Jananas

During my job search earlier this year, I kept getting frustrated by how limiting my resume was. It shows my (corporate) education and my corporate work experience. It tells you about business cases and analysis and planning and excel.

It doesn’t tell you anything about who I am. What my breadth of experience is. What I’ve learned outside of work or school. What my personal skill set is. What I’ve grown up doing.

I was looking at a job posting recently and they are asking for someone with my range of corporate experience but who is also tech savvy and is curious about our digital future. Sounds awesome right? Not so much, because my resume only tells you about my corporate experience.

We’re a strange hybrid generation. We have the corporate education and experience. We also have the knowledge of technology and the experience with things like Twitter and Facebook and WordPress. We’re both, but we’re judged solely based on what is written about us on a piece of paper.

For many of us, we haven’t had the opportunity to marry those two together. To legitimize a skill set that we’ve built and validly have. To do so would require big corporations to have us do analysis on results via Twitter or to come up with a strategic plan that involves reaching out to communities where they are today instead of pushing mass marketing. And most big companies aren’t there yet. Through no fault of our own, we’re stuck in a cycle where we can’t officially prove that we can do what we’ve grown up doing.

Add one more layer which is that we’re been taught to value our privacy. Our facebook accounts are locked down. We use different email addresses to apply for jobs than we would for everything else. We’ve created separation so much so that we may not want to use those personal accounts as proof that we’re competent.

How can I prove to an potential employer that I have a skill set when the only way to show them is to allow them into my personal life? Where is the boundary?

Are resumes still relevant when they stop  capturing what employers care about?

What I want to say is, please give me a half hour of time to allow me to make my case. My resume isn’t going to reflect what you’re looking for but that’s because its capturing only a small portion of what I have to offer. In our new world, are you going to continue to judge based on old world rules (and frames of reference)?

What’s a girl to do?

When we were in Ohio last weekend Jason took me for ice cream at Young’s Dairy. We met our friend Jacob there and Chris, Kerri, and Harper joined us as well. I grabbed way too much ice cream – note to self, single scoop and something light tasting is the way to go.

Then we went outside to pet goats. Jason spent all his pocket change buying feed for the goats. Some of them were super aggressive trying to get to the food (see the neck stretch if you want proof). Others were way more laid back. I especially liked the little kids and the super pregnant mama goats. Its official, I want to live in a place where we can have a goat.

After we’d exhausted our change we went into the small barn area to see some of the other animals. This calf was very affectionate and loves to lick. The big pad of taste buds in the middle of a cow’s tongue sure does feel strange. I’d also love to live somewhere were I could provide land to a rescued cow (not for dairy production!).

The best part of being in the barn was the little kid who pointed at the cows and excitedly yelled “HORSES”. Apparently someone failed the animal recognition section of kindergarten. The same kid was also stoked about the “Hickens”.

I really enjoy being in Ohio. We’re trying to coordinate schedules for this summer to figure out when we can take another mini road trip, but between weddings and prior commitments it may not be until the fall.

I’ve been working for just under three months and am rapidly approaching the end of my probation period. I wish I could tell you that its all its cracked up to be, but frankly I’ve been tempted to just walk out at least twice a week. That isn’t a very good track record.

It sucks because I like the people I work with. They are a good group and I get along with them.

Its the work that’s killing me. I’m a financial analyst doing business case support. But, but, but (there’s always a few of those out there) we’re really just a check in a process. We do business cases but don’t have the authority to say no to a program if the numbers are bad. The numbers we do pull together don’t feed back anywhere (forecasts, planning, budgets, etc.). No one’s held accountable. In fact, our numbers generally aren’t great because we don’t have good data. We don’t understand our customers or their behavior. We don’t really know how previously campaigns turned out. And we don’t know how things are changing (i.e. in a fast moving industry, assumptions from two years ago just don’t cut it).

We got our objectives earlier this month. I’ve been there for just under three months and I’m already 80% to completing them. By the end of next month I will have completed everything on the list. There are no stretch goals. There’s no where to go and nothing to do to get me to the next level. There’s nothing to reach for, to motivate me to try harder. It sucks.

It is really, really demoralizing to have a job that doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t contribute. It makes it hard to stay connected and to care about the quality of your work. It isn’t motivating.

I hate when senior management is so far out there that they bullshit their employees. Please don’t tell me one thing and do another. I’m not stupid and treating me like I can’t put two and two together is belittling. I read through program documents regularly. I get bombarded with marketing jargon telling me how we’re “technology leaders” in our industry. We still use Office ’03 and IE6 (which is so old it doesn’t support tabbed browsing and doesn’t work with some of our own customer facing sites!). I find it hard to believe that we’re leaders in technology when I’m the mayor of our office on Foursquare. Me, a finance analyst for business cases. Not a marketing person. Not a tech person. Not a product person.

I’ve been really struggling with work. I generally have a fair amount of down time (in part because I work fast), which leaves me with a lot of time where I have to look busy. That’s time that I could be spending learning or creating (painting, spinning, knitting, batiking, etc.). Instead, I get home at the end of the day and I’m exhausted. I don’t have the energy to create. It makes me resentful of that time that I spend at my desk. I know that as a salaried employee I’m paid to park my butt at a desk for 7.5 hours but I hate that those 7.5 hours impact the rest of my life.

When I don’t have the energy to create, I’m miserable. And that spills over into everything else as well. It impacts my relationship with Jason and my desire to exercise and to spend time with my friends.

I’m torn. We’re told as employees and good little job searchers that we can’t leave a job after three months. It’ll look bad on our resumes. The next place won’t look twice at us. I’m in an even tougher position because this is my first job after my MBA and I took time off to travel. I have an even bigger gap to explain. This makes me feel like I’m stuck working in this environment where I’m disconnected and bored and resentful.

I know that something has to change because I can’t keep doing this.

I’m not a corporate person. I can’t put in my 7.5 hours every day. I want freedom to be creative. I want a job that wants me to voice my opinion and that will challenge me. I want a job where I care about what I do because its exciting and cutting edge. I want a job that asks me to think and values the fact that I’m not a stereotypical MBA.

It may be time to make the decision that I can’t stay in a job just because I need it to look good on my resume. That my mental health and happiness is more important than making it easy to find my next position. That I’m going to have to bust my ass to convince the next company that I have more to offer than a business degree and analytical skills.

What do you suggest?

We spent the weekend down in Ohio visiting friends and family, and getting Jason all moved out of his old place. On the Saturday we spent time at this parents’ place and got to meet our new nephew Harper. I was pretty stoked. I had two baby sweaters – one knit and one crocheted as gifts for him. Crafting for someone so tiny is pretty awesome.

Harper was such a happy little man. He settled right down and slept on me for quite some time Gucci (our little man) had a lot of fun running around the backyard, playing with his duck toy. He was also very scared of Jason’s dad and tried to jump into Kerri’s lap to get to safety.

p.s. Jason didn’t hold Harper. Scary baby alert!

I knew that I’d spun a lot of yarn when I spent time wet setting it over the weekend. I didn’t realize quite how much I’d spun until I twisted it back up into cute little skeins and started piling it up on the coffee table. I now have a yarn pyramid and nowhere for it to go. Seriously, if you’d like to buy a skein let me know! Bright colours, fun changes, and lots of BFL/merino.