Winning - Jack Welch [88]
The point is: it is virtually impossible to know where any given job will take you. In fact, if you meet someone who has faithfully followed a career plan, try not to get seated beside him at a dinner party. What a bore!
Now, I’m obviously not going to tell you to let fate take its course. A great job can make your life exciting and give it meaning. The wrong job can drain the life right out of you.
But how do you find the right job?
The first answer is simple: you endure the same gummy, time-consuming, up-and-down, iterative process that all working people go through. You take one job, discover what you like and don’t like about it and what you’re good and bad at, and then, in time, change jobs to get something closer to the right fit. And you do that until one day you realize—hey, I’m finally in the right job. I like what I’m doing, and I’m making the trade-offs I’m willing to make.
Yes, trade-offs, because very few jobs are perfect. You may love your work with every fiber of your being but wish the money were better. Or you may only like the work, but love your colleagues. Regardless of its dimensions, the right job for you exists.
My goal in this chapter is to make finding that job a somewhat shorter and, hopefully, less mysterious process.
How?
Luckily, most jobs send out signals about how right they are for you—or not. Those signals apply to jobs at every level of an organization; you can be right out of school, a middle manager trying to move up, or a senior executive looking for a top job. Of course, there are special situations in the job search process that require separate consideration—finding your first job, finding a job if you’re stuck in a situation, and finding a job after you’ve been let go. We’ll consider those at the end of this chapter.
But first, let’s look at the general signals—both good and bad—of job fit.
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IMAGINE YOU ARE CONSIDERING A NEW JOB…
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The “stuff” of the job turns your crank—you love the work, it feels fun and meaningful to you, and even touches something primal in your soul.
SIGNAL
TAKE IT AS A GOOD SIGN IF…
BE CONCERNED IF…
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PEOPLE
You like the people a lot—you can relate to them, and you genuinely enjoy their company. In fact, they even think and act like you do.
You feel like you’ll need to put on a persona at work. After a visit to the company, you find yourself saying things like, “I don’t need to be friends with the people I work with.”
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OPPORTUNITY
The job gives you the opportunity to grow as a person and a professional, and you get the feeling you will learn things there that you didn’t even know you needed to learn.
You’re being hired as an expert, and upon arrival, you will most likely be the smartest person in the room.
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OPTIONS
The job gives you a credential you can take with you, and is in a business and industry with a future.
The industry has peaked or has awful economics, and the company itself, for any number of reasons, will do little to expand your career options.
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OWNERSHIP
You are taking the job for yourself, or you know whom you are taking it for, and feel at peace with the bargain.
You are taking the job for any number of other constituents, such as a spouse who wants you to travel less or the sixth-grade teacher who said you would never amount to anything.
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WORK CONTENT
The job feels like a job. In taking it, you say things like, “This is just until something better comes along,” or “You can’t beat the money.”
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A WORD ABOUT PAY
Before we talk about each of these signals in more detail, a few thoughts about money, the elephant in the middle of the room during any job discussion.
There is nothing worse than a guy who has made some money along the way opining that money shouldn’t matter to people who are picking a job. So I won’t do that. In fact, I’ll tell you that of course money matters—it matters a lot.
When I took my first job, I had several offers, but the one from GE was $1,500 a year