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Resumés: What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?

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Over at LinkedIn, a member of an editors’ group posted this link to a very entertaining rant by ghostwriter Jeff Haden. I used to teach resumé-writing and, as a business owner and as the head of an editorial office at the Great Desert University, discovered all that canned resumé advice, straight out of the textbook, came back to haunt.

How many times have you told some prospective employer how “unique” you are? How superlatively unique!

And how could you fail to tell the hiring committee of your “goal-oriented” nature? Your “world-class” administrative assistant skills? Your “creative,” “dynamic,” and “results-oriented” personality?

But did you happen to provide a concrete example to prove any of these steamy claims?

Come on! All I want is someone to do the filing, answer the phone, and learn the university’s involved purchasing software so we can order some paper now and then. Do I need a “world-class” administrative assistant for these Herculean tasks? Especially one who doesn’t know “world-class,” “goal-oriented,” and “results-oriented” are hyphenated?

When I look at a resumé, I hope to see what specifically the applicant has done somewhere else that a) indicates what he can accomplish on the job and b) tells me how she can bring the skills required to bear on the tasks that my organization needs to have done.

It comes right back to the oldest chestnut of advice to budding writers: Show, don’t tell.

Show an example of what you can do. And try to provide specifics, preferably with figures, that bear on the work you’ll be doing in job you’re trying to land.

If you must use a vague term like “creative” because you figure your resumé is being sorted by a computer searching for keywords, list accomplishments that prove you’re creative:

• Established and oversaw two new departments for Arizona Highways, “Hike of the Month” and “Mileposts”
• Created and taught the College of Arts and Sciences’ first fully online course

You’re “goal-oriented”? Prove it:

• Wrote four feature-length articles a month plus several shorter pieces for regional and national magazines
• Obtained a contract for and completed a fourth book

“Results-oriented”? Show what results you obtained:

• Co-wrote national bestseller for William Morrow that returned $1.5 million in revenues during its first year and $1 million the second year
• Redesigned research newsletter, turning it into a “magaletter” that became the basis of its current magazine format

You say you’re a “team player”? Whose team did you play on?

• Established and developed office and designed all management policies. Developed and regularly updated strategic plan.
• Initiated collaboration with Scholarly Publishing Program and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
• Coordinated management of unit with office of the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
• Consulted with faculty editors and Dean’s Office on publishing matters.
• Mentored graduate students in Scholarly Publishing Program.

If you’re feeding bloviated terms from a job description back to the employer, remember that the person doing the hiring wants to know what you can do for the company, not what you think of yourself — even if you think your qualifications exactly match the hot air in the job ad.

Find out something about the employer. Then massage your resumé so it highlights past accomplishments or training that bears directly on the kind of work you will be doing in the coveted new job. It’s all very nice that you did x or y for some other outfit. But what can you do for me? In your cover letter, show how that will come to pass.

The cover letter, in particular, should explicitly show that you understand something about the hiring company or agency and explain what, exactly, you can do for it. Don’t talk about your needs, for heaven’s sake. Talk about what you can do for the employer.

One of the funniest application letters that ever crossed my desk came from a guy whose cover letter went on and on about why he was applying to my company. He explained in great detail how he had moved to Florida in search of a better life. He decided he didn’t like the weather there and so he was moving to Arizona and wished to come to work for me.

Second runner-up: an application from a newly minted J-school graduate who couldn’t spell and didn’t recognize the comma splices with which she had salted her cover letter.

😆 🙄 😆

Sure: it’s all about you. But your task is to make it look like you’re all about the employer. And prove it.

Another best-laid plan defunct

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{sigh} So the scheme to do a little market research and then race out to Tempe to meet my business partner got derailed last night.

I was thinking the real estate course’s final exam took place next week, during finals week. No. It’s tomorrow!

Forgot that these five-week short courses do not have dedicated final exam periods. I assumed we would meet next Tuesday for the exam. And of course, since I was figuring I’d have Friday, Saturday, half of Sunday, and Monday to read the three chapters I haven’t looked at and to figure out the math procedures that went over my head, I am SO not prepared. Not only that, but I’m only about 3/4 of the way through the page proofs that are due tomorrow morning—had figured to spend late afternoon and evening finishing that, since I’ll hit the road at 6:45 tomorrow morning.

So had to cancel everything for today and dedicate the entire day to reading page proofs and trying to catch up with the course material that I fell behind on while dealing with the toxic client. Shee-ut! That was not what I had in mind.

Fortunately, I scored a 96 on the mid-term. Asked the instructor if I would get a “C” in the course if I fail the final, which I fully expect to do. Did I really need to ask? This is a junior college, after all… He said not to worry, everyone in the class would get an A or a B, and that the final would have no meaning.

Why are we doing this? Why…why…? Because we have to sit in a classroom for 90 hours before we’re allowed to take a certification exam that could easily be passed by simply reading a 26-chapter book, about 80 percent of which consists of common sense and about 20 percent of which contains career-specific information that really does need to be learned?

So I figure I can prioritize the page proofs. Get that done by noon, maybe sooner—about 11 would be good. Bolt down some cheese and crackers for lunch. Then move on to trying to learn something about real estate; work on that into the night, until I can’t hold my head up anymore.

You know…the crazed thing about “retirement” is that the number of hours in the day seems to shrink. You never seem to have enough time to get through all the stuff you need or want to do. Mostly “need.” Rarely “want,” in my case, given the joy and pleasure I take in teaching and in reading the ramblings of demented wannabe writers.

And—here’s the weird part—the phenomenon is not exclusive to neurotic little moi. Almost everyone I know who is retired or semiretired says exactly the same thing. Most of those people manage time a great deal better than I do. SDXB, for example—no one is better organized than that guy, and on top of that he’s a freaking rocketship. He does so many things, every day, day in and day out, and he gets them all done between around 5 in the morning and 9 at night, when he goes to bed. But for him everything is quite orderly (he has, yes, a military mind). His schedule is not gestalt, the way mine is: he gets one thing done at a time.

Other, more normal folks, whose inclinations lie more centrally on the spectrum between gestalt and pristinely organized, report that after they quit their jobs they never seem to have enough hours in the day to do all the things they need or want to do. Maybe it’s a function of age. Or maybe it has to do with making a shift between the regimentation of work life and the naturally gestalt structure of freedom.

Whatever. I need to get back to work just now. Bye!

Plodding toward a New Career

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Spent yesterday afternoon reading Chapter 16 in the real-estate textbook—”Title and Transferring Title”—and filling in four-page single-spaced study instrument on Chapter 15, “Contracts.” All this, by way of pursuing a new career in real estate.

Though it sounds dry as an empty Arizona housing tract, it’s surprisingly interesting. We tend not to think about where these customs, rules, and laws came from, nor, I think, do many of us understand their implications for us personally. Just in reading those two chapters, I came across a number of eye-openers and weirdnesses.

Did you realize, for example, that a person can take a piece of property away from you by openly occupying it for three years, by creating the illusion of owning the title, and/or by paying the property taxes on it? That if you make an offer on a house and then change your mind after the seller has accepted the offer, you may be liable not only to lose your earnest money deposit but also for a number of other hefty fees?

Between now and this evening, I’d like to read Chapter 14, “Environmental Issues and Arizona Water Law.” Exactly how a textbook is supposed to cover the water law of any Southwestern state in one chapter escapes me. There are attorneys who spend three years in law school followed by entire careers studying this subject. But whatEVER. The classmates had already been assigned this chapter at the end of the five-week RE 179 course—I and one other student walked in as the course morphed into the second semester, RE 180. So I’ll need to do a little catchup to come abreast of the other budding Realtors.

Unfortunately, between now and this evening I have to teach two sections of English 102 and drop by Costco on the way home.

One of the magazine-writing students reports that she recently started working in real estate sales, and that she has more work than she can cope with: “literally,” says she, “working from 7am until 2am.”

Welp, it’ll be interesting to find out if one gets paid for all those hours or if, like teaching, it’s just so much unpaid labor.

I figure sales of six $200,000 houses in a year would pay exactly what I’m earning at teaching adjunct, assuming one’s commission comes down to 1.5%. I have no idea whether that’s realistic.

Several online sites say real estate sales people end up with about 1.5% of sales, after the broker grabs half the commission. However, JS says his broker takes 40% of the 6% sales commission, not half (of which the sales rep nets about half). So that would mean he would get something more like two or three percent. Let’s assume he’s pocketing 2%: that would require me to sell 3.75 $200,000 houses in a year to supplement Social Security enough to support a lower-middle-class lifestyle. At 1.5%, I’d have to sell five such shacks.

More than that, actually: you have to cover a variety of expenses, depending on what brokerage you’re working for. And I’d certainly have to get a newer vehicle…can’t schlep prospects around in a 12-year-old dog chariot. So let’s add two houses to each of those: a very modest but for me acceptable income probably could be had by selling five to eight mid-range houses a year. Double that for low-end properties; halve it for upper-middle-class homes.

It’ll be interesting to see how (or if) this develops. I just can’t continue to do what I’m doing at the pay I’m earning.

Is That Light a Will o’ the Wisp? Or a Train at the End of the Tunnel?

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Real estate is definitely starting to wake up around here, thanks to the influx of Canadian and Chinese investors. Everyone thinks the market is improving and will continue to rise. In Phoenix, the inventory of houses for sale has dropped by 42.1% and the median price has risen by 34.5%, with both indicators trending positive at the end of March. Unemployment here appears to be dropping; in January it fell .3 percentage points to 8.7%—not great, but better than a continuing rise. Last night the instructor of my new real estate class remarked that the people who will be taking the licensing exam at the end of this spring or early next fall will be in an excellent position to start working.

Moi, I remain skeptical. My mother got a real estate license in southern California, back when I was in high school. She never made a penny at it. However…she didn’t work at it full time, and she knew little about marketing or business practices. Though I don’t know much, I sure know more about it than she did. And of course, she had my father and so didn’t have to earn a living; I’m pushed by an element of desperation.

Exactly how desperate that element is remains to be seen.

Last night I was noodling with the numbers and realized that if I were to take a 4% drawdown now, rather than continuing to put off drawing down retirement savings until I really can’t work anymore, I could live in reasonable comfort. Actually, there are several ways I could bring enough money into the house to restore something like a middle-class lifestyle. Each has its problems. But it could be done.

One is to draw down 4% from savings.

Because of the mortgage on the downtown house, I’d still have to teach. But not much. The amount I’d need to come up with annually, above and beyond the drawdown plus Social Security, would be $4,400. That’s 1.85 courses per year, a huge improvement on 3 +3 + 1. Since the online magazine writing course is now well established and drawing enough students to make every semester, it would mean I’d never have to go into a physical classroom again. And I’d never have to read another barfiferous fresman comp essay again.

Drawback: it wouldn’t improve my financial situation. I’d still have to pinch pennies and often would run unnervingly in the red.

A second strategy is to take a drawdown but continue to teach composition courses.

I compared my last GDU paycheck, in the fall of 2009, with what I’m making now. One regular month’s net pay came to $3,170. Today, my infinitely pared-back, rock-bottom expenses come to $3044 a month. So if I could somehow bring monthly  net income back to where it was in 2009, I could cover my living costs and pay my share of the mortgage. A drawdown of 4% added to Social Security would give me $2,674 a month, a $496 monthly shortfall, or $5,952 a year.

To make up the shortfall, I’d have to teach 3.1 sections a year—much better than three a semester plus one in the summer.

This scheme—start taking a 4% drawdown now (not later) and make up the difference by teaching (but teaching a lot less)—presents some major drawbacks.

1. I would have to teach. And I don’t want to. Nor will I be able to do so for the rest of my life, unless I drop dead soon.
2. I’d have to marshal every penny in savings. It would leave me nothing to buy a new car, and keeping my 12-year-old vehicle running is starting to cost more than I can afford.
3. It would do nothing to improve my penurious  lifestyle. I’m sick of pinching pennies.

If I taught 2 & 2, I’d net an average $3,314 a month. That would at least give a little wriggle room, but it doesn’t erase the problem that I need a newer vehicle.

Another possibility is to earn a rather small amount in another job—something in the real estate industry is what I have in mind—continue to teach while I can, and not take a drawdown.

As we noted the other day, my friend JS says he earns $200,000 a year selling real estate. That’s in the present supposedly peakèd market! Now, he’s been at it for 10 years, he has an MBA, and he’s a very fine marketer. However, a tiny fraction of that, just $30,000, would suffice to support me, if I kept on teaching—not unfeasible given that I’ve managed to reduce teaching to a minimal workload. Let’s assume I netted $15,000 after taxes and expenses:

That’s teaching three sections a semester (one of which is the online magazine writing course, a piece of cake), and nothing in the summer.

The result is more than I earned at the Great Desert University. It would be a bitch of a lot of work, at least until I could develop a business to the point where I could drop the teaching. But it would return my income to its former glory.

There’s a third alternative: take a 4% drawdown, net 15 grand in working in a real estate office, and don’t teach:

This would provide a monthly net of $3,924, significantly more than GDU was paying me. If I continued to keep an iron grip on spending, it would be enough to buy a car, which I’d have to do anyway if I were hauling prospects around to look at real estate.

And finally, a fourth possibility: continue to teach two sections a semester (only one of which would be in the classroom) while taking a drawdown and hustling a net 15 grand in the proposed other endeavor.

In this scenario, I would net $4,564 a month, more than I’ve ever earned in my entire life. It would be a lot of work. However, two sections a semester would be relatively easy, since only one would be a composition course (work for the online course is now minimal, since I have that down to a template).

The disadvantage to pulling down savings now is huge: it could mean I will outlive my savings. Women in my family have lived into their mid-90s…and they were freaking Christian Scientists! They never saw a doctor in their lives. Given decent medical care (assuming I can get it), I might live longer than that. With inflation forcing me to take larger cuts of savings, I certainly could deplete my savings before I die. And that is a real nasty prospect, given what we know of elder care in this country. One needs a large chunk of money at the end of life to avoid dying in hideous squalor, suffering, and  neglect.

The disadvantages of teaching while trying to build a new career are large, too. I figure I’ll have to hang onto two or three sections while I’m getting started, in order to guarantee enough income to pay my bills. But if the real estate plan starts to fly, then I would want to quit teaching. The question is, would teaching in that first year or two or three be such a distraction that I couldn’t make the real estate idea work?

It certainly could be. Even though I’m not putting many hours into it now, even a few hours a week could be quite a hindrance. I may need all my energy and attention to build a new business.

None of the four schemes is ideal. What would have been ideal would have been to have kept my GDU job until I was 70, by which time I would have accrued enough in savings to support me and my son would be in a position either to sell the downtown house, as planned, or at least take on most or all of the mortgage payment.

Knowing that “ideal” will never happen again, I need to figure out how to make a choice among four less than perfect strategies to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and wheels under my feet.

A Peek through the Escape Hatch…and other minor details

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So tonight after half a day of teaching blessed souls who want so badly to do well in freshman comp (in spite of not knowing how to frame a thesis statement or write an idiomatic sentence), it was off to the new real estate course. It looks good. I enjoyed it, enjoyed the instructor, and came away feeling pretty upbeat. Very upbeat.

The textbook is around $65, but I can get a 10% discount with my faculty card. Natchurly, I didn’t have it with me this evening. Tomorrow I have to take the car to the repair shop, there, we hope, to fix whatever is making the ominous noise—that’ll be a pricey fix, you can be sure. So I won’t be able to buy the book until Thursday, when I’m back on campus to teach again.

Meanwhile, I made a little discovery: for those of us who are given to startling back pain, the amount of quinine in a can of tonic water may be enough to quiet the muscle spasms that give rise to that pain.

For the past week or ten days, I’ve been enjoying an ongoing storm of back spasms. They started in the neck and shoulder and by yesterday had worked their way down to the lower back, which I hate even more than upper back pain. So insistent were these spasms that I could actually feel a muscle in my back twitching. Ugh.

So of course I had recourse to the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest: to wit, the Internet. Googled “back muscle twitching.” And lo! It develops that a whole flock of neurotics suffer the same phenomenon. Many of them highly praise quinine.

Alas, though, some 1 percent of 1 percent of humanity has a dangerous sensitivity to quinine. Make that a life-threatening sensitivity. In response, Big Brother has taken quinine pills, which deliver a respectable dose, right off the market.

Well. In response to something. One message board contained a squib from a practicing pharmacist, who said quinine was not going to hurt you. The real story is that the patent ran out on said pills, widely loved by sufferers of those nasty leg and foot cramps that strike in the wee hours. Big Pharma, unhappy with this development, lobbied to have the drug banned. It’s now back on the market in a new, wildly expensive patented form, presently approved only as a malaria cure. So if you want it, you have to find out what it’s called and then find a doctor who can be persuaded to prescribe it for an off-label use, which is exactly the same as the previously on-label use for which it was prescribed for years. Yes.

Numerous comment posters touted drinking 8 ounces of tonic water about three to five hours before retiring. Various sufferers responded, always with one of two answers: it either worked like Jesus touching Lazarus or it didn’t do a damn thing.

Now I know I’m not allergic to quinine, having ingested more than my share of tonic water over the years. So it was off to the Safeway, there to grab a six-pack of little cans full of the stuff. And a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, not wanting to waste the trip.

The result?

One 12-ounce can of the stuff (abetted by a slug or two of gin) is definitely, unmistakably Jesus touching Lazarus. By the time I crawled into the sack, the twitching had stopped, once and for all. Not a single tic. And though the pain was still there, the gawdawful knife stab had abated enough that I could actually find a comfortable position to sleep. Crapped out around 10 p.m. and slept all the way through until 6 in the morning. That’s some kind of a record.

This morning my back still ached a little, but it wasn’t excruciating. Getting out of bed did not elicit a moan or a cry of pain. I was able to lift Cassie off the bed without fear of dropping her. And the pain has stayed at bay. In fact, it’s actually improved slightly. Right now we’re coming on to 9:30 and it hardly hurts at all.

Tonic water. Don’t forget the Bombay Sapphire.

🙂

Image: A bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin that is half full. Ben Efros. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Personal Finance, Academics, and the Perpetual Recession

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Yesterday I came across a shiny new blog over at WordPress.com by a young academic working in the South. She calls it Budget Glamorous: Living Well on Less. (hmmm… What is it about academia that leads its denizens to write personal finance blogs?)

BG, it develops, is presently working in exactly the same position at her university where I started at the Great Desert University: as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer.  Apparently the idea is considered relatively innovative in Appalachia, as it was here (more or less) when I hired on at GDU, said idea being that the school would hire a small cadre of moderately paid Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s to teach four-and-four or five-and-five, with no research & publishing expectation.

These jobs are paid one helluva lot better than ordinary adjunct gigs: you get a full year’s contract at pay that would be laughable in the corporate world but that looks pretty darned good to an unemployed wretch fresh out of six years in graduate school. I started at the same figure as the assistant professors in my cohort. By the time I left to found and direct the editorial office on the main campus, I was earning the median annual salary for Arizonans—not very much, but as a lecturer I was paid for only nine months of work. My pay, however, most certainly did not keep up with my cohort’s, by then at the associate level.

GDU already had a full-time non-tenurable position, which they called “instructor” and for which they paid shamefully. These were held mostly by ABDs and by women hangers-on, academic groupies who were having affairs with faculty members or who simply wanted a career on a university campus but for one reason or another could not get a position elsewhere. Once an incumbent finished the Ph.D., he or she was out of a job. So in effect, accepting such a position brought your academic career to a halt, in real terms.

The lecturership, by contrast, may be held indefinitely—one colleague at the West campus retired after about 20 years on the job. It has no future: you are not going to get a promotion, you are never going to get a shot at a tenurable position, and the only raises you will get will be COLAs, except that when times are tough (which is most of the time) there are no COLA increases. GDU lecturers earn about half of what a community college instructor here earns, with a comparable course load and much larger classes. To frost the cookies, you have no job security whatsoever: annoy a dean, and you’re canned with no appeal. The university can refuse to renew your contract and does not have to give a reason. No joke: this happened to a friend who got crosswise with a dean.

The advantages for the university are obvious: One lecturer can be made to teach two or two-and-a-half times the number of lower-division students that can be foisted on a tenure-track faculty member. Accrediting agencies look askance at large numbers of undergraduate courses taught by part-time adjuncts, and so hiring anyone at “full-time” status helps hugely at accreditation time. This handles the scut-work courses at a little higher cost than hiring adjuncts who will work for sweat-shop wages and no benefits, but the crucial importance of accreditation overrides that added cost. A lecturer in a non-tenure-track position can be canned at will, giving administrators a little more control over department, division, and college budgets…and a convenient political shilelagh. This came in handy at GDU when, as the current economic depression reached its height, some 550 employees were laid off, and as the layoffs continue to this day.

The advantage to the budding academic? A job. Even before higher education was pinched by the fall of the Bush economy, graduate schools were turning out many more Ph.D.’s in the humanities than there were jobs to accommodate them. There simply are not enough jobs to go around. A full-time junior-college opening can attract two or three hundred qualified candidates. So, obviously, unless you enjoy waiting tables or cleaning house, it’s much to your benefit to grab whatever academic job you can get, if it pays anything like a living wage.

Like BG, I enjoyed teaching as a full-time nontenurable lecturer, at first. I like students and in time found ways to mitigate the obscene workload. It was great for the first seven years. After that, political infighting led to the disintegration of our department and morale went south, fast. I started looking for other work, in and out of academe; it was three years before I managed to get myself into an administrative position on the Main campus.

The question is, if you know what you’re getting into, can one of these exploitive jobs be made to work to your advantage?

Possibly so.

If I were starting that position now, knowing what I know today, I would use the job as a springboard to another job, and I would work as hard and as fast as I could to find that other job. I would not delay just because I liked the teaching or felt grateful to have broken into academia.

If I wanted to stay in the university environment, I’d be angling for an administrative position, even it it meant getting another degree. The Ph.D. in an academic subject may or may not help you get into administration, but certain vocational doctorates indeed will.

You can get these degrees online or in low-residency programs. At GDU, I watched people move from underpaid nontenurable jobs to administrative positions after obtaining advanced degrees in educational administration or online course design. Most of the coursework was done online. An Ed.D., it develops, is as good as a Ph.D. in the job market—maybe better, if it has something to do with administration or marketing.

Meanwhile, I would apply for every tenure-track position advertised in the Chronicle, no matter where it is. I also would not be too proud to apply in the community colleges, where the same workload is rewarded with better pay and job security.

If I wanted to work in the real world, I would be looking all the time for any job I could convince an employer I could do. And classroom skills translate magnificently to the real world:

• Communications
• Publications
• Management
• Human resources (here, too, think online courses: get an online degree in human resources or management)
• Personnel training
• Online personnel training course design (where do you think they get people to build those see-Dick-run employee tutorials—and those annoying courses for traffic schools?)
• Translator jobs (if you’re fluent in a second language)
• Executive director of nonprofit
• Development officer for nonprofit

Some industries that seem far afield of academia welcome academics as they welcome any smart, self-starting, ambitious individual. A friend of mine went into real estate as she neared the end of the doctoral program. She had a long and lucrative career selling spectacular high-end houses to the ridiculously rich. Another went to work for Peter Bogdanovich and became an executive vice president of Paramount Pictures. Two others went to law school—today one is a prominent immigration lawyer; the other went to work in the AG’s office. Another left a tenured associate professorship in communication to found a very successful personnel training business, for which she simply transferred what she had been teaching in the classroom into the corporate workplace.

And if getting a real-world job meant I had to walk from a nontenurable academic contract in mid-semester, that’s exactly what I’d do. A university feels no loyalty to its NTTT faculty (it’s an institution: it feels nothing), and so there’s no rational or moral reason not to move on when a less exploitive opportunity comes your way.