Five years ago, I had a shiny new master’s degree—and a minimum wage retail job.
It was the height of the recession, but I never thought that would affect me, the summa cum laude graduate with all the awards and scholarships. The real world hit me like a brick.
Don’t worry, this snobby academic got exactly what was coming to her. I’ll never forget the day the register was acting up and I had to apologize to customers for taking forever to ring up their orders. One patron wrinkled his nose at me and said, “No wonder you’re a cashier.”
Every day I would go home and rewatch Welcome to the NHK, the only anime that reflected how empty my life felt, and applied to jobs like crazy. After applying to 30 jobs in 30 days, I finally got a position as a Web developer in the city, but only after making some big changes:
“I’ve decided to take my anime and video game experience off of my resume,” I blogged in October 2010. “Because I’ve had more than ten face-to-face interviews, and still no job.”
I’m reflecting on my own career’s beginning in order to suppress my knee-jerk reaction whenever somebody asks me if they should keep the “geeky stuff” on their resume. You know, experience volunteering at cons, articles about nerdy topics, columns on geek oriented sites. Today, as a fandom blogger for Forbes with nerdy bylines on CNN and Anime News Network, it’s easy for me to sit on top of my established career and say, “Of course you should!”
But as usual, the answer is far more complicated, and hinges on one question: what are you looking for in your career?
If you’re looking for something just to pay the bills, geek experience doesn’t matter. In 2010 I was desperate for skilled work. Removing geek stuff from my resume helped me to widen my possible options. With a general resume, I appeared to be a ready applicant to a larger group of jobs. I was less of an individual and more of a website-building tool.
If you’re looking for lasting happiness, put geek stuff on your resume. Geek stuff will weird some employers out, but they’re not the ones you want to be working for if you want a lasting career where you can be happy. I hated my developer job, because it had nothing to do with my interests. I eventually left it to cover fandom and subculture for the Daily Dot. I took a paycut to do that but it was a small price to pay for work I believed in. Then again, it’s a lot easier to be choosy about your career when you can finally afford to move out of your parent’s place.
Everything’s gone full circle, however, with my new Web portfolio. I decided to revive Lorsini.com with a showcase of my design work 1) because my government clients don’t care or need to know about my life beyond my competency level and 2) frankly, because design work pays well. And when I get paid well, I can create more stuff for Otaku Journalist.
Do you see what’s going on here? I once again have a non-geek resume, because in this particular situation, I only care about paying the bills. My work as a writer fulfills me as a geek, so I don’t care whether I relate to the subject matter of the websites I build.
You will have different goals at different points in your career, and I believe that means you should always be reassessing. If your resume is too general for your goals, change it. Or, since I’m a huge proponent of having multiple jobs for increased stability, you can have two resumes. Nothing’s permanent, including your interests, and your work life can reflect that.
How did you get your current job? Did your hobbies or interests play into it at all?
Photo by Zhao on Flickr
6 Comments.
Let me play the flip side here. I came into the working world around the same time as you, and Japanator/Destructoid was the only serious work on my resume. I know that it’s a bit of a special snowflake situation, but if you’re really taking charge of the blogging, you can spin that in a number of directions. Oftentimes, that was the work that got me interviews — I could spin it as management or technical experience depending on what I applied for. It requires some huckstering, but spin it right and it can be an asset.
@disqus_qhSGlMJETn:disqus thank you so much for weighing in. You’re the reason I had geek experience to put on my resume in the first place so many years ago! That’s a great point – you can highlight the marketable skills that come from your fandom work.
I’ve never had a geeky job, though I do consider writing code and such geeks, just a very different flavor of geeky.
My general advice on resumes and cover letters, which has served me well (and I’m sure plenty of readers already know this) is to fine tune my resume and cover letter to each job I have applied to. That has meant more than taking notes from the job description, it’s included things like looking into the company or organization and doing research.
Sometimes, on my resume, it’s simply a matter of rearranging the order of my skills lists at the top of my resume. I also always include my “soft skills,” mainly all my experience writing documentation, client relations, working across departments and all the training classes I’ve done.
The same with what you write under any previous positions.
Lauren, I had a question, what about references? Have you, in the past, used people as references from your geeky jobs, for instance, why you applied for that web developer position?
How did you get your current job? Did your hobbies or interests play into it at all?
I guess it’s easier when you do have sort of parallel lives. No, I don’t hide what I do outside of work, but it also has nothing to do with what I do at work. I got my current job based on four years of experience in the profession, and two years of grad school, that’s it.
The other thing here is that it’s also entirely possible to have a job where geek experience doesn’t matter *and* that also brings lasting happiness. And a pretty good paycheck. Would I be even happier working a geek job? Maybe. Am I happy in my current job – yes.
So, yeah, I would say, if the actual substance of the “geek stuff” has something to add to your resume – then sure, why not. If it doesn’t, then there’s no reason to list it – the same way you probably don’t need to list a part-time job you had in college or whatever when applying for a manager-level position at a major corporation.
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