By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


We hear a lot these days about the supposed value of being a "digital native" (defined as a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology;  familiarized with computers and the Internet from an early age) as though being a digital native will automatically bring value to a hiring company.

Well, I'm here to tell you that a "digital native" is most often  a flat out nothing.

What, why? How can you say that? 

Because being a "native" doesn't mean the individual competent at the skill to which they claim to be native.

Doubt that?

Well, consider how the communicative efficacy of the English speakers we all know or have heard who claim to be "native speakers".

The problem with the "digital native" moniker is that most of the folks this applies to only have experience sole as digital consumers.

They no experience or only very limited experience as digital producers.

They don't possess digital competency in general and more specifically they don't possess digital competency in a business context.

They are competent at perhaps locating an app in iTunes or Google Play, installing it and then using it among friends for fun.

But can they write production quality code? No.

Can they design, run, analyze, interpret and improve an online marketing campaign? Heck no.

Can they troubleshoot or debug a software or hardware problem? Nope.

The answer is most likely no, no, no.

The bottom line is that signing up for a twitter account to tweet your college ski trip is not the same as creating a twitter campaign for a fashion brand let alone an integrated multi-phase marketing program for said fashion brand.

There is good news, so hang tight.

The good news is that for those digital natives that do go beyond the install, that take the time to look under the hood, that actually remove the valve covers and look at the source code or to work to apply these tools in a business context to satisfy real world use cases, well, those digital natives are worth their weight in gold as they are as rare as an honest politician. They can write their own tickets and would be welcome just about anywhere.

So stop thinking being a digital native is enough. It isn't. A digital native is just a fancy word for a digital consumer.

Strive to be a digital producer. Be a digital creator. Be a digital expert.

Think about it. 

You can thank me later.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, SiliconEdge

"So, what, you think you're a minder read and can read minds, right?! Ha!"

I often find myself fielding this question although sometimes it's delivered in a tone of voice that conjures up images of an accusation such as "charlatan!" rather than a genuine question.

But that's okay, as it shows interest and engagement on the person asking it and once they allow me to explore a little more with them, they are usually hooked and have an "aha!" moment.

....

So the simple and honest answer to this question or perhaps the rejoinder to this accusation is, of course, I'm not a mind reader nor do I purport to be. And yet my results are there and they are what they are with them being more often than not extremely uncanny in their accuracy. 

The most important insight from my work and research that I try to impart to my students, clients and skeptics is that you don't need to be a mind reader to be accurate in your reading of a situation because in most cases the party in question through their actions, reactions and inactions almost to a tee loudly and graphically telegraphs exactly what they are thinking and how they are thinking as well as their intentions.

....

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


There's been a lot of talk and debate over the last few years as to the value of the "'lowly" Liberal Arts degree. 

A variety of pundits and talking heads have even gone so far as to argue that there's no value to be had in such a degree, especially when one factors in the direct costs incurred during the course of earning the degree as well as the opportunity costs associated with the four years unemployment typically experienced while the student studies for the degree.

To all of these pundits and all of this punditry I have but one word: 

Hogwash!

I'm here to tell you that Liberal Arts degree, in and of itself, is most likely fine. 

Just fine.

"What? James, are you serious or just totally delusional?! "

Yes, I'm serious and no, I'm not delusional. 

There are many reasons why I am certain that the Liberal Arts degree is not a "Death Wish For Careers" which I won't go into at this time, however, it is readily apparent ot me that plenty of value can be extracted from both the pursuit and earning of a Liberal Arts degree. In turn, this acquired and derive value can be used to great positive effect during a Liberal Arts degree-holder's pursuit of  professional employment.

And as an aside, plenty of value can also be extracted and shown to a prospective employer by even non-degree holding job seekers/job applicants as well.

Here's The Real Deal In A Nutshell:
 The Liberal Arts degree itself is fine, provided that you have studied and learned your subject matter to some basic level of competency but more importantly learned HOW to study when acquiring new information in the future and without direction or prodding from your professor or other authority figure.

Now, reports have come back from many if not most Liberal Arts grads saying how tough a time they face looking for meaningful (versus underemployment or unemployment) employment after having graduated.

There is no doubt that with few exceptions Liberal Arts grads have it harder, but what they face is by no means insurmountable, it's more about filling in a few gaps, buffing out a few dings and learning how to use the value they already have created and possess to their advantage.

For instance, most Liberal Arts majors or grads could greatly enhance their job market value and the buying temperature of prospective employers by simply and quickly adding a few skills which may range from basic tech or analytical skills to work facilitation and work environment skills  as well as the job search strategies, tactics and techniques that are needed to wrap around these core or foundational skill sets to land that coveted or desired job.

We've discussed this before but we can never do it enough:
1. Being good at doing the job is not the same as being good at getting a job.
2. It's not the degree you earned that's killing your job search.

What this means is that not all degrees are created equal in terms of the way they are perceived by prospective employers in particular and the job market in general.

This is not good or bad, it is just the way it is. And that's okay. Once we have tuned into reality, we can own it.

Specifically, the less value your degree is perceived to have in the job market or the lower the value that your degree signals or imputes to the job market (and/or the greater the supply of similar candidates in the job market holding the same credential) the greater your skill in understanding and applying the Job Search 4P's* must be.

Specifically, the Job Search 4P's are positioning, packaging, presenting and promoting skills as well as a candidate's ability to communicate and convey value (C&C) to a prospective employer.

Conversely, if you have a "stronger" degree (that is the perceived value of said degree is that stronger or more greatly valued in the job market) or employers clearly understand how to monetize (or have monetized) or they feel they can more readily monetize a particular degree (such as a  computer science or business degrees), all things being equal, you'll need far less proficiency in the application of the Job Search 4P's during your job search. 

Once you know what you're doing it becomes like shooting fish in a barrel.

If you have one of these higher in-demand, easier to map or more readily communicable  degrees and you know how to use the Job Search 4P's like a boss, well, in such a case, you'll quickly find yourself in such high demand that you'll basically lord over and rule the job market.

And that's a very enviable position to be in!

*Just to note, in this case, I use the term Job Search 4P's to describe a set of specialized job search skills as well as one overall job search process. If you are familiar with classical marketing literature there is also the Marketing 4P's which are Product, Place (distribution), Promotion and Price.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

One of the major challenges that new or recent graduates face in landing their first professional job is not necessarily determined by what they've studied but rather by what value they can offer to a prospective employer as well as their ability to clearly communicate and convey that to the prospective employer.

It's not just that some degrees are "better" than others, it's that some degrees are either far more in demand (due to a constrained supply) OR certain degrees are
more monetizable by the firm in question.

Holding an easily or readily monetizable degree means that prospective employers don't have to spend time figuring out how to use the degree nor does the student even need to be "good" at conveying their value (of course, this is still very important and I'm speaking on a "relative" basis here).

Conversely, if a degree is not easily or readily monetizable (or it's perceived that way) and/or there is a huge supply of those particular degrees in the marketplace, then the graduate (aka job applicant) needs to turn on or develop some strong "marketing and sales" chops to ensure that they have the proper messaging and are properly packaged and presented to the employer, while clearly communicating and conveying their value.

There's more to it than that on the marketing and sales front, but these are the broad strokes that you should be thinking about and internalizing.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


There are two primary, legal and simple ways to win almost any competition and which involves no cheating.

(1) Prepare and then perform better than your competition. This is often very hard which is why so many are reluctant to rely on this.

(2) Brainwash the other competitors, saddling them with emotional and mental blocks.

If you follow the way societies works, including American society, you'll soon see that (2) is most often how those in power, seeking to gain or consolidate power operate.

If you simply disconnect and deprogram yourself from these myths and memes you'll find that success will come faster and easier than ever.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


Myths and memes. 
 
Love it when people soak them up.

Less competition for you and those that understand the way the world truly works rather than how the social engineers would like it to be.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

Over the years, first as a college student looking for my first "real world" professional job and then later as a hiring manager, a business owner, a recruiter and a career coach, I've noticed the same Myths & Memes and misconceptions popping up time and again. 

Often it is so-called "Career Experts" who give life to these Myths & Memes that you the reason you can't find a "good job" or a "suitable job" or "establish a career" is because you are somehow lacking "skills" or the appropriate "education". If and when you finally do land a job, if you don't get promoted or worse get forced out or blocked and decide to leave, these "experts" will chalk this up to it being, you being, a "bad fit" or "poor fit" for the company.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong for many reasons (e.g., we've previously talk about the SWAN Principle and the cost of acquiring new skills or going back to school).

Alright so let's get to this . First,  need to understand that skills by themselves have no value. Period. It doesn't matter how good you are or how much demand there is for those skills, you must have the ability to monetize your skills either by monetizing them on your own or most commonly by plugging into someone else's platform or system.

Now let's talk about the actual patterns you'll see over the life of your career and, in particular, let's discuss what I call the Job Search Lifecycle.

A) In the simplest terms, this view explores the skills that we need:
1. You need the skills to do the job.
2. You need the skills to find the job.
3. You need the skills to land and close the job.
4. You need the skills to maintain and keep the job.
5. You need the skills to plan and manage your career.

B) Now, let's look at a more granular view of the lifecycle and skills needed:
1. Skills acquisition: As a starting point, you'll acquire some amount of skills. They may be hard skills, soft skills, some combination thereof or even simply potential. But in the end, you'll have (and need) something of value to bring to the table of the prospective employer or customer.

2. Packaging: Once you have acquired your skills you need to package them. What are you offering? Is it easy to understand what you do? What is your value proposition? Do you make me money? Save me money? Reduce stress? Enhance productivity?

3a. Job Identification: Now you need to find a position to apply to monetize your skills. You need to identify the job so you have a target to apply to. In some cases, these are easy to find or locate while in other cases you will need to surface them. Much of this depends on timing and luck, so if your dream employer just filled the position you want or you've come into the process very late, there's often not much you can do. That said, just like a lottery,  you need to be in it to win. You don't have a chance to win if you aren't in the game, so you'll need to put the time and effort into this (which is your "lottery ticket" or the price of entry).

3b. Job Creation: Many times, however, the ideal job you want doesn't exist now or just isn't "open". The prospective employer you'd like to work for may not even think such a job is important. So what to do? Well, in this case, you create this job at the prospective employer.

4. Presenting: Once you have packaged your skills, found some targets and approached the prospective employer for a meeting (the interview) you'll need to present yourself to answer their main questions and concerns, to see the fit you have with their culture and team and to demonstrate the value you will bring as well as to assess your interest in working with them.

5. Negotiations: These include title, salary and total package, start date and perhaps the proposed career path that may be your future while you are with the company.

6. Closing: Closing the offer and starting your job.

7. Onboarding: The first 90-days at your new job are critical to set expectations and impute your value, understand the written and unwritten rules of the road and the personalities and politics involved.

8. Job Maintenance: This includes keeping and maintaining your job, your skill sets, working to position yourself for a promotion, building new skill sets and connections and making sure you have concrete deliverables and takeaways from your current job to prove to your next prospective employer what value you can add to them, based on what you added at your now current job (soon to be previous company).

9. Repeat Process: At some point you'll most likely begin looking again for a new job/position, either in the same company you are now working or externally.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

The New York Times ran a recent article entitled Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs.

There are so many myths and memes in this article, that sadly is preventing good and talented people from getting jobs. As you read through this article, you'll notice that many of the people in trouble are talking about how they took a college education, how they graduated and how they did what they were told but still couldn't land a suitable job. In some cases, they did land a job but there were greatly underemployed.

You can read the article below, but first allow me to put a few things in perspective:

1. Education: People seem to believe that an "education" is key to landing a job, especially a college education. This is not necessarily a key for landing a job. An education, some particular skills sets or a college degree may be a baseline requirement to be hired but it's NO LONGER a point of differentiation for you as a candidate.

2. Companies don't just create jobs to hire people: No. Companies hire people, when in the course of doing business and serving their markets and customers they find they need more people (volume) or new skills sets (ability). What you need to do, is to map and align your skills, abilities and potential to the company's needs and show how you provide value.

3. Having the skills is not enough: You still need to find the opportunities and then package and present yourself.

(Fire Your Recruiter!, Crush Any Interview!, High-Impact Resumes)

Europe's fiscal crisis has forced young people like Melissa Abadía to make painful adjustments and migrate to find jobs.


By LIZ ALDERMAN
Published: November 15, 2013

MADRID — Alba Méndez, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in sociology, sprang out of bed nervously one recent morning, carefully put on makeup and styled her hair. Her thin hands trembled as she clutched her résumé on her way out of the tiny room where a friend allows her to stay rent free.

She had an interview that day for a job at a supermarket. It was nothing like the kind of professional career she thought she would have after finishing her education. But it was a rare flicker of opportunity after a series of temporary positions, applications that went nowhere and employers who increasingly demanded that young people work long, unpaid stretches just to be considered for something permanent.

Her parents were imploring her to return home to the Canary Islands to help run her father’s fruit business. It was a sign of the times, though, that even her own father probably would not be able to afford to pay her.

“We’re in a situation that is beyond our control,” Ms. Méndez said. “But that doesn’t stop the feelings of guilt. On the bad days, it’s really hard to get out of bed. I ask myself, ‘What did I do wrong?' 

The question is being asked by millions of young Europeans. Five years after 
the economic crisis struck the Continent, youth unemployment has climbed to staggering levels in many countries: in September, 56 percent in Spain for those 24 and younger, 57 percent in Greece, 40 percent in Italy, 37 percent in Portugal and 28 percent in Ireland. For people 25 to 30, the rates are half to two-thirds as high and rising.

Those are Great Depression-like rates of unemployment, and there is no sign that European economies, still barely emerging from recession, are about to generate the jobs necessary to bring those Europeans into the work force soon, perhaps in their lifetimes.

Dozens of interviews with young people around the Continent reveal a creeping realization that the European dream their parents enjoyed is out of reach. It is not that Europe will never recover, but that the era of recession and austerity has persisted for so long that new growth, when it comes, will be enjoyed by the next generation, leaving this one out.


[read more...]

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!
(This is part of the No Box Thinking™ Series)


Elephants are considered one of the strongest animals on earth and in places like Thailand it's not uncommon to see one elephant compete against forty or more men in a tug-o-war contest with the elephant easily winning! 

Many elephants are also utilized in the forestry industry and it's an amazing sight to see an elephant easily and deftly pick up a massive log and effortlessly move it about like a mere toothpick. 

Not once or twice, mind you, but all day long and in the scorching heat. 

With such power and stamina an adult elephant could easily snap any ropes or chains used to subdue it. Yet why doesn't the adult elephant do this? And how can such a powerful animal be so easily controlled by an infinitely smaller human wielding only a stick or through the simple pressing of feet or heels into the elephant's neck or ears? 

Well, it all comes down to the elephant's mental conditioning and the shaping of expectations it has received and that has been implanted into it. Many humans would call what the elephant mentally engages in to be a "self-fulfilling prophecy." 

Since an adult elephant is so powerful and could easily break the biggest ropes or chains, trainers begin to condition the elephant at a very early age not only to not want to do this so but also to THINK that it is NOT able to do so.  Effectively to not even consider breaking the chains or snapping the ropes as an option.

Why? Because once we deem something to be "impossible" to do, we no longer attempt it. Our own thinking and thought processes, therefore, become a set of mental chains. 

As a baby, the elephant is often restrained with a substantial piece of rope or chain which is so strong that the baby has no chance of breaking it or escaping. As the baby pulls on the restraints it quickly realizes it cannot get free so it tries less and less frequently and less and less heartily to do so during each attempt. 

As the elephant grows in size, the diameter of the restraints can be reduced since the elephant has now been conditioned to believe that trying to escape or break the restraints is futile. 

Eventually the elephant no longer even attempts to break the restraints as it is now fully conditioned so that the presence of the restraint alone, rather than the tensile strength of that restraint, signals to the elephant that it is incapacitated and cannot move.

At some point, this restraint could be as thin as a piece of twine. 

In other words, the trainer has created a set of unbreakable mental chains for the elephant that the elephant cannot overcome! 

Humans, like elephants are also susceptible to these mental chains. Sometimes we create them ourselves. Other times they are given to us by friends, parents or relatives however well meaning they may be. 

We are taught various myths and memes  (the restraints) during our formative years and then these restraints are constantly waved in front of us to remind us of our inability to move freely through life. 

This is done through the usage of rituals. These rituals can be mores or folkways, comments from friends or family, even imagery beamed into our homes by satellite tv, found on DVDs or in our daily newspaper. 

What mental chains are holding you back?
Would you like to break them?
How will you break them? 

Knowing that they exist in the first place is the major step forward. 


(James originally posted this online on August 16th, 2004 but it is even more relevant today than it was 9 years ago. Several slight modifications from the original have been made)

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


How hasn't heard this advice before?

"Fake it 'til you make it!"

And while this may appear to be sound advice, we'll briefly explain why it's a loser's mentality and how very dangerous it can be.

First, by using the word "fake it" we are engaging in negative internal talk.

Think about it. 

Fake something. 

Why? 

Why would we "fake" something?

Second, if we are "faking" something, do we even care about what we are doing?
It suggests that we don't.

So rather than "fake it 'til we make it", what we really want to do in these circumstances is to identify an appropriate model for success and then work at it for as long as it takes until we are able to fully and completely internalize and integrate that particular success model.

The key is to deliberately choose your success model and to be as principled as possible while you work to fully and accurately internalize and integrate it.