EPTIn hindsight, spending almost nine months looking for a new job seems a bit much and since I got the offer, I have been thinking a bit about what it was that took me so long to take a career step in the right direction and have come up with a few things that may be worth keeping in mind for your own search.
Where I would first start is my major, which is Political Science with a minor in Chinese. There isn't as well defined of a career path for the major, and having graduated into a poor economy, despite having a good internship at my state capital, there was little chance a department was taking a chance on a comparatively untested intern. Rather, I continued working at a job that had paid my bills through senior year, until I was offered a contract position with a major US retailer located here in Minnesota.
This isn't to say that less definitive majors in terms of potential careers are necessarily bad. I don't regret my major, and in fact I would say I learned a lot about reading people and situations that I may not have had I changed majors, and not spent the time abroad that I did. These are softer criteria, and far more subjective in their own right, but I think at a cursory glance they make sense.
It is also important to realize that to a very real extent, what you little piece of paper from your university says in many larger, corporate environment, can be less relevant to available postings, and more indicative of the height of the glass ceiling you'll hit before you need a post graduate bit of paper. I think pushing into the workforce, as difficult and uphill as that experience has been, was a far better decision than continuing onto grad school; a decision which a fair few of my classmates opted for in 2011.
I do plan to get a masters at some point and time, but rather than finance it myself, or going after it straight away I feel the emphasis should be on finding the right company that will help pay for it. I would emphasize right company as having seen a number of education incentives, suffice it to say that not all are created equal.
The other factor that I banged my head against a wall for the longest time about, was operating within an established corporate culture. I mentioned I made the transition to a contracted position, while in that role I was hired by the company proper. While this looks good on a resume, what I hadn't accounted for was the system in which I would have to make my next move.
In a nutshell I am not the best at networking en masse, card sharking in the sense of business cards, or creating what I would call creating surface level connections that would get your name on the lips of hiring managers in a company as large as the one I work for presently. It just doesn't work for me, instead I focused on cultivating a few, deeper connections to areas I was really interested in. The problem being that I was not the only one interested in said area, and the queue was out the door when I got in line.
This type of exposure, in a contracting business environment is absolutely critical for moving positions. The best analogy I have drawn about the trickle of postings that have come out in not just my company but others as well, is that it is a dripping faucet and every drop has a name on it even before it drips down (or is posted for all to see).
My inability to move within this structure is just that, my own shortcomings. I don't personally rate them as shortcomings as such, some people may not be cut out for certain work environments, but I was not cognoscente of this for the longest time. As a result I sojourned on, into areas I wasn't even interested in; for a while I was more interested in making a move for the sake of a move than I was in making the right move when the right opportunity came about.
That was a gross error on my part.
The last thing I'll say is that help in a job search comes from the strangest places at times, the woman who helped me get my foot in the door with my new company was one I hadn't seen for almost three or four years, but one who had floated in my brother's social circle while he was in college. In other words, she was probably the last place I really expected help to come from and not even on my radar.
Things are looking up in the world of Thomasjservo, I was patient and not only got to take a slightly upward step, but I got to take a step in the right direction, doing my favorite part of my current job. It isn't Political Science, but it is something I am building a strong background in, and I am uncharacteristically optimistic it is building towards something.
