Imagine: You are well credentialed…
For instance… Let’s say you have your degree in Aeronautical Engineering… Or Industrial Psychology… Or a Masters in Business Administration; take your pick of credentials.
It is a few weeks after graduation. And you don’t yet have a job in your field. You know you can do the job, and you’re good at it – it just hasn’t happened yet.
So you keep telling yourself: “It’s still early in the game”, “It’s a tough job market” or “I’ll get my break when I meet the right person”. At the back of your mind, you are getting a little scared, but at least these copes keep you going.
More weeks pass by with no lucky break. Then a few months pass by. And before you know it, three years pass by!
Yes, your job at the coffee shop pays the bills, and lets you eat – but you are not gaining a second of work experience in your field, and you are barely making any progress toward your student debt.
And yes, technically, you are “still looking” for a job in your field. But you haven’t had a serious interview in almost 10 months. In fact, even the government has stopped counting you in it’s unemployed statistics – as far as they are concerned, you are happily “employed”.
In fact, as far as the rest of world is concerned, you are now a happily employed barista.
What It Means To Be Permanently Underemployed
Sure… You do have your education, no one can take that away from you. So… You are “not like the rest of those baristas”. You are a “special” barista with a serious education.
An education that helped you develop genuine skills. An education that helped you become cultured, and allowed you to acquire a taste for the arts and sciences. But also, an education that likely indebted you for the rest of your adult life – with tens of thousands of dollars that you have to pay back, which you cannot absolve even if you declare bankruptcy!
You may indeed be a very special barista, but… What good is your Aeronautical Engineering, or Industrial Psychology, or a MBA now? Was it worth it?
Let’s take a step back and think…
Even in such a situation, your education is NOT worthless. So please do not conflate the horrors of underemployment with an attack on education, that’s not the point.
I have no issues with education; in fact, I love education. I myself have two technical degrees, and throughout the last decade, I have gone through pretty obscure online lectures from Stanford as well as MIT as part of my morning routine – just for fun – because I enjoy learning. None of that goes on my resume, just in my brain… Incidentally, my wife teaches at a college, and most of our friends and relatives are involved with academia one way or another. We love education.
The truth of the matter is your education – and the relevant job skills you developed during your education – are crucial for building a fulfilling career and are not the problem.
The problem is the disconnect between academia, including business schools and MBA programs, and the world of careers and making money. Yes, schools teach you much of the job skills you need, and point you in the right direction to learn some further skills on your own. But they leave you hanging in putting those skills to use, and never actually teach you effective career skills.
Here, you need to understand the distinction between job skills and career skills…
Understanding The Difference Between Job Skills And Career Skills
The skills that you use while doing your job are job skills. For instance, a mechanic’s ability to fix a broken engine is a job skill. Or a doctor’s ability to examine patients is a job skill. Or an industrial psychologist’s ability to come up with corporate world-salads – whether we like it or not – is a job skill.
Job skills are the skills you use to do your job. They are what you do.
But these are not the only skills you need to be a successful professional. On the contrary, these are only a fraction of the skills you need. If you want to excel, you also need career skills.
And what exactly are those career skills?
Career skills are the skills you use to get the job. They include skills like writing resumes that actually get read, or sending letters that make people call you, or the ability to network with hiring managers directly rather than being trapped by HR gatekeepers, or the skill to identify and get the maximum salary for any role.
Career skills are the specific skills that lead to success in a competitive job market. They are called career skills, because they build careers.
Remember this: Job skills do the job. Career skills get the job.
Keep in mind, career skills are not optional. They are crucial for career development. And, unfortunately, in the modern education system, they are chronically underdeveloped.
Pretty much every institution I’ve attended, my relatives or my students have attended, as well as any institution I’ve examined – they all get an F when it comes to teaching career skills!
Most don’t even bother and leave you to figure it out on your own, which is arguably better than teaching you the wrong stuff. Others either go through the motions without teaching you anything useful, or worse, give you harmful advice.
They might, for instance, shove you through a one hour resume lecture that teaches you techniques as outdated as cassette players. You think your resume gets you interviews, when in fact, it ruins your chances of a first impression.
Or they might have you do mock interviews with clueless classmates, yapping about “elevator pitches” or buzzwords. In a desperate attempt to make you sound smart, they turn you into a candidate that gets marked in the system as “never hire”.
You get the idea. Schools do try to teach you how to get jobs, but those that teach you haven’t themselves gotten any kind of a competitive job, or even know anyone who has gotten a competitive job, since the dawn of the Internet! How could they teach you anything useful?
Hint: They can’t…
Make no mistake, while my education has helped me develop my mind, it did not make me a single cent! It did not help me get a job. It did not get me promoted or help me lead teams or run departments. It did not guide me in creating ventures, building teams or in making money in the world of business.
And I’m not alone. In fact, pretty much every single executive I’ve worked with and befriended, after we got to the point of sharing a few drinks and laughs, flat out told me that what they got out of their college experience was “the partying”. And when it came to their hiring philosophy, college only showed them that the candidate “could stick with it”, and an Ivy League degree signaled that the candidate came from the ruling class – which isn’t always desirable.
That’s it! That’s was all of it. That’s what the college degree meant.
This is why, without career skills, both the job skills you develop in education, as well as the credential you get, are worthless!
How To Make Your Credentials Work For You
TL;DR? Here’s the short answer: Learn career skills.
Now the long version:
If you are an early career professional trying to break into your field, or thinking of making a transition from one field or another, you have a huge risk, which as the Chinese say, is also a huge opportunity…
The risk is that you will continue to do what you’ve been taught to do, which is what everybody else does. And in our current economy, with a lot of effort and a good dose of luck, doing what everybody else does could work.
It will most likely will fail, and lead you down a permanently underemployed career. But there is a small probability that it will actually work.
That, however, is not where your opportunity lies…
The opportunity is that you can take this moment – this very special moment where you are reading these letters and considering the trajectory of your future – and you can realize that there may be a better, easier, more effective way to utilize your education to get the kind of jobs you really want and create a future you are excited about.
You might – you just might – stop drinking the koolaid of credentialism, and get curious about developing real career skills, simply by hearing what real world professionals who have “been there and done that” have to say.
That’s your opportunity: to get curious about career skills.
If you don’t take this moment to get curious about career skills, nothing bad will happen. At least, not immediately. You will likely continue having a job, keep finding new jobs, doing the 9 to 5, getting promoted once a decade… You’ll experience what most professionals consider the “normal” career trajectory.
In my opinion, that’s a travesty – but not everyone thinks like me, I get it… Some are fine with it.
If, however, you do decide to take this moment to get curious about career skills, and start exploring how you might develop them – your life will change.
If you explore and develop career skills – your past education, your credentials, your work experience – they will instantly become more valuable. Instead of abstract notions, they will become tangible assets that get you opportunities, meetings, projects and jobs.
You will learn how to communicate what you know and what you’re capable of to people that matter. You will see how to connect with, meet with, build relationships with and partner with “movers and shakers”. And above all else, you will transform into a high-value professional.
A high-value professional, by the way, has a specific definition…
A high-value professional is someone who has a meaningful, engaging and high-paying job (at least 200% median salary before bonuses) in their field of study or interest. A high-value professional is someone who isn’t paid for their their labor, but instead, paid for their opinion, attention and expertise.
Hopefully, this is the moment where you decide to become a high-value professional.
Once you decide, let us know – and we’ll get you all the career skills you need.
Remember – it’s job skills plus career skills that makes the high-value professional. You deserve to be one too…
🛠️+🤝 = 💰😎👏