Re-inventing your career? Try these tips

The Seattle Association of Black Journalists (SABJ) held a Career Re-invention Workshop last weekend at the University of Washington aimed at any current and soon-to-be non-journalists or others considering transitioning out of or into journalism as it changes and figures out what it will look like in the coming years.

I had the pleasure of serving on the day's second panel, made up of people who make hiring decisions, to offer some advice to journalists on how to put their best foot forward in the interview or interview process. The panelists were Scott Battishill, Senior Vice President of internationl PR firm DDB; me, Rhonda Woods, Human Resources Recruiter for Seattle University; Susan Long-Walsh, owner of a recruiting firm, who has worked for companies like Microsoft and Starbucks; and  Jack Evans, Director of Public Relations for Legal and Policy Issues at Microsoft.

Here were some of the top tips offered. 

1.      Learn about and use new media and social media media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Understand how they can help you as an individual (networking, job research) and how they can help companies (connecting with customers, market research) you want to work for. LinkedIn can also help you research people and positions. Here’s a useful slideshare on it Using LinkedIn in Your Job Search and Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job.

2.      Make sure your resume conveys your transferable skills, not just titles, companies, and job-specific jargon, especially if you’re trying to transition to a new field or a job very different from previous ones on your resume. This is also true in the interview. Assume your interviewers have no knowledge of what your past jobs entailed so paint a picture of what you did day to day and the skills involved.

When I was transitioning from reporting to communications, my resume had all my previous writing, reporting, and anchoring positions. Someone in the TV industry would know what that involved day to day. But one of my three interviewers, who was clearly not convinced I had the skills they were looking for, finally said, “I don’t own a TV so I don’t know anything about reporters. I thought you all just stood there and ad-libbed all that stuff you said.”

Umm, no. So I walked her through my day as a reporter: the story research, the source building, the contact with organizations, the outreach to experts and people who could provide insights for stories, the collaboration with a photographer and project management on longer-form pieces to get the right pictures, interviews and full-screen explanatory images to bolster the story, and through it all, the daily deadline writing. At the end of my explanation, she said, “Oh. Well I didn’t realize how involved it is. Thank you.” I got the job and had a great tenure there. I still see the people I worked with then and they remind me, “If you ever want to come back, we’d love to have you!”

3.      Be clear yourself about what you want in a new job. Is a long commute a deal-breaker? Then don't bother applying to the position that's an hour away with traffic. You’ll spend the weekends dreading Monday and hate the job the moment you sit at your desk.

Also evaluate the culture of the place and whether it matches what makes you tick. If you’re hard-charging and they talk a lot about how laid-back it is, you might want to ask more questions to decide if it’s really the place for you to spend 40+ hours of your life each week. Being the impatient person in a meeting of ditherers or the person who wants to walk through the options a couple more times while everyone else is off and running on the next task will get old quickly.

4.      Quantify what you’ve done. Number of projects completed on time and on budget. Number of stories researched and written each week. Dollar amount of coverage you secured for your company. Number of events you planned and number of attendees or amount of media coverage. Numbers help people put things in context.

5.      Give examples of your skills. Tell stories. Review your old performance evaluations to refresh your memory on projects and successes you’ve had before interviews so that you have examples to share that help you sell your skills. Whether you’ve had a short or long career, you’ve probably forgotten some of the big projects you worked on and how you contributed. Examples help you show what you’ve done and what you can do for another company or organization.

One candidate I interviewed had great examples in response to questions about her skills. She said, “Yes, I have a lot of project management experience. Week to week I always have at least two on-going, multi-part projects that I’m moving forward. I get out my excel charts and track each step so that I don’t miss anything and I can see what’s left to be done or who I need to contact to keep it moving. One recent example was a major outreach event I coordinated for one of our divisions. I planned the event, contacted all of the participants and third-party validators and followed up to make sure they would be coming, and created the publicity pieces for it in coordination with our staff. I also did outreach to local media to get coverage. I also coordinated with staff and gave them talking points on all of the improvements we were announcing so they would be prepared if they were interviewed.

On the day of the event, I put up signs directing people to the staging area, made sure all the speakers stayed on schedule, then I took the media on a tour of the facility and did a number of interviews with them and connected them with staff, volunteers and other participants for interviews. In the end, stories on the event ran in two papers, two TV newscasts, three high traffic community blogs, and one local radio news program. It was a lot of work but it was so much fun pulling all of those pieces together!” She told a story that conveyed her expertise, her initiative, her project management ability and her positive attitude. She got the job.

6.      Increase or develop new skills by volunteering or freelancing on a project-to-project basis. Many organizations have had to cut staff but still need help. Find a need and fill it. Author and freelancing expert Michelle Goodman's book and website www.anti9to5guide.com has great tips on working for yourself permanently or while you look for something else.

7.      Look beyond titles when you job hunt. Just as titles on your resume may not convey the full scope of what you did, a job listing title may not paint an accurate picture of daily duties. Especially in companies that use non-standard titles like “People Pleaser Extraordinaire” instead of Customer Service Manager. Read closely for key words that match what you’re truly looking for in a position.

8.      The panel of hiring managers was mixed in its responses on whether cover letters were still useful. Some said they never read them, other said they always do but they agreed that if you do one, it should be (like your resume) targeted to the position and error-free.

Overall, the panelists and audience had great tips to share for journalists and anyone else looking to transition from one industry to another and the Seattle Association of Black Journalists did a great job of putting together the entire morning of panels, discussions and resume reviews. It was a pleasure to be part of it.

Be the change you want to see

I saw this quote in Oprah’s magazine recently and it perfectly captures how I’ve felt since Ava arrived. 

“In bathrooms, boardrooms, buses, bagel shops, and everywhere, we all need to imagine a little girl following us around, repeating everything we say and everything we do. Think about all the things you want for yourself and your daughters, granddaughters, and girls everywhere – and teach them by living it yourself.” – Nell Merlino, entrepreneur, former union organizer, author

Wearing our fleece, sharing cereal on the kitchen floor while we look out at the sunny, but cold weather.

Superstar!

It's like having a little shadow following me around, copying what I do, how I do it and taking copious mental notes. It's inspiring and daunting at the same time. How do I prepare her for a future that will likely be dramatically different from what I've known? Think about the advances and changes of the past 80 years and try to imagine what the next 80 will look like.  It's mind-boggling but I want to get it as right as possible for her so she can adapt to whatever life throws her way.

What lessons do you hope kids today are getting from their parents or caregivers?

Hosed by Nokia e71

Back when I had a Palm, I learned the painful lesson of backing up my data on a regular basis when an upgrade to a new phone went horribly awry and instead of copying all my old data to the shiny new phone, I wiped over all of my old data. I felt a sick feeling in my stomach as I realized the years of calendar items, memos and contacts gone in the push of a button.

I did damage control as best I could, sending a plaintive message to everyone in my e-mail address book for new contact info. Still, I knew there were some people I would simply lose touch with because they'd only been listed in my PDA. I became a backup utility evangelist, strongly recommending/entreating everyone I knew to backup their phone/PDA to a card or a desktop or hard drive. If I drove in NASCAR, my ride would have been covered in logos for SanDisk, Fusion-Seagate and Maxtor.

Fast forward a few years and many backup utility tools later and I again find myself staring sickly into a smartphone that has done me wrong. This time, it's my formerly enjoyed Nokia e71. Despite backing up my phone's contents regularly to the microSD card, I recently lost the entire contents of my calendar while trying to delete a single recurring appointment.

"What a pain," I thought. "But lucky for me I ALWAYS backup my data. So even if I've lost a couple calendar items entered in the last few days, at least I have a copy from last week." Right? RIGHT?! 

When I tried to restore the entries, I discovered (to my horror) that the default settings for the card backup application only back up images, sound files, video clips, documents and MIDP apps to the card, but not the calendar, contacts or messages!

Excuse me? What coder/engineer decided that in the event of some sort of catastrophic issue, the default setting for the most important data to be preserved on my phone would be the ringtone that sounds like a laser beam or perhaps a picture of daughter looking hilariously adorable in a hat while emptying a laundry basket, but NOT my calendar entries, contacts or SMS files?! WTH! To make it worse, I cannot find any menu for adjusting these properties. Aaaaaaggggh!

I've checked the user guide, forums, message boards, FAQ, etc., to no avail. I've e-mailed Nokia and look forward to learning something that will assuage my fears of continuing to use this device's backup tool.

UPDATE: Here's what Nokia had to say. First they wrote back and said the solution to my problem was to back up my data in the future using the Nokia PC Suite, which of course does not address my problem of being unable to backup my contents to the microSD card in the event that I need to do a restore when I'm away from my computer, which has happened several times over the years with other PDAs, namely Palms. 

Palm's Backup Buddy included the option of fully restoring everything from the card. Unfortunately, Nokia's tech support folk wrote that the backup application on the e71 cannot be modified to include the calendar, messages and contacts. Grrr.

Dear Natasha, Thank you for your response. I'm sorry that your original inquiry was not addressed in our previous e-mail to you. However, I am more than happy to assist you. Natasha, your Nokia E71 does not have any settings that can be adjusted to change what information is backed up to your microSD card. Also, there is not a way to save your calendar to your memory card, but there is a way to save your contacts and messages to your memory card. I have provided the steps below.

So, note to self: try not to break or lock up your PDA if you're ever away from your computer. And keep watching for announcements of availability for the unlocked Palm Pre.

Future student

I don't think I'll have to worry about Ava's school readiness. Not only is she already sitting flipping through books with a knowing look as if she's assessing the narrative arc and plot development (Ava on Pat the Bunny: nice!), her vocabulary is growing almost daily and she's starting to be bored with some of the shorter books in her collection.

She also loves this backpack my parents bought her when she was literally about 14 months old. She had barely started walking and would bop around the house with it on.

Note the scary-ish happy monster on the back. Yes, that is a matching coin purse.

I hope she loves school as much as I did. I loved it so much, I once ran six blocks, crying, chasing a school bus I'd missed. Only to catch it, out of breathe and sweaty and discover... it wasn't my bus. I trudged back home, dejected and had my dad call the late bus for pickup.

Needless to say, I was not a kid who my parents had to harangue to get going in the morning. In fact, since I was bussed to the other side of the city for many of my school years, including a two hour public bus ride from middle school on, part of my morning routine was to wake my parents up for work before I went to catch the bus and to let them know I was leaving. Fun times.
I don't know what Ava's school years will look like but I hope she has this same smile on her face when she heads off to school in less than 4 years.

Mom's night out

After a busy day at work, it's Mom's night out. Bookstore, reading by Heather Armstrong and a slice of quiche w/bacon and gruyere. An awesome trifecta! Always nice to hear from a mom who acknowledges some of the downside (in her case, many downsides) to mothering an infant. So I'm live-blogging this.

Having never been to this bookstore before, I came a bit early from my board meeting to get some food and roam the aisles. Because I don't care where it is, if you put me in a bookstore or library anywhere in the world, I'm at home. 

After roaming a bit, I bellied up to a table with my laptop, quiche and a beverage to people-watch. Within a few minutes, I'm 98.3% sure I'm the only person here w/any melanin. Not even someone with a slight tan! Interesting. But then, it IS Seattle in March. Oh, I stand corrected: there's an Indian couple... aaand they're leaving. Make that 100% sure.

This place is packed! I was able to snag a chair but many folks are standing in the back. See that distant figure with the lovely pregnant glow in the image below? Yep: Heather. She's quite funny and she talks like she writes, or vice versus. Either way, lots of laughs already.

Okay, logging out to immerse myself in the hilarity.