Quick Introduction
I graduated during the last global recession. It was a real struggle, but I learned and hustled my way to a rewarding, and satisfying career in Data Science. I went from being rejected hundreds of times after graduation to working in the world’s most admired companies over the course of ten years.
I want to share my knowledge and experience with recent grads in today’s economy. Here is a summary
- A lousy economy will hurt your career.
- You’ll need a killer resume.
- You’ll need to transition into work successfully.
- You’ll need a system to be very productive.
Helpful Books
- Knock Em’ Dead Resumes: you’re going to need a killer resume.
- First 90 Days: get off to a great start once you land a job.
- The Minto Pyramid: communicate your thoughts with precision.
- What Every Body is Saying: learn to read body language.
- Scrum: get twice the work done in half the time.
Your Career Will Be Hit
“I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.” — Lou Holtz
In 2008 I was a junior at UCLA studying mathematics & economics. I had a Money and Banking course that started at 10 am. This class was a series of courses I took to prepare to work in the banking sector or management consulting. The senior class was being heavily recruited on-campus by the top investment banking and consulting companies that year. Then the 2008 Financial Crisis started ravaging the economy, and on-campus recruiting from banks and other significant corporations stopped. Our professor in the Money and Banking course came in looking pale, he left the class after experiencing a nose bleed, then came back and told us the economy was about to get annihilated. He then went into how this would happen with mathematical (calculus) precision to a stunned classroom of a couple hundred students.
I had studied macroeconomics and labor economics, and I knew what was coming was going to be devastating.
I knew from economic studies that people who graduate during economic recessions earn less for the next 10–15 years. This was not a drill, this was real life. Gone where the once bountiful internships available for economics majors. I could see opportunities dwindling, so I took massive action, and so can you.
You’re going to need a killer resume
“Express enthusiasm about your material, but only if your enthusiasm is real.” -Edward Tufte
You are going to need a killer resume during these times. You may feel challenged to create a resume if you have limited work experience. I’ve been there, and here is what I did to strengthen my resume early on in my career.
- **Think carefully about the experience you have: **most people have skills that employers may find helpful, but they may not know how to articulate their value in a resume. People may leave off their resume: singing in their church choir, participating in team sports, organizing a student event, and many others. In the sections below, I’ll share how to put these experiences in your resume effectively, start collecting them now.
- **Volunteer in your field: **find a way to volunteer your time with an organization in your area. I volunteered for the National Association of Business Economist in Los Angeles after graduating. The duties involved greeting and walking people to their seats at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank building. This experience helped me build my ability to engage in small talk with senior economists and policymakers. There are numerous organizations in your field or a field that interest you that are looking for volunteers. Find a volunteering opportunity and go for it.
- **Start a passion project: **share your work-related or academic passion with the world. The aspect of my education I enjoyed the most was statistical modeling, so I started a blog in my senior year on econometrics. This exercise taught me how to create a website, showcased my passion to future employers, and allowed me to continually practice what I would eventually do for the next ten years of my life: data science and machine learning for major global corporations. My first day on the job at a Dow 30 company was met with a Senior Vice President coming to introduce himself and telling me: “I love your blog, so well written and insightful”. I think that passion project kicked off my career. How can you showcase your passion to potential employers?
- **Create an eye-catching resume: **with unemployment figures climbing; there are more resumes submitted for fewer and fewer jobs. Even if you have the right education and experience, so will many of your competitors, and many of them will have a few years of experience in the working world. Your resume is probably your most important financial document; you’ll want to work on it every six months to enhance it. You’ll want to follow Google’s formula for impactful resume bullet points — **“Accomplished X, while doing Y, leading to Z.” The more numbers you have that describe what you did, the better. **Let me show you a few examples of people’s resumes before and after applying this formula.
Bad: Administrative duties for the yearbook committee in my high school.
Good: Created first digital yearbook in the school’s history, teaching myself photoshop in the process.
Better: Increased yearbook sales by 15% by leading development of the school yearbook and proactively teaching myself photoshop in two weeks.
Bad: Designed and created a website for a client.
Good: Used Wordpress to create a website for a car dealership and learned basic Search Engine Optimization.
Better: Generated 10% more leads for a car dealership by building a customized website on Wordpress that used Search Engine Optimization.
The experiences above may be the same, but in the first examples, an employer can glean very little about the impact you had compared to the improved cases. Here is an excellent book on this topic: Knock Em’ Dead Resumes. You’ll want to read many job descriptions and keep track of the keywords used and the skills required, tweak your wording accordingly and gain in-demand skills to add to your resume. I prioritized computer programming early on and it helped my double my salary in about 4 years. What in demand skill can you learn to help you differentiate yourself?
#interview #jobs #careers #communication #professional-development
