The Write Solution

Three times this week, (and it’s only Wednesday), I’ve had clients say to me, “If only I’d …”, or “How am I going to explain this gap in employment?”, “What will ‘they’ think, when they see …?” and other, self-deprecating comments about their career and the choices they’ve made in their lives. To which I gently SHOUT, “Stop apologizing for events and decisions you cannot change. Find the value or diminish the event, but stop carrying it around everywhere you go.” (Easier said, than done. I know.)

Photo by satguru via Flickr

Too often job seekers and careerists focus on the one thing they perceive as a lack and forget to dig deeper and find value in that one thing. To add fuel to the fire, not only do they apologize for life choices, they throw them up as red flags and roadblocks during interviews. Rather than keeping conversations focused on what they learned, they make excuses and apologize for the fact they weren’t “gainfully employed” or “weren’t in a normal cookie-cutter situation” while learning new, exciting, and marketable skills.

We all, intellectually, know we’re in a completely different job market. Fifty years with the same company and retiring with a gold watch are pretty much a thing of the past. Frequent job changes, gaps, sabbaticals, conscious decisions to take a break, relocate, go back to school, just sit and be are common pieces of today’s careers story. YET, we continue to act as if we took more than two seconds off since the age of 16, something is wrong and must be “explained away.”

I worked with a young man last year. He made astute investments and managed his money wisely. When he married, he and his bride traveled Europe – for a year. A dream vacation for them both; they had the time of their lives.  He came to me, ready to re-enter the work force. One of his first questions, “How do I explain the fact I didn’t work for a year? That looks bad doesn’t it?”

Hmmmmm. Let’s see. His target was financial analyst for organizations with a global reach. He saw a gap. I saw someone who:

• Invested, saved, and managed his money well enough to support two people traveling for an entire year in Europe.
• Learned about currency exchange and market fluctuations, first hand.
• Embraced many different cultures; became versed in behavioral nuances and social expectations in each one.
• Made lifelong connections building a solid foundation for a global network.
• Troubleshot and responded to last minute changes and emerging situations.
• Planned and arranged international travel.
• Communicated frequently with non-English speaking locals, eventually attaining understanding.
• Honed interpersonal skills through meeting so many people from so many different countries and navigating the first year of marriage. 🙂

After looking at the trip through career-value eyes, he no longer saw the time spent traveling as a roadblock, but rather a differentiator. He had the skills needed, like “every other financial analyst,” but now, he knew how to capitalize on the extra layer of expertise, derived from his travels, he brought to any employer.

I could tell you about the aspiring office manager who volunteered for a local charity during a two-year gap in employment. She thought she just answered the phone.” With prodding, she shared she built a donor database for the organization enabling targeted donor campaigns and boosting overall fundraising. She also helped create content and managed mail marketing campaigns. She thought she “didn’t do anything” for two years because she “didn’t get paid. In reality, she’d built solid office management, collaboration, and marketing skills.

Or we could discuss the person I spoke with the other day who started the conversation, “I’m sorry, but my degree is only in history ….” She didn’t see the value, knowledge, or skills derived from attaining the degree – time management, teamwork, research, communication, subject matter expertise. She’d decided that her degree in “history” was no help to her current career goals and led with a statement pointing out that fact. She didn’t see the thousands of people who would LOVE to have the opportunity to earn and hold a degree, or that (I’ve read repeatedly) a good many folk have drifted away their majors only five years out from graduation. She brought her own job search and interview roadblock with her and quickly flopped it into the middle of a conversation about her career goals.

{As an aside, she was doing marketable things in operations management and logistics. By the time she’d dazzled with all she could do from an operations, efficiency, and cost saving standpoint, a potential employer probably wouldn’t care if her degree was in eating bon-bons.}

Bottom line: life and career choices make up the wonderful fabric of you. Job searches and career moves are difficult enough without feeling like you have to apologize for anything falling outside the “fifty-years and a gold watch” scenario. Look at what you learned during the “non-traditional” times and rather than apologize for being different, embrace, tout, and flaunt the value being different brings.

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