As my students constantly are looking toward the job market in the not-so-distant future, I found myself trying to figure out the best way to explain what to weigh in terms of job offers. The old pro/con lists seemed not to be as helpful as they once were, as it became difficult to weight ““management is nice” against “It’s too cold here.”
What I developed was the concept of three key aspects of life related to the job search that I call “The Three Scales.” The students seem to grasp it and it tends to help them feel more in control of their situation, so I’m sharing it here with the hopes it will be valuable to you and your folks:
THE THREE SCALES
When you consider a job, you consider a number of variables that seem almost like you’re juggling jello. To simplify the areas you need to consider, here are the three scales that cover most of the things that you will want to examine.
- PROFESSIONAL VALUE: What does this job do? How does it fit into the area of work I am interested in? What kinds of opportunities are available for learning? Advancement? Etc.
- FINANCIAL VALUE: What kind of salary do I get? What kind of benefits do I receive? What kind of buying power do I have with that money? How stable is that money?
- PERSONAL VALUE: What do I want out of my life beyond the job? How will my job help or hinder those things?
In breaking the job down into these areas, a lot of the considerations you have are easier to sort. For example, you might consider WHERE you live a pro or a con generally, but it’s hard to quantify that.
However, if you look at the scales, it can be easier to understand: If you are interested in movie and film industry, the WHERE might be a professional issue, with it being easier to find options in LA than Winneconne. However, if you are thinking, “I need to stay close to home here in Wisconsin” or “I want to go somewhere that I don’t turn into a pale freeze monster for nine months out of the year,” then the WHERE is a personal value.
These scales often work in dynamic tension with each other, meaning that when you go hard after one of them, you likely have to trade off something else on another scale. In some cases, you get value out of all three but rarely are they equal.
Let’s look at each of the scales individually and pick at the things that help shape those aspects of each scale:
PROFESSIONAL: The professional scale covers over the job and the work itself. You have multiple factors that contribute to this that are worth considering:
- GROWTH POTENTIAL WITHIN: If moving up the ladder in a field is important to you, the ability to grow within a company and try on many hats might appeal to you. That might mean you move from reporter to desk editor to managing editor of a small paper or it might mean you move from technician to team lead to management in a PR firm. The ability to move up and avoid writing the same press release or event story would fit here.
- SKILL ACQUISITION: A lot of jobs expect you to know a lot when you get there, but the best jobs teach you more and more things as you stay there. For example, you might be hired to do social media posts for Company X and you’re doing well on certain platforms. They then say, “Hey, let’s send you to a seminar where you’ll learn this new platform so we can expand our reach” or they might pair you up with people who are there that have expertise in an area with which you aren’t familiar. Just as each class we teach you is meant to put tools in your toolbox, jobs should be doing the same thing for you.
- WORK ENVIRONMENT: You might value the idea of working in groups or you might like the idea that you are left alone. You might want to be in an office filled with people who like stopping by your desk to shoot the breeze or you might want to work remotely. Some jobs are all about holding meetings for no real reason, while others don’t bother you at all. Some places value fast pace while others have no real sense of deadline. Finding the environment that best matches your vibe will improve your overall professional life.
- MANAGEMENT: This one is drastically overlooked in a lot of ways. I’ve had bosses I’d step in front of a bus for and others I wished I could have pushed in front of a bus. If I had the choice to take less money and work for a good boss or take more money and work for a bad one, I’d sell plasma to make up the difference if I needed to. That’s how much a boss can matter. Matching your vibe to their vibe is important, but also is the issue of honesty and integrity. One boss I had, I used to joke that she was always behind you, primarily because that was the best position to stab you in the back and run away. Other bosses instilled confidence in me. If a manager trusts you and values you, there’s a lot to be said for that.
- AREA OF INTEREST: In some cases, you might find yourself doing exactly what you trained for in media, only to really hate it. In other cases, you might take a job that’s somewhat tangential to your area of study and fall in love. Or the exact opposite can happen. A job becomes less of a job if you like what you’re doing, which can mean maybe being a TV anchor because you trained to be a TV anchor. Or it might mean you trained to be a broadcast journalist, but you fell in love with a job doing PR videos for an environmental organization because you really are passionate about the environment. The point is, if you like what you’re doing, you grow. My dad once told me if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. That’s pretty close to true.
FINANCIAL: Money isn’t everything, but it beats the hell out of whatever comes in second for a lot of people. You didn’t work this hard, study this much and give up this much of your soul to work for less than the average Walmart greeter. Consider the following part of your financial package:
- SALARY/HOURLY WAGE: You should do some research on the jobs you’re seeking to see what is a fair wage for the work, what kinds of expectations there are for that money (overtime vs. salary etc.) and other similar issues.
- BUYING POWER: Money isn’t equal everywhere, as for what it cost me to buy one Diet Coke in San Francisco, I can buy a 12 pack on sale at the Piggly Wiggly of Omro. Trying to figure out how financially sound you are is often a reflection of where you are working and what money buys out there.
- HEALTH AND LIFE: How much you have to put in for health insurance, life insurance etc. matters here, as does the quality of the bennies themselves. For some people, the ability to stay with a doctor matters more than how much they will have to pay for a co-payment. The benefit we had was that every time I took a new job, we moved somewhere new, so I basically was starting from scratch and didn’t have to worry if my preferred doctor was covered. Also, do they cover things like dental, vision and so forth.
- SALARY INCREASES: How often are you likely to get a pay bump or be able to renegotiate your salary? Are bonuses in the mix or is it straight pay for straight work? What kinds of bumps are there? Do raises come along easily and fairly or are you going to have to participate in The Hunger Games to get some of that fat cash?
PERSONAL: There’s way too much here to consider, but think about the things that matter to you outside of work. It might be living in a certain area of the country or being closer to family. It might be the ability to eat dinner at home or work certain shifts. It might be attaching yourself to a cause that you value or something along those lines. Think about the idea of what it is that really holds sway in your life that you would give up something else to have happen for you.
For example, I never realized how much I valued stability until I saw how layoffs work. A friend of mine has worked for multiple major software companies and he’s been fired or laid off at least five times in his career. Each time that happens, he said he’s usually found a job in 3-6 months and it’s usually better. He’s used to that and the lack of stability and he kind of plans for it to happen.
For me, I’d need about 8,000 milligrams of Valium each day to deal with the anxiety of going to work and not knowing if I’d be fired that day. I make less than he does, but it takes an act of God to get rid of me without cause.
BALANCING ACT
The hard part is often trying to figure out where you want to be at any given point in life. As we noted in the grad school post, it’s often a question of if you’re trying to run towards something or away from something. It’s also about making sure you aren’t cutting off your nose to spite your face.
One of the most important things to understand is that every job change is usually a concept of trading one thing for another. You get something, but you give up something else.
I often tell my sports-enthused students that it’s a lot like a Fantasy Football trade: You want a lock-down running back and the one you are trying to pry away from your friend wants a high-volume wide receiver. When you make the trade, it can feel awesome that you now know you’ll get 100 yards and a TD every game out of that slot, but now you’re constantly trolling the waiver wire looking for whoever the hell is the slot receiver in Cleveland.
In each move I made (and I know that’s true for a lot of former students as well), I had to consider what I was getting and what I was giving up. Keep in mind a few things in relation to how these tradeoffs work:
- ACKNOWLEDGE YOU ARE MAKING A TRADEOFF: One of the biggest mistakes people make in taking a job or switching jobs is that they look at it only in terms of what they’re getting. “I get to work at a bigger place,” or “I get more money.” The problem with that is once you get there, you realize you’re not JUST getting something, but you gave up something to get there and what you got probably isn’t as great as you thought it would be. This is the recipe for buyer’s remorse and some long-term misery. You need to look at both ends of the trade among the scales before you take a gig or make a move.
- WHAT DO YOU VALUE AT THAT POINT: Certain things matter more to you at certain points in time. To that degree, you often end up trading off one thing for another to maximize the value for yourself. Case in point, when you are at this stage in your life, you likely value experience and money, so taking a job that provides you the opportunity to do a lot of things and earn some decent cash makes sense. At some point, however, you might have a family and it’ll be more important to you to make it to your kid’s soccer game or to make sure you can eat dinner with the family each night. Thus, a job that’s maybe a little less go go go will be an improvement. Being honest with yourself about what matters to you personally (not in comparison to other people) will be helpful in this.
I just had a conversation with a former student over the summer who is a single mom and was let go from her job doing news. She was obviously freaked out and hurt by this, but then she asked about what it would “say” about her if she picked a job that wasn’t as much of a journalism news thing. I told her that life is long, there’s no “club” that we would kick her out of if she did so and it would likely be fine. I then outlined the three scales and she told me “I’m in my family stage and I want to soak up time with my kid because I have to share (custody) and I’ve totally done the job thing for a while that gives me zero personal. It’s not fun. I like disc golfing more. Being with family and hell, having a night in for once or not feeling pressured to have my professional camera in hand all the time…”
At some point in the past, digging through thousands of pages of FOIA documents was her first love. Now it’s a kid. There’s nothing wrong with that and when the kid is at that “Mom! You don’t have to hang around so much!” stage, she can go back to that if she wants. The point is, now she wants this one thing and it’s totally fine.
- DETERMINE HOW EASY IT WILL BE TO MAKE THE NEXT ONE: One of the things that happens as you get further into your careers is that you might have a greater difficulty in shifting the scales. If I wanted to change jobs, it would likely mean a move out of this city or maybe the state. For someone like Amy (a nurse with a ton of experience), she can literally throw a rock off the porch and hit six employers willing to sacrifice their first born to get her. The point is, you have to play a little more chess than checkers at this level of the game.