Michael Ellsberg makes some excellent points about the “Formal” versus the “Informal” job market and the cost of each. One requires an enormous amount of money and the other requires you take responsibility for yourself.
The informal job market comprises all jobs that are not filled through someone responding to a job advertisement.
In this article on Tim Ferriss’ website (Highly Recommended and his podcasts too), Ellsberg explains how to go about tackling the informal job market and how to make one’s way in the world without following the herd, especially when following the herd will cost you a fortune and still land you in a crappy formal job market. The key for this and all other types of advice is to understand that it rests with you to do the work. The reason that university, then applications, then job at a big corporation is so alluring to many is that it requires so little thinking and so little real effort. Does it take a lot of time and manual effort to perfect your resume, network your LinkedIn profile, and upload applications to what Keva Dine calls Deep Space Mining? Sure, but it is largely senseless and mind numbing work.
What Ellsberg so clearly lays out is how to decide what it is you want to do, how to develop your skills, how to display your skills, and how to sell your skills. Readers of this blog will recognize some of this from the Seth Godin post a week or so ago.
Well worth a read.
