Category: Careers and Jobs

Reflecting on Navigating Job Politics

In my attempt to make a career shift in the least risky way possible, I’ve had to expose myself to a bit of career politicking.  By this, I mean that in order for me to lay down the foundations of a future paramedic career, there are certain things I need to do now while also working to support myself.  I’ve read a few books recently that advise against diving head-first into your passion and instead build career capital that you can eventually cash-in when you decide to make the shift.  Cal Newport discusses in So Good They Can’t Ignore You how a person who is passionate for yoga should not quit their job to start a venture as a yoga instructor without first building a business foundation: getting certified as an instructor, gaining experience as an instructor, building a client-base, etc.  The idea is that you have to hustle on the side, until you can smoothly make the transition from one career to the next with minimal disruption to your income.  Larry Smith, in No Fears, No Excuses: What You Need To Do To Have A Great Career, takes a similar approach when he recommends researching and exploring your passions in a systematic, deliberate manner.

I’ve been largely following this attitude by reading widely on medicine, researching schools, taking the biology course to ensure I have the prerequisites to apply to school, etc.  Some of this I can do on my own, but some (like getting my boss to sign-off on an employee tuition discount for the biology course), requires me to share my plans with others.  This has lead to an interesting tension between my current opportunities and future options.

My boss knows that I have aspirations to go back to school.  In fact, she supports the effort.  However, this leaves her in a difficult position.  Because she knows there is a chance I will be resigning my job if I get accepted, she’s hesitant to expand my role at my job.  Even if this is a small chance (less than 3% based on admissions statistics), she does not want to increase the scope and responsibility of a job tailored to my strengths if she will then need to replace me down the line.  While I’m not saying this is a problem that should concern me, I empathize with her dilemma.  The job I currently have is unique at my place of employment.  To my knowledge, no one else has a job exactly as I do.  My job has evolved over the last three years based on my outcomes, skills and strengths.  In order to replace me, she would have to find someone that is essentially me, or have to dramatically change the nature of the job, which she’s not inclined to do because I’m currently solving problems for her that would then have to be addressed down the line.

I say all of this without the intention of making me sound more important than I am.  I know I’m not special, and I am easily replaceable.  What I’m saying is that this level of uncertainty in my boss’s mind about my future is also impacting the present opportunities extended to me.  Even if my boss doesn’t want to punish me for thinking about leaving (quite the opposite, my boss has been very supportive with the idea of me advancing my career within the College, including changing roles and growing into management levels), she nevertheless will think twice before updating my duties with more responsibility.

So far, I’ve been dealing with this by remaining transparent and keeping an open mind.  I assure them that I don’t have an intention to quit before I receive an acceptance.  If I am accepted into a program, then I will have to make the decision to carry on down the path, or stay where I am.  If I’m rejected from all the schools I apply to (again, each program is incredibly over-subscribed, with over 1000 applicants vying for 30 spots), then I will keep working at my job and reevaluate my plan.  I’ve also kept an eye out for further opportunities to improve myself, such as taking on a teaching job for the Fall to try it out.  If it works, there could be more avenues opening up for me.  If I discover that it’s not for me, then I’ll have a fun story to tell about the time I was a college professor.  But, the point to keep in mind is for me to be cautious and deliberate in how I move forward.  Otherwise, I’ll end up screwing myself over and closing doors that never needed to be slammed shut.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

Education – Who do I want to be as a teacher

Before the summer break, I spoke briefly about being hired to teach a college class in the Fall.  On August 4th, I accepted my teaching contract for the Fall term, and thus set in stone the deal I hashed out with the Program Chair a few months back.  With this turn of events, you will probably see an increase in posts about teaching and pedagogy on this blog.  Fear not, I am still exploring the paramedic career, but I still firmly believe that even tangential experience will feed into making me a better medic.  I hope you find these digressions interesting and informative.

Having said that, I’m incredibly nervous about this new opportunity.  It’s a pretty big step for me and it will really test the idea of a patchwork work history.  Normally, people who come to teach will have a lot of career experience, or they have higher terminal degrees (specifically a PhD), and therefore are way smarter than me.  I got the job because of my eclectic work history and my attitude/perspective; or in other words, the Chair liked me.

Now that the contract is set, there’s no going back now.  I’m all-in to teach my first class (tentatively set for September 9th, but scheduling can be tricky at the post-secondary level).  This means it’s time for me to plan out my lessons and start visioning how the course will fit together.  Thankfully, I will not need to build the course from scratch; I will be able to start with the materials left by my predecessor (who, in a marvelous turn of events is a friend and former colleague of mine from grad school!).  Still, there is a lot of work to do on the course.

What also needs some work is to figure out what kind of teacher I want to be.  Here are some of the questions I’ve already started posing to myself:

  • What will my persona be?
  • What are my teaching values?
  • How much unpaid labour am I willing to give?
  • How flexible/inflexible do I wish to be?
  • What style of delivery will I use?
  • What is my power-point strategy?
  • What are my expectations on the experience/my students/the college?

I don’t have formal teaching experience, so I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I’m going to do on the fly.  There will be some wiggle room, a lot of mistakes, and some short opportunities to road test material.  But all-in-all, I’m driven to figure these things out because I’m scared that I’ll fail my students; that I will be inadequate.  Or worse yet, I was a poor choice to be put in front of the students.  I had the same worry in grad school – by me being here, I’m depriving someone else of the opportunity to do great things in their live and career.  It’s a game of trade-offs, only instead of me considering the trade-off between short term gratification and long term benefit, I would be trading-off my employment for the student’s long term success.  That’s a heavy thought weighing me down.

I know I’m not alone in these thoughts.  Plenty of people whom I look up to as teaching exemplars undoubtedly went through the same angst when they were first starting out.  The best thing for me is to act as a sponge and soak up as much wisdom as I can.

I stumbled across one such instance of someone who is wrestling with their teaching identity.  In a recent blog post entitled Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto from the Tattooed Professor, author Kevin Gannon opines on the values he wishes to uphold in order to be the best teacher he can.  The post is short and well worth a read.  There is plenty there he’s learned from experience that anyone can take away.  I’ll certainly be stealing some of his ideas to get me started on the right foot.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Careers: An Answer to the Experience Problem

This blog is primarily about my path to becoming a paramedic.  I take as an assumption that I will at some point enter school, work to receive my credentials, and eventually find work as a medic.  That is the single focus of my career planning at present.

However, I would be negligent if I did not keep an open mind towards other paths and alternate routes.  There are a number of ways a plan can go wrong, and if I place all of my eggs into one basket, rest all of my progress on a few key milestones, there is a good chance I will be frustrated by setbacks, barriers and challenges.  Therefore, on the advice of the paramedic program’s coordinator, I am keeping an eye out to other opportunities that I can invest time and energy into that will pay off down the line.

This passed week, I became one of the latest faculty at my College and will be teaching a philosophy course in the Fall.  Depending on how you stand, that might be the furthest thing from my plan as you can get.  Instead of becoming the student, I just took a part time job as a teacher.  I am excited and incredibly nervous about delivering a course to people barely out of my peer group range, but I think this is a positive experience and will pay off in the future.

This all serves as a preamble to a realization I had this morning on the question of experience in young people.  Job seekers everywhere I plagued with a common problem: how am I expected to have experience for jobs that all seem to require experience to get in?  This problem is the bane of the young person’s job hunt because it is often the biggest weakness in their candidacy when they apply for work.  It is the first thing that selects them out of the pool, and no matter how charming they are in person, a lack of experience is the blemish on an otherwise beautiful package.

It’s understandable why experience is so important to employers.  The are spending huge amounts of money to try and hire people, so without knowing anything about a candidate’s work habits and results, the employer needs some signal that they are not wasting their money to hire someone that will be released after a few months.

How does a young person resolve this issue?  The short answer is you need to learn how to tell a story about yourself.  You need to learn how to stitch together your work history into a story that demonstrates you are a good bet for an employer to take.  This obviously assumes you have experience to draw upon.  If you don’t have that, you need to get some.  I’m sorry, but it’s the only way to progress forward.

Would you walk into a store and buy the first expensive item you’re looking for based solely on how it looked?  Imagine shopping for a high-end purchase like a car or a computer, and you bought it purely on looks.  Generally speaking, you probably will not.  You’ll take the time to study the specifications, the deals, consumer reports, tests, etc.  Employers do the same thing; they look for evidence that you aren’t a lemon.

I’ve now been hired for two jobs at the College having none of the classical markers of experience that were advertised for: I did not have any administrative assistant experience for my current job, and I have almost no formal teaching experience.  How did I pull this off?

I understood what the job required and demonstrated how I already had what the employers was looking for.  In the teaching case, it went like this:

Interviewer: I see you have never taught before at a college.  Do you have any experience?

Me: I know I don’t have the teaching experience you might be looking for, as you saw on my academic resume.  If you are asking if I have experience teaching a 7-1-7 teaching block (7 weeks of lectures, 1 reading week, 7 weeks of lectures, or a 14-week course), then no, I have never done that.  However, I have done all of the individual parts; I have:

  • designed workshop plans and delivered the content;
  • assessed students based on those workshops;
  • written speeches and delivered public talks;
  • designed and delivered a guest lecture in grad school; and
  • acted as a teaching assistant and grader for 5-7 university courses.

I was able to demonstrate that I had experience, even if I’ve never taught a college class before.  This does not guarantee that I will be a good teacher, but it assures the interviewer that I am not unaware of the level of work and care that is needed to do the job.

This is one solution to the problem of job experience.  You need two things to sidestep the problem.  First, you need to have some sort of past experience that you can draw upon from a related field.  You need to demonstrate that you know something, or that you can easily figure the problems out and solve them on your own.  Second, you need to learn how to tell your story.  Lacking experience and having gaps in your employment record do not have to signal the death knell on your advancement if you know how to reframe the problem and still give an answer that shows an appreciation for the question being asked of you: If I were to hire you, how could you make my problems go away?  Really, that’s what an employer is looking for.  Someone they can pay to solve a problem or puzzle for them.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan