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Transferable Skills in Action: Applying Your Student Affairs Experience

Transferable Skills in Action: Applying Your Student Affairs Experience

by | Jun 30, 2011 | Career Skills, Student Affairs, transferable skills, Uncategorized

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Understanding how skills you have gained in one position will benefit you in another is critical to anyone seeking career advancement. I serve on the steering committee for a local non-profit organization, AthFest, which plans the local music and arts festival each summer, the Athens GA Half-Marathon in the Fall, and year-round art and music education events for local children. The festival was last week and I put many of the skills I gained working in Student Affairs to good use.

Candidates will often be asked to give examples of times when they planned a program, dealt with a difficult person or situation, or responded to a crisis. This week, I will give some examples from my recent experiences during AthFest. I will do my best to explain them in a loose P-A-R (Problem-Action-Resolution) style, to emulate the way that candidates should use in their interviews.

Part 1: Event Planning and Coordination

The AthFest Music and Arts Festival is a multi-day event, featuring an Artist Market with over 50 vendors, a business and food area with about the same number of vendors, two main stages, two beer tents, a kid’s festival with inflatables, arts and crafts, a comedy night, a film festival and music video awards, and a “club crawl” with over 150 bands during the week of the festival. Planning for the festival occurs year-round.

Problem: Select Approximately 50 artists, Assign Booths Spaces and Keep Them Happy

I serve as the Artist Market Chair. In this capacity, I recruited 2 jury members to review artist applications, and facilitated the jury process using online resources (mostly Google Apps) due to the difficulty of coordinating schedules.

Actions:

  1. I fielded a few hundred inquiries, some of which were clearly not fine art, but commercial products, hobby crafts, or materials made by persons other than the applicant. These I notified of their status, and forwarded to the business vendor contact.
  2. From the rest, we reviewed submissions, debated each on their merits, and accepted over 50 artists to exhibit their work in 47 tent spaces. I coordinated the notification of the artists, their payments to the festival, and their assignment to particular booth spaces, taking into account special requests, and trying to vary the assignments so that artists were not directly beside or across from their direct competition.
  3. I also worked with the business vendor chair and her team to keep business vendors separate from the artist market, and to ensure that we maintained legally mandated fire lanes and points of entry and exit. I coordinated the timing and flow of artist and vendor loading and unloading, traffic control and barricade passes.
  4. During the festival, I worked with two judges to select award recipients and managed all aspects of the market, and other festival “duties as assigned or became necessary.”

Experiences from Student Affairs Used:

  • Jury: My experience serving on award and scholarship committees in Residence Life and at the Smeal College of Business served me well. It’s always interesting to see how groups come together to work out a process for reviewing applications. I worked with my fellow Judges Pat McCaffrey and Susan Staley to review artist applications and the art samples submitted. I scanned samples of the art and saved pdf files to a Google Docs space and set up a Google spreadsheet for the judges to enter their thoughts. Working from there, I coordinated an e-mail conversation and we accepted some artists, and referred the rest to our business vendor contact, in case they still wanted to show their wares, outside of the juried market.
  • Booth Assignments: I met with our talented intern, Regan Mulcrone, who did a CAD drawing of the festival using Google Sketchup. We created 3 zones for the booths and designated them according to their placement on upper Washington Street, the area of the festival where all of the Artist Market and KidsFest would be located. During the assignment process, we varied assignments by categories and tried to assure that artists were not right by their direct competition. These are skills I developed in helping with Involvement Fairs, Career Days and of course, roommate assignments.
  • Traffic Control: At Penn State, I was responsible for a while for Residence Life’s Welcome Week events and for a time, I was directly responsible for managing the logistics involved with getting about 6,500 first-year students, their 240 RAs, nearly 500 Welcome Week Leaders, and the appropriate professional staff to their hall meetings and hall dinners, and then over to the President’s Convocation, and after that, to Late Night Penn State, our alcohol-alternative programming. I was the first person in the history of the event to get all these people to the Bryce Jordan Center on time, so that President Spanier could start his dog-and-pony show, and so that Residence Life could be praised for managing the process, instead of roundly criticized for not doing so. I am extremely proud of that accomplishment, and of the fact that the model I designed is still being used. It has been modified a bit, but the larger framework I built still stands. And Residence Life doesn’t get slammed anymore for being late to the President’s party.

Some Take-Aways

  • Everything you do teaches you something worthwhile, if you remember it and can integrate it into your skill set.
  • Your ability to appreciate the skills you have gained and to apply them in new ways is critical toward success in any position.
  • Even things that seem to be minor accomplishments, 0r footnotes in your career history, can hint at areas of expertise you might develop and apply later in your career.

Questions

  • What transferable skills have you gained from your work in Higher Education?
  • How can you explain your experience in ways that show that you appreciate the skills you have gained, and are ready to apply them?
  • How do you explain your ability to get results?
  • Do you have appropriate examples of your experiences to discuss in your interviews?

Game Theory 101: Don’t Play Games. Win Them!

by | Jun 14, 2011 | Career Skills, Negotiation, Site News

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Games are always a part of business, and many times a part of life. Whether you enjoy a game or not depends on a couple of factors:

  • Whether you want to play a game
  • Whether you are playing the same game others are playing
  • Whether you agree with the other players about how the game should be played
  • Whether one side or the other has an unfair advantage (or is cheating)
  • How big the risk is, in comparison to the reward

I’m not a hard-core gamer. I appreciate those who are, and can identify with where they are coming from. I used to play video games quite a bit, but I wasn’t very good at them. Not terrible, just easily bored. I only have a certain amount of energy to put into playing a game, and when I get bored, I usually stop playing and don’t go back to the game for a long, long time–and then more to figure out why I liked it, or to intentionally waste time. So, in most cases, I don’t want to play games (at least not the ones other people are playing.) Tactical exchange bores me easily, because I’m less worried about objectives, and more worried about winning the war.

This is different for me if the game is strategic, but most video games aren’t. They are tactical, and have clear objectives, definite results, and limited rewards. I like that stuff for a little while, but overall, I am a strategic, long-haul thinker, and as a result, people don’t get what I’m doing, because I am often playing another game altogether (a game within the game, or a game I am making up outside of the game.) So it’s about understanding game theory, more than winning a particular game

I also don’t believe that life is a zero-sum game, like poker, where someone has to lose for others to win. I actually think that cooperative games, played over the long haul, can result in unexpected outcomes for all players. The point of playing the game is still to win. But more than one person can win, and it doesn’t have to be at the expense of others.

This doesn’t remove the need to be self-interested and protect your goals. It just means that you don’t have to take something away from others to win. It does reinforce the inherent need to keep others from causing you harm. Like I said before, I generally prefer not to play games. But if forced to play, I do my best to win. And if people go for my throat, I don’t hesitate to fight back, and to do so on my own terms.

In a couple of recent conversations, I’ve tried explaining to people what exactly I am trying to do with my coaching business, programs and websites. They didn’t get it. I had a conversation with another person about these conversations. It was a social setting and this was a friend, so our talk was free-flowing as we had beers with a few others involved in a community organization (Athfest) that I am involved in.

These are the conclusions we arrived at:

  1. I need to do a better job explaining myself and what I do.
  2. Other people probably still won’t get it, because they think I am playing a different game. And…
  3. People will understand what I am talking about in five years, when it’s an established way of doing things, and accepted as common wisdom and common practice.

What game are you playing?

Whose rules are you playing by?

How committed are you to winning?

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Salary Negotiation and Poker: Start With the Hand You’re Dealt: Unique Value Propositions

Salary Negotiation and Poker: Start With the Hand You’re Dealt: Unique Value Propositions

by | Jun 13, 2011 | Interview Tips, Job Search, Negotiation

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Salary negotiation is a really hard process, and one of the top concerns of job-seekers in any industry. It’s the “poker round” of the hiring process, where both sides try to set aside their enthusiasm for working together and think in their own best interest, cards closely held to their vest, and wait for the other to either show their hand or fold. It can be gut-wrenching and nerve-wracking, because nobody ever wants to leave money on a poker table.

Before I go any further with this analogy, I want to say a couple of things. First, I am a lousy poker player and in many ways, a lousy negotiator, because I’m not motivated by money. I’m usually motivated by fear of losing money, and a desire to win. And I struggle with both, and can be frustrating to play poker with, as a result. I am usually the one to fold early, and I have a lousy poker face. Other players can usually tell when I have a winning hand, and they will fold early rather than fork over a lot of money. So take my advice about poker and about negotiation at your own risk! I usually end up leaving money on the table, or having others walk away out of sheer frustration.

But come along for a moment, and let’s break this down, using the poker game analogy, because I think many people can relate to it.

When you are dealt a hand in poker, you know what it is, and depending on whether you are playing stud, or draw, you either know your hand outright, or you can make a couple of trade-outs for fresh cards, to see if you can find a hand worth playing.

If you are playing stud poker, you know your hand from the get-go, and can make your bets based on that hand and your perceptions of the moves others around the table are playing, and whether they are betting, calling or holding.

If you are playing draw poker, you may place an initial bet, based on your gut feeling about being able to cobble something together worth doing, and then raise, call or fold, again based on the moves that other players make in response.

In the salary negotiation process, you also have to start with the hand you are dealt. It starts with your Unique Value Proposition. This is the where you describe your knowledge, skills and experience in ways that show your potential fit into a position. The keys to putting together this UVP (also referred to in the business world as a Unique Selling Proposition or USP) is that you have to explain who you are, what you can bring to the table, and why you are the best person to do so.

Let’s put a formula to negotiation, using your Unique Value Proposition:

  • First, describe who you are, in terms of current education, skills and experience.
  • Second, differentiate your education, skills and experience from other candidates.
  • Third, describe, in terms as concrete as possible, the value that you will add to the employer’s bottom line, that others cannot. (i.e., how you will solve their problems.)
  • Fourth, be ready to fold and walk away when the stakes get too high.

As I mentioned before, I am a lousy negotiator and this does affect my bottom line. I’m going to be spending more time in the near term explaining the Unique Value Proposition for this site and for my coaching programs, trainings and consulting services.

In the process, you’ll see content on this site, and the nature of the free and paid programs that go with it, change. I’m doing this for two reasons: so you can clearly see the value offered, and so that I can tweak the business model so that it results in sustainable business. In short, because being a good coach and a lousy businessman isn’t sustainable, and I really want to win, for the sake of my family and all they’ve sacrificed over the last couple of years to help me build my sites and my business.

It’s basic economics in action. Let’s return to what I learned in ECON 201 when I was actually listening to Dr. Benjamin’s lectures in Sirrine Hall my sophomore year at Clemson, when I wasn’t sleeping off the night before, or checking out the cute sorority girls who wouldn’t really even tell me the time of day.

Transactional business is driven by the concept of marginal utility. The success of any business model hinges on the perceptions of price in relation to utility of the product or service. In business transactions, people (including employers) don’t pay for experience. They don’t pay for history or content. They pay for value.

When utility (perceived value) outweighs price (i.e., risk), people will pay more (by upping their ante.) When price (risk) outweighs utility (perceived value), it’s easy to fold and walk away.

Key questions to consider in preparing for negotiation:

  • How are you presenting your value?
  • How are you contrasting your unique value against other options (other candidates, or starting over with a search.) This might also be seen as overcoming objections to price.
  • How comfortable are you in protecting your unique value, by folding (walking away)?

Once you get these points down, you’ll be ready to not only play, but to win.

So are you going to up the ante, call, or fold?

Hate my analogy? Love it? Tell me in the comments!

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QR Codes: Like Poop on Your Résumé

QR Codes: Like Poop on Your Résumé

by | Jun 10, 2011 | Job Search, job search tools, Resumes and CVs

This week, I’ve been putting out articles on Interview Ecology, and exploring the risks and benefits of introducing the “new and shiny” into the process. We’ve considered whether bringing a iPad into an interview is akin to bringing an invasive species into an eco-system.

This ecosystem approach relies heavily on the idea that anything that distracts or disrupts may destroy the delicate balance of a search process, and bring up dissonance in respect to person-environment fit, resulting in a candidate not getting a particular position.

Which forces me to bring up a particular pet peeve of mine: the all-the-sudden popular and ugly-as-sin QR code. I hate them, because like many fads, most people rushing to use them don’t understand how to make sure they add value to the experience. In general, I feel that most people might as well take a poop on their résumé as put one of these on it, because adding a QR code without adding something of value to the “interview ecosystem” is well…just a load of crap.

I’m already anticipating the response from candidates and tech geeks who think these things are cutting edge and allow a new layer of interactivity that wasn’t possible before. Well, I call bullshit. Scanning these blotches into a smartphone just allows lazy people to avoid typing a URL into their browser, as if the 20 seconds of time spent doing so will add up, like all the partial pennies Richard Pryor dumped into his bank account in Superman III, and will result in the résumé screener having a richer, more exciting , and complete view of the candidate.

Bullshit. Bullshit. BULLSHIT.

The same can be achieved by pointing someone toward a regular URL or hyperlink. QR codes only add new functionality to a paper résumé, which you probably aren’t viewing anyway. And anyone with half a salt lick of sense in their head can run a long URL into an URL shortener. So if space on the résumé is your major concern, that’s no argument, either.

Now, I will admit upfront to being a résumé geek and a purist. I don’t believe all the hogwash people throw around about résumés going away. Advances in technology and social media are just changing how they are delivered. And nothing takes away from the basic truths at play:

  • Your résumé needs to be targeted toward your industry, level of experience, and the level of position you are seeking.
  • It needs to be scannable (visually scannable)
  • There has to be a sense of logical and visual flow that draws a reader in, and keeps them reading and scanning. And…here’s the big one…
  • It needs to be attractive and not full of distracting bullshit.

I had a client recently work with me on his CV and he had a QR code on it, at top right. I asked him why it was there. He replied that he wanted to show himself as cutting edge and tech savvy. So I asked him where the QR Code goes, and what value was added by putting it on there. And…wait for it…it went to an online pdf copy of his CV!

We talked a bit and I told him I didn’t see the point of having it there, if it only went to his CV. He was really tied to keeping it there, so we came to a compromise position. He had also been updating his LinkedIn profile, which had some great recommendations on it, and some other links to relevant information. So we decided to point it there, because doing so added some value to the equation. The result: the QR code went from being poop on his résumé to being rich compost instead.

My criticism of his strategy should not be equated with a critique his level of technical savvy or his readiness for the type of job he was applying for, and I’ve told him as much. In fact, I think he’s a great candidate, or I wouldn’t be working with him. I don’t work with clients I don’t believe in, because that’s not fair to people on either side.

Ultimately, I’m grateful for the perspectives his situation has given me, and what it allows me to share with you.

Here are the big take-aways:

  • New technology is great, and showing comfort with it is just fine. But using tech badly could actually hurt your candidacy. Make sure that your use of technology is appropriate and that there is a clear point to using it (like adding interactivity or pointing to recommendations or portfolio work.)
  • If using a new way of doing things distracts from your design, content or flow, you really need to weigh the risks of using it against the value added. And if you can’t do this on your own…
  • It pays to talk this sort of stuff out with a trusted friend, advisor, or career coach.

What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

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Interview Ecology and Your Job Search

Interview Ecology and Your Job Search

by | Jun 6, 2011 | Higher Education, Interview Tips, Job Search, job search tools, Student Affairs

bigstock-Daffodils-blooming-through-the-30407135Today’s institutions spend a lot of time assessing environments and  making sure they understand them, so that people will feel comfortable and welcome. We also spend a lot of time struggling with ways to promote sustainability and integrate new technology into our approaches. So let’s crash these concepts together to examine the ecology of the job search, and apply the resulting framework to different aspects of the job search.

(This is one of those moments when I’m going to get a little de-constructionist, so if you are not interested in the theory behind this strategy, come back later this week, as we explore some particular issues and strategies  you might take when working through them and making intelligent career choices. I’ll try to come full circle by ending with some more practical to-dos for those who don’t care about theory.)

Interview Ecology: Definition

One of the great things about mashing up concepts into something new is that you can make up a term to describe the new concept. So I’m going to call this interview ecology: the study of the co-created environment that exists when persons interact with each other during a search process, and the impacts on the shared environment, when new variables are introduced.

Key questions for consideration

  • If the job search process is an ecosystem, how could we describe the “natural environment” which exists before we introduce humans, interactions, and other variables?
  • How will the introduction of a new variable affect the environment and the people in it?
  • How could each human player in a given job-search ecosystem control the introduction of new or unexpected variables into the process, and limit any adverse impacts on the environment?
  • What new variables might be considered “invasive” (i.e., not present in the “natural environment” of the job search, and creating an imbalance that disrupts or destroys that environment)?
  • How should one evaluate the risks and benefits of introducing a new variable into a search process?

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