What I learned today

Today was the second half of a two-day course sponsored by my former employer. Frankly, I expected that it would be a waste of time - my friend and I have been taking courses and workshops at Career Link for the past month, and I expected that all this would be covering old ground. Some of it was - most amusingly, some of the things that we were told to always do in the other courses we were told to never do here, and vice versa. But some of the techniques we were taught were new to me, and very helpful, even though the course material was quite old - the copyright on the instructional videos was 2001 (I suspected they were pre-9/11 when the narrator stated that you should "never mention military service, unless it was your full-time occupation"), and the copyright on the workbooks was 1994. (I had been working at my old employer for two years back in 1994. A lot of things have changed since then.)

But the most important thing I learned was about myself and my friend: we are both intensely detail-oriented people who excelled at highly complicated and technical jobs that we loved and that are almost utterly incomprehensible to people from outside of the technical realm. This is a bit of a problem. I am realizing that unless I am looking for another job in a similarly detail-oriented technical field (as I described what we did today, "we cared about nine billion* bytes of data one byte at a time"), I will have to essentially "dumb down" my work history for the benefit of anyone who is interviewing me.

Most people are generalists of one sort or another. Someone who works in a warehouse or a distribution facility can pretty much transfer those skills to any other warehouse or distribution facility. An electronics engineer who works in field A can easily transfer those skills to field B or field C, even if A, B, and C are totally different fields that have nothing in common except for the need for a top-notch electronics engineer. But someone who can take a DVD from concept to actualization, someone who can make nine gigabytes of data dance and pirouette and do backflips as I see fit, someone who can simultaneously solve multiple equations in such a way that every part of your DVD viewing experience is as good as it can possibly get - how do you just pick those skills up and transfer them somewhere else?

The short answer is, you don't. You step back a level and determine what transferable skills you do have. Continuous Improvement, Statistical Process Control, teaching, analyzing, assessing, deciding, managing...and a fanatical attention to detail doesn't hurt, really.

The shorter answer is, I probably won't be mucking around too much with companies where they are not conversant with or appreciative of technical qualifications. At least, not until I get really desperate. And hopefully it won't come to that.

Another thing that I learned is to have a "summary statement" in your résumé. This was not something covered in my previous résumé writing course, although that one did suggest having a summary statement included in a follow-up note that would serve as a mini-résumé, a reminder of who you are and why you should be considered for the job. The summary statement is the up-front ad, the hook that catches the attention of the person who is deciding within ten seconds whether to put your résumé on the "keep" or "toss" pile. The similarities to a personal ad are not entirely coincidental . So anyway, here's mine:

B.S. in Physics with over 15 years experience in industry, including Continuous Improvement and Statistical Process Control. Analytical, intuitive, resourceful, and detail-oriented.

And that's me in a nutshell. If you're interested, contact me at databoy142 at hotmail (dot) com.

*Yes, I know, 9 GB of data doesn't translate exactly into 9,000,000,000 bytes. Don't you get all technical on me, pal.