Stanford GSB: Stanford Business November 2002

November 2002, Volume 71, Number 1

Careers

Help for Alumni in Career Transition

If you’re out of a job right now, you’re in good company. The Business School offers an array of workshops, counseling, and online services to recharge your career.

BY JANET ZICH

EVERYONE KNOWS about the plunging dot-conomy in Silicon Valley, but many alums affected by it are not in the Valley at all; they are hundreds, often thousands of miles away. In the words of human resources professional Steve Balogh, they are “geographically stranded in the old economy.”

Last spring, under the sponsorship of the Stanford Business School Alumni Association, Balogh, MBA ’73, took to the road. The president and CEO of executive search firm PontusOne, Balogh helped organize workshops in four cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London. Aided by his GSB classmate Tom Friel of the international search firm Heidrick and Struggles, Balogh put together panels of career experts who discussed job options with the participants. On the days following the workshops, Balogh counseled some 50 alums one-on-one.

Balogh believes those who attended the workshops offer a true reflection of the current job situation. “Many had been out of the GSB five years or less and were statistically more likely to be hit by the current economy,” he says. “They were stranded in places where they didn’t know quite how to go about getting jobs in old-economy, traditional companies. Roughly half were in the middle of an employment transition—either out of work, or soon to be, and looking—and another quarter were afraid they’d be next.” Of the people Balogh counseled individually, about 75 percent were in transition.

You’re not your job title

As Balogh talked to the panelists and listened to participants, he compiled a list of tips. And while most are aimed at the young, high-tech folks who peopled the workshops, anyone in search of a new position anytime would do well to consider these.

Remember that you are not your job title. Separate your life from your work.

Move past the shame and blame of a job loss to celebrate the chance for a new direction. Accept the fact that your next job may not be your dream job, but think about how it can be the bridge to a new industry or company, or even to one of your personal passions.
Don’t let the silence get you down. The most frustrating thing about job hunting is not rejection, it’s the lack of response to your inquiries.
Take time to reflect on lessons learned in the past week or month. Then set a plan of action for the next period.
Focus on what you want, and pound the pavement to develop the necessary connections to get you in the door. Try to connect to target companies and individuals at trade shows, professional events, conferences, and career workshops.
Stay in touch with your friends. Start your own personal support group, an advisory team that you can be accountable to from time to time. Don’t be shy about making your interests and needs known.

And it might also be said, stay in touch with the GSB. First stop in any job search should be the alumni career services site at http://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/career/. Here you will find news of career resources such as the MonsterTrak online jobs database, conferences, networking lunches, and other services like last spring’s offsite workshops, all created or updated by the Business School to address the needs of the time.

Thinking about a career change?

If you’re thinking of changing careers just now, Uta Kremer has some advice for you: Wait! While now is not the ideal time to move, she adds, it may instead be the perfect time to start preparing for a change. “Changing careers is a long process,” she warns. “It can take a few years.”

“Process” is the key word for Kremer, the unofficial fairy jobmother of Stanford MBA students since she joined the Career Management Center in 1981. Kremer sees that process as a series of steps to begin while you’re still employed.

The first step is a rigorous self-assessment in which you identify your skills, values, and interests. As you examine yourself, read about the industry you’re aiming for. Ask yourself: Do my interests really mesh with it? Am I willing to take a pay cut—or even live without pay for six months or a year?

Once you’ve done your homework, tap your classmates. Yes, says Kremer, whatever year you graduated, however few classmates you stayed close to over the years, there must be dozens who have experience in the area you are interested in. Meanwhile, begin to develop the skills you lack. You may be able to learn them by transferring to another job with another function in your present company. Take courses; volunteer; do project work; any or all will help build your credibility with a new employer.

And don’t forget to have a framework, she says. Maybe it’s to make one phone call a day, maybe only one a week. “When you’re out of a job, it catapults you into a new one. But when you’re in a job search you need structure to keep pursuing your goal,” Kremer says. She suggests enlisting a buddy, perhaps a spouse, to keep you on target.

Kremer has advised more career changes than she can count. She recalls one alumnus who wanted to go into investment management, a field in which he had no experience whatsoever. “He decided he really wanted to do this,” Kremer says. “He bought a car for $1, he had no furniture, and he told prospective employers, ‘Take me on for a year. You won’t have to pay anything; just let me shadow you.’” The happy outcome for this alum: He proved himself during his year of penury and now runs his own investment firm.

Another successful career change involved a banker who wanted to produce movies. He found an established director, offered his financial services for free, learned his new profession, and is now a full-time producer with a half-dozen movies on his resume. And still another, aiming for the other side of the camera, gave up a secure job and a salary to move to Los Angeles and become an actor. He took menial jobs and eventually landed a few small roles, but finally decided he’d like to make another career change and return to the mainstream.

“You see, it can be done,” Kremer says. “We used to say people have three careers over a lifetime. Now it’s not unusual to have five or six. It’s never too early to start planning for the next one.”

My Resume, My Best Marketing Tool

IN JUNE 2001, I was rudely awakened to a new, unsympathetic job market. The startup I worked for ran out of money, and I found myself turning from a dot-com millionaire wannabe into a stressed-out recipient of unemployment checks.

I was not alone. Silicon Valley had been hit harder than most regions, and I was not optimistic about my chances of finding new employment quickly. There simply were too many people with similar skills and experience competing for too few jobs.

Fortunately, I realized that my employment picture was similar to many marketing challenges I had dealt with before. The problem is the same: to build a market-leading position with products that are at parity to those of the competition. The solution is to achieve differentiation.

Did I just say “differentiation”? I knew this concept well from my years of working as a marketer for Procter & Gamble. Drawing on that experience, I systematically applied marketing strategy to the task of writing my resume. Within four weeks, I received six callbacks and interviews with five different companies. I eventually accepted an offer from an Internet company in Mountain View. I have since been asked how I got such quick results.

First, using what I learned in marketing, I identified my target customers and their needs. My targets were the gatekeepers who decided, sometimes in seconds, whether to pass on my resume or toss it. They were hr managers, administrative assistants—even scanning machines. Machines? Rather than dismiss them, I gave them a human dimension; I asked myself how I would program them to perform their job.

Whoever they are, gatekeepers need information that is easy to find. For example, most companies today don’t care what your career objectives are. They want to know what you can do for them, not what they will do for you. Instead of taking up the most valuable real estate on my resume to list my objectives, I began it with a summary of my skills and experience.

In marketing lingo, I was positioning my product, me. And the more specific I could be in aligning myself with the job I was applying for, the better. By listing the skills I had that matched the requirements in the job description, and even using the same words, I made it easy for the resume reader to determine that I was indeed a viable candidate.

But resumes that merely list your skills fail to show that you are very good at what you do. Providing what my old colleagues at Procter & Gamble would call “convincing reasons to believe” is how I was able to differentiate myself from the hundreds of other candidates competing for the same job. I learned to write every bullet point in every job I ever had as an accomplishment and not merely as a job description. I asked myself: “What was the business problem I was trying to solve? What did I do to solve it?” This gave hiring managers convincing reasons to believe that if I delivered for my previous employers, I could and would do the same for them.

Finally, I remembered that a successful marketing campaign requires both the right strategy and excellent execution. All the work that you put into identifying the target audience and its needs, presenting yourself as the solution, and supplying convincing reasons to believe may still go to waste if you don’t write every sentence with consideration and care.

During the Internet boom, jobseekers joked that all you had to do to get a job was pass the breath test—if it breathes, hire it. These days it helps to know the principles of marketing to differentiate yourself from thousands of other candidates. I know it helped me.

By Trinh Do, MBA ’92, who now receives a paycheck from VeriSign in Mountain View, Calif., as senior manager for product marketing.