Career Q & A
Sage strategies to help every worker succeed
Interview by Robbie Miller Kaplan
author of How to Say It in Your Job Search
Today’s work environment offers none of the stability and long-term tenure of prior decades. Penelope Trunk, author of “Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success
” delivers a fresh approach to help everyone survive and flourish in today’s dynamic workplace.
Q:
What is the difference between traditional career and job search
strategies and your book’s focus on Generation X and Y?
A: A
traditional career entailed paying one’s dues early in one’s career as a way to
get a ticket to climb up the corporate ladder. In exchange for doing that,
workers were guaranteed that a company would take care of them financially for
their whole life.
Today there is no ladder to climb because there are no jobs that are guaranteed to last that long. Since we cannot depend on companies to take care of us financially, we have to depend on ourselves. Workers today are more self-reliant because we have to be. We have to be ready to change jobs at any moment because companies can downsize us at any time.
People who are best prepared for this workplace climate are great at job hunting and do it all the time. They depend on their network, rather than job ads, to get the next job. And these workers take personal responsibility for continual development of their skill set and career refocus.
Other generations valued money more than time; now we value time more than money. This means people are not willing to sell their whole week in exchange for money. It’s insulting. Workers today are simply not willing to work 60-hour weeks for a company over a long period of time. There’s too much to lose.
Q:
Why are stories important and what’s the trick to writing them?
A: People remember you by the stories you tell. If you list all the things you’ve done in your career, it’s boring and people tune out. If you tell a fun story that illustrates a time when you exhibited your strengths, people will remember you for your strengths.
Stories need a beginning, middle, end, and a conflict. Most stories don’t come to people at the spur of the moment unless they are exceptional storytellers. Stories must be prepared and practiced ahead of time.
Most people don’t write their stories, they tell them. Few people are writers. If you are telling your story, practice. If you are writing your story, I will give you some advice from my writing teacher who worked the hardest to teach me how to write a story well. Jim Krusoe from Santa Monica College told me: “Make each sentence interesting. No sentence is so important to your story to justify a boring one.”
Q;
Salary negotiations are so tricky and you suggest readers use colleagues
and recruiters to identify appropriate salaries. How do you do this if
you don’t have colleagues with the same credentials and you don’t know
any recruiters?
A: Most
companies don’t pay you based on your credentials, they pay you based on
what work you are performing. So you can probably find someone who is
performing similar work to you. If you don’t know someone in your office
to ask and you don’t know a recruiter, go online to salary indexes. But
really, get a clue: If you don’t know any person in the world doing the
same job you are, and you don’t know any recruiters, you are doing such a
poor job at networking that you should focus on that instead of getting
that 6% raise to get you to where you should be. The raise will do little
for your career. Cultivating a stronger network will drastically improve
your ability to build the career you want.
Q;
What are some effective ways to work with your boss?
A:
Your job is to make your boss’s job easier. Throw out your job
description immediately. Ask your boss to share their priorities and make
sure you’re working on them too. Watch your boss to identify the facets
of their job that they hate; then get good at it so you can do it for
them. That’s your job – to help your boss.
If your boss loves you, they’ll mentor you, help you get to where you
want to go, and show you gratitude. These are all things that make a
great job. To get a great job, do a great job – for your boss.
If you think your boss is an idiot, get over it. Dumb bosses just present more ways for you to help. So do that and stop being such a snob. If the boss is awful, leave; but, if you can only work for perfect bosses then you’re very limited as to where you can succeed, and frankly, that might be nowhere.
Q;
You highly recommend coaching and yet it’s such a big financial
commitment; how do you justify that to someone in the early stages of
their career (and possibly in debt from college loans) or individuals not
seeking senior management opportunities?
A:
Career counseling offices at colleges will help you no matter how old you are, and they’ll often do it for free. Colleges depend on their graduates going on to do great things, so good colleges will help gradates to do that, any time in their career. Also, some big companies offer free, confidential career counseling. Take your company up on the offer if it’s there.
A lot of people think free counseling cannot be so good. But don’t be
so hung up on the complexity of your problems. They aren’t complex for
someone who doesn’t have them. It’s always easier to solve someone else’s
problems than your own. A career counselor surely has heard your problems
before, and will have good advice. Anyway, it never hurts to talk through
a problem out loud.
Even if you have no access to free counseling, pay for it. Think of yourself as a business; if you don’t invest money back into yourself, you’ll get stuck. Most people can afford a couple of sessions. And if you don’t, save up because it’s worth it. You’ll get where you want to go a lot faster if you have a range of people helping you.