The 22 Careers of Brian Aillaud

I was in junior high the first time I was told that my generation would change careers more than any previous generation, and that many of the careers we would have had not been invented yet.  I do not recall the exact number of careers, but it seems like the most common number is seven.  This prediction seemed like malarkey then, and even more so now.  If the average worker will have seven careers, and I look at people I communicate with semi-regularly, I am the only one who has changed careers, and I did that once.  If I am generous with the count, I can get the count to four careers, but realistically, two seems like the more honest number.  If I look at five other people I know, they have all only had one career.  For the average to be seven, this group of six needs to have forty two careers!  If I assume that my group of six has worked for 25% of their total working years, and all five others made a switch today, I could expect them to have four careers over their working life.  This leaves me to make up the 22 careers remaining, which means I need to get busy.

The seeming ridiculousness of this statistic was described in 2010 by Carl Bialik for the the Wall Street Journal.  He has some quotes that support both sides, and some statistics that refute it.  The real problem he runs into in his column, not to mention what the Bureau of Labor Statistics seems to have difficulty with as well, is how to define a career change.  Bialik quotes a career councilor who gives this example:  "He describes one 30-year-old client, currently working as a manager of a doctor's office, who is exploring a new professional path. Previously, she worked in real-estate sales, at a talent agency, a sports-car dealership and as a sales representative at top-end health clubs."  An office manager would be a promotion from the front desk staff at a physician's office, who are, realistically, a form of sales staff.  So, this person has worked in sales and sales management, or a closely related field.  I count that as zero career changes.  The quoted career counselor, I assume, counts that as five careers.  Is it a career change every time someone in the military gets a promotion?  Every time a teacher changes grade level?  Every time a geologist changes rock type?  No, for me, a career change means a significant change in education, e.g. a new college degree.

I was lamenting the issue of career (job) changing during a company training one day.  I said something along the lines of, "my problem is that I cannot seem to stay in a field long enough to get beyond entry level."  Most of my low-level comrades did not understand my lamentation, but an executive director in another department laughed heartily, and was friendly with me the rest of the time I was with the company.  In that company, though this high-ranking individual appreciated my understanding of the workforce, and was one of the few who, without obligation, introduced me to her husband (or encouraged her husband to introduce himself), could do nothing to lift me out of my menial duties.

When I talk to people who are recruiting staff (it is becoming more and more common for my CV to be more developed than, but lacking as much continuity as these people), they hesitate to hire young people who do not want to do menial tasks.  While I will admit that I am less and less willing to be part of a "team" of high-school drop-outs, I do not mind doing these tasks to get the job done.  What I want is to have more responsibility and control over the entire aspect of my job.  I had a conversation with a vice-president-level executive once about this (he pressed me for something I would like to see changed in my job).  He was shocked.  He said he hated that part of his job, and wished he could do more geology.  After years of being reprimanded for not holding my tongue, I resisted my impulse to say, "then let's switch jobs."  To him, those aspects of the job were things that had distanced himself from what he loved about geology.  To me, those were the aspects of the job that were keeping me from rising in the company.  (I had, on multiple occasions, watched my supervisors absorb other project's budget over-runs with my profits, negating my chance of standing out among the junior staff.)

While to many it may seem that I have a cavalier attitude about leaving jobs, and changing my life, it is actually that I take very seriously my ability to advance in any career.  If a job is dead-end, why stay in it longer than you have to?  If you are told you are ineligible for promotions and raises (which I have been told within the first month of being with a company), then you must start looking for a new job where those are a possibility.  Everyday you spend in that position is a day of your life you have wasted.  So to those who see job switching as being cavalier with your career, I see not job switching as being cavalier with your life.

This verbose introduction brings into light a question without an answer.  What am I looking for professionally? I get tired of this question, so I have developed a string of quips to respond with, "independent wealth," and "outdoor gear tester with no salary, but a credit card with no limit, and someone else to pay the bills."  In reality though, I am looking for a company that values my abilities, and me as a person.  I also follow a strict rule where I only give a company as much respect as the company gives me.

A co-worker once told me that the military needs people like me (he was retired Air Force), but that people like me are not interested in the military.  In many ways, he was right (about the latter part).  I have never really felt like the military valued me as a person.  Whenever I have spoken with a recruiter, they always seemed very interested in my abilities, but never that interested in my person.  The military, for good or bad, has never been that interested in diversity, which is a major strike against for them from my perspective.  That said, there are many facets of the military that do interest me.  Some of it may be imagined, as I do not know much about the military, but I do value that the military does not pretend that everybody has a say, like science does.  It seems that the military earnestly wants to employ people in positions that they are best suited for.  The military (and I'll include the CIA and NSA in this) seem genuinely interested in improving their workforce by promoting education, foreign language proficiency, and physical fitness, as well as empowering their employees to do their jobs more effectively by furnishing essential family services, e.g. childcare (which I would never use).

A few companies do this, maybe not to quite the level of the military, but when you read Yvon Chouinard's book, Let My People Go Surfing, it is clear that Chouinard values his employees as people.  He also argues that when the company's budget is considered holistically, expenses like onsite childcare facilities pay for themselves.  These companies are rare, making jobs with them highly coveted.  Companies like Patagonia are also legally prohibited from excluding people based on sex and sexual orientation, and though many of them still do not offer women equal pay, they cannot openly discriminate.

Thus, the first thing I am looking for is a company that values improving the lives of its employees.  I have friends who work for Boeing and Encana, both of which offer commuter incentives, which improve the quality of their employee's lives.  Teck, a company I have worked for, offers employees discounts at gyms, and will sponsor health and well-being initiatives.  Perks that those in the private sector often forget are not present in public sector jobs (outside the military).  While some of those companies do value their employees, many companies do not.  They may have these perks as ways to appear to value their employees, because most people will accept pretend appreciation when they are accustomed to none at all.

Before I seem too cynical though, I will admit that I became slightly jaded with worker's rights as a child.  My parents were active in the National Education Association, and so I was privy to the slow erosion of pay and benefits my parents experienced from their employers, and the waning support to outright hostility they experienced from parents and the public.  Through them, I learned that I had to take care of myself in the workplace, because no one else was.  (I also learned from them that it was absolutely important to take care of others, but my point is elsewhere.)  

When it came time to choose a career path, I chose engineering.  In many ways, the idea of engineering chose me.  As a very young child I wanted to be a garbage man, who else gets to cruise around on a big truck all day?  But, after that mysterious phase which is apparently not entirely uncommon, I wanted to create things.  The next question was what I wanted to create.  In junior high, where careers start being explored, it was computers, but at that time, computers looked like the future (they were, and are), but eventually, I realized that my true love was the outdoors.  Through twisted logic that only the ill-advised could create, I found mining engineering.  

My grandfather was apparently disappointed in this decision, as he felt I, my abilities and personality, would be better suited in medicine.  I say apparently, because his wise and loving nature allowed me to only ever know his support, never his disappointment.  Another person and the only career advice I ever got through the schools thought I should pursue medicine as well.  A career test in junior high suggested that I was ideally suited for a career either as a gardener, or a cardiologist.  The range in career goals given in that test seemed to impeach its ability to offer any insights into a potential career.  Rather vividly, I remember classmate, Jenni, talking to me at a desk in the science classroom in high school.  If it was a class, it had to have been early in high school, freshman or sophomore year.  Equally as likely, it was late in high school, and we had been herded into the room for a class meeting.  I do not remember the specifics of the conversation, but she asked what I wanted to be, I told her an engineer, and she reacted with, "Why? You should be a doctor or something."  I remember her visceral rejection of my ambitions clearly.  Her contention was that I was smart enough to do something useful, like cure cancer, and I would instead be wasting it on designing mines.  It actually made me a little angry, why should my abilities choose what I do?  Why do I have to dedicate myself to the common good of people, what about the good of me?

Years later, I find that my reaction to my career choice is much the same as Jenni's.  Not that I fancy that I could study medicine, then immediately cure cancer.  Maybe I would get lucky, and I would be the Nobel Laureate who will be honored for creating the final "cure for cancer," but most likely I would just put another brick in the proverbial wall, making a better world.  My new regret is not related to abilities, but rather to what is important to me.  The world needs mining, and I find myself defending an industry I do not love because of the simple logic of its necessity (read my post "The Inevitability of Pebble Mine" for more), yet mining does not need me.  Nor do I get any great satisfaction from providing the world with copper.  I like the puzzle of exploration, and earth systems are fascinating, but at the end of the day, I feel empty.  I wonder if I had listened to Jenni better, would I feel empty at the end of the day?  After all, Jenni is not just some girl in a class of 1000 people (my class was something on the order of 27 students).  I grew up with her.  She was one of, if not the first girl I "liked," well before that had any romantic meaning.  This was a person who had known me well for, essentially, my entire life, so why wouldn't she know something about what I should do with my life?

The obvious choice now is to make that change.  The challenge with career changes, as I define them, is that they are difficult.  This is not changing from selling exclusive gym memberships to selling fancy cars, this is years of education, years of lost wages, years of commitment, all of which could culminate in a career that turns out to not be an improvement.  Further, all those years of education could place me on the other side of age discrimination, where I have the same difficulty finding a job that I do now.

Age discrimination is almost always used to describe discrimination against people who are older.  Yet, a position that requires a college degree and five to ten years of experience is essentially saying, those under 30 need not apply.  That is age discrimination in a cloak of "experience."  The jobs my abilities are most suited for at this stage of my life almost always require a person to have a PhD, and 10-15 years of experience.  Yet, also require a person to be agile and healthy.  In a single job description, the job advertiser excludes everyone under and over 40.  I will admit to some dramatization to try to underscore a point, but I think anyone who has applied for jobs can attest to this frustration.

For those who balk at the apparent arrogance of saying that I have the abilities of someone with much more experience, like those recruiters wary of inexperienced who balk at menial tasks, should consider a few things.  First, I am arrogant (cf. I have a blog).  Second, while not in the same industry, I have a solid experience base, including project planning and management.  Third, I recently took a silly online career test, that offered that I am most suited for a managerial role.

Let us assume that these career and personality tests have some merit.  That by answering sixty questions the internet can assess the best career for a person.  Given this assumption, the test suggests that I have already encountered my first calamity with the Peter principle, before I am ever promoted.  Whereby, my abilities are most suited for a position that is not my current position, or that my level of incompetence is entry level.  Without wading through every eponymous "law," I must consider the related Dilbert principle, and the Dunning-Kruger effect (Writing of Dilbert, a recent comic takes a humorous look at Millennials in the workforce).  If the Dilbert principle is correct, then I am not promoted because I am technically competent, and the work I do is highly valued at the entry level.  This interpretation holds with my experience of my profits being vanished through the creative accounting of my superiors.  It also lets me save face, avoiding the much less flattering Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect would suggest that my inflated self-worth is a result of my own incompetence.  I do not think this applies, because I am not arguing that I am better than people at my current level, and therefore should be promoted.  I am arguing that I think I would be better than people at my level than they would be at the level above us.  That is I assume that others are as good as me at say, collecting soil samples, but others are not as good at me at planning a soil sampling program.

The fun considerations of professional life created by these principles are mostly harmless, but suggest several things about career choice.  If I am to change careers then I need to change to something where the entry level position is personally rewarding, engaging, and technical enough that I do not feel the need to be upwardly motivated.  Possibly academia is then the best place for me to be, or maybe it is something in the geosciences that I have not yet tried.  Perhaps it is medicine, as my grandfather and childhood friend thought.

The difficulty in making these decisions is that for the person it affects the most, the answer is the hardest to see.  Often those close to us do have a better vision of what we should do, but they rarely have the understanding of the situation to make an elegant and persuasive argument.  My MS advisor was probably the most successful at having a positive sway over these decisions, but I still cannot face his last suggestion, a PhD in experimental geology.  Unfortunately for me, most people who have ideas for me, are either too respectful of my personality to suggest them, or I am too stubborn to listen.