Tag: work experience

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Career Advice Tales from the Workplace

Working for Experience

No one should ever enter into an arrangement that isn’t beneficial to them. This includes working for free. However, I think that “working for experience” has been conflated with “working for free” inappropriately. Working for experience can be extremely beneficial in ways that aren’t monetary and open doors to new opportunities that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

I graduated from college with a degree in Creative Writing with a focus on Non-fiction. While going to school, I worked a number of different jobs, including debt collector, graveyard shift hotel front desk, and 411 operator. And, of course, I waited tables. So, after graduating (and discovering that my dream of being the next great American novelist wasn’t going to pan out), I looked for a job where I could make good use of my writing skills. Unfortunately, the only professional work experience I had was in customer service. I ended up back in the call center; this time I was providing online tech support for a large bank.

Nevertheless, I continued applying for writing positions, but everyone wanted someone with experience. I remember applying for a restaurant review writer at a local newspaper. They were looking for someone with experience in different kinds of restaurants, ranging from family to fine dining. They referenced knowledge of foie gras as an ad hoc litmus test except the newspaper misspelled it in their job ad.

When I saw this listing, I responded, but this was during a time when I was knee-deep in rejection letters from Hollywood agents, and my impulse control was wearing thin. So, my reply was a little snarky, correcting them on their error and explaining why they needed me, considering my bevy of restaurant experience that fit their requirements. I wasn’t expecting a reply, but lo and behold! They contacted me the next day. I rejoiced, thinking that the answer to my problems was to simply unleash my personality.

“Authenticity,” I thought. “That’s what people want.”

Perhaps that’s true and what got me the callback, but it’s experience that determined if I got the job or not. The paper patched me through to the hiring manager. I was on hold for a few minutes, which meant that this person was looking at my résumé for the first time. When she finally got on the phone I could tell it wasn’t going to go well for me. She was pleasant enough, but the conversation boiled down to one sentence:

“I’m just not seeing enough writing experience.”

Which was true. At that point, my résumé had zero professional writing positions listed. So, I made up my mind to start writing for experience just to build a portfolio. I hopped on Craigslist and found several publications that needed contributors, so I applied. Doing so opened more doors for me than I could have imagined. Within a year I had gone from guy-in-a-call-center to bar/restaurant reviewer to movie reviewer to sitting in front of Wes Craven, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, and Reese Witherspoon and having them answer my questions. Granted, I hadn’t earned a single cent for doing any of this, but this experience made me attractive to publications that paid.

On the day job side, I was able to point prospective employers to my writing experience which acted as the bridge to transition from customer service to marketing. At no point did I feel exploited. Writing for experience is directly responsible for the career I have now and the one-of-a-kind experiences that I’ll never forget.

All of this is to say that not every employer who only pays in experience is a predator. And even if you view them as such, that doesn’t mean you can’t still benefit. Just make sure the experience you’re getting is valuable and that you have a goal toward which you can apply that experience.

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Tales from the Workplace Work Environment

Open Work Environments Are Bad for Marketers

I understand the impulse that businesses have for open work environments. When workers know that they can be seen, it makes sense that they are less likely to screw around on the internet or their phones. Synergy is also easier when employees can simply turn around and get answers from coworkers rather than type to them via the internal chat system. However, when it comes to marketing departments in general and my work experience specifically, I can’t see that these benefits outweigh the cost in productivity and quality.

Almost every job I’ve worked after college has been in some kind of cubicle. Some cubicles wrapped around me with high walls while others were little more than desks with low barriers to separate the stations. During almost all of that time, I was performing some aspect of content creation for marketing purposes, like copywriting, blogging, video editing, designing, coding, etc. Looking back, I know that I was most productive when my environment was mostly closed off and I could work in relative peace. Open work environments always made marketing unnecessarily more difficult.

No matter how collaborative a project is, the various parts are always built individually. That means the copywriter, designer, editor, photographer, whomever all work by themselves to produce the deliverable that assembles into the final product. The worst thing a company can do is give these people visual or aural distractions. I know that when I’m trying to find the perfect combination of words that fit the limited space I’m trying to fill in an ad while still being persuasive and on-brand, the last thing I want is to hear other words. In fact, I want to make it as hard as possible for other people to disturb me in any way.

Designers and production artists probably feel the same way about open work environments. I see them struggle to block out light by building makeshift shades around their monitors to get accurate color reproduction. The best creative rooms I’ve seen have always been dimly lit and quiet so that artistic people can concentrate.

That’s not to say that I can’t be productive in an open work environment. My first exposure to it was at a mid-size manufacturing company where Marketing was situated right next to Sales. So, you had one department that needed quiet next to a department that was necessarily loud. To make matters worse, my specific station was directly beneath a loudspeaker, which the owner of the company used very frequently to summon people to his location around the property. When I think about those times, I’m impressed that I got any work done at all. My manager was always impressed with my work, so I certainly wasn’t turning in substandard copy, but I can only imagine how much more I could have accomplished with a better work environment.

There’s also something to be said about illnesses and privacy. I have watched flus and colds run rampant through offices one sneeze or cough at a time. One shrewd boss even sent me home when I was deathly ill so that I could work remotely, because she was worried that I would infect the office. I had just started with the company, and I didn’t think it would look good to call off on the first week. And while I don’t think that high-wall cubicles are a foolproof answer to stopping the spread of disease in the office, they certainly help.

In terms of privacy, not every call is personal. Sometimes conversations about office political maneuvers or other work-related delicate topics need to be had, and forcing workers to leave their desk to find private spaces just seems like wasted productivity. I sit next to the director for my business unit, and I often see him get up and walk for a phone conversation that is several paygrades above me. And this forces him to use his personal cell phone for business matters. Perhaps a high barrier wouldn’t prevent me from hearing his conversation, but at least it would prevent me from seeing his monitor or paperwork or anything else that would give me the context of the conversation.

I’m straying a little bit from the marketing topic, so allow me to wrap up with a relevant anecdote. In one company I worked for, the workspace was broken up into large rooms, so corner workstations – while still rare – weren’t impossible to get. As soon as one opened up, I put in a request to move there. In that space, where no one was walking around me and I could block out the faces of coworkers and their conversations, I was able to innovate for the company, creating a new marketing content process that would lift sales by 4% for every product that used my process. I created this process while making sure my regular duties were fulfilled, of course. It’s doubtful that I could have done the same in a more distracting environment.

After I left the company, I visited them a few months later to discover that large windows had been cut out of every internal wall, destroying the privacy that corner stations offered. I was told that it was a decision by the owner who reportedly said, “When people can hide, they don’t work.” I admit that there is some truth to that, but a low-value employee will always find ways to not work regardless of visibility. Conversely, a high-value employee may be prevented from going above and beyond their salaried duties in the same environment.

So, companies need to decide what goal they want to achieve: encourage workers who are actively working against the company’s interest or encourage workers who are creating new opportunities for the company’s success. Once that’s decided, then the choice of office environment should be a no-brainer.

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

The Here-to-Work Mindset

For most people, the natural reaction to a day job is revulsion. It’s something that must be done as upkeep, like doing laundry, but is otherwise a meaningless use of time. That was my mindset for too much of my professional career. To be fair, a lot of the jobs I worked were not what I wanted to do in life. Can you blame college students working retail when their minds drift during their shifts? No one goes to college expecting to make retail their career – at least not as anything less than management. For entry-level jobs like this that are designed to give new workers experience in the workforce, I can appreciate the clock-watcher mentality. Just do your time, clock out, and then go do what you really want to do. The danger is when that mentality carries over into your career.

Job Expectations are Nebulous

In a perfect world, job descriptions would encapsulate everything an employee is responsible for and nothing else. The nature of work, however, is fluid. Problems arise, requirements change, locations fall through, personnel turn over, and any other variable can conflict with assigned tasks. In those circumstances, an employee can either fall back on the constraints of their job description or stretch to meet goals.

I think we’ve all worked with the kind of people who only do the bare minimum on the job. They show up to work, do just enough to keep their jobs, and go home. When there’s a crisis, they’re slow to help if at all, and they’ll complain about “extra” work so much that it’s sometimes easier to leave them out of the crisis management altogether. They’re just going to depress and annoy others, and too much time will be wasted combating their negativity. I’m ashamed to admit that I was that employee for too far into my professional career.

While working at Newegg, that mindset was completely turned around by a colleague of mine who was the Creative Director at the time. A problem had arisen that would require extra work for him and his team. I grumbled in sympathy, but the Creative Director simply said, “No problem. I’m here to work. What do you need?” In that moment, my outlook on work completely changed. I was supposedly there to work as well, but I found myself resisting work, minimizing work, and escaping work. The work was still there to be done; I just made sure it wasn’t me doing it.

But after hearing the Creative Director’s words, I realized that work is fluid, and it ebbs and flows. Rather than fight it, I should swim in it and learn its tide patterns. There are only so many hours in the day, and the work being demanded of me wasn’t going to take over my life. In fact, I discovered that I enjoy my job the most when there’s a lot of work to be done. Don’t be afraid of work; embrace it. Be here to work.

The One-way Ratchet

There are limits to the here-to-work mindset. While the nature of work is fluid, the nature of companies is to wring more productivity out of employees without more compensation – or at least not commensurate compensation. And sometimes accepting more work or providing more value only results in setting a new minimum expectation of performance. In those cases, resistance to work makes sense.

As a product content writer as one of my professions once upon a time, my manager’s manager asked me to give her a demonstration of how I write the product content. Thinking that she just wanted a high-level view of what I do for visibility purposes, I gave her a cursory example, rushing through the process, and glossing over some steps. Honestly, who wants to watch someone research and write about products in real-time? Unfortunately, I would later find out that she was actually timing me, and my demonstration was going to be the baseline for my expected productivity.

When I think about that moment, it always reminds me of this scene from Schindler’s List:

When you’re in that kind of environment, resistance to work and productivity is to be expected. But it should be used as a tactical maneuver, not as a default behavior. It should also go without saying that if tactical work resistance is necessary, then it’s time to look for a new job. If your current company doesn’t reward being-here-to-work, then they’ll miss you when you’re somewhere-else-to-work.