Why I wrote this
This is for the broad audience of those who graduated in the past five years, regardless of what you studied. I saw a post on LinkedIn recently which lamented the number of new grads who aren’t getting jobs in the fields they studied. Here’s the tough love: the labor market is fickle in what it values. As millennials learned early in life, no one is entitled to any job in particular, and a STEM degree alone is not enough to differentiate yourself in a role requiring technical acumen. I say this also because liberal arts majors have been encouraged to give up any hope of a career if they want to study something bringing them joy. If you don’t have a direction, your best bet is to pursue gathering a generalist’s skill set. It can be argued that generalists are the best equipped to handle the inevitable, periodic shocks to the market (for more, read Range by David Epstein).
How do you want your life to look?
The best career-building lesson I’ve found comes from computer science professor and productivity expert Cal Newport. From his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: figure out the lifestyle you want and work backward toward the job/career types you can attain.
This means it’s incumbent on you to explore how people who work in a given function live their lives before committing to a path. E.g., I hate using the computer and need time for hobbies. I would have done terribly as an engineer or a doctor, and I’m glad I knew it before I tried and ended up miserable. You may even have picked a field because you thought it would bring you economic security. However, that is also a recipe for dissatisfaction if you don’t enjoy the subject matter or its application.
What you can do today
Here are a few things you can do if you’re having trouble breaking through:
Be open to experiments - i.e., jobs that don’t draw on your field of study. Take a leap of faith if a job that sounds interesting and pays decently comes your way. I had to do this by default because of my majors, which was a blessing in disguise.
If you’ve studied a technical field, don’t consider yourself above a job that doesn’t directly draw on your study area because you may not want what you think. You may find that what you studied as applied to a job doesn’t satisfy you.
Acquire & strengthen some basic ‘soft’ skills.
Written communication - the art of persuasion and explication in writing can save you many meetings. Writing essays and outlines in my job has honed my thinking continuously.
Public speaking skills - this is required for more than just decks. Learn how to give a presentation without really using the deck. Your speaking skills matter greatly in meetings; more than half of your hours will be spent in them.
Understand data structures & learn how to tell stories - so much data will be available that you will be overwhelmed, but it’s essential to develop the art of telling a story with it. It’s not just about synthesizing but about figuring out which questions you can answer or problems you can solve no one would have thought of. This means you have to dig and be uncomfortable if you don’t have the background.
If you’re in marketing, much of the role involves figuring out your success and getting data between systems to create a connected experience. You’ll be well served by learning SQL or, at the very least, memorizing your data model for a person and their interactions.
Learn project management principles - this is the bare minimum, and you'll stagnate if you can’t do it. Efficiency and conscientiousness are built through these sorts of activities. Much of my success has come from advanced project management ability. And I can do that because I learned how to think about systems holistically.
Understand the software dev process - if you’re aiming for a job involving software creation, it’s advantageous to understand how it’s produced in the average corporation. You may even benefit from reading about product management principles because the best engineers I ever worked with had product sense and technical skills.
Develop systems thinking - seeing how parts work together holistically is essential for success in any field, especially marketing and, more obviously, product management. This is because there are various marketing tools and types of data.
Examine the stories you’re telling yourself - I had to dismantle mine to get anywhere close to satisfaction, balance, and economic stability. Ironically, the stories I told myself about economic instability were counterproductive to finding it.
Be able to concentrate intensely for hours at a time - IM, email, and meetings are the enemies of productivity. Solving complex problems means the ability to think profoundly, but it also requires intense concentration. Such concentration involves the cultivation of discipline. The internet itself doesn’t allow for deep thought in a knowledge-producing field.
My story: becoming a problem chaser
For liberal arts graduates, especially marketers: there is no escaping, in my opinion, that one must learn many areas of marketing and develop advanced logical reasoning ability to ensure future career security. I don’t see how I could have gotten to product management without taking every chance I could to solve complex problems no one else wanted to take.
Here’s my own story as an example of the above:
I graduated in 2011 with a liberal arts MA, and the only job I could get was with Teach for America. When that ended, the next job in my lap was working at a bank call center to process retirement transactions. Did this sting after getting a degree? Yes, but it also taught me not to expect things just because I’m ‘educated.’ As I said above, no one is entitled to anything. And, a person’s worth is not tied to their job.
While I was at the call center, Google randomly called for a recruiting job. I had a feeling I’d hate recruiting, and I did, but I took the chance to develop project management skills wherever I could because I realized it was satisfying and enjoyable. Having the G on my resume didn't hurt, but that’s for another post.
I got a job at Indeed working on a new product that required the speedy screening of applications and creating recruiting processes from scratch. That taught me process improvement and project management, which are essential to understand in any role.
While in that first job at Indeed, I automated processes and trained people. I then shifted my focus to getting more candidates, which meant learning email marketing.
After learning rudimentary email marketing and applying it in my recruiting role, I landed another job at Indeed on the marketing automation team using Marketo. I realized how much I love solving logic problems and learning new tools.
I was recognized as having superb organizational and project management abilities, so I was made the program manager for the email marketing team, which had never had one. I then started gathering skills essential to product management, though I didn’t realize it then. I learned JIRA, scrum processes, backlog babysitting, requirement writing, and stakeholder management.
When my first PM opportunity landed in my lap, all of the above experiences had rounded and prepared me to dive in, even though I had a ton to learn. At least I didn’t have to waste time teaching JIRA or learning the basics of the process from scratch.
I hope the above is a helpful starting place for those looking for one.
An aside about STEM degrees
The labor market has valued STEM degrees highly for the last fifteen years, a historically aberrant period of rapid technological advancement akin to the first industrial revolution. Things have stabilized, and there’s arguably a glut of recent grads wanting engineering jobs. I get it; they pay well, and few fields do anymore. But arguably, you don’t need a degree to develop software. Companies insist on using degrees as a proxy for ability, even though it’s been demonstrated that college is neither strictly necessary nor attainable for most people.
Finally, college degrees were never meant to map to careers; this is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last thirty-ish years. A university education was once meant to provide a broad knowledge base instead of preparation for a specific career. The Ivy League still functions this way; history majors get hired at McKinsey.
If you free yourself of the idea that degree = job function, you might find something you didn’t know you were looking for.
An aside for women in marketing
I’m talking to women here because we tend to be pigeonholed in many jobs due to the assumption that we lack technical understanding. Women in marketing might struggle with being seen this way, despite the areas requiring plenty of logical reasoning ability. It’s essential, then, to show this ability off.
Applying logical reasoning to your job functions is imperative to differentiate yourself. This means not just doing what’s in front of you but looking at the system you’re working with holistically and finding ways to improve it and your team’s processes.
Marketing is necessarily interdisciplinary, so if you find yourself in the field, it’s pretty easy to grow if you look in the right places. Your essential role doesn’t matter - I’ve learned that pushing yourself beyond what you’re doing has a good chance of propelling you. Because marketing appears to be a non-technical field, the assumption is that you can learn one area and stay in it for most of your career. That approach leaves you stagnant.