played him incessantly. The couplet stuck in my mind

 

“I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

 

Do you remember Morrisey’s musical reminiscence of  his employment experience?

 

Has this happened to you? So many graduates have an unhappy experience in their first job. Maybe it was the first thing that was offered to you and you were desperate. Maybe the reality of the job did not meet your expectations. Whatever. You are out of it or intending to be out of it as soon as you can find something else.

 

And that is why you are here trawling the aisles of the Business Design Centre in search of some inspiration.

 

As you look for your second job after leaving University what will you do different the second time around? Those who do not learn from their history are condemned to repeat it – don’t let this happen to you.

 

So what did you do wrong?

 

I just assumed I would get a good job. Everybody said there were plenty of jobs to choose from. I was working hard on my finals and dissertation so I thought I’d get onto the internet and go from there.

 

And what will you do differently?

I realise that although there are lots of jobs that can be picked up, but relatively few of them offer a lot of training support and development opportunities. When I see details of a job, I will check what is offered in the package; not just the money but the chance to build a solid foundation of skills.

 

 

What else did you do wrong?

 

I assumed they would want to utilise my graduate skills. They could have employed a robot to do my job

 

And what will you do differently?

 

I will find out more about the job content. I will do my research. I will find out what I can about the company and the role I am being offered. If I am going to be given humdrum repetitive work – and as the new boy or girl I almost certainly am – I will try and find out how quickly I can progress to more meaningful stuff.

 

Any other errors?

 

I did not realise that I hate the environment in local government /small businesses/ big corporations / schools / hospital labs / IT firms / media companies etc

 

And what will you do differently?

 

OK so I cannot be expected to really know about a working environment before I join it. But I can make some effort to find out, talk to people on the careers stand, try to find if my friends know anybody in a similar line of work so I can get the low-down from them, read whatever I can find, ATTEMPT at least to be well informed.

 

 

What will you say to your next employer about this unimpressive and rather short period of work?

 

Will you simply omit it from your CV? Account for the time it occupied by saying that you were ‘travelling’? Perhaps you do not want to look like a job-hopper. Don’t leave it out form your CV. If you do then you leave out the opportunity of  showing what you learned from that taking that job. You could turn a negative to a positive by your analysis of what went wrong.

Leaving one job quickly does not make you a job hopper. Leaving two in quick succession will certainly get an employer wondering if a pattern is being established.

 

Should you take a second stop-gap job?

 

It may be a financial necessity. But if it is avoid jobs that are so exhausting or time consuming that they leave you unable to pursue your primary task: getting your career on track

 

Should you go back to college?

 

If it isn’t a financial no-no you should think very carefully about this. If you are clear and focused about what you want to do and a postgrad course fits into the plan, then fine. If it is just a way of buying more time then be very very careful. For most employers, more education does not necessarily mean ‘better educated’. It may mean ‘perpetual student’ or procrastinator.

 

So this time, think it through

 

• Research the job and the company as thoroughly as you can.

 

• Reading about the employment market more generally (Remember ‘Reading around your subject?’) might give you the right kind of insights, knowledge and vocabulary to take into your next interview.

 

• Consider  a C2 mock interview before you do the real thing. It may prove a sound investment.

15 minute rule

I notice how a lot of advisers will start a quick query session with a gambit that says: we have 15 minutes for this session… It seems to have wide currency and -presumably – wide approval. The argument being – lets get this into the contract straight away.

I think this is a most unhelpul way to begin – particularly in those early rapport-creating moments where the emotional temperature of the encounter is being set. It seems to say – I am busy man, you are going to need to get on with it. Surely we should be creating an atmosphere that says: I am at your disposal.

Not that I think a time contract does not need to be set: it does. Its just the way its done. I think that time frame should be set in the process of ’signing up’.  A student needs to know how long will this take – can s/he fit it in before the next lecture?

If a student has been told that they have 15 minutes prior to signing up, then the CA saying it as the FIRST thing, rather feels like rubbing it in.

I suppose you get a seense of what 15 minutes of guidance feels like; better to do this than use the device of a former colleague – to set an oven timer going on the desk at the beginning of the session. When it buzzes you are ‘done’

 What would we feel if the student came in saying – look I only have 5 minutes for this – can wwe get a move on? I have actually had such a student. I sent them away – unguided. It was an offer I could and did refuse.

Visit to Grant Thornton – accountants

This was a firm that was sort of at the edge of my consciousness. Bracketed with BDO and Baker Tilly. So it was good to visit them.

They have taken over Robson Rhodes. One feature of their recruitment is that they operate office by office. About 90 trainees in London but plenty of other offices around the UK. Slough is the second biggest – and one of the hardest to fill. Why did we all laugh at this. I am sure slough is a fine town.

Bradenham Manor is their Training Centre – an ancient manor house in the Buckinghamshire countryside. A little tour by the Manor’s tour-guide was offered to us after lunch.

The ususal tour of their specialisms which included corporate recovery and corporate advice  ( looking at M & A. plans).

Tiny number of actuarial openings. One office offers specialism in Farm auditing. It is possible to focus on audits for the not-for-profit sector.

 

Asked Charotte Whetham to come and do a session for Jeff Riley at King’s.

Guidance is a complete waste of time

according to most public pronouncements on the subject. I used to collect uncomplimentary reports of guidance from the news media until i found my case notes got too large to manage – or at least to numerous for me to nurture hard gem-like flames of malice against (scuse the syntax, grammar, vocab).

Surely so many pronouncements all pointing in the same direction cannot be wrong?

I think that the experience of many of the consumers of our service is disappointing. To acknowledge this is a pre-requisite for doing something sensible about it.

There is bad practice about. I have seen some of it. Heaven knows i have delivered some of it.

There is some appalling training going on. I have witnessed the outcomes of it – narrow, uncreative, defensive ’models’ of interview behaviour.

But a lot of guidance is really good. A lot of it is really skilled. But, here’s a thing – it does not have to be very skilled to be very good. At heart guidance is a conversation about getting jobs.

One side of the conversation is a person who is engaged in seeking a job, the other side is a person who has talked to few other people engaged in seeking a job, has talked to a few employers about how they choose people for jobs, and has developed a few ideas to help the job seeker proceed. The standsrd way to communicate these ideas is to guide the job-seeker to formulating these ideas him or herself.

The problem is that aspirations are bound up with this. Clients want the best jobs. Employers want the best recruits. To crudely re-cast Groucho Marx’s quip: clients only want positions in the companies that would not consider recruiting them. 

So guidance is often a negotiating process in which alternative opportunities are considered – less attractive perhaps, but maybe containing some elements of their aspirations -but not all. The client may emerge form such an encounter unimpressed and unenthused. That may have been good guidance, but who will say so?

Client Dilemmas

A client wants to see an adviser to help him decide which subjecy choices on 2 separate LLM’s will most suit himand help him in his career. He seems to be well into his 20’s and has no work experience. He has booked and paid for 2 hours for this discussion and is planning to travel from abroad for the sole purpose of having this interview. How dreadful that I feel I will not be able to satisfy his stated objective. He is not from Western Europe and may have a different notion of ‘professional’ – ie one who can diagnose the problem and prescribe the cure. Perhaps I can do that -though not in the sense he anticipates.

The factor that prevents me from being ‘daunted’ is my experience that the written statements of clients are never the whole story; that they cause you to make assumptions that are not borne out in the actual interview. We will see.

What does daunt me is the sense that I have felt very uncomfortable about my last 3 clients all of whom wanted things in their careers which they were unable to fulfil – and where I got in the position of trying to tell them this unwelcome news. In each case the possibilities for change existed, but the client’s commitment to their lifestyle ( including salary and location) meant that change was not feasible. So I had to send them back toi their jobs with their frustrations inttensified.

More MBTI validation for me.

So my client is an ESTP. His presenting problem is that when he goes to interview he feels he has no vision of where he wants to be – and that is losing him jobs.

So I read up on ESTP, and i find that his inferior function is ‘Introverted intuition’  – ‘has difficulty forming an internal vision of the future’. Bingo.

The client wwas very negative about his career and his managers. And he was very rational about this negativity; All straight out of the text-book.