Job-Hunting Tactics to Match Your Personality, Part 2

In my previous blog, I explained how your personality type can be the key to job-hunting tactics that will be effective for you. I gave examples of tactics appropriate for Realistic, Investigative, and Artistic types. This time, I’d like to consider the other three types in the Holland taxonomy.

If you’re a Social type, you want to make the most out of personal interactions, because you’re good at them and enjoy them. It’s clear that you should join one or more organizations related to your job target. Find a role that is not being filled; communications roles are particularly valuable, because they put you in touch with the largest cross-section of members. For example, you might offer to start a Twitter feed for the organization and encourage members to come to you with news. Also, be sure to leverage your existing social contacts. Make sure that all of them know about your job hunt and have several copies of your JIST card.

Enterprising types may find it useful to start a small business related to the career goal. For example, find out what low-price consumables your targeted industry uses and start selling them on eBay. A sandwich route can get you past the front door of a business and into the offices of people who will be useful contacts. Develop a brief business plan for a small project related to your targeted industry and be ready to explain it. Along with your resume, carry this plan with you, so people who are interested in the former can learn more about your skills from the latter.

Conventional jobs often depend on demonstrating a particular competence, such as typing speed or accuracy with figures. Volunteer work, such as keeping the books for a club, can give you opportunities to develop and document your competencies. Also consider that Conventional types tend to be highly organized and methodical, so you should bring these strengths to your job hunt. Study and follow techniques that are recommended for scheduling your job-seeking efforts, compiling lists of contacts, tracking the progress of the job hunt, and following up on contacts. Conventional-minded people in your network will be impressed with your organizational skills.

Keep in mind that Holland himself emphasized that most of us are not purely of one personality type. Your job-hunting efforts should not and probably cannot conform to the skills and work habits of any one personality type. Artistic types need to impose some organization on their tasks, Enterprising types need to use creativity in their tactics, and Realistic types need to use social skills to build their network. Nevertheless, by paying special attention to the tactics that are best suited to your personality type, you can mount a job-hunting campaign that minimizes discouraging situations and is more effective.

Job-Hunting Tactics to Match Your Personality, Part 1

People making career decisions often find it useful to think in terms of personality types. I have written two books about this: 50 Best Jobs for Your Personality and 10 Best College Majors for Your Personality. In additional to these two, several of my other books also use the Holland taxonomy of personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) as an introduction to career exploration.

But personality types are helpful for more than just making a career decision. They can also guide you much later in the career development process, by suggesting strategies for the job hunt.

One reason your personality type is relevant to your job hunt techniques is that you probably are looking for a job in an occupation that is related to your personality type, and different kinds of jobs demand different job-hunting strategies. For example, in a job-hunting process with an Artistic job as the target, a portfolio showing examples of creative work is almost always required. Although portfolios are being employed in job campaigns aimed at other kinds of jobs, such as Enterprising jobs, the people who do the hiring for those jobs tend not to expect them.

There’s something to be said for running counter to expectations—for example, using a portfolio when seeking an Enterprising job precisely because it will set you apart from other job-seekers. However, your job-hunting activities should be the kinds of tasks that best suit your personality. If you’re a Social type, you’ll be more skilled at using strategies that maximize your personal contacts with others. If you’re an Investigative type, you’ll be more comfortable emphasizing research techniques that uncover job openings.

Here are some ideas for how to match your job-hunting tactics to your personality. At their foundation, all of them share the highly effective strategy of networking, but they go about the network-building process in different ways.

If you’re a Realistic personality type, you like hands-on involvement. You should visit workplaces related to your career goal or perhaps an eatery where the workers can be found, so you can interact firsthand. Dress accordingly; you may not need to wear steel-toed boots, but you should avoid wearing an expensive suit. You may want to bring a model or sketch or photograph of an idea you have for how to do the work better or how you have done it in a previous job or school project. Use this as a prop when you start up a conversation with a worker. A related strategy is to do volunteer work of a kind that is related to your career goal and that, ideally, allows you to work alongside people who do that kind of work for a living.

If you’re an Investigative type, you probably have good research skills. Use them to identify important employers for your career goal and compile a list of people who work there with whom you can make contact through intermediaries. Savvy users of LinkedIn and Twitter can search these databases to identify potential contacts. Another tactic is to find the blog where people in your targeted industry exchange news and ideas. (Every industry has at least one.) Become a conspicuous presence there; if you can’t contribute useful comments, at least ask intelligent questions. When you eventually get a chance to meet with a useful contact, bring a chart or diagram that analyzes an industry issue or a plan for solving a problem.

Artistic types, as I noted earlier, will certainly want to develop a portfolio and bring it to any meeting with a contact. You may want to brainstorm and develop an original, media-based way of representing the industry or an industry-related issue, such as an animation, a collage, or a Web page. This representation of your ideas may be easier to distribute than a traditional portfolio. The kind of job you’re aiming for may be more open than most to gimmicky methods of making cold contacts, such as printing your resume on a piece of paper shaped like a shoe and sending it attached to a sticky note saying that you’re trying to get your foot in the door.

In my next blog, I’ll cover the remaining three Holland types.

STEM Careers--and STEM Skills in Other Careers

One indication that an idea is catching on is that the President of the United States refers to it frequently. In recent remarks by President Obama, I’ve been pleased to hear mentions of STEM careers and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Two recent articles have pointed out the rewards of STEM careers and the barriers to them.

Last month, my former ETS colleague Anthony Carnevale and his research team at Georgetown University released a report about the career experiences of people who majored in STEM subjects. Analyzing Census data, they found that, on average, 65 percent of those holding a bachelor’s degree in a STEM subject out-earn those with a master’s degree in a non-STEM subject. And an associate degree in a STEM subject brings in a higher income than a non-STEM bachelor’s for 63 percent of those surveyed.

The Georgetown researchers also found that STEM degrees are excellent on-ramps for careers in medicine and in management, career changes that can lead to higher income than staying in a STEM work role. They note that although the traditional STEM career fields employ only 5 percent of the workforce, the need for STEM competencies keeps increasing in other fields. For example, along with the rapid growth in the number of technology products, there’s a growing need for an appropriately skilled sales workforce. So, even though the STEM career field is growing at a pace exceeded only by health-care careers, the careers that are competing for STEM-competent workers (including many health-care occupations) are among the fastest-growing and highest-paid in the economy.

Given this growing need for STEM-skilled workers in a broad range of occupations, it is not necessarily alarming that (as Carnevale et al. found) 43 percent of STEM grads immediately go off to work in non-STEM careers. To be sure, I’d rather see engineering graduates go on to engineer bridges instead of financial derivatives. Nevertheless, market forces will divert STEM talent to many non-STEM work roles, and many of those roles will benefit our economy.

What is alarming, however, is how many young people don’t even get as far as the initial STEM degree. Carnevale and his team estimate that our K–12 educational system turns out enough students with initial STEM skills to fill the labor market’s need for STEM-skilled workers, but more than 75 percent of them do not go on to develop their potential by majoring in STEM subjects. Furthermore, of those who do major in STEM subjects, 38 percent switch to another subject or drop out of college. This is twice the combined attrition rate for all other subjects.

An article last week in The New York Times investigated the reasons for this massive leak in the collegiate STEM pipeline. The main reason seems to be the inherent difficulty of the STEM curriculums. This is not helped by the high level of competition often found there. It’s significant that the highly selective colleges, which get the best students, also have higher STEM attrition rates. Evidently, the problem is not that the students are poorly prepared or lack good work habits.

GPAs tend to be lower in the STEM majors, and grade inflation in the non-STEM majors may be part of the reason. Another factor discouraging STEM majors may be the emphasis on theory, especially in the lower-division courses. Some STEM faculty members are experimenting with using project-centered curriculums to sustain the interest of the students. The traditional engineering major leads to a senior design thesis, but for many students this opportunity to turn STEM skills to practical applications comes too late.

It’s important to understand that a specific college degree, while it provides useful quantitative evidence for researchers, does not tell the whole story about the skills a young person acquires. A friend of mine dropped out of the engineering curriculum at a highly competitive engineering school and graduated with a degree in a humanities field. He would be considered a STEM dropout, but the STEM skills he acquired in high school and during the two years of engineering curriculum that he completed served as the foundation for a very successful career in technical sales.

You may also consider me a STEM dropout. Although I gave up on a STEM career goal well before entering college, I have had a lifelong interest in science and managed to acquire enough STEM skills to hold my present job, in which I spend a lot of time (sometimes days on end) working in databases and spreadsheets, even occasionally writing programs.

As Carnevale and his team found, the need for STEM skills in non-STEM occupations (even writing!) keeps growing. Educational policymakers need to do more than just encourage students to get STEM degrees. They need to ensure that the curriculum of everyone in high school and college includes STEM subjects and imparts STEM skills.

Who Pays the Price for Globalization?

Along with automation, the force that has caused the largest number of U.S. job losses is globalization. Jobs that used to be done by American workers are being shipped overseas, in a never-ending quest for lower-paid workers. But some American workers are being hurt by this more than others.

To understand who is suffering the most from globalization, it helps to consider what makes this economic environment possible. A major reason is free trade agreements with foreign countries, removing tariffs that used to shelter American industries. The argument for international trade is that it lowers costs for everyone, and I must agree that much (though not all) of the Chinese-made merchandise that fills the shelves at WalMart is priced lower than equivalent American-made goods.

On the other hand, even if you set aside the arguments against globalization (for example, the problem of China’s manipulation of its currency to depress the dollar cost of its goods), you cannot pretend that globalization has no adverse effects within the United States. Even if it’s too late to reverse globalization, policy-makers must recognize whom it damages and take appropriate measures to mitigate the damage.

Therefore it’s significant that last week Congress issued a little-noticed report (PDF here) on this topic, called “Nowhere to Go: Geographic and Occupational Immobility and Free Trade.” The report was written by the staff of Sen. Bob Casey for his role as chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The report notes that the chief American victims of free trade are older workers and those with less education. These two groups are concentrated in the manufacturing sector of the economy, the sector that has been undermined the most by competition from foreign countries.

These older workers are closer to retirement and therefore may be reluctant or unable to invest the time required to acquire the new skill sets needed for the industries that remain in the U.S., such as high technology, finance, and health care.

Occupational mobility often requires physical mobility: the ability to relocate to find work. Physical mobility also can allow workers to find new jobs in the same occupation as the job that was eliminated. But older workers are the least likely to move, both locally and over long distances. One important reason for this is that older workers are more likely to be homeowners and therefore may be tied down by the slow-moving real estate market we have been experiencing for several years now. Many are stuck with a mortgage that exceeds the market value of their house. And although older workers tend to have better-developed networks than younger workers, useful for finding work, the networks usually are anchored in the workers’ local community. If the community has few jobs, the network is of little help, but the displaced worker is reluctant to attempt to find a job in another location where he or she has no network in place.

The congressional report outlines the problem well but gives short shrift to solutions. I would suggest the following:

• Education has to be made more affordable, especially at community colleges. During the Cold War, aid to education was considered a matter of national defense. That has not really changed.
• We need to invest more in our infrastructure, which supports manufacturing (and, for that matter, all aspects of the economy)
• We need to run our manufacturing sector more on the German model, as I wrote in a blog a few weeks ago.
• We need to require that banks renegotiate mortgages for properties that are underwater. Most of these homeowners did not take on mortgages larger than they could afford but rather are victims of a general decline in real estate values. If homeowners can pay off their mortgages, they can relocate to where the jobs are.

Will Congress move on any of these measures? That seems unlikely, but it’s worth remembering that older workers are also the most likely voters.

Steve Jobs and American Jobs (part II)

Last week I used the iPod as an example of how innovation creates jobs, some of them offshore, but many of them--especially those that pay well--here in the United States. Steve Jobs, who died last week, was one of America’s greatest innovators, and we may well wonder where the next innovator of his caliber will come from. But another question is how and where that person’s skills for innovation will be refined and implemented.

We hear a lot of talk these days that the key to job creation is getting out of the way of the private sector. Tax it less, regulate it less, and it will nourish innovation and create the jobs that our economy so desperately needs right now. Let the marketplace discover and reward breakthrough technologies.

But there’s also a case to be made for the role of the public sector, especially at a time when the private sector is unwilling to invest in jobs and in basic research. I was impressed by the video of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren that recently went viral, in which she says, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you, but I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” It’s useful to remember that Steve Jobs was the product of a public school education.

Political demonstrators who invoke an earlier era by wearing three-cornered hats seem to forget that this country has a long legacy of innovation that was fostered by the public sector. Samuel Morse developed the electric telegraph in response to a prize that Congress offered for a better form of long-distance communication than the semaphore signals that were in use at that time. His first demonstration of long-distance telegraph transmission, from Baltimore to Washington, was financed by a federal grant.

At last night’s Republican debate, one of the questioners asked, “From the Erie Canal to the Internet, . . . innovation is what’s always fueled economic recovery.  So shouldn’t the focus now be on trying to create the innovative jobs of tomorrow?” None of the candidates present commented that the Erie Canal, which transformed New York City into the paramount port on the East Coast, was financed entirely by the public sector. So was the development of the Internet, by what’s now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The integrated circuit, which made all of Steve Jobs’s products possible, was invented by Jack Kilby, also the product of a public school education. He was working at Texas Instruments, a private-sector company, but TI morphed from a company that served the oil industry to an electronics powerhouse because of contracts from the Signal Corps and the Navy. Development of the computer chip got a massive boost from the space program.

In fact, the Cold War and the space race that grew out of it were responsible for a wide range of innovations that continue to shape our economy. This push also resulted in federally funded improvements to the infrastructure, notably the interstate highway system (which is officially called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways), along which Steve Jobs’s products were shipped to your door. This effort also expanded federal funding of education through the National Defense Education Act. The accelerated academic program that I was enrolled in while in (public) junior high school was initiated in direct response to Sputnik. And the fathers of many of my classmates had gone to college on the GI Bill and were working at a federally funded New Jersey laboratory that supported the work of the Signal Corps.

The recent collapse of the Solyndra company, recipient of a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, has been used by some as evidence that government support of innovation is misguided at best and corrupt at worst. But when private-sector investment is focused on complex derivatives and arbitrage rather than on basic research and infrastructure, the government becomes the innovation investor of last resort. The money that the treasury lost on Solyndra is miniscule compared to the funds that the private sector lost investing in subprime mortgages.

It will never be cheaper to borrow money than now. We can find workers more easily and hire them for less money than in normal times. What are we waiting for?

Steve Jobs and American Jobs

As the nation mourns the death of Steve Jobs, it’s interesting to look at the role that his company plays in job creation, because Apple is one of the highest-achieving firms in one of the outstanding American industries: high tech. I came upon a fascinating analysis of the employment impact of just one Apple product, a device that Steve Jobs essentially invented: the iPod. An article in the Journal of International Commerce and Economics (PDF) looks at how many jobs were directly created by the iPod.

It’s well known that the device is assembled offshore, mostly of foreign-made components, and the authors of the study estimate that the number of foreign jobs in the iPod value chain outnumbered domestic jobs in 2006 by 27,000 to 14,000. In fact, they estimate that only 30 production jobs and a similar number of professional jobs are created by the manufacture of a few iPod chips here in the U.S. However, in 2006 the iPod also accounted for “7,789 nonprofessional jobs (primarily in retail and distribution) and 6,101 professional jobs (primarily at Apple’s headquarters), including management, engineering, computer support, and a variety of other categories.”

More important, in their analysis of the earnings of the 41,000 iPod workers, the authors estimate that here the balance tilts decidedly toward the United States, where the workers earned nearly $750 million in 2006, compared to only about $320 million earned by the foreign workers. “Over two-thirds ($525 million) of the earnings in the United States went to professional workers, and an additional $220 million to nonprofessional workers. While most of the nonprofessional jobs were relatively low-paying retail positions, we estimated that nearly $50 million went to administrative jobs at Apple for which we used the national average wage of $38,000 a year; actual Silicon Valley wages were probably even higher.”

In drawing conclusions, they hold up the iPod as an example of the opportunities and risks that globalization has created. “Apple’s tremendous success with the iPod and other innovative products in recent years has driven growth in U.S. employment, even though these products are made offshore. These jobs pay well and employ people with college degrees. They are at the high end of what might be considered middle-class jobs and appear to be less at risk of vanishing from the United States than production jobs.”

However, these high-value jobs require that future workers coming out of U.S. schools get a really good education. In addition, there is the risk that creative jobs, such as engineers and designers, will be taken by overseas workers as foreign governments and even American companies invest offshore in education and in cultivating creative industries.

The authors of this study don’t address the question of how many jobs the iPod indirectly created--or destroyed. The invention of the iPod set off a revolution in the way music is distributed. As people shifted to buying music on the Web in the form of MP3s, many record stores had to close, and as pirated MP3s circulated widely, record companies suffered declining sales even as the amount of music being consumed probably continued to rise. Although the shift to MP3s probably caused a net loss of jobs, the iPod also sparked the invention of the podcast, which created many jobs, not only for podcasters themselves, but also for the sound engineers who are involved in production of the glossier podcasts. Radio broadcasting has been consolidating into a few megacorporations, such as Clear Channel, but podcasting has helped keep many local sound-production businesses afloat.

Of course, the iPod is only one Apple product that sprang from the fertile imagination of Steve Jobs. The iPhone created a whole new platform for which creative programmers could devise new applications. Many of Steve Jobs’s other inventions will continue to create employment for American and foreign workers who are still to be born.

Use Common Sense with Assessments

I worked for 19 years at the nation’s premier testing company, and one thing I learned was not to be dogmatic about assessments. Even the makers of the mighty SAT exam freely admit that their scores do not predict college achievement as well as high school grades do. The SAT scores still have value, however, because when combined with high school grades, they give a better prediction than the grades could alone.

Something similar can be said about assessments that are designed to help you with career choice: Alone, they probably are not the best way to identify a promising career. But combined with other sources of information, they can be very helpful.

Incautious assessment users sometimes forget that psychological instruments are not as precise as a yardstick. Every assessment has a certain margin of error, meaning that although its scores put you into category x, there is a chance that you really belong in the neighboring category y. In baseball games, it’s usually pretty obvious whether a ball has landed in fair or foul territory. But imagine what accuracy would be possible if the ball were ten times as big as a beach ball and even more squishy: Even the instant replay would not resolve a borderline hit.

In baseball, it’s also helpful that the foul lines are at the edges of the area that the batter is aiming for. Now imagine what the game would be like if a line ran right down the middle of the field, and the score of the game depended on which side of the line the enormous beach ball fell on. For good measure, imagine that both right-handed and left-handed batters tended to hit the ball towards the middle. Now you have an idea why I’m reluctant to use the Myers-Briggs assessment. It attempts to place you on one side or the other of a bipolar range (e.g., introvert or extravert), although the normal distribution that is so typical of psychological characteristics clusters most people near the middle. There’s a very high likelihood that your actual location on this continuum is close enough to the middle that the inevitably imprecise measurement of the instrument will assign you to the wrong side of the middle.

Although I prefer to use assessments based on the Holland types, I have to caution that they also are unable to achieve a pinpoint focus. For the Holland types, let me change the metaphor from baseball to hopscotch, where a lot depends on which square your marker lands in. On the playgrounds where I grew up, the squares tended to be at least 10 inches across, but imagine how the game would be if they were only 3 inches across and your marker were a beanbag the size of a dinner plate. Fortunately, the Holland rationale is conceptually more forgiving of ambiguity than is the Myers-Briggs rationale, because it is not bipolar and accepts the notion that bordering types (for example, Realistic and Investigative) share some characteristics. If I can’t tell for certain whether my beanbag fell in the Realistic of Investigative square, I probably would not err greatly by favoring occupations coded RI, IR, or even just R or I.

But the really big mistake would be to rely solely on the assessment, whatever its rationale. Here are some other indicators of your interests and preferences that you should consider:

• In what school subjects did I get the most enjoyment and the best grades?
• What activities am I reluctant to drop at dinnertime?
• What are my favorite sections of the newspaper or of news websites?
• At a party, what kind of people would I be able to sustain a conversation with?
• If you could meet the world’s greatest ____________ and get that person to share his or her secrets of success, what field would that person’s achievement be in? (Romance doesn’t count.)

Still another indicator is the opinion of a family member or of a friend who knows you very well. Explain the concepts that the assessment is designed to measure and ask this person which characteristics describe you best.

Making decisions is hard. People naturally tend to seek the quickest and easiest way to decide between x and y. This is one reason why people often perceive an assessment as the beginning and ending of the decision-making process. Instead, use an assessment as the start of a gradual process of self-discovery.