~Job hunting is dead, rest in peace!
A thought provoking talk at TED: “What’s Truly Behind Career Crises”
Philosopher Alain de Botton, author of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,“ speaks on why job snobbery and social inequality are fuelling anxiety and fears that we’ll be judged an ‘under-achiever’, he says in this TED talk about the realities of success.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/605
He implies it seems that the real questions about work and life are ‘who are you’, ‘what are you good at doing,’ ‘why are you here,’ and ‘what does it matter if “life/work balance” is an impossible ideal.’
This fits well in my thinking about why job hunting is dead, and why I’ve started this blog.
Rebecca Thorman, the woman behind blog modite, writes: “It’s time to stop looking at your career as a set of skills applicable to a single position. You probably won’t use the major listed on your college degree. You’ll change jobs six to eight times before you’re thirty…. If you can’t talk about how your waitressing job applies to architecture, how teaching kindergarten makes you great for customer service, or how your blog has prepared you to be a circus manager, you lose.”
“Job seekers looking to open up fresh career territory need to add to their arsenal the ability to show the less-obvious connections between roles that don’t necessarily appear related at first glance. If you want to be what Marci Alboher calls a ‘slash’ (as in a musician/engineer or management consultant/cartoonist) you need to learn how to sell the connections between your various work identities, perhaps by boiling down your job to core skills like information assimilation and rapport building, perhaps by arguing, as Thorman does, that having broad experience makes you a more innovative employee.”
I had watched this before, as someone else had linked to it. Its a great eye-opener about the dynamics involved. But it is still a pretty complex subject, and I have a hard time extracting a solution from his talk. Even if we accept others and ourselves openly, not with snobbery, we need to depend on society to do the same.