Translating vacancy announcement jargon

Posted on March 23, 2012
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job | Leave a Comment

After completing graduate school, I read thousands of job vacancies as each day I would sit behind my laptop pouring over the information returned to me by job listing aggregators like Indeed.com. For better or worse, the Internet is an ever-expansive information landscape, whose beginning and end are never in reach, and always out of sight. In short, my queries returned all of the information I could possibly handle. While this less-than-systematic approach to searching for a job didn’t supply me with any solid leads, after a month of searching I began to recognize patterns—similar logic—underlying seemingly divergent position descriptions. Beyond evident structural similarities, contained within many of those vacancies was the same tired, vapid, unspecific language. In the same way that we might form “schools” out of writers whose prose have similar, identifiable stylistic or thematic touches, job vacancies, full of vague unhelpful language and jargon, might be understood as representing a specific, thoroughly unentertaining, uninviting species of literature, its name both entirely apropos—reflective of its function—and ironic: Vacant. Read more

Keeping your shoes on in your next interview

Posted on March 20, 2012
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Interview | Leave a Comment

Nowhere does Murphy’s Law ring more true than in an interview. It’s a gauntlet. Something through which job seekers are forced to pass, hoping to make it out the other end intact; a series of carefully devised challenges, tailored to incite confusion, anxiety, and, sometimes, (mild) panic. For many job seekers, living through an interview might appear like surviving the garbage compactor—a room of sodden of trash and debris, its walls closing in without any evident means of escape—into which Luke Skywalker and his motley gang tumble in “A New Hope.” While some job seekers may face this daunting challenge with greater air of confidence and courage than others, the experience strikes every job seeker with the same, inextricable fear. And some job seekers, unsure of how to handle the situation or pressure, box themselves in, committing some of the most egregious interviewing sins. Read more

Reading resumes as cultural economic history

Posted on March 7, 2012
Filed Under Cover Letters and Resumes, Employment, Finding a Job, Hiring Forecast, Recession | Leave a Comment

Have you ever considered what’s driving lexical evolution? That is, have you ever wondered how forces of culture and language interact, and may influence each other? Although it can be difficult to trace effect to cause, determining how the introduction of certain words into the public lexicon may begin to impact or shape our cultural horizons and vice versa, woven into our everyday language is a complex web of understanding. While stating that language is a gateway to understanding may be a bit mundane—after all, without language we would presumably lack the requisite tools to properly formulate the ideas which form the foundation for all understanding—perhaps more exceptional is the remark that, in using language, we sometimes subconsciously communicate information about our social, cultural, and/or historical context. That, unbeknownst to us, our use of certain words instead of others may covertly convey important details about the socio-cultural milieu of which we are part. So what does this have to do with resume writing? More than you might think. Read more

Translation vs. Transposition: How to apply military experience in civilian markets

Posted on February 27, 2012
Filed Under Career Change, Cover Letters and Resumes, Employment, Federal Employment, Finding a Job | Leave a Comment

Admittedly, the lines connecting military experience and professions in the civilian sector are not always clear cut. In fact, the translation of military experience into civilian terms is not always easy—some ideas, experiences, skills, and qualifications may not always seem translatable, computable, or easily applicable. Thinking about the difficult task of translation with which servicemen and servicewomen are often tasked brings to mind something poet and translator John Ciardi wrote in his introduction to his translation of Dante’s Inferno, writing, “I believe  that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a ‘transposition’ than a ‘translation,’ for ‘translation’ implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin.” Although Ciardi’s words ring true as it regards the business of translation, many employers (including the federal government) have come to realize our men and women in blue are not only highly trained, but possess an array of unique skills and abilities carefully honed through military service. Using Ciardi’s metaphor, even if piano sounds may not exist in the violin, a violin can certainly carry a melody played on a piano. So too, even if the specific duties one performed while in the military may not directly correlate to professions in the civilian sector, employers have come to realize that military experience and knowledge can be easily transposed, and put to use in the civilian workplace. Read more

The 14 unicorns of business

Posted on February 20, 2012
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Hiring Forecast, Recession | Leave a Comment

I remember writing a position paper as an undergraduate philosophy student, which, I suppose in some way, epitomizes how philosophy is sometimes characterized by popular culture: arcane, esoteric, and utterly preposterous (or bizarre). My target? I sought to expose the epistemological faults latent in empirical observation. My foil? The unicorn (its single antler does, after all, resemble a sword). While I used more than the mere unicorn to illustrate my point—I used something even more intellectually elusive: theoretical physics—I hoped to change the parameters we use to determine whether a thing exists. In short, I (quite unsuccessfully, I might add) sought to conflate two different categories of being: things that exist only in concept (e.g. unicorns) and the intelligible, observable universe. Read more

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