Apr 30

Apr 30 Every job I've ever had: part 12.

It’s funny, as I go through my career history, I keep remembering one off gigs (usually about an hour after I hit publish on a post). Like the summer I spent in the Township of Red Bank’s Parks and Rec department, as a wannabe Leslie Knope. So I’m rolling a few things into this final installment and well, probably skipping a few others. Here’s a look at the last seven years, give or take a side job or two:

Job #19 - Tech PR pro.

Age at time of employment: 28-present
Qualifications: Varied.
Employer: The Devon Group.
Application process: You could say I knew the CEO.
Onboarding: Jumped right in.
Training: Life-long training.
Pay rate: Varied.

Job #20 - Freelance jack of all trades (continued).

Age at time of employment: 27-present
Qualifications: Varied.
Employer: Varied.
Application process: Varied.
Onboarding: N/A.
Training: N/A
Pay rate: Depends.

Job #21 - Employer brand expert.

Age at time of employment: 33
Qualifications: Varied.
Employer: Verizon.
Application process: Recruited.
Onboarding: My boss walked me around the office.
Training: I took a couple of online courses.
Pay rate: Hourly.

This is where things get complicated. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that career paths aren’t always straight. Sometimes you jump off one and onto another. Sometimes you wind around and around not even sure of the destination, anyway, back to my story.

Seven years ago, in the fall of 2012, I decided to leave the city (once again) and buy a house by the beach. I was tired of bouncing around every year and eager to grow “roots.” As part of this move, I also went to work for a family business, taking all my years of marketing and communications to The Devon Group. The reality is, I’ve been working on and off at The Devon Group since high school, lurking in the background and learning about the wonderful world of PR. This experience also means I know far more about HR technology and recruiting than your average person, with most of our client based concentrated in this space.

I stayed there full-time for five years, before deciding to try my hand at freelancing in early 2018. That brought me a host of new opportunities, contributing to sites like RecruitingDaily and ghostwriting for a slew of HR tech “influencers.” That’s right; those people you think are so dang smart and profound are sometimes…me.

Around this time I also took on a project at Verizon, tasked with launching the company’s careers blog, Verizon Works. There I spent about seven months getting the project up and running, jumping through the corporate hoops and drafting the first slate of content. Despite the bureaucracy, this work earned some early praise from the Bowen Craggs & Co. Index of Online Excellence, which called out, “Verizon's new Careers blog and 'Inside Verizon' section, with daily behind-the-scenes videos, also do an effective job of 'selling' Verizon as an employer. The blog only has a few posts so far, but it has a strong statement of purpose – ‘a blog that offers careers insights and advice’” less than two months in. Still, enterprise life wasn’t for me, and I moved on quickly after receiving that validation (and a job offer). What can I say, I like to float.

And there you have it. Every job I’ve ever had. All 21 of them (or close enough).

Next up: Not done yet. Let’s take a deeper dive into the great job application experiment of 2018 (a.k.a. I applied to more than 50 jobs to see what would happen and kept a spreadsheet in the process).

Image by @robin_rednine.