Appreciate Your Work History
By Jeri Hird Dutcher
Do you know people who decided when they were in kindergarten that they wanted to be a teacher, followed that path through their orderly Ph.D. and taught until they retired, loving every minute of it and contributing significantly to their career and community?
Me neither. I wanted to be a nurse until I took a chemistry class. I thought maybe social work would be OK, mostly because my friend Bonnie was majoring in it, and I didn’t have a clue. Then, a particularly astute professor said it was odd that a social work major was taking so many writing classes, and a career was born!
Most of us stumble into a college major, change our minds a couple of times, try out a few jobs that don’t fit, and if we’re lucky, discover something we’re good at that we like to do and call it a career. Some of us do that a lot.
Others wander from industry to industry in search of that elusive satisfaction, wanting to find something that clicks, waiting for our career gift from heaven.
Still others skip lightly along the same path, intrigued by a wide variety of experiences. They make a million selling widgets. Then, they write a best-selling how-to book. Next, a restaurant chain. Finally, professorship at a national university. I met just such a person recently, who wasn’t taking advantage of the wide variety of skills and interests covered in her old resume.
“Mattie” graduated from medical school in England but preferred not to practice medicine in a clinic or hospital setting. Her old resume showed she had been working as a medical consultant for a legal practice for about a year. She’d done a good job, helping the firm win a $2.5 million verdict by conducting medical research. It’s not that it was a bad job; it just wasn’t what she wanted to do. Mattie wanted to be the next Dr. Sanjay Gupta, medical correspondent.
We talked more, and I discovered she also ran her own multi-media entertainment consultancy and the year before, had launched a line of clothing with celebrity endorsements and B2B sales! Now, that’s certainly a ways from medical school and research, and that’s what she had been afraid to show. Even though she’s one of the smartest people I know, she had not been able to show the connection between her multi-media consultancy experience and her dream of being a medical correspondent.
At that point, our resume strategy took a sharp turn toward the unconventional. Rather than trying to hide her wide variety of experience because it was unrelated to the medical field, we highlighted it because it was closely related to her target. We concentrated approximately equal space on the medical and entertainment consulting. Our rationale was that a medical correspondent would need equal portions of medical knowledge and entertainment savvy.
Two weeks after her current job ended, she interviewed for and landed her “dream job,” she wrote in her celebratory email. She is a professional educator for a cord blood bank, talking to other medical professionals about cord blood collection and recruitment. Best of all, she hosts a medical talk show on XM Radio.
Dr. Mattie made a very common and erroneous assumption, that her work history wouldn’t serve her well because it varied from the “norm.” Few of us walk the straight path to the job of our dreams. It doesn’t hurt to show the side trips if we weave them into the pattern and let them inform the subsequent positions.
The roads taken
Many jobs profit from forays into other fields as much as they do from professional education and training – if not more. After my first copy editing job at a daily newspaper, I was hired as the executive director of a small nonprofit. I hated it almost immediately. The board’s perception of successful sales techniques was continents apart from mine. I left after only 18 months, but for years, I kept the position on my resume because it was evidence of:
- Business management skills.
- Annual planning.
- Marketing materials creation.
- Work with a board of directors at a nonprofit organization.
A few years down the road, I obtained a position as a public relations manager at another nonprofit organization, this one of national renown. I’d venture to say the earlier experience, however unpleasant in my memory, helped.
Then, there’s the rest of your life
The same often holds true for life experience. Although we may look at months or years spent caring for children or an elderly parent as “wasted” in the career sense, I believe that is rarely the case.
A recent client had gained several years of laboratory and clinical research experience before he resigned to care for his ill father. For nine years, he tutored high school and college students in science and math to allow him the time for the caregiving. Now, ready to return to his career, he wondered how to represent his time.
We handled it in the cover letter, saying that the caregiving had taught him patience and compassion essential to clinical research where the fears and attitudes of the patients have a bearing on their ability to comply with the research requirements – and even their ability to recover.
There’s one more ingredient. The researcher has it. Dr. Mattie has it. In fact, it appears in her signature at the bottom of her emails. It goes:
Determination is born out of purpose ... knowing that you are gifted for something and this something must be attained. It is never enough to rely on luck or natural talent. You must, above all, believe in yourself, face the goals, and then fight as if your life depended on it.
~ Successories
