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Experiments in creating my own path and living on purpose. Sometimes lost, occasionally found, and often inspired.

#7. Confessions of a Job Seeker – Oct. 2012
This series is based on a design journal that I kept between 09/12 – 02/13. New? Start here.

7. Multitudes_cropped

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.”
– Walt Whitman

As a designer gone MBA gone founder, I’m very comfortable wearing many different hats. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly make for an obvious job title. Over coffee one day, an acquaintance offered to help me with my job search, but left me with the question “So, what can you do?” Well, I said, I can do a lot of things. This didn’t give him a whole lot to work with. As I continued to explore opportunities, I started to ask myself the same question.

While in part this is very much a reflection of the generalist’s dilemma, I believe that it also taps into something much more fundamental. Asking people to search for jobs based on industry and function essentially requires them to tell a partial story of who they are and it limits the context of their value. For me this felt like I was being asked to show up as a subset of tasks rather than as a whole human being. The experience lacked dignity. It asked me to be less than who I am and what I’m truly capable of. Many of my peers advised me to just play the game and then expand my job function once I was inside the company. Out of principle though, I really struggled with this. I didn’t want to play the game and then bust out my true abilities after being selected in based on a partial and constructed story.

While I do believe that the underlying framework for job search is broken, I realized that what I faced first and foremost in this instance was a communication challenge. I decided to do a brainstorm of concrete ways that I can offer value and approached the exercise as if I were a business, rather than a prospective employee. I developed a list of my capabilities and then bucketed them back into a subset of more traditional functions. These categories then became the basis for my personal Capabilities & Expertise one-pager.