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Should today's communications practitioner be a specialist or a generalist?

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An ignorant engineer stereotypes marketing

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Bing - Overused Words That Make Your Resume Suck by Kay - Bing Jobs Blog - Bing Community

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swissmiss | Career Advice

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Office Christmas Party FAIL. Your gift - a pink slip.

via Business Pundit

This genius didn't need to rely on some Facebook digital job-killing flameout.  She did an old-school foot-in-the-mouth blunder.  Though thanks to the alcohol, I doubt her foot can actually find her mouth.  So, here is a timely reminder to be responsible about alcohol at your company's holiday party. Especially if said holiday party is actually a lunch, like ours.

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Taking Stock...

At the end of a very interesting year in my life, I'm taking stock. My 8-year career as a landscape designer has been rather successful, with hundreds of installed projects, many awards, a trip up the ladder of my professional organization, and recognition in print, TV
and now social media. My lifelong love of gardens and making art was the basis for it,
and my fifteen years in high-tech marketing and advertising gave me the means to grow it.
It has been a good run.

When my husband and I divorced 3 years ago, things changed. When I bought my house
two years ago, things really changed. When the economy dove last year, I knew I had to do something. But what? For the last two years I have been searching for the right next thing.
I can no longer support myself as a landscape designer, I need to do more. I have explored teaching, consulting, writing, graphic design, but nothing held together right.

Last March, on the last day of the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show I was chatting with Jay Estey, husband of show producer Kay Estey, and told him to ask Kay to think of me if she needed help with the next show (new owners had just been found). Having done a display garden and a couple of educational booths over the years, the garden show is something close to my heart. So I planted that seed. About five months later it sprouted, and Kay took me up on my offer. They needed help filling the exhibitor's marketplace with new plants, gardening tools, and green living products. Would I be interested?

Here was my chance, and I was excited at the prospect of using all of my new connections to find the best of the best to participate in the show. And while I have many cool prospects, and even signed a few of them, my overall statistics on the job have been rather poor! Despite my gregariousness, I'm not a hard seller, nor very fond of 'sales calls.' And the economy hasn't helped. I prefer to build relationships and connections organically, and see what develops from there, which is a much slower process. So while I may ultimately be very successful come February, my numbers this fall were discouraging. I hate to let people down!

What I DID enjoy and do well, though, was raising awareness of and promoting the show through social media on my own time, as an experiment. As a result, people all over the country have been talking about the show for weeks now. We even hope to use it as an opportunity for a big meetup of many online friends-who've-never-met in the gardening world. Our Facebook Page had 200 fans in the first week. I love doing this kind of thing; producing content, making connections, spreading the word, reporting what I see.

Kay was wise enough to see this too, so now I will be doing Public Relations for the show as well as stalking the perfect exhibitors. I have, I believe, arrived at what I've been preparing for over the last two years, and especially the last six months. It's a relief to finally know.

The point of this post, and I do have one, is that I know I'm not the only landscape designer out there who is struggling. As a sole-providing single mom with a California-sized mortgage and a daughter in college, it has been scary. I've had to combine all of my resources and connections, and develop lots of new ones, in order to create something that will hopefully be more sustaining. Designers, what other skills can you add to your mix? If you find that your professional garden is a little bare these days, maybe you can take stock and nurture a few seeds yourself.

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3 critical questions for baby boomers

Dear baby boomers +,

According to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute? (2009), you have three critical questions that you should ponder:

1. What are your favorite skills?

2. Where do you most enjoy using them?

3. How do you find such a place and such a job or endeavor?

He mentions that "these questions are the doorway to finding your energy." Earlier this year, I heard a speech at Toastmasters where an individual was referring to life as a football game because when you reach a certain age (say past 50), this time of life could be compared to the fourth quarter of a game.

In this book, the author refers to our lives as a symphony where the end of our lives are like the fourth movement, also called the finale.  As I share this note with you, I have this particular individual in mind.

He's into classical music and his son studies classical music. Go figure. This piece will sound better to his ears than a violent sport game (no offense, football, you'll get your glory moment in a different letter). 

Let's hear this finale,

Musically open Gen Y

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The unemployed’s elevator pitch for the holidays

Norm Elrod is a laid-off marketing professional and freelance writer who blogs about his experiences with unemployment at Jobless and Less. View his LinkedIn profile. Or follow him on Twitter here: @JoblessandLess.

Like you may have, I spent Thanksgiving weekend with family. I ate enough food for a mammal twice my size, watched large men in pads run into each other and sat in traffic (because that’s what America is all about).

I also talked plenty about my recent layoff and what I’m going to do next. This was problematic for many reasons, two of which stand out…

1. I’m sick of talking about my recent layoff.
2. I don’t know what I want to do next.

I’ve decided what I need is a personal elevator pitch and conversation strategy for family that satisfies their concern and interest but gets the conversation on to another topic posthaste – like who mom saw at the grocery store last week. And while I don’t need this until Christmas, there’s no time like the present (get it, present) to get started. So let’s…

The first step is to go online and pilfer someone else’s instructions for how to write a personal elevator pitch. From there, nationally certified resume writer and career marketing expert Michelle Dumas recommends we ask ourselves these questions (with my adjustments)…

1. What is the focus of your search the conversation? What is your job target goal?
2. Who is the person/people most likely to make a hiring decision about you you’ll be talking to?
3. What are the problems faced by concerns of your target audience?
4. What is it that you are offering can say that would solve these problems make them think of something else?
5. What is it that differentiates you and makes you different from your peers interesting (and better than your cousin the doctor who makes six figures and saves babies everyday)?
6. What are the benefits of your work unemployment as experienced by your target audience you?

And here are the answers, or at least how to find them…

1. The conversation will likely focus on your unemployment, as news like this tends to get around in families. If the topic is something else, use your extensive conversation skills to talk about that. Since your goal is to avoid talking about your joblessness (and if you’re like me, get to the tray of Christmas cookies), you’re getting off easy this time around.
2. You’re likely talking to a family member that you only see on holidays and other special occasions. They’ll want to catch up on what’s happened since the last time they saw you, what you’ve been doing.
3. They’re family, so I hope they’re concerned for your well-being. But they’re human and have things on their mind too – things they want to talk about and things they don’t. Pay attention for these. A topic could present itself.
4. You’re unemployed, so you have plenty of time to watch TV and keep up with current events. You have no excuse not to know the latest about Adam Lambert or the health care bill. But keep in mind that your relative may have a job and, therefore, less time to keep up with these things. Keep your topics pretty general (as if around a water cooler) until they show some knowledge and interest. And then get more specific. These specifics will anchor the conversation and keep it from moving on to your unemployment.
5. There are plenty of things that make you interesting and worthwhile; not having a job doesn’t make you any less of a person. Maybe you’ve built shelves in the closet or read War and Peace in your extra free time. Maybe you’ve been training for the Ironman Triatholon or the World’s Strongest Man Competition (or at least watched them on TV). Focus the conversation on these things. Why you have all this extra free time will probably never be asked. As for your cousin the baby-saving doctor, he probably works 18-hour days and never sees his family, whereas you’re home all the time. Score one for you.
6. If after all this, the conversation still arrives at your unemployment, you need an answer. Unemployment gives you the opportunity to find the perfect job. Unemployment lets you re-examine your career goals. Unemployment allows you to explore your passions in search of career opportunities. Don’t dwell on the negatives, discuss the positives. A tangent will soon reveal itself and lead the conversation off in another direction.

With the answers to these questions, we have enough to come up with a solid elevator pitch and conversation strategy that satisfies their curiosity and transitions the conversation on to another topic. If all this fails, excuse yourself to the bathroom and start a conversation with someone else after.

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Interesting Read: What did you do with your degree? (From Metafilter)

Somebody on Meta Filter asked:

“Have you managed to turn an undergrad degree in the humanities/liberal arts into a satisfying and intellectually challenging career? Please tell me about it.

I'm finishing up a social science/humanities degree (philosophy/psychology/cognitive science, if it matters.) I'm considering graduate school, but I'd like a sense for my other options - what can I do with my degree? Standard answers like "education, research, law, academia, marketing, etc" are vague, and of little use in forming a concrete plan. I'd like some specific examples of possible paths (the more details, the better), and some reassurance that my degree is at least somewhat useful.

So I'd like to hear how you turned your liberal arts/humanities/social science degree into an intellectually challenging and reasonably fun career, one that utilizes abilities like:
- writing clear, succinct prose
- research skills
- reading and summarizing abstruse/academic material 
- analytical/problem solving skills
(etc.)

I should mention, also, that I've taken some computer science courses - I don't want to become a programmer, but if you have a relevant job that requires some modicum of technical skill, that's fine.

I'm not looking for something particularly lucrative, but extra points if your story doesn't involve a dying industry (e.g. print journalism.)

Extra, extra points if it's a career that I've probably never heard of.”

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I'm reposting some interesting responses:

"Graduated with Honours in film studies. BA was film studies and political science. 

Both before and after graduation I was a freelance writer for about 5 years. This work encompasses everything from what you'd typically expect a freelancer to do (articles, interviews, reviews) to broadcast work with national radio, contracts with various government departments on internal writing projects and weird, ad hoc kind of stuff that might have been grant-related etc. etc. The perks were phenomenal, but the pressure to be shit was intense, and the pay was usually appalling. 

From there I worked in the non-profit advocacy sector for a while, diong communications/marketing stuff like press releases, newsletters, organising events, building or writing content for web sites etc. You can get a lot of responsibility with these kind of jobs, but the pay is again lower than median and the non-profit sector is largely dominated by two types: people who are too shit to work private sector, and crusaders of one sort or another. Crusaders can be nice or terrible. But the combo makes a weird mix. Obviously, as someone just started out, I was in the first category for a couple of years. 

Then - whilst unhappy with my job, my girlfriend suggested I apply for her large multi-national company. I was initially worried because I'm a bit of a commie and had never worked in that kind of environment. It's now been two and a bit years working in the communications department for one of the largest companies in the world. 

I have done external PR for them, things like organising events, setting up interviews with journalists, reco rding podcasts, etc. and now work on the internal side, trying to make the workforce feel more engaged and energised about work, and trying to simplify their lives a bit from a comms perspective. I also do a lot of polling and metrics stuff now, which ties in nicely with my pol sci major. 

So that's my story, but I just want to point out a couple of crucial things:

1) No one gives a shit about your degree, positive or negative. They want to know you have one, they won't care what it is, and won't believe it qualifies you for anything. (this is for 'soft' degrees. Obviously pharmacy is a different story.)

2) You may not ever find anything as stimulating as uni. You pay to go there cause it's so fun. Jobs pay you money mainly cause they're shit. If they're not shit, everyone wants to do them and they are either super competitive or pay terribly.

3) Following on from points 1 and 2. If you want something good, you need to start thinking about it now. Throughout my degree I was nearly always doing something that would set me apart from the other fifty kabillion graduates of any given year. Concrete skills from things like internships, volunteering or anything. 

Your degree won't 'lead' to any kind of job, it is your work that will do that. A degree like ours is only good for teaching you how to think, and frankly, thinking is not rated very highly in the world of jobs, a fact that recent graduates seem largely unable to grasp. Doing, on the other hand, people love doing."

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"BA with honors in anthropology. I also took a certificate program (more than a minor, but not quite a second major) in culture, health and science. It took me 5 years of work, in an unrelated field (project management for a small web design firm), to figure out that I wanted a Masters in public health.

What really helped over those 5 years was not just getting up and going to that same job every day, but trying different volunteer opportunities (I never did any internships in college, which I immensely regretted as soon as I was out and tied to a paycheck and my student loans). My last volunteer work - at my city's local board of health - really helped me see the connection between my undergrad coursework and the huge field of public health (epidemiology, health policy, bioethics, etc).

Connections I made through that volunteer work turned into my current job, as a writer/editor for a health communications firm. I've also been accepted to a Master's program in Health Communication and Education. My current work hits many of your points - writing clear, succinct prose - absolutely a requirement. Research skills - definitely, and this one - reading and summarizing abstruse/academic material - yes, in the sense that I 'm often 'translating' medical / technical jargon into plain language.

The greatest part of all this is realizing that the 9-5 I had for so many years at the web design firm wasn't a waste. Even though on the face of it, it was totally unrelated to health or anthropology, it was a great experience in dealing with hands-on usability and literacy issues, design challenges, and of course the critical thinking / problem solving needed to actually get projects out the door on time. Plus, my technical know-how is serving me well as the field of health communication moves online and into new media (Twitter, etc.)."

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"I have undergrad degrees in physics and English from a liberal arts college. Neither degree offered much in terms of immediate employment, so I decided to go into technical writing. I earned a Masters degree and immediately had good job prospects in the software industry. I've been a tech writer for about 7 years, and I really enjoy it. I get to work with brilliant engineers who respect my unique skill set. Plus, I even get to teach tech writing courses at my local university.

Tech writing matches your description well:
- Requires clear, succinct prose
- Requires good research skills
- Requires ability to analyze and summarize
- Requires an understanding of the reader's thought process, an area of study increasingly dominated by cognitive scientists
- Requires some computer science skills, but not as much as a programmer
- Should grow as a field over the next few decades
- Prefers people who write using bulleted lists

Two ways that it doesn't match:
- You'll get further faster if you have a degree or a certificate in tech writing, so you might be looking at more school.
- You can expect to make good money as a tech writer, so I hope that non-lucrative wasn't a requirement."

See more thoughtful responses at http://ask.metafilter.com/139099/What-did-you-do-with-your-degree

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My new background made its way to the twitter gallery

vote for my design

I've been working on re-inventing myself; much like the Dark Knight, for the past year and now I'm beginning to break through my own defeatist 'lack of creativity'. In a way, this small sample is yet another small step in the mountain climbing that is success. My purpose for using social media and writing here and on my site is to reach out. I'm sure there are many others in the same place I am. This will be my record of the path from freelancer to small boutique agency to author and professor. I intend to enpower budding designers or even mid-career professionals (like myself) to take the reigns of your life and forge your own path. What seems impossible is possible if you break it down to smaller steps and put a stop to our own self judgement. We can be hard on ourselves but there's a limit (it will only paralyze you.)

I don't know how it is in your cities but in mine, there's a huge disparity between Print Designers and Web Designers. Most of the AIGA members make up this group. In fact according to an Aquent & AIGA report, the only increase in jobs and salary in the creative/marketing field has been web-based.

Since I can't afford to actually go to school right now (though I will certainly go back) I have decided to tackle front end developing alongside web design. Something which I'm completely convinced you can't learn without the other. I have to become adept at this form of communication otherwise I will never be able to compete in this market with so many veterans holding on. Eventually, businesses will rely primarily on the web to  promote themselves while print design will take a backseat. Don't get me wrong though, I will still do print design & illustration. I don't think it'll go away in my lifetime.

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