The Easy Answer

A couple months ago, I met with a friend who completed a masters program from a prestigious university. He was looking for jobs, but things were taking longer than expected. After his first few interviews, he realized that he was not at all interested in jobs related to his major. It was a big setback and he wanted to know how to broaden his job search.

He asked for my career advice, and in response I asked him a slew of questions. Which part of the country do you want to work? Do you want to travel? How important is leisure time? Do you want to get an MBA?

After I grilled him for thirty minutes, we took a break because we got tired about talking about these serious issues. It was at this point my friend made a clever observation: “See Presh, this is what I liked about school. When people used to ask me what I was doing, I just said ‘school’ and that was it. Everyone knew what I meant.”

The more I think about it, the more I agree my friend. Once you get a job, it is a lot harder to explain what you do. And you probably need several explanations for different groups of people. Ryan Healy of Employee Evolution admits he explains his startup differently to at least four groups of people:

1. My pitch to old friends
I’m taking Employee Evolution full time and offering new features so we can make some money. I definitely miss the East Coast, but nothing beats working in my living room!

2. My pitch to “adults” (anyone not in Gen-Y)
I’m creating a website that is similar to Monster.com for people in their twenties. We recently partnered with an extremely popular career advice blog and we plan to introduce new features and leverage our traffic to generate revenue.

3. My pitch to girls at the bar
I’m creating a website to help people our age figure out what they want to do with their careers, and hopefully I can help you get a good job!

4. My pitch to a young person in a “non social” setting
I’m starting my own business and creating a career website for Gen-Y. The site will consist of a network of bloggers our age and a bunch of other features to help you get control of your career.

He admits he is unsatisfied with some of his answers, but I give him much credit for preparing in advance. Which is some thing I thought about after a recent episode.

I was put to the test at a bar. My friends pretty much forced me to sell myself and my blog to groups of new people we were meeting. Even with my tipsy charm, I didn’t get past the words “personal finance” with most people.

I wish I could have just said some thing like, “I’m a med student.”



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  • Erik

    Presh, I disagree with your friend. I could never just say, “school.” People want to know what you are studying, and what you are going to do with it. Now, for different people, it all depends on how comfortable you are with your response. Kudos to Ryan Healy for perapring four replies.

    As for me, I have never been comfortable with that last question. That’s why I have been on school campuses for 22 years and counting.

  • http://www.actionm.com Joe Jordan

    You and your friend are not alone. . . While working with hundreds of people engaged in career transitions–some early in their careers and some far later in the journey–I found few were able to clearly and concisely articulate how they bring value to an organization. They can give a job title, even describe the job. But when pressed to define their value statement in one or two sentences–most people struggle.

    The bigger question for an individual or a company to answer is: How does what we do (or the service we want to offer) bring tangible value to our target market? I find that when I can answer that question in terms that other people understand (their eyes don’t glaze over) I have clarity about how to invest my time–and a better chance people will ultimately buy what I have to offer.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com Presh

    @Erik: True, as you get older people do ask you what you want to do with your college education. Which is why it’s amusing that about 50% of Stanford juniors my year had yet to declare a major. The university administration was shocked.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com Presh

    @Joe Jordan: Thanks for sharing because I learned a lot from your answer. The whole topic reminds me of a story.

    My friend is a legal consultant and he helps defend big unpopular businesses in antitrust cases (like Microsoft). He enjoys the job, but often gets questions like “how do you sleep at night defending the bad guys?” These experiences have slowly made him question his job’s worth to society.

  • http://www.mawsoft.com/blog RohoMech

    @Presh, interesting post, I like the four responses Ryan has, though I expected the “girls at a bar” to be a bit…flirter :-P

    I agree a bit with Erik, people always follow up the college / student question with…what are you studying? Being a grad student made that question much more fun, like what is your thesis about etc.

    I actually have a much much easier time telling people what I do now that I’m working. “I write software that helps the consultants do their jobs better” might lead to “what do the consultants do?” but it settles things pretty quickly.

    Though, honestly, sometimes its just more fun to lie about things and tell people I’m studying Post-Modern-Feminist-Thought or Marxist-Reductions-with-Game-Theory-and-propaganda or some none-sense like that.





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