Tag Archives: career

Recent graduates: how to find work you love

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My friend Charlie Hoehn just released a free ebook: Recession-Proof Graduate and it encompasses a lot of ideals that I’ve learned over the last few years.

Rethinking the typical “job hunt”

Charlie has done a great job capturing a lot of the secrets to finding meaningful work out of college. They include:

  • Steer clear of the beaten path: don’t send resumes everywhere, don’t do what you think you should do. Go find the people and companies you want to work with. Do this even before you graduate from college.
  • Offer to do a project for free: it’s a scary notion, but doing a side project before working for someone is far better than sending a resume and interviewing with them. This is how you set yourself apart, learn along the way, and do things on your terms.
  • Forget about the money: expecting to earn a big salary out-of-the-gate is a silly way to filter the world around you. Be realistic and realize you don’t get a “trophy just for showing up.”

Is free work a good idea?

I want to expand on Charlie’s point about performing free work. From both the employee and employers perspectives (I’ve been on both sides) free work can be beneficial to everyone:

  1. The individual finds something to do. You pick what you want to do, you learn as you go, make mistakes, have more flexibility, take more risks. This is ideal for the self-starters, self-motivated individuals looking for great opportunities (ie: you create them).
  2. The company can learn about you. From my few experiences, it’s becoming clearer that interviews are mostly wasteful and hardly indicative of how a prospect will perform. But, if you someone offered to do work upfront, I’m at no loss, I can become comfortable with your results, and I can bring you on to do many more excellent projects. Note: this is not solicited spec work.

Useful advice for graduates

Charlie then dives into some great advice on how to create the lifestyle and find the work that you want (not the job that everyone else is aiming for). To paraphrase Tim Ferriss: it’s lonely at the top, aim high because the rest of the world is competing for mediocrity. Sidestep the familiar routes and try some of these different approaches:

  • Find the people and companies you want to work with, not the ones that match your college degree
  • Start to define your desired lifestyle and aim for jobs that are aligned with it
  • Cut your losses and realize everything up to now is a sunk cost, stop basing future decisions on your previously invested time
  • Go learn something and bring some real skills to the table (not ‘Microsoft Office’ and ‘Communication’ skills)

This is exactly what I did

I’ve been on both sides of the fence and Charlie is spot-on with this book. I went through college trying new opportunities, working remotely on fun projects like helping organize a conference, I even met with David Cohen to talk about TechStars. But, I watched what everyone else around me was doing and I left college with a job lined up at a Big 4 accounting firm (the job matched my degree). I wrote about my lessons as soon as I left to go work for Crowd Favorite and haven’t looked back.

I recommend you check out Recession-Proof Graduate and subscribe to Charlie’s blog.

PS: Charlie asked me to contribute to the book so I wrote about building momentum through your online presence. Find me on page 22.

The One About The New Job

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Now that I have a few spare minutes to collect my thoughts I figured I’d share a little about my professional life as of late:

The Previous Employer

If you’re not aware, I left my job of 11 months and 3 weeks (just barely a year) this past July 18th. I had been working at Ernst & Young* and made a quick decision to move on to my passion: the internet. The firm itself is awesome; they’ve definitely earned the many awards and recognitions (a top 25 employer for a decade according to Fortune). I learned a lot, worked with great people and clients, and I don’t really regret anything about my time spent at E&Y.

Lessons learned from my first full-time job out of college:

I’ve learned plenty from my other experiences and jobs but this one is a bit different. It was my first full-time job out of college (not an internship, not a part-time job); one where I had bosses, business cards, a phone number, responsibilities, performance reviews, etc. Some things may be obvious or things you’ve read about before–but this is the kind of stuff I finally learned from experience.

  • You’ll never love everything about any job. But it’s definitely possible to dislike most of it.
  • The people you work with are extremely important (50 hours is different than a few times a week).
  • Hopefully you like those people if you don’t like the work, or else things get frustrating.
  • Despite management’s best attempts, I’m still convinced I can work an entry-level corporate job from home.
  • And I could probably do a typical entry-level corporate job in 20 hours a week.
  • Many people still see the ‘ladder’ and the need to ‘pay dues’, they’re the rule, not the exception
  • Some people are very good at getting work done, but that doesn’t mean they can manage / lead
  • Big companies are great because there are processes and structure that help support you
  • The wealth of knowledge is “out there” but so damned hard to collect and organize
  • Traveling can be fun no matter where you go (anywhere from Lexington to Atlanta)

…and I could go on and on.

The Current Employer

I’m now working for Crowd Favorite which is an internet company specializing in WordPress (the software that powers this website), custom web development and design, consulting, and builds some web products. Surprise surprise, I’m working on the web!

I suppose this isn’t new: I’ve moved around a lot and some people might look at that as being scattered or unfocused. But, guess what: all that moving around and dabbling paid off! I found something I really enjoy (and I think I’m good at it, too). How do I know? For starters, I’ve been excited to go to work all 10 days these last two weeks (and enjoy checking / responding to business e-mails during some of my spare time)!

My job is a mixture of things but I think we could describe it as a mix of the following:

  • Account management: working closely with customers to help address things including future development needs
  • Business development: following up with individuals that are looking to use our services, deciding what we can do to help and make sure they’ve fully explored their projects
  • Project management: managing project goals and tasks, scheduling them internally, managing budgets, updates to clients, etc.
  • Internal projects: there are some things we’d like to do internally and I’ll be managing those, too

So, that sums up what I’ve been doing and what I’ll be working on. Everyone I work with is great, I’m happy, excited and learning plenty each and every day.

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* Note: this is the first and only time the firm name was used on my site (for employment / search engine / opinion purposes). They were aware of devinreams.com and I was aware of their awareness.