Every time I have had to look for a job, I have found myself having to box myself into an application template or a job spec. To cover every possible instance, I used to make a couple of CVs, tweak my LinkedIn, produce multiple portfolios and a few different cover letters as standard procedure. I’m not the only one.
I have never walked the acceptable route. At university, I studied two specialties, rather than one, which was the default school scheme. I was into coding, which almost no one else was, which meant I had the wonderful chance to work for my teachers and learn their design practices while I applied the code to make them a reality. It was very clear to me then that design is not enough to make things real, and it was only later I learnt that development and design are also not enough: I had to learn more about business.
I don’t believe in linear growth; I believe in exponential growth (like a startup). I believe cross-disciplinary teams are strong, and the same is true for cross-disciplinary people. However, it’s not easy to convince people of that. I live in hope that the new world will see these kinds of people as Da Vincis, rather than as “unfocused”, which seems to be the typical response.
Titles are misleading
When filling in an application template, or writing your CV, we’ve been taught that titles are important. I believe titles are worthless, because they don’t trust indicators of what people do. It’s better to rely on descriptions of work, and even better to have references. What’s good about titles is that the discipline is encapsulated in the title. It’s easy to tell the orientation or that person, or which profession they belong to. Still at the end, what counts and what’s trusted is only real feedback from trusted contacts.
Changing jobs
Sixty percent of people claim they would change a career if they could start over. and 51% of twenty-somethings already regret their career choice (Source: School of Life, 2008).
People might think that a change in someone’s career perhaps suggest that they weren’t good at the previous role, or that they are unfocused, but I strongly disagree. There are many people who transition from another discipline to design and vice versa.
According to the Bureau of Labor (2017) people change jobs an average of 12 times throughout their working life, which means they usually stay in each job an average of 4.2 years. In addition, in the early years 25-35 of the career trajectory, each role lasts around 2.5 years and when they reach higher roles it’s around six years.
Changing a job is not the same as changing a career
One in every 10 people in the UK considers changing their career (Guidance Council, 2010). According to the 2015 and 2016 data from the Current Population Survey, about 6.2 million workers (4 percent of the total workforce) transferred from one occupational group to another. Are we making it easy for them to do that? And why do they want to do it? And another question is; why do so many people think that changing career is ‘madness’, whereas changing your job is quite ordinary?
Why not stay in a ‘career’ and be an ‘expert’?
I am a musician, but like many others, most of us are not on stage alongside Beyonce. Most of us don’t even make money out of music. We’re hobby-professional musicians who do other things for a living, but we still maintain our love and understanding of music. Some might argue it’s a purer way, one that reflects our truth, freed from ‘the industry’ so our music can be loved by people who really value it. Am I better than Jay-Z? Probably not. Would I be if I would have done it 100% of my time? Maybe. Would I be as successful as he is? Who knows.
Granted, making money out of music is harder than most of every other profession, but is making money out of your skills enough? Or is music more about making your own ‘art’, and surely the amount of people who get paid for that is tiny! Even if you can make money out of something you love, surely you’ll have aspirations, to grow bigger, to learn new things and not to do the same stagnant thing over and over again.
Most people can’t be experts
My point is, to be an expert is hard and only 2% of people in each field can achieve that level of mastery while others suffer from boredom (after 2 years doing the same job), lack of challenge and lack of progression. This leads to mediocrity, and eventually redundancy at the age of 55 when that person can’t find a job anymore, because they don’t have other skills and they are so worn out that they haven’t learned anything new professionally in the past 10 years.
And this leads me to say – once an expert, not always an expert. People move on, time doesn’t freeze and people who once were the tip of the spear could just as well now be stuck in the ground somewhere. The only thing that lives is organic growth. How many people made a one hit wonder, had a short career as a model, launched a successful startup and then had many other failures after? Most! I applaud the lessons of history and learning from biographies and stories, but it’s an over-simplified admiration for a set of events that can never happen again.
The only things that people like to do again and again are things that were designed to make us addicts or ones that are instrumental to our survival.
So, when you’re searching for a new role and you feel like going cross-disciplinary, but are worried about how an employer is going to view your career so far, and how you’re going to deal with the questions about why you haven’t stuck in one role for a decade or more, take a look at these questions and think about how you might answer them.
Here are some questions worth asking yourself
- How long do you think it takes to master something?
- What happens to mastery if you neglect it and go and do something else for a while?
- What is the difference between being 80% good at many things, rather than being 100% good at just one thing?
- How does it feel to do many things (same things) for a long time?
- How does my 100% compare with some other person’s 100%?
Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block, because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge. And, since challenges grow as you rise up the ladder, the compensation should align with it. Not only because the cost of living is rising, but mainly because it’s the main way to drive human beings in a positive way.
Not everyone is ambitious. Some people stay unhappy and won’t do anything about it. Some will always be unhappy no matter what happens or what they do. But in a workplace, when you see these amazing people that drive your business forward, the entrepreneur or super dedicated employee, you should help them. Help them to learn more, help them change career. Be open to someone with a CV that shows a career change. You might think it’s better for your business to have someone who did something all of their life, but the time span of doing a particular job has nothing to do with the quality of the output. It’s better having diversity in a business, with people from all kinds of backgrounds, rather than disqualifying them. Humans have a desire to evolve, and that’s the benefits of that are what you’ll get if you hire a person who doesn’t neatly fit into a box.
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