Setting Career Direction

I read a piece knocking on my open door recently suggesting the typical approach to job application details were tired and no longer apt.

Albeit undercut through insistence on using 'young people' as sanitised labelling. Lazy, patronising institution-speak othering that ignores actual differences between any youngsters within quite the range of ages. Just say who you actually mean. Which is what someone trying to climb on their first rung of the career ladder would better appreciate.

Getting that first break can indeed feel impossible. Recruitment black holes and AI-generated rejections would test those with substantial experience, let alone just starting out.

Expected to trot out qualifications, experience and role aspirations can be like trying to hit barn door with a banjo. Worse still, when you neither live anywhere rural nor play an instrument.

Bear in mind the converse. As I've seen, Enterprise efforts to take on grads ripe for solution selling stardom are fraught with danger too. For instance, the Sales leadership that built a regiment of "human brochures", decimated on the battlefield of entry-level prospecting. Recruits soon recoil from being cannon fodder, and when prospects see the flank coming they close ranks.

Here's one para that might resonate;

"We should start somewhere more human. What excites and interests you? What do you love doing? What contribution would you like to make and what are you curious about?"

As this evokes why and how I myself got into this fine profession.

B-School and early workplace tasters had given me hunger to shake-up companies for the better. Yet with hastened dawning that those brought in to drive 'transformation' weren't the kind of people you'd really want to entrust such fundamental overhaul to.

BPR was the buzz back then. Tom Peters wowing (the freshly termed) chief execs to rip out swathes of middle management and fatten their own bonus bottom lines.

Sure there was deadwood aplenty. But I happened upon a key enabler. A new land emerging between nascent individual desktop and industrial mainframe computing. Businesses wanting to harvest the fruits of such tech were less keen on being talked to about bits and bytes, but more interested in actual business impacts. Especially from someone genuinely fired up by helping through it all.

All the points in that quote above got happily ticked off. I relished helping mainly underdogs steal a march on rivals, whilst helping valued staff redeploy or embrace new ways of working which in either case they then preferred, enabling legitimate growth all round.

Indeed economist Dr Daniel Susskind, coincidentally just publishing a new book touching on this, says that those starting out should be asking not what jobs they want to do, but instead, “what problems are you interested in solving?"

And such markers make for a solid platform for both your own future career development and that of those you wish to attract.