Think of marketing as a combination of creating a market for the product you are offering and of creating a product for which there is a market. Consider some highly successful products the "Slinky," the telephone, and the light bulb, for example. None was developed as a result of surveying potential consumers to determine what kinds of household products they would be willing to buy. They were created through imagination, experimentation, thought, and hard work not unlike yourself. Once created, they were presented to potential consumers in ways that made them desirable. No successful marketer can afford to be isolated from the needs and desires of consumers, but neither can she or he become a slave to them and still retain the ability to create unique products.
A large portion of this article will be devoted to sources of information about job opportunities. As you gather more information about organizations and their needs, you will find that you can locate (or create) an organization that needs what you offer and that can provide the kind of work and setting you desire, provided you have a clear idea of what you want and what assets you can offer in return.
Thinking Short Term And Long Term
As you begin to define vocational objectives for yourself, bear in mind that you may not be able to get where you want to go in one step. Also bear in mind that you probably won't stay in your next job forever even if you could, you probably will not want to because you and your circumstances will doubtless change in the coming years. It pays to think simultaneously about what you want in the next year or two and what you want 5 to 10 years down the road. In this way, you can be more certain of taking steps now that will be helpful in reaching your longer term goals, as well as in meeting your shorter term needs.
Negotiating Objectives With Yourself
In a sense, you have already defined your objective by describing your perfect job: your objective is to find a job as nearly resembling your perfect job as possible. But first, you need to check your perfect job description against your inventory of assets and your list of values. Does your perfect job involve using all or most of your assets? If not, perhaps you have not yet defined a position that would be perfect for you. Would your perfect job enable you to live in accordance with your values? Some of your values, of course, will concern the realm of home, friends, family, and community. Would your perfect position allow you the time and freedom to pursue these non workplace values?
You may feel, for example, that a position in the corporate finance area of a top investment bank in New York City would allow you to use the abilities you most value in yourself and contribute to the building of stronger business enterprises and ultimately a healthier economy. It would also involve working with the kind of high energy, highly ambitious, highly intelligent people whom you enjoy. Finally, you would be well compensated and could buy an apartment, which you may feel is very important to you at this point in life. But it would also demand long hours sometimes on short notice and a great deal of travel. Furthermore, the requirements for advancement in such a position would probably not allow you to take a leave to have a child or to care for an aging parent.
If you have no desire for children or no desire to participate in their development and your parents are both dead or you wish they were and plan never to speak to them again anyway and your preferred mode of participation in community activities is to write out checks, you may, indeed, have identified an excellent position for yourself at this point in life. You may, on the other hand, perceive potential problems; though possibly very satisfying vocationally, such a position might interfere with your ability to realize non workplace goals and values. What to do? You have several options, but the important thing is that you not simply disregard the potential conflicts you have identified.
First, you might focus your information gathering on identifying the top firms that have the best provisions for family related leave taking and that see community involvement as beneficial for both the individual and the company. Books like The Best Companies for Women by Baila Zeitz and Lorraine Dusky (Simon & Schuster, 1988) and The 100 Best Companies to Work For in America by Robert Levering, Milton Moskowitz, and Michael Katz (Addison Wesley, 1990) can help you with this task, as an informational interviewing with past and present employees.
Second, you might consider negotiating with yourself a trade off between conflicting sets of values. Maybe you would be willing to work for a second tier firm, where the projects might be less exciting and the compensation more modest but where the pressure and demands would take a smaller toll on your personal life. Or maybe you would be willing (if able) to postpone some of your personal goals for 5 to 10 years while you focus on your career. If you select this option, be careful. Once you establish a pattern and start moving up a career ladder, making a change can be very difficult psychologically and financially as you may know from your recent experience.
Third, you might decide to stick with your initial choice but to negotiate more acceptable terms with the company after you have received an offer. Often the terms of employment are more flexible than job seekers believe, especially after a company has committed itself by making an offer. Relatively few offers are simply, "Take it or get lost!"
Finally, you can focus your thinking and research on identifying positions that would give you satisfactions similar to the ones you hope to find in corporate finance (or whatever) but that would involve less compromising of your personal goals and values. Frequently, this is the most reason able option, though it is infrequently given enough serious consideration.
Ignorance about the vast diversity of the American workplace is sometimes the culprit; people's knowledge of vocational possibilities is often limited to what they have learned rather haphazardly from their own experience and that of close friends and family. Sometimes the problem is a rusty imagination difficulty conceiving of how one might satisfy one's needs and desires in contexts different from the jobs or organizational settings with which one is familiar.
Rebecca exemplifies what I mean. She was soon going to lose her job as an account executive in a large ad agency because of a merger and the firm's loss of several large accounts. Despite her awareness that jobs in agencies were very scarce and the competition for them intense, she felt she had to get another position in account management at an ad agency.
"What do you like so much about ad agencies and account management," I enquired. "Everything!" was her reply. "Could you be more specific break everything into some of its components?" I asked. "No," she replied swiftly with annoyance, "it's the whole gestalt, the whole feel of agency work and the kind of people who do advertising." After a few more conversational turns of this nature got us nowhere, I gave her an assignment.
She was to record the activities of her next work day in half hour intervals what she was doing, where she was doing it, and whom she was with. Then she was to describe the people with whom she had contact how they were dressed, what they talked about, and their general appearance and manner. After completing this assignment, she was able to stop focusing on job titles (i.e., "account executive at a large ad agency") and start focusing on the kinds of work she liked to do and the kind of people with whom she liked to do it.
Rebecca now holds the tide "Director of Marketing" at a small, highly regarded design firm that specializes in package design for gourmet food products and wines. Like her work at the ad agency, her current job (1) involves daily contact with "creative" as well as with business people, (2) gives her a great deal of exposure to clients as well as to co workers, and (3) uses her talents as a persuasive writer and presenter. In addition, she is surrounded by people who dress fashionably, love exchanging gossipy tidbits about others in the industry, and like to talk about the best restaurants, movies, plays, and concerts in town just like her cohorts at the ad agency.
Rebecca's experience is worth considering because she faced a dilemma many job seekers share these days. Demand for the work she had done was declining in the industry with which she was familiar, and the industry itself was (and still is) going through difficult times and consolidation. Advertising agencies, banks, insurance companies, government agencies, manufacturing companies and marketing concerns are all cutting back, and they are making many of their cuts within the ranks of mid-career managers and professionals. "Flattened pyramids" are being touted as the way of the future by all sorts of management gurus. Added to the toll taken by recessionary pressures, this infatuation with lean and mean management suggests that many people will not be able to find jobs comparable to the ones they lost. If you face a dilemma similar to Rebecca's you feel the perfect job for you would essentially be the one you lost, but you realize a similar job may be almost impossible to find you might want to begin to search for alternatives the way she did.
Make a chart that breaks the work day into half hour intervals (for some people 15 minute intervals or hour intervals may be more appropriate) and recreate a typical day at your former job. Record what you would be doing, where you would be doing it, and with whom you would be interacting. Then describe the people with whom you would be having contact. Use the exercise to help you think in terms of desirable activities and cohorts instead of in terms of job titles.
