Almost as soon as geologists trace the southern coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, the findings become out-of-date. The reason: Eruptions from the Kilauea volcano keep pouring molten lava into the Pacific Ocean, altering the coastline. Sightseers from every continent gawk at the spectacle of Hawaii’s shoreline growing by the minute. Look downward, through gaps in the rocks near the water’s edge, and you can see red streams of molten rock. Look outward, toward the ocean, and you will behold huge plumes of steam where lava splashes down. Listen closely, and you will hear the hiss of escaping gases. The freshest land is steaming hot; it can’t support life. Nearby, however, previous eruptions have cooled to the point that native ferns can take root. Another mile away, everything is lush and green. Tropical vines, flowers, and other vegetation have settled into timeless patterns.
Something similar happens in the topography of work. It isn’t as dramatic; you can’t find YouTube footage of tourists shrieking at the sight of new-job formation. But the analogy holds true in many other respects. As much as we may think the boundaries of gainful work are well fixed, they aren’t. New types of jobs keep coming into existence in ways that catch us by surprise. Technology opens up fresh possibilities. So do changing social dynamics; so do evolving public priorities. Every year, a few million people choose to work in the equivalent of Hawaii’s expanding coastline, making their mark on professional territory no one else has claimed before.
In the workplace, as in coastlines, the cycle keeps repeating itself. Millions of jobs barely known or inconceivable a generation or two ago have become mainstream norms. That’s true in medicine (as seen in the rise of everything from hip-replacement surgery to genetic counseling); it’s true in engineering (with examples ranging from mobile-app development to solar-cell design); and it’s true in all kinds of fields where a liberal arts perspective can be put to use. Even big companies stretch their ambitions in unexpected ways, creating fresh jobs in uncharted areas. Governments and nonprofits do as well.
The result: Employers routinely insist they have no openings until they meet a promising candidate—like you. That’s when your energy and optimism reshape the day. New ideas take center stage. Moods brighten. Suddenly, doubt turns into belief; diffidence into action. Before long, someone utters the magic phrase: “What if we tried…”
This chapter will chart half a dozen sectors where fresh adventure awaits. You’ve already heard in chapter 1 about the broad-based ways the labor market is evolving. Now it’s time for a closer look at booming demand for project managers, designers, social-media experts, market researchers, recruiters, and fund-raisers. Opportunities are vast, with at least ten thousand jobs a year being added in each of these realms. All these fields prize the strengths that emerge from a robust liberal arts education: curiosity, discernment, adaptability, and a prepared-for-everything gusto that can turn chaos into triumph. Bring a few years of relevant experience to the interview, and you can end up earning an annual salary of more than a hundred thousand dollars. Even entry-level positions provide substantial paychecks that justify four years of college tuition. Companies as big as IBM are hiring; so are organizations as small as the Kentucky Ballet Theatre.
Toward the end of the chapter, you will get to know Bridget Connolly, an earnest global citizen in her twenties who has built her career on the outermost edge of anyone’s professional map. Think of her as the first living presence on a lava outcrop still warm to the touch. It took more than a year after college graduation for her to find the right job. There’s a lot to be learned from the way she went about her hunt, the pitfalls she encountered—and the special mix of hope, luck, and timing that finally paid off.
There’s even more value in tracking Connolly’s adventures after she got hired. At age twenty-three, she stepped into a remarkably big job: head of internationalization for wikiHow, a popular how-to website with global ambitions and no proven road map to make them come true. No one had held this job before. No one knew how to get things done, including—at first—Connolly herself. Yet she pressed on anyway, fine-tuning her strategy as she went along. You’ll discover how she built an informal network of several hundred freelance translators and editors around the world, including a bored lawyer in South Korea and a Russian speaker marking time in a Ukrainian refugee camp. She survived run-ins with a series of swindlers. She learned how to project authority without seeming brittle while dealing with people twice her age. Eventually, she improvised her way to success.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a computer at eleven p.m. wondering how to complete a project due at dawn, you have tasted part of Bridget Connolly’s world. If you cranked up the Notorious B.I.G. on your headphones in the hope that painfully loud rap would inspire you to greatness, you have embraced her life hacks too. Working so close to the unknown isn’t the easiest way to make a living. For anyone who craves a lifetime full of adventure and discovery, though, such jobs can be an adrenaline rush with a big payoff.
How do you find such opportunities? Most of them aren’t clearly advertised. In fact, often there is no public notice whatsoever. Bosses develop hazy ideas about where they want to expand next without being able to articulate precisely what they want. It’s an awkward fact of life that the best-organized employers usually aren’t all that visionary—and the most visionary employers tend to be disorganized. So if you’re hoping to land a job no one has ever held before, you probably will need to help create it yourself. All the same, those chaotic beginnings shouldn’t distress you; they can be an advantage.
A few years ago, University of Chicago economist Steven Davis and several colleagues picked through the federal government’s massive Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (known as JOLTS), which examines the way sixteen thousand enterprises do their hiring. To their surprise, it turned out 42 percent of all hires happen without any trace of a formal job posting in the previous month. After peeling away the cases where vacancies were filled so fast there was no end-of-the-month opening, the economists still were left with as much as one-sixth of all hires that seemed to be born out of nothing.
Davis suggests we think of those situations as “hiring by osmosis”; an individual is in the right place at the right time with the right opportunity. It’s weird, from an economist’s perspective, to believe people can find work without any preliminary recognition of a vacancy that needs filling. Then again, much of what happens in the world defies classic economic models.
Because these new jobs are being conjured up on the spot, employers start with an unusually elastic sense of what skills and past experience they might want. This can work to your advantage in a big way—especially if you’re the unconventional candidate. Employers become much more willing to hire on the basis of passion and potential. If you’ve got an engaging life story and a willingness to work hard, you might be the right match. Your job interview won’t even feel like a traditional interview. Instead, it will be a much more natural conversation in which a sudden sense of compatibility counts for at least as much as traditional résumé skills.
When the chemistry is right, employers make contextual leaps that play to the advantage of the classic prepared-for-everything liberal arts graduate. A hundred-and-fifty-page senior thesis? President of the LGBTQ association? A summer job in a cigar store? The more you can present your life journey as a testament to your diligence, leadership, or rapport-building talents, the closer you are to being hired. After all, what else can employers go by? Because they need someone ripe for an unusual new challenge, it’s impossible to find past masters with the standard five to seven years of experience. Such people don’t exist; these positions are bound to involve a leap into the unknown. As a result, employers won’t slam the door on candidates with partly formed skills. Quick learners are welcome too.
In such settings, savor the sense of optimistic exploration on both sides of the interview table. If your interviewer isn’t inspecting you for flaws (and looking for reasons to say no), it’s much easier to make your own luck. Be open to any possibilities that get you started at an innovative organization or in a fast-growing field. Once you’re in the door, it’s a lot easier to find new contacts and opportunities that can lead to your next job.
So where do you find such jobs, and just how common are they? Here are six especially exciting areas of interest.
Market Research
From 2012 to 2016, the U.S. economy added 166,000 jobs in market research and marketing, fields in which overall employment leaped 30 percent. A big part of this boom can be traced to Provo, Utah, the home of Qualtrics. The company’s easy-to-use software makes it possible for anyone to construct cheap, addictively popular online surveys. Banks, hotels, and car companies are huge users, eager to know what customers and employees think. Psychology professors are Qualtrics junkies, too. If you ever found yourself moving a ratings slider between one and seven to express your views, chances are you have filled out a Qualtrics survey.
A decade or two ago, when market research meant spending fifty thousand dollars or more to conduct a single survey via phone calls or face-to-face clipboard research, national appetites were limited. Today, a big online survey can be run for as little as one-hundredth of that amount. As a result, we’re constantly polling one another about everything. Employee morale surveys happen weekly instead of once a year. Dentists send out surveys to find out what’s regarded as a healthy smile. (Move the lever toward seven if you want to see more teeth; toward one if you don’t.) The boom in online surveys is so intense that even though nobody is hiring phone-bank or clipboard researchers anymore, there’s been a vast leap in opportunities for people who design online surveys, train online partners, analyze the data—and help everyone get smarter about what questions to ask.
In the summer of 2016, I visited Qualtrics just as the company was moving into its fourth headquarters within a decade. (All the other ones became too small.) I spent the better part of an afternoon chatting with recent hires who’d majored in psychology, sociology, English, or American studies in college before making their way to Qualtrics. These postgrads are breaking down the old barriers between sales and customer service, stepping into a new kind of job that makes them the embodiment of all-things-Qualtrics when it comes to dealing with major customers. While their titles are a forgettable blur of buzzwords involving “customer success” and “partner services,” what they actually do is intriguing. They are detectives, menders, coaches, and counselors to the likes of Coca-Cola, Chase Bank, and other global businesses. Sometimes they fly to Atlanta on a moment’s notice to solve an unforeseen issue; other times they coax Qualtrics’ own engineers into building intricate new features that will satisfy a major client’s cravings. The constant key to success: an ability to improvise.
“If it’s predictable, I’m not doing my job,” recent hire Cliff Latham told me. He earned a degree in industrial and organizational psychology from Brigham Young University–Idaho in 2013. Now he pitches Qualtrics’ survey technology to a wide range of clients. There’s no script for him to follow. It’s up to him to find a way of connecting with Sports Authority on one major new survey; with a renowned psychology professor studying public attitudes on another. The biggest unifying theme in his conversations with clients, Latham observed, is “being intellectually curious.”
Caroline Poole earned her sociology degree from Furman in 2014. At Qualtrics, she’s part of an elite team of in-house consultants who help big clients construct complex surveys. “You need to be good at nonlinear thinking to solve problems,” she observed. It can take as long as twenty hours to establish clients’ true research goals—especially if various project participants don’t see eye to eye. That’s when her sociology training pays off; she’s at home dealing with the sorts of organizational conflict (aka office politics) engineers can’t diagnose or ameliorate.
Social-Media Experts
Viral videos. Tweet storms. Blogging in the name of “thought leadership.” In social media, it’s hard to say what techniques work, why they work, and whether they will keep working. Everyone is still figuring out how Facebook, Twitter, and their kin can be used to build brands and share ideas. During this transitional period, it’s clear that traditional approaches to marketing, sales, and communications are being upended. As a result, organizations ranging from Google to the Kansas City Zoo have decided they need social-media managers—now!
Take a broad enough view, and annual demand for such expertise could total more than four hundred thousand openings a year. That’s the tally Burning Glass Technologies came up with when the Boston labor-data firm counted job listings in which social-media skills were part of what employers wanted. Many of these opportunities still involve a lot of traditional sales, marketing, or public relations skills. They’re fresh terrain in part; familiar work in others. Even so, the hiring templates of a decade ago now seem unduly strict. There’s greater room for people like LeAnne Gault, the Mississippi English major whose jaunty wit and off-hours social-media experiments turned her into a brand-building genius for the Viking Range business.
What’s the value of a liberal arts education in this fast-changing field? At some companies, you might need to be a friendly educator, stretching older colleagues’ awareness of ways to connect with audiences. Or perhaps you want to be the inspiring-message shaper, conjuring up the phrases, photos, and videos that make people say “Wow!” in a world where so much organizational content is dull and forgettable. Don’t hesitate to pitch yourself as the in-house cultural interpreter, discerning how your employer’s business objectives interact with the rest of the world. If you’ve ever staked out an audacious position in a humanities seminar or slipped an outrageously good line into a term paper or connected with a social science professor’s model of how the world works, you’re on the right track.
Max Menke graduated from Pitzer College in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a smattering of everything from photography to acting classes on his transcript. “I’m not sure anything I did in college was relevant to my current job,” he tells me. Then he reconsiders. Actually, Menke says, that college-fueled willingness to keep jumping into new areas has turned into his biggest asset. His time at Pitzer included a study-abroad term in China, which led to a variety of sales and teaching jobs in China after graduation, which greatly honed his ability to connect with people from other backgrounds. In 2015, Menke became a founding partner of GrowthX, a San Francisco start-up accelerator that helps young companies master the business strategies they need for success. In a typical month, he explains sales strategy and social-media tools to companies in fields ranging from shipping logistics to heart monitoring and women’s makeup. Such varied work is the perfect home for an unreformed liberal arts explorer. As Menke explains, “I love switching gears.”
Recruiting and Career Coaching
From 2010 to 2015, the U.S. economy created 73,000 new jobs for human resources specialists, the equivalent of a 17 percent jump in this sector’s overall employment. This field has seen a whirlwind of software innovation, as new digital tools take the drudgery out of payroll, benefits, performance reviews, and the like. In most cases, this new technology ends up creating jobs, rather than destroying them. The reason: once clerical chores are automated, organizations start seeing HR as a good area to expand, because smart, imaginative people can make the entire organization run better.
Recruiting becomes a fast-moving source of company pride instead of a sluggish headache. Benefits become increasingly customized to each employee’s needs. Employee training becomes more efficient, and on-the-job feedback becomes more timely and helpful. Stepped-up investments in HR pay their way. When new software tools are put to use by insightful specialists (many of whom have liberal arts backgrounds), the once-stuffy world of HR becomes much more innovative.
Mike Junge saw this transformation play out during the first fifteen years of his career. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Unable to get established as a poet, he began working in a technical recruiting agency in what amounted to a broken job market. Companies spewed out dull job ads; engineers responded by submitting listless résumés. Nobody was happy with the status quo. Over the next few years, Junge used his college-honed listening skills and his eye for people’s hidden hopes and motivations to improve the recruiting conversation for everyone.
First, Junge helped engineers describe their problem-solving skills in an upbeat, can-do manner. Then he tackled the boilerplate language of most technical-job ads. Don’t present a long string of adjectives as requirements, he told employers; you’ll only deaden candidates’ enthusiasm. Instead, take those same points and reframe them as questions. “Are you responsible and conscientious? Can you work efficiently under pressure?” Invite candidates to see themselves as winning the job because they have what it takes. That simple shift in perspective “provided a surprising edge in terms of getting good response rates,” Junge told me. What looked like better writing was actually the by-product of two liberal arts mainstays—empathy and curiosity. Junge’s strengths led to zestier messaging, so both job seekers and recruiters felt they were engaging with someone who understood their interests.
In 2011, Google asked Junge to join its recruiting team. His mission: to hunt for the best engineering talent anywhere in the world and to draw those candidates into Google’s interviewing process.
At about the time Junge joined, LinkedIn was hitting its stride as a giant database of potential job candidates that amounted to a recruiter’s best friend. Suddenly, recruiters in California who needed to find big-data experts with at least three years of Hadoop experience could bypass the laborious old routine of visiting university professors, asking about prior students, and trying to wiggle into industry conferences in hopes of meeting Hadoop-trained engineers. With a few clicks at the keyboard and some basic knowledge of the Boolean logic that underlies database searches, recruiters could find many thousands of established engineers who weren’t looking for new jobs but who might be open to an approach. In Junge’s words, “LinkedIn put the entire universe of talent into our hands.”
The faster recruiters could find candidates, the more Google’s appetite for talent grew. If the pool of Silicon Valley candidates seemed thin, why not pinpoint the thirty best Hadoop engineers in Texas and see if they wanted to move? How about considering the top fifty in Israel? No matter how many recruiters Google hired, it wanted more. By 2012, the search-engine company had nearly eight hundred people in its recruiting organization. Having established himself as a top producer at Google, in mid-2012 Junge went back to Southern California, where he is now head of talent acquisition for a financial-tech company.
Ultimately, tech companies like Google rely on their own engineers to assess each prospect’s suitability via a series of interviews and coding tests. For getting the conversation started, though, there’s a special role for recruiters with the unique blend of rapport and engaging communication that comes with a liberal arts education.
Fund-Raising
In 2010, full-time fund-raising was such an unusual job that federal statisticians didn’t even recognize it as a stand-alone category. By 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tallied 68,900 people in this line of work. Once again, assistive technology had created a flurry of new jobs. Software tools such as Raiser’s Edge and CauseOS made it vastly cheaper, faster, and smoother for small organizations to go prospecting for donations than it had been. Online campaigns meant that postage, phone, and printing costs dropped to zero. Fund-raising initiatives that never happened in the old regime—because high costs would have overwhelmed the amount of money raised—suddenly became feasible and often outright attractive.
Crowdsourcing initiatives such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo open up new avenues too. Anyone wanting to make a movie, launch a product, or help out a worthy cause can go online and seek support from around the world. Early boosters can rally their friends via all the communications tools of our interconnected world. You don’t have to be the American Red Cross anymore to be able to raise money effectively.
In Lexington, Kentucky, dancer Brie Lowry found she could support her professional passion—and make additional part-time income—by becoming a fund-raiser for the Kentucky Ballet Theatre. Some of her successes came via digital connection with potential donors in Florida. Others came from face-to-face contact with local Kentucky businesses such as Maker’s Mark. (Who could resist an evening of “Bourbon and the Ballet”?) In essence, technology freed up time and extended her reach.
In The Generosity Network, longtime fund-raiser Jennifer McCrea argues that landmark donations take shape when “two people sit down together and have a deep conversation.” Ideas swirl about. Bold solutions start to take shape. Consortiums form around the notion of doing something together “that might be creative, exciting, rewarding, and fun.” Her model acknowledges the importance of technological tools but only to the degree that spreadsheets, donor-yield studies, and so forth make it easier for like-minded people to find one another. Writing from the perspective of a philosophy major (BA, Allegheny College, 1988) with more than twenty-five years of fund-raising experience, McCrea emphasizes the importance of creative longings that bring people together. The passion found in liberal arts majors can be infectious, making it easy to draw in partners once these grads start talking about their beloved causes.
Digital Designers
In 2003, Soleio Cuervo graduated from Duke University with a degree in music composition. Within two years, he had wiggled his way into Facebook as one of its first designers. His role: making the young social network’s site appealing, clean, and easy to use. No one knew how Facebook’s rapidly evolving Wall should function or what it ought to look like. That was fine with Soleio (he prefers to go by his first name only), a supremely self-assured son of Colombian immigrants. His technical skills were solid, thanks to a multiyear spree of building websites as a hobby in college. His great mark of distinction, however, grew out of his aesthetic sense. Not only did Soleio know what beautiful music should sound like, he was brimming with ideas about what great design should look like and how it could move technology forward. In this new job at Facebook, Soleio was ready to experiment.
When I first met Soleio, in 2008, he was already making a name for himself as a relentless champion of understated efficiency. Other parts of Facebook’s development team kept wanting to add features; Soleio insisted that everything be as streamlined and unobtrusive as possible. Never use five words when one would suffice. Never use words if an icon could get the job done just as well. Pare everything down to its essential form. With his shaven head, booming voice, and lush eyebrows, Soleio carried himself like an artistic giant. Over time, he earned serious acclaim both inside and outside Facebook. The Wall Street Journal made him famous in 2011 by profiling him as the inventor of the thumbs-up “Like” button. Since then, he has set up his own venture firm, becoming a much-sought-after investor in other people’s start-ups. I was amused (but not surprised) to find that he has turned his first name into a registered trademark. If you look him up on LinkedIn, you will find him listed as Soleio®.
Digital design is such a young field that you can create your own credentials to a surprising degree. Hal Wuertz, a Brown philosophy major, has recast herself as a digital design specialist. So has Brad Neal, who studied art history at the University of Illinois. Both of them now work for IBM in Austin, Texas.
All told, about sixty-seven thousand web-development and web-design jobs come open each year, according to Burning Glass Technologies. Most of these positions are treated as computer-industry jobs by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the truth is, digital design relies at least as much on a person’s aesthetic sense as on his or her technical knowledge. Pick up a basic grounding in industry tools, such as Adobe InDesign, Pixate, Sketch, Figment, Framer, or their successors. Beyond that, show up with nerve, a few ideas, and a willingness to learn fast. And once you get established, don’t forget to trademark your own name.
Project Managers
In late 2013, I received an invitation to come to Minneapolis and address a regional conference of something called the Project Management Institute. I assumed this must be a group of defense contractors and construction engineers. It didn’t take long to realize my perceptions were painfully out of date. Yes, the notion of project management as a serious line of work in its own right can be traced back to men in hard hats who built submarines or bridges. It’s a different story today. The worldwide ranks of registered PMI members have surged more than 500 percent in the past fifteen years—to 467,000. Most of that growth involves our kind of critical thinkers, the ones who bring interdisciplinary ingenuity to a new breed of projects with a high-tech twist.
Amazon hires lots of project managers. So do Google, Nestlé, Oracle, Sony, KPMG, Microsoft, American Airlines, and a never-ending list of start-ups with cute names such as Wonderful and Faith. If you take one of these jobs, you will be guiding, planning, and mediating. You will put out metaphorical fires—and perhaps a few real ones too. You will help the folks in engineering understand what the sales team wants. You will constantly use soft influence to get help from people who don’t work for you. Many of these jobs go to people with specialized industry skills, but a surprising number of them don’t.
When big bosses go hunting for project managers, they cherish people with the full suite of critical-thinking skills. If you can make allies, think on your feet, and learn fast, you’re the sort of liberal arts graduate who should thrive in such settings. It’s unlikely that your first job out of college will involve nothing but project management. Even geniuses don’t mature that fast. Spend a few years figuring out how an organization works, though, and you could be looking at a long and exciting future in this field.
Just ask Bridget Connolly.
Growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Connolly thought she wanted to become a diplomat. She inherited her mother’s love of travel; childhood trips to Ireland, Spain, and Puerto Rico left her wanting to see more of the world on her own. As a high-school junior, she spent two weeks in a Mexican homestay in Cuernavaca as part of a Spanish-language immersion program. As a high-school senior, she wrangled her way to Australia as part of a girls’ leadership conference. She leaped into high-school student government and volunteered with the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. As she discovered how politics really worked, however, her ambitions changed. Diplomacy became a distant dream; heading straight into government lost its allure. She opted for an international relations major in college, now uncertain how she might apply it.
Instead of being a means to an end, travel became an end in itself. Other classmates at Stanford dabbled in marijuana; she loaded up on anti-malaria medicines. In the spring of her junior year, she journeyed to South Africa to study whether crime rates in impoverished areas could be reduced by building social cohesion. To gather data, she plunged into a radically different culture. She learned some isiXhosa, a clicking language spoken by seven million South Africans. She and a research partner conducted sixty-two field interviews, building alliances with community guides, so they could be sure respondents were providing candid answers instead of saying whatever they thought might please foreigners. She bought headlamps and pepper spray to ensure her safety in the event of a power outage; she savored every day of the adventure.
When Connolly graduated in 2011, the U.S. economy remained on shaky ground after the financial meltdown of 2008–2009. Career-minded classmates got the jobs they wanted at such firms as Bain and Morgan Stanley. For Connolly—and many of her friends—it was a different story. Her rambling adventures weren’t what big corporations wanted. She had kept busy leading learning trips for a grassroots nonprofit in Ecuador, but she didn’t see a long-term future in such work. Each week, she hunted for opportunities on Craigslist, Monster.com, and other job boards. Day after day, she dispatched cover letters that began “To whom it may concern” and ended with “I look forward to hearing from you.” Nothing worked.
A quiet sense of terror started to take hold. As Connolly later explained: “There’s this feeling that you need to get your stuff together by the time you graduate, or you’re screwed.” In her first year out of college, she hadn’t yet found a permanent job.
Hoping to connect anywhere, in September 2012 Connolly applied to be a creative manager at wikiHow. The job was an imperfect match; wikiHow wanted a visual whiz, and that didn’t exactly play to Connolly’s strengths. Even so, she sprinkled her cover letter with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Talking up her campus photography and film projects, she pitched herself as “an artist with a bold and creative eye.” What else could she do? The company sounded intriguing, and her job-hunting anxiety was mounting.
It was Connolly’s good fortune to step into a company rooted in the striver’s maxim “Hire for attitude; train for skill.” Her interviewers didn’t spend much time grilling her about her (nonexistent) design portfolio. Instead, they asked for an example of a time when she’d shown initiative. Connolly seized the moment. Without knowing whether this was what her interviewers wanted to hear, she started recounting a plucky path that led her to shoot a video documentary on the world’s largest coral-reef restoration project. She and her boyfriend were vacationing in Indonesia. Other tourists were lazing on Bali’s beaches—but that wasn’t her style. She had a video camera with her, and she wanted to interview coastal fishermen.
The fishermen didn’t speak English. She didn’t speak Indonesian. So she memorized one crucial phrase: Memberitahu kita tentang karang (“Tell us about the coral”). Then she headed to the piers at five a.m., before the boats left. Relying on this single query, she interviewed restoration workers and fishermen, who responded in their own language. Later on, translators could create the English-language subtitles she needed.
Could wikiHow harness such raw energy? A wild idea popped into the mind of Elizabeth Douglas, the company’s tightly focused president. “I know we’ve been talking about the visual-design job,” Douglas said. “But there’s this other project I want to tell you about.” She dreamed of wikiHow being a global business someday. That meant translating thirty thousand or more of the site’s most popular articles into Spanish, Arabic, Korean, and at least a dozen other languages. Nobody knew how to pull this off on a tight budget. Quality standards couldn’t be compromised. All the same, Douglas asked, what if…
“It was as if a lightbulb went on,” Douglas later recalled. Before the boss could finish explaining the internationalization project, Connolly shot back: “I definitely want to do that!” The two women started to talk about the challenges of building translation teams across the globe. It would be new territory for everyone. Connolly didn’t mind. “This is what I’m passionate about,” Connolly declared. “I’m a fast learner. I will put in the hours.”
That week, Douglas and Connolly shook hands on the new job; wikiHow was about to hire its first international project manager. Ironically, the job hadn’t existed until this twenty-three-year-old walked in the door.
For all of us who like adventure, there’s nothing like the first glimpse of uncharted territory. Find such a situation, and you enjoy delicious freedom to set your own goals, choose your own methods, and write your own rulebook. In boom times, we savor the open-air thrills of being the first to discover something new; we cherish the euphoria of getting it right. If obstacles arise, at least we can battle to find solutions no one else has ever tried to find. Month by month, we gain mastery of a new discipline. We’re always growing. We experience what the great dancer and choreographer Martha Graham described as the “divine dissatisfaction” of being an artist: the “blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
If your liberal arts education has led you everywhere (and nowhere), take heart. Your formal skill set might be just as ragged as Connolly’s. No matter. If you’ve got enough energy, optimism, and willingness to learn, what you’ve already developed might suffice. In fact, you might be surprisingly well prepared for the work’s newest terrain. If you need more encouragement and some specifics, consider these eight pointers from Connolly’s own survival path.
The first few days will be scary. On day one, Connolly discovered she had inherited a rickety collection of translation attempts dating back nearly four years. The Spanish version consisted of eleven thousand answers to various questions, yet it lacked many of wikiHow’s biggest hits. (People around the world can’t get enough of wikiHow’s article “How to Kiss,” for example.) The Italian version had barely taken shape. A rudimentary Dutch site had been constructed, but it appeared to be abandoned. “The first thing you need to do,” supervisor Chris Hadley told her, “is build out the spreadsheets that keep track of what we’re doing.”
Awkward! Connolly’s résumé identified her as proficient at Microsoft Excel and other office-software tools. That was… optimistic. When Hadley observed her trying to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet, he winced. “Try using an IF command,” Hadley advised. A few moments later: “It will go a lot faster if you use VLOOKUP.” Connolly did her best to act unflustered. Each time, she replied, “Oh.” Then a pause, followed by “Okay.” And eventually: “Got it.”
With so much to learn, Connolly relied on tenacity to pull her through. For the next few weeks, she arrived early and left late. She kept switching her seat, pulling up a chair next to someone who could help her. Her questions were so incessant that some colleagues’ patience wore thin. All the same, she kept getting better. She tried so hard that people rallied to her side. When things got tense, wikiHow president Douglas reminded everyone, “We all screw up sometimes. That’s part of the culture.”
You will make surprising allies. Most big jobs call for a lot of teamwork. Typically, the allies you need are one desk away or just down the hall. If not, at least they speak your language and share your culture. Befriending them is pretty straightforward. Not so in Connolly’s world. She needed local-language managers—and esoteric subject experts—everywhere from Amsterdam to Bangkok. Her future hinged on building a loose-knit confederation in a hurry and keeping it moving forward.
Had college prepared her for this? Indirectly, it had. Connolly couldn’t speak Dutch or Thai; she knew nothing about wikiHow topics such as how to adopt a child. But she had been well trained in how to make sense of unexpected settings—and how to connect with people profoundly unlike her. “I’ve ended up becoming a diplomat after all,” Connolly told me. “I figure out what different people want, and what they are capable of doing. I negotiate with them. If they’re older than me, I treat them with a hundred percent respect. But I’m also very clear about what we need.”
Connolly’s most eccentric triumph: Finding a boss for wikiHow’s German-language rollout. None of wikiHow’s early users in Europe seemed suitable. Then Connolly discovered Monica Miranda, a retired Swiss chief executive who had settled in Costa Rica. This time, everything clicked. Miranda’s German was impeccable; her technical knowledge was vast. Best of all, she had a knack for rallying German-language speakers anywhere in the world to serve as translators. Miranda’s home situation was bizarre; she lived in a tree house thirty feet off the ground. “But it had excellent Wi-Fi!” Connolly told me. “We could Skype in my morning and stay in touch by e-mail the rest of the time.”
Similar recruiting triumphs played out across the globe. In Connolly’s new world, mastery could be found in the most unlikely places. There was room for Namiko, Ahmad, Rosa, and Sonya.
When in doubt, improvise. Early on, Connolly concentrated on hiring translators with strong English skills. That seemed wise. As she soon discovered, though, the best answers came from translators who wrote with great accuracy and clarity in their own language. English mastery actually didn’t matter so much. People with limited English but keen attention to detail could rummage through dictionaries and end up producing fine translations. Catastrophes were far likelier when wikiHow relied on people who chatted engagingly in English during Skype calls but got sloppy about metric conversions or social niceties in their own language. As Connolly wryly told me: “If you’re going to tell people how to bake a cake, the batter needs to rise when you put it in the oven.”
It all comes back to one of the essentials of critical thinking in the real world—being mindful of other people’s perspectives. A notable moment for Connolly involved an effort to communicate in person with her South Korean translation team. “We had done fine via e-mail,” Connolly recalled. When everyone finally met in Seoul, however, “We couldn’t understand each other’s spoken English. We just couldn’t. So we typed out messages on our phones and passed them back and forth.” Weird? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Fresh feedback will tell you what to do next. If you’re a stubborn manager, you rely constantly on your own expertise. If you’re a pragmatist, you soak up useful information from others, basing your decisions on many people’s insights. Connolly wasn’t a business major; she hadn’t studied different leadership models. Even so, her international relations courses had developed her social antennae, especially when unexpected clashes arose.
In general, wikiHow avoids translating articles that would be patently offensive in different cultures. The result: nothing in Russian about marijuana oil; no articles in Arabic about how to brew your own vodka. But what about an Arabic version of the legendary article “How to Kiss a Girl for the First Time”? That was tricky. While this piece waited in the Arabic translation queue, one Egyptian man protested its inclusion. Unsure how to proceed, Connolly began paying close attention to wikiHow’s community forum, where members shared pointers and gripes.
Before long, women across the Arabic-speaking world began to weigh in. I think it’s gonna be ok if we know how to kiss, one wrote. A loftier perspective: It is important for partners or couples. The ultimate insight: We are curious about this stuff. Smiling at the responses, Connolly decided the people had spoken and wikiHow was ready to do its part to make the world a slightly happier place; anyone in Egypt, Jordan, or other Arabic-speaking countries who needed to know could at last get the answer to that burning topic: Kayf litaqbil fatat li’awwal marr?
There will be moments when you work inhumanly hard. For most people, Halloween is a one-evening holiday, full of momentary mischief. For Connolly, it was a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. During her first autumn at wikiHow, she discovered that the company’s Spanish site—supposedly the most advanced translation project—was tangled in record-keeping snarls. Translators, editors, and administrators all had different, incomplete spreadsheets of which English-language articles had already been translated, making it hard to know what should be done next. A few popular articles had been translated two or three times; other favorites were not being prioritized. Orderly growth would be impossible unless someone created a universal database to coordinate everyone’s efforts.
Finish by the end of October, wikiHow president Elizabeth Douglas told Connolly. Bring everyone’s information into a single system that amounted to the fundamental “source of truth.” Time began to blur for Connolly. She couldn’t tell whether it was sunrise, late afternoon, or one in the morning. Day or night, she would be staring at a gigantic Excel spreadsheet, trying to tame the chaos. (“How to Avoid Mean Friends”? Done. “How to Dribble a Basketball”? Not yet. “How to Measure the Height of a Horse”? Done twice—heaven knows why.)
To keep despair at bay, Connolly pumped her headphones full of the throbbing techno-pop sounds of Ratatat playing “Wildcat.” When that didn’t suffice, she resorted to the Notorious B.I.G. declaiming about “Mo Money, Mo Problems.” Finally, after a late-night work binge, the Spanish project had found its fundamental source of truth. The next morning, Connolly walked up to Douglas and whispered the two words that had seemed unachievable just a few weeks earlier: “It’s fixed.”
Help will arrive. By December 2013, a year after joining wikiHow, Connolly had expanded the company’s global offerings to eight languages. Why stop there? She hired a freshly minted international relations major, Allyson Edwards, to join what was now a two-person team, which gave Connolly extra resources to get wikiHow established in even more languages. All of Asia beckoned. It was time to visit new countries where wikiHow could make a mark.
On their second prospecting trip, Connolly and Edwards started in South Korea, where a small translation effort was ready to expand, and then prepared to travel onward to Thailand. Because of various airport snarls in Seoul, the two women ended up nearly a mile from their airplane’s gate with only a few minutes to spare before the Bangkok flight departed. “We were running through the corridors, clutching our backpacks and duffel bags,” Connolly recalled. “Allyson didn’t think we were going to make it. I kept telling her: ‘We’re fine!’ Every time we encountered a group of people in a line, I’d tell them: ‘We’re doing good things! We work for an educational website. Can we get through?’”
The crowds parted. Connolly and Edwards made it onto their flight with seconds to spare, laughing and high-fiving each other. They were headed to Bangkok, confident they could hire another forty-five translators before the week was over.
You’re in uncharted territory; sometimes you must start over. Could wikiHow connect with the Indonesian market by using the same approach that had succeeded in most other languages? Connolly didn’t see any reason to be wary, so she signed up dozens of translators and a small cadre of editors to start customizing popular articles. The translators’ work might be erratic, but if so, the editors would surely catch mistakes and fix awkward wording. With everyone based in Indonesia, what could go wrong?
A few weeks later, Connolly realized her mistake. Some Indonesian translators did nothing more than shove English articles into Google Translate, producing barely intelligible clots of misaligned phrases. The Indonesian editors then declared everything was flawless. Connolly had ended up with a pool of editors who felt it wasn’t appropriate to criticize others’ work. Her translation teams were so dysfunctional that a do-over had become essential. She and Edwards needed to fly to Indonesia and recruit a new batch of translators and editors. This time, they steered clear of unreliable operators in the capital city, Jakarta, who hadn’t lived up to their promises of careful work. Instead, the two women made a fresh start at a provincial university, three hours outside Jakarta, where the efforts of students and their mentors were much more closely aligned with her expectations.
Having taken an adventurous approach to college course work, Connolly didn’t find such a workplace crisis so terrifying after all. It can seem hellish, as a college sophomore or senior, to abandon a research topic that isn’t working out and to scramble to complete a term paper on a new subject with half the available time already gone. Even so, there’s honor in starting over. Get on the right track, even belatedly, and progress becomes possible once more. Terror subsides. Even a hasty sprint to a B-minus—or a red-eye flight to Indonesia—beats the paralyzed anxiety of being trapped in a project destined to fail.
Eventually, it’s time for the next great advantage. Some people like to sustain what’s working well; others prefer the thrill of repeatedly starting something new. Toward the end of 2016, Connolly couldn’t stifle the urge to begin a fresh adventure. She wanted to make documentaries again; she wanted to work in the social sector; she even wanted, perhaps, to give politics a try. She handed over control of the globalization effort to a wikiHow colleague and headed to Ecuador for a short-term research project on a traditional weaving method called ikat.
I spoke with Connolly a few weeks after she returned to the United States, and she was savoring the opportunities to come. “I’ve got twenty books that I’m interested in reading,” she told me. “I know how to teach myself what’s needed to succeed in a new area. The project-manager skills I learned at wikiHow can be put to work in so many different areas.”