Andy Lester has written a great book about finding a job you love in any market. He thinks it’s just for technical people, but he’s wrong. It’s for anyone who wants to find a job that he or she can love.
The first section is all about preparing to interview: knowing what you want in a job, creating your resume, building your resume in Word, html, and text. Yes, your potential employers may want more than one version, so write it and make sure it looks good in all three versions. In the section called “Finding Your Job,” Andy says,
“Your most important tool in finding a job is relationships with other people.”
He’s right. And, the chapter about building your network, creating and building relationships has great ideas about how to build your network in a variety of ways.
I love the section called “The Interview and Beyond.” Andy’s advice shines here. From clearing your schedule, to all the other preparation (selling the interviewer on you, answering tough questions, compiling and bringing a relevant portfolio, which questions you want to ask), the idea is that if you are prepared, the interview is now on your terms. (He’s got a great sidebar on how to shake hands.)
Chapter 9 is called “Handling the Tough Interview Questions.” Here, Andy delves into what to do and, especially, not do. In the section, “The Tough Questions”, Andy provides examples of what not to say and what to say when you encounter the “Tell Me About Yourself” question. With Andy’s empathy for the hiring manager and the candidate, his advice is targeted for candidates to prepare in ways that make sense.
Andy doesn’t stop there. The chapters “After the Interview” and “Staying Hirable” are gems, too. In fact, you should buy this book and Chad’s The Passionate Programmer, as part of your New Year’s actions to improve your overall skills.
You can buy Land the Tech Job You Love on Amazon in hardcopy only. Or go to the Prag site and buy it in hardcopy or a variety of softcopy formats.
In yesterday’s Boston Globe there was an article, Start-ups stifled by noncompetes, which had a wonderful quote (go to the second page):
Luckily, we have an academic here in Massachusetts who has dedicated the past few years to looking at the impact of noncompetes. Matt Marx, who recently joined the faculty of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has made three important findings about what noncompetes do.
First, he looked at Michigan. During the decades of that state’s greatest economic growth, from 1915 to 1985, noncompete agreements were illegal. In 1985, the law changed – and Marx found that inventors were suddenly less likely to move from one company to another, and specialized inventors were much less likely to move. (I’d observe here that the last 25 years in Michigan have not been a good era to emulate.) Marx has also surveyed inventors in the speech recognition industry around the country and found that about 25 percent of those who were bound by noncompetes often took “occupational detours’’ into other technology sectors reluctantly, to avoid getting sued.
Finally, Marx’s research has found that employees bound by noncompetes tend to take jobs with large companies rather than small start-ups – in part because they believe that a larger company might be able to defend them against a potential lawsuit.
Holy moly! I knew I didn’t like non-competes, but I had no hard data on how a non-compete can work against you in hiring and in innovation.
If you are a hiring manager, learn about your non-compete agreements and see if they are preventing innovation in your organization or preventing you from hiring the people you want.
My non-US readers: are there non-competes where you work? Are they enforced?
This series is going to be focused on the portfolio of skills that will make you a better IT/Information Security professional and help you manage your career.
If you’re thinking about your career, consider tuning in.
It’s common for candidates to be experts in some technical area that the manager knows little about. Sometimes managers don’t realize how to ask questions about the qualities, preferences, non-technical, or technical skills, so the manager asks, “Where do you want to be in five years?” Managers, if you want to know about ambition, ask another question such as, “When was the last time you wanted to improve a skill? What did you do?” instead.
Candidates, when you’re faced with this question, consider your options. You can answer jokingly, “On a sailboat with a gin and tonic.” Of course, you run the risk that your potential boss will think you’re a lazy lush:-).
A better answer is to help your interviewer by answering a question the interviewer didn’t ask. Interviewers want to know about ambition, but they also might want to know how you’ve improved a particular skill, or worked differently with a group of people, or where you’re trying to learn different skills. Maybe the interviewer wants to know if you need a technical track or a management track job. Take stock of your functional skills, domain expertise, tools expertise, and industry expertise, along with your non-technical skills and practice your answers before the interview.
Hopefully you’ve thought about your past jobs and how they’ve shaped your career. (If you haven’t, read Jobs and Careers and Career Calculus.) Now, look at your progression throughout your career. Tell your story of the last five years: the experiences you had, the skills you learned, the lessons you learned, what you would do again and what you would not do again. When someone asks you where you want to be in five years, you can say, “Hmm, I’m not sure. Here’s my progression through the last five years. (Now tell your stories.) I couldn’t have foreseen this, but I’m looking to grow as a (developer, tester, writer, manager, whatever you are) and I’m willing to work hard to do so.”
Without telling the interviewer the question is a bad question, you’ve answered with a behavior-description answer — valuable information for the interviewer. You don’t need a specific plan for the next five years, but you do need enough introspection to reflect on your past experiences to see where you’ve added value, so you can explain that to the interviewer.
I’m always amazed at the number of people who take a job because it’s steady employment, or don’t choose to leave a job when they’re no longer learning. Eric Sink’s Career Calculus is an excellent essay on the value and necessity of continuing to learn throughout your career. He lumps all learning together. I think there’s a natural progression throughout a technical person’s career, and of course, you can make your own progression.
At the beginning of my technical career, I focused on my functional skills: how to be a better designer, debugger, unit tester, coder, all-over software developer. When I transitioned into testing, I refocused on my functional testing skills: how to be a better tester. This is the time you learn new tools and technology skills.
When I realized I was not interested in learning more than just technical functional skills, I started working on my project management and people management skills. It doesn’t matter which functional skills you start to improve once you’ve been working for 5-6 years; it only matters that you are ready for the next step.
Once you’ve been working for 10-12 years, it’s critical that you continue learning about how to adapt your functional skills to new domains and new tools/technology. Otherwise you become like someone I met a few weeks ago, who said she was a “Cobol programmer.” She had not learned any other functional skills, such as design skills, or other languages or anything other than Cobol programming. She had not increased her value to her employer.
Now that I’ve been working over 25 years, I’m focused most on my people skills, so I can improve my facilitation, consulting, and marketing. But I still keep learning new domains and how they are similar and different from other domains.
Here’s a table of how I’ve seen a bunch of successful people manage their careers over time:
Career stage
Functional skills
Domain expertise
Tools/technology
Industry
early (first few years)
high focus on technical functional skills
moderate to high focus on learning the product domain
high focus on learning how to effectively use the tools and technology
typically, low interest in industry expectations
middle (next 10-20 years)
high focus on technical functional skills that help improve domain expertise, OR high focus on new functional skills for career move, such as into management, marketing, service, and so on
high focus on learning the ins and outs of the product
moderate focus on how to use different tools and technology more effectively or adapt them to current environment.
moderate focus on industry expectations
later (hey, I don’t intend to retire…)
high focus on previously ignored functional skills. For highly technical people, this might mean people skills
May focus on a particular domain, or adapt previous domain expertise to new domain
It’s critical once you’ve worked for a while to continue to learn new tools and technology. Otherwise, you’re seen as a dinosaur
typically, higher focus on industry expectations
Note that the columns are not mutually exclusive. You don’t have to choose one column and focus on that. For many of us, learning is something that starts in one place (maybe functional skills) and continues organically to some other place (such as domain expertise or tools). The key is to keep learning.I’ve made some unfortunate choices, and ended up with only jobs, not a place to learn as part of my career. I tried to move out of those jobs into more learning opportunities. If you’re a manager, I hope you think about how to help your staff with learning opportunities. If you’re a candidate or employee, think about where you’d like to learn next. Then go out and actively pursue those opportunities. The more you learn, the less of a commodity you are to your employer. And my personal philosophy is that life is way too short to waste it on non-learning jobs.
