Job-search and career-building links.
June 12th, 2007
Myself, I’m in a good spot with my career, but here are some links for those of you who are looking, or who might be looking soon:
–The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace by Penelope Trunk. Years ago I used to read Trunk’s “Brazen Careerist” column regularly. Here she answers questions from Guy Kawasaki. Good stuff to keep in mind, especially if you’ve fallen into the trap of believing that you owe your soul to your current employer. One thing that’s hard for me to understand is her comment on “Office politics is about backstabbing.” It’s clear to me from this and other things of hers I’ve read that she and I have very different experiences of the corporate workplace, because I’ve never been in any situation where backstabbing would have been taken as the norm. No decent person should assume that it is — or keep working in a business where it could even be seen as normal.
–Gems You Must Have In Your Cover Letter and 6 Resume Tips For Seasoned Professionals I think that a successful job hunt is much more about making friends early and then calling upon them when you need them, but if you’re in a position of applying for a job cold, these posts and others at the Career Ramblings blog will be useful to you.
–“The Oh-f***-it Moment” by Hugh Macleod. (I censor the F-word, which Hugh doesn’t, out of deference to my mother, who sometimes reads this blog. But I won’t always.) The basic point: if you’re going to do something big in your career, at some point you’ll confront institutional inertia — or even your own inertia — and you’ll decide that you just don’t care about the negative consequences that will come from doing the right thing. I’m no fan of breaking crockery for its own sake (why scare people for no reason?), but there are times when the truth so clearly needs to be said that you can’t waste time worrying about how everyone will react. Just go ahead and say/do the right things regardless. If you lose your job, at least you’ll have gone out with guns blazing.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
awesome!
June 12th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Hi, Tim. Thanks for writing about Brazen Careerist. I agree with you — most of the time offices do not have backstabbing. Most places I have worked people have been nice with each other.
The backstabbing part was one of the myths. I think a lot of people believe office politics is about backstabbing, but it’s not. It’s about being nice.
Penelope
June 12th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Thanks for the comment, Penelope. I get what you’re saying now. It makes me sad that any big number of people would believe that backstabbing is the way to go. In my own career, I know for certain that I’ve been rewarded in cases where my individual, technical performance was nothing super-special, but my demeanor was taken as a plus because being nice, optimistic, and willing to help translated into happier teams and a better working environment.