Strategies for Success in the academic world, non profits and other ambient than the traditional business arena

Sometimes I get a comment that some of the career strategies I describe in this blog are too oriented to the business world, and are far from reality of the academic world (and other paths like the NGO, sports, etc.). I decided to take a closer look at what the differences and similitude’s are.

It is true that I use most of my examples from the Business world, it is maybe the most common scenario and easy to grasp for everyone, but the intent of the Career Blueprints blog is to help all young adults to start or boost their careers, including careers outside the business world.

I started my career in the academic world early on, during high school I participated in the International Mathematics Olympiads (I know, quite nerdy… ) I trained for 2 years to represent my country in the WW contest, and from there my path was clear, I studied Math in the National University in my home country, Mexico (UNAM) and since the first month I was doing some research, attending congresses and taking the most advances courses, I was in an “all in” mode. I developed a close relationship with many scientists doing research I got to understand pretty well that world. Also my father has been involved in research and teaching forever (like 40 years or something) and I have meet many many PHDs both new and old. In the NGO and not for profit world I also have experience, much less than in the Academic world, but I participated in an NGO for a couple of years, since inception until it was fully operational and I have had close contact with many “nature/ecology” organizations for many years.

After a few years in the Math world I decided to make the switch to the business world (money and fame are the reasons J), first building my own company  and now in a big corporation. Let me tell you that even some pieces are different, the tools and strategies are the same. What you do to be successful is really similar and most of what I cover in this blog, applies to the academic path, the NGO path and the business path. You will need to fill a certain set of specifics that your path requires, no doubt about it, I may not be the right person to help you with that, but I am sure, that many of the tools covered here will work.

First let’s start with what is different.

In the Academic world, the weight of the “intellectual power” is slightly higher, publishing is a measure of success, advanced studies (like master or PhD) are a must, jobs are a little bit more “secure” and rotation of jobs is smaller.

In the NGO and not for profit world its basically the same than the business world but the objective of the organization, so passion for the cause is more important and in many cases, they are slightly more tolerant to personal mistakes.

Besides a couple of things I am sure I forgot, the three worlds are very similar in many aspects, all paths give a great deal of importance to reputation, past achievements, relationships and networks. You get a compensation (I don’t mean money exclusively) and you add value to the organization, either in the form of a marketing plan, a group of students trained in calculus or raising 100,000USD in donations in an event, you get something and you give something. You want to get more (again, can be money, can be recognition, can be saving the rainforest) in that deal, and you know you have to give more to get it (more can mean more time, but can also mean other things, like less time doing more impactful things). You want to raise the ranks and fulfill your dreams. These are universal structures of human nature, as always with any generalization, there are exceptions and deviations, but for most of us, they are true at least.

That is why many resources to be successful in business are in reality general, they apply to the academic and NGO worlds (and sports, and others). The reason they look very businesslike is money. There is a hungry audience willing to pay. But that doesn’t mean an academic can follow tips to build a resume, define a personal brand, have a successful interview or any other tip in the blog, it only means, they have to add a tailoring to it to fit the protocols and expectations of that mini universe.

I think that under this perspective, the importance is in the individual awareness, development and knowledge of your own objectives, strengths, weaknesses and others related things, instead of the specific path he or she is following. That is the last mile of customatization, and that, that is up to you to add.

Is Generation Y doomed? How to save yourself

You know the feeling, most of your friends and maybe even you are facing a tough reality, so many people is going back to live with their parents because they can’t pay a rent, or they live with 2 or 3 other friends to share the expenses. We come out prepared, with a lot of studies and energy, we breadth technology, we have good ideas and yet, there is not enough room for all of us. An entire generation is fighting to survive.

What is Generation Y you ask? I really don’t like being  tagged as Generation Y, I mean, it translates literally as “the guys after the uninteresting Generation X” and that is not flattering… there are other terms like the Millennials, iGeneration or the Net Generation but unfortunately they are not widespread so I will have to use that term, deal with it.

In a nutshell you are part of the Generation Y if you are less than 30 and you are not a kid, it can vary depending on your country , but roughly that’s it, the young adults of today. Your parents are usually Baby Boomers, a very strong generation that was able to provide a lot to their kids, we had better education than in any point in history, computers since you were a kid, we can multitask (doing many things at once), I mean, we look great on paper!.

What went wrong? Well a combination of several things, first old guys live longer now, so they work more years, so they occupy the seat more time. Second our generation is maybe the first with a strong representation of women, so now for the first time, it’s not only men fighting for the job. Third many parents did their best to provide us with strong educations, so there is a lot of people with college and even higher studies. When you add it up it means too much demand for a job offering that can keep the pace (hold your flames for a moment, as a disclaimer: I think it’s great that seasoned people can work longer and that women can compete with equal rights, what sucks is that opportunities don’t grow as fast as we need).

What can we do? As in any other Darwinian situation its survival of the fittest, so you need to have a good strategy from the start, something that will let you apart of the rest, here are some ideas:

Lots of experience: This is the typical chicken egg situation. Most people will go to the first job interview and face the hard question, do you have experience? (you think “no, this is my first job, what did you expected?”), as the answer is mostly no, you become a risk that not all companies want.  How can you counter this? Find opportunities to get experience in the fields that you want early on, if you can during college. It doesn’t matter if they are greatly paid or interesting; it’s part of the training. This is the strategy I choose, I am almost 30 and I have 13 years of professional experience.

Top grades: Top grades students are recruited by some companies into special programs to build future leaders, the problem is that unless your school happens to be in their radar, they will miss you. So you need to be proactive before graduating if possible. Find out how is shopping and engage.

Start low, grow fast: This is one of the most popular strategies, you take something small, and you expect that delivering great results you will shine and grow on the organization, the big problem is that most people think that great results will come because they are great (I know in your case its true, you are the smartest guy around… but the problem is that everyone thinks the same…). And on top of that, sometimes, even if you deliver great results, some organizations will not respond as you expected.

Build a network: A different approach is to build early on a reputation and a network, and expect that someone will bring you in. It’s like fishing. It’s important to have both pieces, a good reputation, that means you are seen as trusted and hard working AND a network of people that you think have good chances to grow fast, either because of their family or their brains.

A combination of strategies that suit you is best. It doesn’t matter which ones you choose, the most important thing you should you, (I left it to the end so only if you read everything you get it J) is this:

There is a big gap between You out of school, and the You that a company would like. BIG.

This means that you don’t have the set of abilities that will make you successful professionally, you may have some from college or your masters degree, but trust me, you don’t have the complete set. It gets worst; you may even not discovering that, so you have done nothing to remediate it. Until now.

I built this blog as one of the pieces of a bigger strategy to help my generation remediate that, I am trying to concentrate all the best practices that other successful young adults have and share them. That is the objective of Career Blueprints for a new generation. Invest some time reading the articles and subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated, I will try to make it fun but either way, it will be realistic, useful and life changing, I put my word on that. Send your comments to help me shape it.

Help me change our Generation perspectives, spread the word.

Felipe

Rewire your brain, dont be a caterpillar

In work as in our personal life we sometimes tend to let the old habits rule our behavior, for comfort we tend to codify certain responses into our “nervous system” and they become almost reflexes, that is what Stephen Covey would call Reacting (vs. Proactive) as his 1^st habit of highly effective people (amazon).

 A common example is when someone says a critique about our work, some people tend to think: this guys made a critique of my project, therefore he is insulting my intelligence, click, whirl, snap, I am very angry now at him and I should get even. Pure primitive reactions that get in the way. I describe some of the aspects of this in the 4 steps to talk to unreasonable (read stupid) people.

These responses help us save some time thinking, and were especially useful while living in the jungle, tiger roar, click, whirl, RUN! This was a simple environment, not much to think, so simple codification was very useful. Now that we live in more complexes environments, when hostility may not always be life threatening we need better responses, we need to go against our nature and break the habit and the reflex to introduce a previous reflection moment. We need to rewire our brains.

There is a very interesting bug, called processionary caterpillars, they have developed a technique of finding food,  they follow the caterpillar in front, no matter what, forming long lines of caterpillars walking all according to the first guy criteria. One scientific called Jean-Henri Fabre once decided to test the limits of this bugs, he guided the front  caterpillar (and therefore make the entire column follow) until he put the front one just behind the last caterpillar, forming a circle, there was no more front leader but no one bothered to wonder that, they just followed one another. They continued and continued marching; the scientist decided to put them to a test and placed food inches away. How long until they get tired of this and go to eat or rest? He left the caterpillars walking in the circle and he discovered something amazing.

The caterpillar followed the behavior for a week until starving to death, no thinking, just acting even if that means a slow death with food inches away.

Pretty similar to some behaviors we follow sometimes, when it matter the most, we tend relay more on hard coded behaviors, reacting and not choosing our actions.

We can connect this with the anatomy of the brain, were we can distinguish 3 main pieces. The cortex and neo cortex (rational thinking), the limbic brain (emotional center) and the automatic brain (breathing and basic functions center).

Usually when we think we use the Cortex, it’s much slower than the other parts and it needs to take breaks (like when you day dream) but it’s capable of solving problems, planning, and high level tasks.

When you connect a past experience to the present and act without thinking, that is when the limbic brain is in control, remember that dog that bite you as a kid?, every time you react to dogs with fear it’s for that reason, that is the limbic brain in full, it never rests, its 100 times faster than the cortex and it can highjack your entire body and cause stress, fear and other feelings.

There are many techniques to control yourself on this circumstances, and an entire set of books around Emotional Intelligence that connect to this, but the first and most step is to understand in ourselves the animal within so we can someday learn to tame it.

Have fun discovering it

Felipe