Articles like this one make me smile. Maybe because I'm a bad person or maybe because I've spent my whole life hearing people tell me "OMFGBBQ without a college degree you're going to be broke and homeless."

I am a full-time Ph. D. student, in my very late thirties. I am presently very underemployed and underpaid as a part-time private music instructor ... I have been searching for a full-time job with benefits for over a year now but have so far been unsuccessful.

This despite my having had a 4.0 GPA in my master's program and having a 3.9 GPA to date in my doctoral program, and being a member of national honor societies in both music and education. It's hard to tell if my lack of success in finding a "real" job is due to being considered "not a good fit" for those positions I have applied for, or if I'm simply "overqualified."

Hat tip, Danny.

By all traditional metrics, this person is way more qualified than me at pretty much everything. 4.0 in their grad program. 3.9 in a PhD program. And yet, except for about a month after I was fired in my very early twenties (because I was young and dumb), I've always found jobs with ease. Maybe I'm too pretty not to hire because it's certainly not my school track record that's getting me in the front door.

There are thousands of possible reasons that our hero can't find a job. But what I find telling is that is that the article was written by anonymous. If you're desperately seeking a job, why stay anonymous? I can tell you that if I was actively looking for a job and wrote an article like the one above, I'd be linking to my blog, twitter, etc, etc. Every possible online profile that I could. If I'm looking for a job, there's no value in staying anonymous, how else do employers find me?

I'll bet that whoever wrote that article doesn't have a blog. They're probably not spending a lot of time writing about what they're learning in school or what they're teaching as a private music instructor.

They need to be. The resume is dead and it's because more and more, people want you to show them what you've done, not tell them what you can do. The best job-hunting advice I ever got was from an article about getting a job on Wall Street. This partner at a trading house was complaining about all the kids who would come in for an interview with their resume and no portfolio. Loosely paraphrased (because this was ten years ago) he said

All of these kids tell me that they want to be traders. So why aren't any of them trading. Why aren't they taking a few grand and creating a portfolio? Or if they don't have the money why aren't they giving themselves an imaginary budget, "buying" a few hundred shares of different companies then tracking that for six months? I'll hire the first kid who shows me initiative even if he's lost money. I can teach trading strategies, I can't teach hunger.

This was back before blogs, before people really had their own websites. I didn't necessarily want to be in trading but I did like the advice. So I figured out how to get my own server online and I set up my own website. Now running a website wasn't going to convince anyone to hire me to be their network engineer, but I wanted to show them that I wasn't sitting around waiting for them to hand it to me. That when they mentioned a technology (DNS, Apache, ssh, etc) I, at least, had some hands on experience with it, enough to get it running anyway.

A good resume only proves that you're good at writing resumes. You can buy a book on how to write a killer resume, hire a service too look it over, inflate it.

How do I inflate my blog? Lie about my traffic? Try and sound smarter than I really am? Take credit for things I didn't do? All of that is so easy to see through it's ridiculous. You know, probably within minutes of reading, whether I know what I'm talking about or if I'm full of shit. And even if I know what I'm talking about, you probably can figure out within minutes of reading if I'm someone you want working with / for you.

The world is a changing and unless you want to be some meat puppet pushing papers on a project that no one gives a goddamn about anyway, you need to do something to differentiate yourself from everyone else out there. You need a portfolio.

Posted by Ben Corman at 9:58 AM

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