14 Incorrect beliefs about how employment works
At several hundred points over the course of my career, I have made poor decisions based on assumptions that I took as fact. We all have such strong opinions about employment, don’t we? I overhear them all the time: somebody ranting about how things work in an industry they’ve never worked in, somebody else moaning that they would never have a chance at getting a job they’ve yet to apply for, and so on, and so forth.
Because of how rapidly the world keeps changing on us — employment-wise and just in general, frankly — I try to identify and challenge my own assumptions whenever I can. Throughout this book, I’m often going to ask you do this, too. To start us off with a bang, I have assembled this list of 14 incorrect beliefs I used to hold about employment — and all the things I now know to be true instead.
Incorrect belief #1: ‘I should cast the widest net possible with my job search so that I don’t miss an opportunity.’
Let me tell you about a situation I often run into with recent graduates, with school leavers, with experienced talent, with pretty much everybody:
Acquaintance: I’m looking for a marketing job!
Me: Nice. What sort of job are you looking for?
Acquaintance: Any sort of marketing position. Or operations.
Me: Oh. Uhh, okay, so … Paid social? Analytics or content? Which industry?
Acquaintance: I want to work in marketing! Or maybe management.
Me: *exits stage right*
‘I want to work in marketing’ gives me exactly nothing to go on. I cannot help you. Here’s what’s rolling around in my head during that kind of conversation: Do you prefer B2B or B2C marketing? Do you have any experience with AdWords? Are you more interested in community management? If so, have you analysed organic engagement data before? What do you know about SEO? More specifically, what do you know about how code needs to be organised in order to implement SEO? Have you worked with a CMS before? How experienced are you with email marketing automation? Could you write the content, too? Do you know WordPress? Are you a good writer? How quickly could you create content? Could you write your own editorial calendar? Do you have contacts to journalists in any specific industry? Do you know what you’re talking about?
The instinct to be vague makes a ton of sense. You could be great at lots of things! You don’t want to say anything that will get you crossed off the list before you’ve even had a chance to prove yourself. In Step 1, I am going to get up on my soapbox and give you my big speech on the powers of specialisation and how asking for exactly the kind of job you want will accelerate your career growth, not hinder it.
I know, I know. You don’t want to get ‘stuck’ on the wrong path. To illustrate where we’re headed, I can only offer real help to one of these two people:
Person 1: I’m looking for a job in marketing.
Person 2: I’m looking for an entry-level marketing role. I know that a lot of marketing is maths and data these days, which I think is really interesting. From different marketing job descriptions I’ve seen online, I think I would like SEO and SEM. Getting it right seems like a strategy game. I also read this interesting article about … is it called real-time bidding? I had no idea how those social media ads worked. It makes so much sense! I also think it would be really cool to work in an industry that I already know a little bit about, so I want to find a job that deals with sports somehow. Maybe a surfing brand?
With a few extra sentences, Person 2 is able to quickly explain that he or she actually knows what a marketing department really does. I know what industry interests this person. And, crucially, I have enough information to know whether or not I can help.
Incorrect belief #2: ‘I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into the wrong path before I know what I want.’
Career paths don’t follow straight lines anymore. That ladder you were supposed to climb has become a 4D monster, constantly shifting and decaying and moving and sprouting new heads. At the rate at which the global economy and technology are changing, you could not possibly predict where your career will take you. It’s almost impossible to pigeonhole yourself, because the modern economy will ask you to keep adapting again and again. You get to want something today, and you get to want something else five years from now.
You’ve probably been on a hike, right? You know how you have to choose a route at the beginning, but then trails merge and separate, and sometimes you can jump from one trail to another? In order to ever get anywhere, whether that’s to go on a Saturday morning hike or build a career, you have to choose a starting point. It doesn’t have to be the obvious trail that goes straight up from the car park, but you have to start walking. Choose. Yes, it will change the course of your life. It may change the course of history, in fact. But just keep reminding yourself that you literally cannot get anywhere unless you start walking.
Incorrect belief #3: ‘It’s really hard to break into X industry.’
I sometimes find that the best thing I can do as a career coach is to give you the permission you refuse to give yourself. So, here it goes:
We hold ourselves back from applying for the jobs we want. We hear that it’s a ‘tough industry to get into’ and we don’t bother trying. We don’t even look into how to figure it out because we believe what we were told. We assume that we will fail. But here’s the thing: hundreds of thousands of people are employed in all those dream jobs that someone deemed too unrealistic to chase after, and all those cool industries you are dying to work in are multi-billion-dollar behemoths that need a giant workforce. You are allowed to step up to the plate, if you like. No matter who you are. You are allowed to take your shot.
Do your research. Go see for yourself. Do not tell me how hard it is if you haven’t tried.
Incorrect belief #4: ‘I have to choose between an interesting job and a high-paying job.’
I spent the early moments of my own career chasing not money, necessarily, but security. I thought that the big corporations would be safe. I thought that people with analyst-type jobs were less likely to get fired. Armed with a boatload of assumptions based on who-knows-what, I made up all kinds of stories in my head about which career paths might be riskier than others. Importantly, I never bothered to actually ask anybody whether or not my assumptions were true.
Here’s what I can tell you: there are some career paths where you get paid a lot of money right off the bat. There are some career paths where you make very little money for a long time, and then — if you stay the course — you can wind up making a ton of money. There are some career paths that we associate with prestige or a certain social class that actually make less money than we think they do. There are plenty of electricians, for example, who make more money than the office worker down the street. Moreover, there are factors beyond salary and passion that you will want to consider over the course of your career. The hours, the team, the benefits, the annual leave, the opportunity for growth, the on-site childcare, the flexibility to work from home, the team dynamics, the office snacks, and many more.
If you’re convinced that you need to make a binary decision, you most likely just don’t know what all your options are yet. I certainly don’t. I’m a career coach, and there’s no way I could write down a comprehensive list of every job that exists in the world, and I certainly couldn’t guess the salary range for each of those positions.
Incorrect belief #5: ‘I don’t need to enjoy my job. Jobs are just supposed to be jobs.’
Too many of us were taught that career fulfilment is an out-of-reach indulgence. A few lucky people might get to like their job, sure, but the rest of us are just meant to suffer, day in, day out. If this belief is present in your family or your marriage or your community, I want you question it fiercely. You don’t owe it to anybody else to suffer. You get to look for — at least look for — a career you will enjoy.
Listen, working a job you love is still hard work, but working a job you hate is so much harder. There are so many interesting puzzles to solve in this world. When you find a job solving the kind of puzzles that light you up, you will be amazed at how your outlook will change. My hope is for everyone to experience that feeling every day.
Before accepting, blindly, that your fate in life is to grin and bear it for the next 40 years, give yourself permission to do a little research about something — anything — that sparks your curiosity. Go and see what’s out there. After all, unless you believe in reincarnation, you only get one life.
Incorrect belief #6: ‘I am a university graduate. A nondescript job of some kind is being held for me out there somewhere because, like I said, I am a university graduate.’
At least once a week, an email just like this one lands in my inbox:
Hi Alexa! I’m starting to get really frustrated about not finding a job that shows off my potential. I graduated with a first-class degree, and I won an award for the best undergraduate student of all time. I speak French. I’m a world-renowned macramé champion. I volunteer at Christmas. I am ready to start my career. What am I missing?
Congratulations on all your wonderful accomplishments. Genuinely. If this is you, I want to tell you that you’ve done an incredible job at taking advantage of all that life has offered up to this point. I want to commend you for studying hard and for pushing yourself. Your efforts do not deserve to go unnoticed. But the thing is …
*pauses, opens mouth, shuts mouth*
*exhales and continues*
The thing is this: even if you are a university graduate, you don’t get to have a cool job (or any job) just because of everything you’ve done right from primary school until now. You’ve been given some really bad information about how and why people get hired. Doing everything right is not enough, and your degree doesn’t matter nearly as much as you’ve been told that it does.
What I’m about to say next is messy and complicated and would probably make a brilliant premise for a PhD thesis about reforming the global education system in this 21st century, post-internet, post-recession, knowledge-based economy. But I don’t have any interest in doing that PhD — and you don’t have that kind of time to burn — so I’m going to do the best I can. (Future PhD candidates of the world, please remember to cite me!)
The modern education system and the modern employment market are not mapped to each other. Not even a little bit, not even vaguely, not even at all. In a perfect supply-and-demand economics vacuum, an entry-level job in fields X or Y would become available in the market each time one person graduated with a degree in X or a qualification in Y. The education system would work much like a factory conveyor belt, one that produced the exact right number of qualified people in all necessary fields. Young people would be trained up to exactly the right level of knowledge needed to integrate seamlessly into their specific and productive role within society. A graduation would trigger the creation of a new job. Or, perhaps, a new job would trigger a graduation.
Did you ever read The Giver in school? Where they line up all the kids and tell them which jobs they’re going to have for the rest of their lives? For better or worse, we don’t live inside that particular dystopia. Instead, in the modern western world, you are encouraged to pursue a formal education where you ultimately study a topic of your choosing. This is a good thing. I think. The employment world, however, continues to hum along regardless of whether you decide to study medicine or French. The world is not magically going to have the right jobs available for the right number of French graduates. There’s no butterfly effect rippling through the global economy based on the classes you decide to take. The agency that you have in choosing what to study creates a hiccup (not your fault — the education system’s fault!) somewhere along the way:
For your whole life as you went through school, this is how the world worked. As soon as you achieved X, you were slotted into the next X+1 level. You finished Year 3 and went into Year 4. You completed secondary school and, based on a set of criteria, there was a university waiting to accept you. And if you did particularly well at any point, a better thing (a higher set or a more prestigious university degree) would be waiting to reward your efforts.
This all stops as soon as academic work stops — but nobody ever really tells you that. You’re just supposed to learn a new set of unspoken rules on the fly, often while the grown-ups roll their eyes at you. Transitioning from education to work requires a giant mental reframing. If you’ve done it recently, you know this. There’s the big stuff, like adjusting to working hours, but there are also a lot of subtle glitches in the system that you might not have noticed.
For example, I find it truly frustrating that universities and companies both use the word ‘application’ when referring to an availability. A university has a guaranteed number of slots available for learners who meet certain criteria, year in and year out. X number of people apply and X-n number of people get in. A company, on the other hand, does not work like this at all. In the world of work, nothing ‘happens’ just because you decided to switch from medicine to French. There is no next X+1 level waiting for you.
Instead, the employment market is chaos in motion. Entrepreneurs will continue racing around like headless chickens, haphazardly creating new companies which might create some new jobs. There are global organisations that will keep trying to shift and change with the times. There are non-profits that will keep trying to raise money for whatever cause they believe in. There are government agencies that will expand or contract based on the needs of a population and the politics of the day. It’s all just particle theory come to life. I was always pretty lousy at science, so to refresh our memories: particle theory, or the kinetic theory of matter, states that all matter consists of many, many, many small particles operating in a continual state of motion. How much any particle moves is determined by the amount of energy it has and its relationship to other particles. Sounds a lot like networking.
Perhaps I’ve freaked you out. For now, the most important thing to know is that companies are not looking for learners and they are not incentivised to reward you for your past learning. Your new mission is to become excellent at knowing how to make somebody some money or save somebody some time.
Incorrect belief #7: ‘I am a university graduate, meaning that I was being groomed for the strategy track. I’ll do a little administrative work, but I want to focus on the big-picture stuff.’
Okay, time to address the big E word: Entitlement.
I genuinely believe that you are hard-working and eager, but I want to stress that you need to be careful when you go around saying stuff like this because it makes you sound entitled, even if you’re not.
Career progress will happen quickly and naturally (at any point in your career!) if you possess all three of these attributes:
You don’t have any of those yet. You couldn’t possibly. It’s not because you’re young, and it’s not because you’re not capable. It’s simply because you don’t have any context yet. You don’t know how the business (whichever one you’ll be working for) actually works. You have no idea what problems you’re trying to solve.
For as long as I’ve been coaching new grads, I’ve done my best to defend you to all the other grown-ups on this topic. One of my first bosses explained the goal of entry-level work really well to me. It’s a rule of thumb that can be applied to the first three to six months of any new job, no matter the seniority level. I’m paraphrasing, but the way he explained it was this: ‘You are going to want to score goals, but that is not your job. Your job is to do whatever is needed to help the team score more goals. Your job is to provide defence and maybe make a few good passes. Observe the top strikers who are already on the team, but in the meantime just keep defending.’
I know, I know, you excelled at strategy problems in your exams. But … the business world is not the same. The business world is the Wild West. You have just joined the circus. Honestly, you’re probably on the right track so far, but the physics that guides academics is simply not the same as the physics that guides business. You need to understand that in order to succeed.
Incorrect belief #8: ‘I will never be able to get a job in X, because I never formally studied that area.’
As you already know, this is the extent of my formal academic history:
During my undergraduate degree, the careers advisor asked if I was interested in teaching. I said no. They asked if I wanted to pursue law school. I said no. Their final suggestion was to sign up for missionary work in Africa. And I’m, like, not particularly Christian. When I finished a Master’s degree in music, nobody suggested anything at all.
Four years after finishing that Master’s degree, I became a beneficiary of the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent Visa (Technology) in the United Kingdom, a prestigious immigration route awarded annually to just 200 technologists — technologist! Me, a jazz singer! — who demonstrate potential to become world leaders in their field. When I was working at Facebook, my last big project involved advising a team of back-end engineers through the process of reorganising a crucial part of the codebase. If that sounds like crazy technical gibberish that has nothing to do with your field of interest, please don’t worry.
My point is this: a little bit at a time, I taught myself all the skills I needed along the way. I was not doomed just because I studied music. On the flipside, my degrees are not the sole reasons I succeeded either. Both of my degrees are, at the end of the day, just something I chose to do with one chapter of my life. And, because of how time works, they slowly fade into the distance as I continue to write more chapters of my story.
Over the years, through every good job and not-so-good job, I always wanted to understand more about how all the dots connected. I fell into ‘technology’ stuff completely by accident, because I kept wondering what the team in the next room over was doing all day long. My curiosity has always been my biggest professional advantage. I have naturally spotted opportunities to grow my skillset, even in toxic and restrictive environments, because I am always genuinely interested in the big picture.
The curious will win over the educated, every time.
Incorrect belief #9: ‘The next degree will make me stand out. I should go get my MBA (or whatever).’
You’re probably spotting a pattern to what I think about degrees by now, but let’s really hammer in the point with this one: a degree does not guarantee you a job offer.
Here are the good reasons to go get an MBA (or whatever):
Here are the wrong reasons to go get an MBA (or whatever):
Getting another degree won’t automatically get you hired. Learning how to get hired — and understanding why people get hired — will get you hired.
Doctors and other professions that require a specific qualification, obviously ignore me on this one. Everybody else, please heed my advice. Be critical about whether or not that degree is actually necessary, or if you’re just hoping it will help. The worst-case situation here is that you will have wasted a couple years of earning potential, you will be deep in debt, and you will still not be able to get hired.
There is a quiet, growing trend of global companies getting rid of their requirement even for an undergraduate degree. While you might expect that from Silicon Valley companies like Google and Apple — both of which have gone on the record to say degrees are not a requirement for most of their top positions — the trend has already spread far and wide. As Maggie Stilwell, then Ernst & Young’s managing partner for talent, explained in a 2015 interview for HuffPost: ‘Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door.’
To be clear, the trend towards ditching degrees does not mean you don’t need skills. You definitely need skills — lots of them — and you’ll probably need to learn new ones from time to time. But you rarely need a traditional degree in order to obtain said skills. Got me?
Incorrect belief #10: ‘I can only apply for internships, because I don’t have any official experience yet and internships are the only way to get official experience that counts.’
Nope. The concept of ‘official experience’ is a false idol, and it’s not dissimilar to the idea that you have to do the ‘right’ kind of degree in order to work in certain fields.
An internship is a great way to get experience, but it’s not your only option. We’ll go through several techniques in Step 2 for adding skills into your toolkit on the fly. For now, just know that there are so many ways to demonstrate proficiency. Whether you take up volunteering, tackle a strategically helpful extracurricular initiative at your current job, or spend every night watching YouTube tutorials until you really grasp the subject matter, your learning is going to be in your hands from here on out.
Nobody can ever stop you from learning. Not in this day and age, not on my watch.
Incorrect belief #11: ‘I don’t have any skills. I am an unemployable disaster.’
Everybody has some kind of super talent that can be harnessed to get them ahead. If you’re lucky, these talents are obvious. A triple axel in freestyle figure-skating, for example, or the ability to fit more marshmallows in your mouth than any of your friends can. Other talents — most, in fact — require a bit of an archaeological dig.
Over the course of any job search, it’s tempting to fool yourself into thinking that you need to acquire a brand-new set of skills (or a new personality) in a desperate attempt to tick off every candidate requirement you come across. In reality, the first skill you need to acquire is the ability to explain why the skills you have right now, today, are valuable. If you can’t do this, you will never be able to explain why any new skills you acquire are valuable either. This is the argument I use with anyone who tells me they need another degree in order to get hired, by the way. If you couldn’t explain why you’ll be helpful the first time around, why would anything change with a second piece of paper?
If you can identify your own skills and explain yourself to others, you can do anything. Pair this narrative-spinning magic with a willingness to teach yourself new skills over the course of your career, and you become unstoppable.
Incorrect belief #12: ‘I should only apply for jobs at companies whose names I recognise because those are the most prestigious jobs.’
Many of us are instinctively drawn to working for companies we’ve heard of before.
‘I work for Coca-Cola!’ you can imagine yourself saying. ‘You know … the world-famous beverage company!’ The security of brand recognition feels good. You could tell anyone in the world that you work for this company, and they’ll know just what you mean.
Look, just because you’ve had a Coke, doesn’t mean you know a single thing about what it’s like to work for the company behind the beverage. And just because you haven’t heard of Some Smaller Company You’ve Never Heard Of doesn’t mean a thing. The stranger across the street might very well be your soulmate, feel me?
Be wary of logo blindness. You will miss a good thing that’s right in front of you.
Incorrect belief #13: ‘No companies are hiring right now. It’s the wrong time of year.’
Companies are not like universities, companies are not like universities, companies are not like universities.
There is no single application cycle that every employer out there has agreed to stick to so that all the new grads know where to go on their first day of the autumn term. Every company’s hiring patterns and timelines are entirely unique. The world is chaos come to life, there’s a lot going on. If you Google ‘best time to look for a job’, you will overwhelmingly get the impression that most hiring happens from January to April. That’s a much too simplified answer, but it’s based on something more important that will be really helpful for you to understand during the search process: headcount planning.
Alexa, what’s headcount planning?
So glad you asked.
In the autumn, many companies start making decisions about how many open roles they need to fill in the next year. This process, sometimes referred to as headcount planning, is based on a lot of different factors: revenue growth projections, new projects the company wants to invest in, people getting promoted, people leaving the company, etc.
Based on this, a company comes up with a number. They may release these roles over time (it would be hard for some companies to train 20 new people simultaneously), but most companies attempt to have a set prediction in place for the entire year. Because of money. The company needs to know how much money it is going to spend on its people.
Once the budget gets decided (example: we’re going to hire five people at £30k per person for an estimated salary budget increase of £150k), it gets difficult for a hiring manager to just ‘find’ other money that hasn’t been spoken for elsewhere in the company. While it can be tempting to think that every rejection or ‘we’re not hiring right now’ response is a personal affront to you and your character, it’s usually got a lot more to do with these predetermined annual budget allocations. Employees make the world go round — and they’re also just an expense that needs to be accounted for in a company’s financial reports. Understanding how hiring works is an invaluable asset during the job search.
(I’m very proud to report that I had an accounting friend read over this particular myth. Her response: ‘As someone who has managed headcount forecasting in a major Fortune 500 company, this is exactly true.’)
Incorrect belief #14: ‘Tomorrow, I will figure everything out and my new life will start.’
I like to refer to this particular belief as the Movie Montage Phenomenon.
Movie Montage Phenomenon = the unrealistic thought that, once you decide on the ‘right’ path, you will immediately enter into a period of frenzied achievement during which you work hard in a total vacuum and then, 90 seconds and one uplifting song later, achieve your goals and complete nirvana all in one go. (See: that scene in Legally Blonde where she goes dressed as a bunny to buy the MacBook and then studies really hard on the elliptical trainer.)
You will not magically figure out life in one day and then go out into the real world to execute your entire vision in one fell swoop. You will figure out your life by trial and error, just like the rest of us.
Careers require action. Taking action is scary if you don’t know where to start. Luckily for both of us, you have this book. You have me. I’m going to help. Let’s go and get started.