Searching for a job…

It could happen, at a certain point in your life, that you just feel you want something different. It could be a voice inside you (e.g.: after a journey inside your mind, listening and discovering yourself, realizing you stepped into a new phase or a mid-life crisis) or maybe the surroundings are changing and so the conditions you liked/accepted are not the same anymore.

Breaking down the job

When we are young, things are simple. Well, we think things are simple: it’s just we see a simpliefied version of everything. This could happen for 3 main reason:

• we have little direct experience of the world, so we just rely on what others say to build our internal “structure” of the model of the world (see “Semantic Memory” in Memory);
• we’re discovering more on the surface, going for quantity, not for quality: let’s think at the primary school, when you spend time to listen to condensed history (all the WWII is between a couple of pages), basics of math, geography and everything – then, there are older ultra-specialized people that spend years studying just a little aspect of a piece of history. It’s like when we’re 6 to 12 years old, we give a quick glimpse to all the earth observed at a huge distance, than we narrow down like… let’s think about an ice core: a really tiny part of the glacier, but incredibly in depth! (Yes, we all know people that can just survive without learning anything in depth, but I hope that you, dear reader, are a little bit like me and that you also agree with the principle “The unexamined life is not worth living“);
• we don’t see the parts and the systems as a whole, so we’re like the politician claiming: “we will reduce taxes” in front of a crowd, since people seem not able to understand that taxes are something needed for services to work (OK, actually a lot of people are like babies when it comes to economics and complex stuff, but you got the idea).

So, when we’re children, it could be that adults say us “follow your passion” or “you need to find a job to put the bread to the table”, then you grow up and you can be exposed to something like “this famous person working in that industry or in that sport is making billions, having fun and getting also fame and all the partners he/she want”, then they come also ideologies and values, but usually it’s only when you get your first job that you really start considering other aspects.
Also, some aspects are completely neglectable at a certain point of your life, but then they weigth more (and maybe, in a later phase, they can become less important again). So you can decompose a job in several factors, like it happens in big numbers. If you also studied a little bit of statistics and machine learning, we can go further, saying that some factors are less relevant (for us) like it can be discovered with PCA (Principal Component Analysis): we can just focus on the principal ones and then almost ignore the others. Before going on, please have a quick look also at my post “Here today to STAY! (…or not?) to see a practical way to take decisions in different aspects of our lives.

Example of some aspects that you can take into consideration about a job (yes, there’s much more than just “salary”):

• stimulating working environment: we may want a challenging task to perform, let’s say this parameter can range between “pushing me way out my comfort zone, far away in the panic zone so I’ll spend nights to figure out a solution” and “the same routine every moment of the day, every day of my working life”;
• money: it heavily depends on your lifestyle, if you’re running for FIRE or if you want to live like a Bhikkhu;
• work/life balance (or: “leisure time availability” + “remote/hybrid working” and other options): you may want to spend the more time as possible out of office, spending part of your working hours to plan your free time during the weekend, or you can be a workaholic, thinking and working every moment you’re awake (and, in that case, I really suggest you reading something like Dopamine nation);
• working environment as a whole: for you, it could be extremely important the processes and structure involved in your daily activities, the people you work with and all the environment, including policies and places;
• status: maybe you’re obsessed with job titles so you can put a fancy headline on your Linkedin profile like “I’m the big master evangelist head of photocopy department!” or you may want power in a public office to act as a sherif in your small town or you desire so bad to show your FAANG badge to your friends – plus you can be a fetishist of widely recognized uniforms (medical doctor, fireman and so on);
• purpose (within you company): you may want to perceive you’re adding value, that your tasks are so important that the future of the department really depends on you;
• meaning (in a broader sense): striving for/against something really important for you, it could be possible you want to see an impact deriving from your actions in your daily work;
• ethics: you may (or not) accept some compromise if your job is not totally in line with your values (e.g.: you’re vegan, but maybe you don’t care if during the day you work in the butcher’s shop);
• career opportunities: maybe you’re a son of the “hustle culture”, for you nothing is more important that gaining a new promotion, you’d sell your family in exchange of the remote illusion of advancing in the long ladder that you absolutely want to climb as soon as possible… or maybe you’re just OK with the idea of working in the same position for years (like the case of the skilled worker in the great book “Flow“).

These were just some aspects that you may want to think about, when evaluating your current or future job. Nice theory, but… is this actionable? Yes, of course! Once you have your mind clear (“Mind like water“, as David Allen and others say, but mostly from an oriental mindful perspective), you can assign a score to each point. And that’s more: you can estimate your current (and your potentially future) job factors as well, so to see if there’s a match. Yes, “see”, since I’m a dataviz (data visualization) lover 🙂 Here’s a practical example. Let’s suppose you can assign numbers from 1 (“not important at all”) to 4 (“this is fundamental to me”) for each value, like: “carrier opportunities: 1 for “I don’t care if I’ll be in the same position for 40 years” and 4 for “If I can’t get a promotion during the first 2 years, I’ll quit””; or: “meaning: 1 for “I don’t give a f*ck about the world and the society” and 4 for something toward “I want to have more impact than a Nobel prize for the peace and also be remembered as the savior of the earth” (OK, just exaggerating, but I think I’ve made the concept clear).
Just do the same with the job you’re evaluating (examples: “carrier opportunities: 1” if it’s well known that the company has an incredible strict and heavy policy about promotions and “meaning: 4” if the job is in an influential United Nations department aimed at improving health all over the world and so on.
Then, just put the data into a spreadsheet, visualize numbers as Kiviat/Radar/Polar chart (let’s call it the way you like, but just below you can see the example) … et voilà:

As you can see in the example, this is kinda far to be considered a “perfect match”, so looking at the job’s factors values you can sing like sting: “That’s not the shape of my heart“. What does it mean? In a similar case (e.g.: you want a challenging task to work on, but the job is always the same routine; the job keep pushing you to outperform expected results to gain a promotion, but you actually are completely fine to just working in the same position; etc.), you may feel a little bit unsatisfied and stressed but in severe cases you can slowly move toward cognitive dissonance, occupational burnout or even adjustment disorder (yes, it’s a mental disorder, included in the famous “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”). So… yes, it could be worth to take a few moments to think about your life and your job.

Need for Directions

As Lene Marlin could sing here: “Just give me directions, I’ll go anywhere / I need to find something I cannot find here” (from “Come Home“). The previous section was just a part of the process (“It’s a hard life“, yeah :D); if we recognize we want/need to find/create a new job, we have to translate it into actions, but before moving it’s humble to understand in which directions we have to move – in the words of Seneca: “Ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est” (When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind). I strongly suggest you to read Designing your life, with a practical approach to get insights and plan the next move, but I also thought there are several possible paths in the real life, depending on several factors, including your past, your desire/way of learning/discovering something new, your will to change/explore different fields, the people you met in your life and many, many others. Basically, I thought about 3 possible commons situations:

• Option A: I imagine a more or less vast typology of sectors and jobs, I inquire (by asking or downloading info from the Internet) about the “job descriptions” and then I head towards the direction in which the market is moving (covering more or less broadly the skills requests);
• Option B: “spontaneously”, I develop skills on what I truly like to do and therefore I become attractive to companies looking for profiles like mine;
• Option C: a combination of the above (e.g.: I develop skills on what I like most, but also taking a look at what is most in demand).

Trying to draw those cases, it’s something like that:

Don’t compare (too much) to others!

This title could be misleading without any context, so: I’m not talking about the natural human bad habit to compare ourselves to others (that leads to sadness and dissatisfaction, as discussed also in the science of well-being). Since we’re talking about seeking a new job, I’m referring to the comparison between us and the people that had “success” (whatever the word “success” means to us, in career). The approach of just browsing through Linkedin profiles can maybe help you to find inspiration, but it’s not totally reliable, for a lot of reasons: after you spotted let’s say a successfull CEO of an amazing company you like, there are some considerations (just a few, the list could be much longer):

• you don’t know the family and early friends, teachers and mentor, the overall background:
  • something can be “latent” and then just pop out, clicking something in the mind and bloom so much later, like a butterfly effect;
  • I’m not a big fan of Freud (I’m more into Adler and Frankl, focusing on the search of meaning and on the purpose/direction of your goals), but it’s known that indeed some experiences you have (or have not) had, can influence your present and your future self, even some experiences you don’t remember;
• you don’t know all the time spent outside of the “formal staff”, e.g.: you may have spent the time in the school and in the office in the same exact way as the people that inspires you, but in the evening you spent time in so much different way, in different places and with different people (and that moments could have made all the difference!);
• I know it’s an abused image, but you just see the top of the iceberg: you see only the visible public part of a person, that usually it’s a really small part compared to all the person (not to mention the Johari window…);
• you can be victim of the survivorship bias: you don’t know how many have the exactly same CV, same skills and experience, but failed.

So, even studying everything about your desired VIP covering the position of [insert here any dream job you have], you can have some suggestions, some clues, but be ware that:

what you see is not a necessary condition to fill that role and it is not a sufficient condition either. In other words:

1. you don’t need to follow every step they made because probably mostly of their education and previous experience was almost “useless” for their actual position;
2. you may have studied the very same subjects in the same school with the same teachers and then worked in the same companies with the same colleagues, too, but it does not guarantee you’ll have the same chances to be promoted like them.

There’s even more: once you manage to get the same role of the person you’re “mimiking”, you may not like it. Examples:

• using again an iceberg model, you don’t know all the “invisible part” of the work; e.g.: you are now finally a big youtuber, with a huge number of followers, but now you discover that, behind the 30min of fun during a video you post, there’s a lot of work and so much effort (before, meanwhile and after), so you face the truth, that a youtuber doesn’t work “4 hours a week” (as Tim Ferriss would say), but actually he’s working more than a normal 9-5-5 worker, coping also with something you never imagined;
• maybe you’re introvert (whether you performed the “OCEAN” (5 big five personality traits) or the fancy zodiac-like Myers–Briggs test, I’m talking about the classic definition by Junge), so maybe it will be painful for you to constantly speak with a lot of people, replying to demanding messages, draining all your energy while staying all the day long surrounded by others.

The multiplier

Once you finally developed skills and experience, there’s a point that most of the people (especially the young ones) ignore: the multiplier effect of exposure. I can try to summarise in: luck = preparation x opportunity.
(If you don’t like “luck”, you can use “success” or whatever you like).

• Preparation comes from study, practice, experience
• Opportunity can be enhanced by increasing “exposure” – both to people, like bosses, colleagues and “influencers” in your field, and building a strong presence online (e.g.: portfolio or contributing to projects)