It was time to leave my entry-level public relations job and take the next step in my career, but the move I wanted to make — from an entry-level position in a nonprofit organization to a manager's job at a Fortune 100 company — was roughly like earning a night school associate's degree at a local community college and applying for a tenure-track position at Harvard.
It isn't done, and certainly not by someone like me, whose resume consisted of four years of junior-level public relations experience and a few years of routine secretarial work.
The friendly employment agency woman I consulted was full of helpful advice: Forget it, she said, no one moves from nonprofit to corporate public relations. Maybe I could get into an insurance company — she rolled her eyes, dismissing an industry that gave employment to hundreds
of thousands of people — but she doubted it.
Probably I would have to leave town like a thief in the night and start my career over somewhere else.
But, like so many other young people, I believed in education, and so I signed up for a one-day seminar about developing a career in public relations offered by a local professional organization.
I showed up one Saturday morning in my best business outfit convinced that, as the flier promised, I would now achieve guaranteed success by learning the inside tips of job hunting.
I looked at my fellow job seekers and saw that, out of perhaps 200 hopefuls, almost all were young women of my age wearing similar dress-for-success suits.
Each of them, I was certain, had graduated from a better college than I had, was prettier, slimmer, smarter and more talented, and, for sure, had a better resume. There weren't that many Fortune 100 companies hiring communications people just then, and I took my seat, looked at my competitors for the one or two jobs available, and shuddered inwardly.
The leader was a therapist who had moved out of private practice when she sniffed potential in corporate America, and now earned her living advising aspiring young people about how to make it in the working world.
She urged us to throw away thoughts of our current job — dismiss even the idea of the next small steps in our career — close our eyes and imagine our ideal job. We were to dream big and see ourselves as CEOs of our own global public relations agencies or editors of leading national daily newspapers.
I closed my eyes and sighed. Not only did I probably have the worst resume in the room, but, to the despair of all my guidance counselors
and college mentors, I was never very good at these visualization techniques. I simply could never see the future.
All I could see was the professional past I wanted to escape and my specific narrow ambition of working for a first-rate corporation, earning
my living while learning my trade and, I hoped, eventually working my way into middle management. I thought again about how the other participants in the seminar probably all had better resumes than I did.
Why was I even trying to accomplish anything with my career?
Even with my eyes closed, I couldn't imagine my ideal job.
All I thought about was the negative messages I'd received throughout my few years of working experience: Women in business took jobs away from men. Women would quit work once they were pregnant. Women were too emotional in business.
Then I thought about all the pundits, like the seminar leader, who had emerged — from where, I wondered — to teach young women how to succeed.
I could easily spend all my time attending the programs designed to teach me how to dress and behave in the workplace. It was very time-consuming to learn how to work without actually working, and, at the end of the day, listening to the encouraging words had the same effect as listening to the negative ones: They came at the expense of learning about work by working.
I thought about the people I'd actually learned from. Few of them had gone to fancy colleges, or visualized what they truly wanted to do in life as young men and women.
Lots of them, both men and women, had heard a lot of negative messages throughout their careers. For better or for worse, they'd learned to survive in the business world simply by coming in to work every day and doing their best, taking advantage of opportunities available to
them and trying to move past the bad breaks. Dreaming had its place, but in the workplace, doing was still more important.
Suddenly, my eyes were wide open. I looked around the room.
Here I was, surrounded by 199 young women, all of whom were probably smarter, more talented and more experienced than me — all competing for the same job, for which they were doubtless better qualified — all of them sitting in a hushed room with their eyes closed.
All I had to do was get my resume in order and hit the pavement before they woke up.
One of the few companies that was hiring for communications positions was a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer. I had the job in a week.
