To read more of the Uncertainty series, here are Post #1, Post #2, Post #3 and Post #4
There are times when I feel like I was put into my job experience a decade ago just to understand my father. Growing up, I couldn’t understand why us having university degrees was really important for him. In my opinion, what mattered more was the knowledge, skills, and real-world experience. But my father didn’t even want us to get jobs on campus lest they ‘interfere’ with our education.
So naturally, as a student, I would still take those jobs without informing him.
Two weeks after graduation, I joined a graduate training program at an engineering company. On paper, it was the ideal job; a multinational company with its headquarters in the US, there was some form of career path, etc…
But I didn’t last. Because the training program had just started, there was a disconnect between top leadership’s vision of us and how our line managers understood what we were supposed to be doing.
In other words, I was paid as an engineer, but was basically a glorified secretary.
When the first year had passed, I remember looking at my office diary and realizing that 12 months have passed and my diary was completely empty.
No scheduled meetings. No meeting notes. Just mind-numbing work that made me feel worthless and undervalued.
I thought about how growing up, my father used to give me his empty diaries and I would use them as personal journals, filling them with teenage angst.
And it suddenly hit me.
For years, my father used to train people who would then become his manager, because he didn’t have the right papers.
That explained why he would still tear up during each and every single one of our graduation ceremonies.
That empty diary seemed to whisper to me, “Now you understand your father?”
Of course, at that time it was the post-2008 economic crash, and getting another job was hard especially when you’ve been in an entry-level position where your main experience involved little engineering and more printing and filing, so I thought of exiting this whole thing called the corporate world and go back to academia (partly for the student holidays), and as they say – the rest is history.
However, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have seen the world as black and white – either corporate or academia. Actually, the first thing I would have done was unlearn everything I was told about how elements of school, work, and life integrate with each other. I would have started with a clean slate.
Thanks to technology disrupting entire industries, work nowadays exists on a spectrum. A great model was discussed in this post that describes 8 different employment models.
In the book The Startup of You, the authors echo what micro-finance pioneer Muhammad Yunus says about all human beings being born entrepreneurs. Your mind is a problem-solving machine. So much so that when it doesn’t have a problem to solve, it creates one. That’s why it worries me when this natural trait gets dampened by our academic systems when we see graduating students think that degrees should equal to a job, even if as I had written previously, they don’t know what market problems their degrees can help them solve.
So to make the best use of your entrepreneurial spirit, understand that your competitive advantage comes from a combination of three things; your assets, your aspirations, and market realities. Your assets include the information in your brain, skills you’ve mastered, your professional network, the cash in your bank account, and your degrees.
Your aspirations are connected to your core values and your deepest wishes and desires.
However, it is important to note that “Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything.”
So knowing what I know now, I would have dealt with the frustration of that corporate job differently. I would have conducted research on market realities first, by going through people’s Linkedin profiles, identifying 10 people whose job roles looked interesting for me, and finding a way to conduct informational interviews with them, then start from there.
Honestly, when you think about it, in our day and age, the skills you really need to navigate this market are learning how to learn, how to deal with ambiguity, and having the self-confidence to pursue the unconventional path, because as I usually say, it always makes for a better TED talk.
So in case you’ve been wondering why I publish these posts, it’s because I wish people like my father would read it and realize they didn’t have to feel stuck in a job they hated because of something arbitrary as having the right papers.
Let me know what your thoughts are.
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