Tech Employment Placement
His athletic talent was potentially at the professional level but a game injury forced him to focus on a different career. Always a “people person,” he had the foresight to understand how he could combine technology with his interest in working with personnel placement.
FAMILY INFLUENCE TOWARD CAREER PREPARATION
HK’s father was an electrical engineer. His mother was a homemaker who later worked in the insurance industry while also a trained volunteer counselor. Both parents were college graduates who established expectations for college attendance within each of their three sons.
EARLIEST CAREER THOUGHTS
Adult observers of HK’s athletic skills within youth league baseball, basketball and football projected him as a future professional. Looking back as an adult, HK recalls thinking then about pro sports, but that goal was never his singular focus.
HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHTS OF A CAREER
HK’s high school girlfriend’s father was an FBI agent, who arranged for HK to attend a local Federal Court trial of a well-known mobster. HK became interested in catching “bad guys” as an FBI agent and even as an adult, continues to watch true crime tv shows (e.g. ‘Dateline’ and ‘Law & Order’).
Meanwhile, HK’s football talents as a quarterback were attracting interest from nationally well-known D1 football programs. Fortunately, a football related leg injury during his senior year did not derail any college scholarship offers.
COLLEGE CHOICE CONSIDERATIONS
As an adult sized football QB, successfully operating an offense within a competitive high school league, HK naturally attracted the attention of many college coaches. Clearly, he was headed to a D1 program but which scholarship offer to choose?
During his sophomore year, HK visited an older friend who was attending and enjoying college life at a Southern area university with an excellent reputation for both academics and athletics. The Head Football Coach and his assistants met with HK and his parents, selling the school’s “40-year commitment” to each of its graduates; his parents were impressed, although HK was focused more on the next 4 years. Several of HK’s football teammates had enrolled earlier at this university and played well at the varsity level so HK assumed he could also work hard to earn playing time, possibly as the starting quarterback.
CAREER PATH REVISIONS DURING COLLEGE YEARS
There are many reasons a career path may – and often does – change sometime during the college years. HK experienced two of them:
Athletic injury – The path toward a career as a pro athlete can reach a dead-end for several reasons; one of the most common is a significant physical injury suffered on or off the field. Such was HK’s on-field, injury fate, which forced him to abandon any dream of a pro athlete’s career.
Academic courses perceived to be irrelevant for future work – While the university offered strong academic support for its student athletes, HK was already motivated to attend classes, including math, which he passed during the introductory phase of the first semester. However, on the first day of the second semester, HK realized that the complexity of the math problems had suddenly increased dramatically when the professor predicted that half of the class would fail! This serious announcement created more of an academic challenge than HK thought would be necessary for his future (still specifically undetermined) career interests so he promptly headed to his guidance counselor to discuss a new academic path involving history, based on his love of that subject due to his grandfather’s experiences as a Civil War buff and battlefield guide. HK added political science courses for their relevance to potential thoughts of law school and a career with the FBI.
Before his senior year, HK’s father recommended enrolling in business related courses, including accounting and statistics, which HK later found to be valuable for his overall knowledge of business basics.
VALUE OF SUMMER JOBS AND INTERNSHIPS
HK had always been motivated to work during time off from school and athletics, to earn spending money. Early on as a child, he made a deal with his dad to split the cost of a video game! Early jobs included lawn mowing, assisting his dad to open the town swimming pool where HK later served as a lifeguard. Other part-time jobs included an accounting internship for a major grocery retailer and a helper for union electricians. None of these jobs created a long-term work interest but those experiences did at least eliminate some potential career paths.
GRADUATION APPROACHES BUT CAREER PATH UNDECIDED
The university provided a robust career guidance service, scheduling as many job interviews as impending graduates were willing to attend. HK met with representatives from insurance companies and “Big 5” (as they were then known) national accounting firms. He received no “call-backs” which was fine with HK, who, on learning more about them, wasn’t further interested in any of those businesses as a career path.
VALUE TO SEEKING JOB DETAILS FROM ONE WITH EXPERIENCE
HK knew that an adult friend of his family was an experienced FBI agent, who was glad to privately answer any of HK’s questions about the daily activities of an FBI agent. In contrast to HK’s limited high school experience attending a jury trial featuring a successful criminal prosecution of a mobster, the behind-the-scenes, daily activities of FBI agents presented a much different picture of such a career. Yes, there would be successful arrests and bad guys brought to justice but most days, especially for entry level FBI agents, often involved either boring sitting (hiding in unmarked cars, listening to wiretaps) or dangerous activities (big guys like HK would routinely be selected to break down doors and wrestle fugitives to the ground), all the while being aware of potential threats to the life and security of the agent and his family.
Additionally, since HK was always motivated to work hard to be financially compensated in accordance with his efforts, he was disappointed to learn that FBI salaries were related to general pay grades, not specifically to successful arrests. Thus, one agent could make 30 arrests in a year and be paid the same amount as another agent who had captured only one bad guy.
Finally, HK was advised that at least during his early FBI career years, he would be assigned to a geographic area away from his home area where he was already well known and thereafter, occasionally be transferred from one area to another to continue to preserve his anonymity.
HK appreciated hearing the candid, full details of the potentially exciting life of an FBI agent, all of which informed his decision to seek a different career path.
NETWORKING CAN OPEN DOORS
Having eliminated multiple potential career interests (landscaping, accounting, electrician, insurance, and FBI), where to go to open some doors to hopefully interesting careers? Among the potential options (including answering Help Wanted Ads, mailing resumes to random businesses, seeking employment within a parent’s business, or hiring a “headhunter” to match you with an employer), HK recalled his university’s pledge to care about their graduates for 40, not just the first 4 years. So, he contacted his alumni group and asked for referrals to alums in business within his home geographic area. HK still didn’t have a specific career path in mind but was confident that he could sell himself as a “people person” with a comfort level in general math and accounting. He wanted the opportunity to be rewarded for hard work.
A university alum opened a door for an interview. The alum headed a very large, architectural, and engineering business with many facets to its organization. When HK mentioned his interest in accounting, the alum walked him to the office of the head accountant, who described those duties in such detail that HK realized immediately that full-time accounting would be more focused on numbers than working directly with people. So, HK promptly returned to the alum’s office to explain that his interests were more in working with people on a daily basis. The alum then referred HK to his contract engineering firm which placed highly trained engineering personnel in jobs lasting as long as the project required.
LEARNING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT HELPS TO FOCUS ON WHAT YOU DO WANT
This job – recruiting both prospective employees and prospective employers needing to staff limited projects – “checked all the boxes” of HK’s career interests: (1) working directly with people; (2) selling his company’s services; and (3) the opportunity to be financially compensated according to his success in recruiting and sales, rather than pursuant to a paygrade with predictable but slow advancement more related to seniority than competitive, individual initiative.
DIFFERENCES IN “EMPLOYMENT RECRUITMENT” CAREERS
Most people associate staff augmentation type recruiters with “Headhunters” who earn commissions paid by employers searching for full-time employees to add to their staff. Headhunters use their sources, including relevant internet sites such as ‘Linked-In’ to identify people working in the occupation sought by the prospective employer. The headhunter may “cold call” an individual who wasn’t actively seeking or even thinking about moving from one employer to another.
In contrast, technical staff augmentation firms specialize in hiring highly specialized Engineering and / or Information Technology professionals (e.g. electrical, mechanical, civil engineers and designers and on the Technology side of the spectrum – Project Managers, Application Developers, Infrastructure and Cyber Security Professionals and numerous positions within Artificial Intelligence) and placing them on project based assignments temporarily with other organizations to help them complete mission critical initiatives. These engagements tend to last 14 to 18 months but sometimes longer. This is the type of business to which HK was attracted.
ADAPTING TO A CHANGING ECONOMY ADDS CAREER VALUE
When HK started with his first employment placement service, he was happily envisioning remaining with that employer on an extended basis until he retired. When the company changed its focus from hiring and placing engineers to hiring and placing technology specialists, HK easily adapted since he was comfortable with both math and technology issues and saw that the future of business would be seriously affected by advances in technology.
LUCK (?) RISKS A CAREER CHANGE
While HK originally intended to remain with an employer who met all his career criteria, the employer did not seem to be adapting to changing conditions within the marketplace to enable it to compete with competitors. Additionally, the employer established defined sales territories to avoid competition among its recruiting / sales staff. While HK’s hard work had earned promotion to a management position still involving his people skills interests, HK began to think about looking for a different employment opportunity which could combine his desire to be associated with a company more dedicated to keeping up with emerging technologies and allow him to live and work closer to his family’s home area.
By luck (?) (Editor’s note: recall from the Definitions applicable to these career stories that “Luck is Hard Work and Experience Meets Opportunity”), a headhunter called HK with an offer to join a different employer focused solely on placing Technology Consultants, which coincidentally met all his current employment criteria, not the least of which was that the opportunity was in the geographic market area he preferred.
CAREER SATISFACTION
From early self-assessing his interest and academic talents as a ‘people person’ comfortable with math concepts, to finding a career providing him with an opportunity to work directly with people, selling them on the benefits of working with him and his business while permitting him to be compensated according to his business success, HK had dealt with uncertainty and a few disappointments along the way but his persistence and dedication to working hard – like driving an offense down the gridiron or persuading people to adopt his goals for their mutual business success – has culminated in a satisfactory career for HK, who notes: “I’ve always felt that as long as I could create a path, I would be successful. I am very goal oriented and as such, I like to see the steps ahead and then follow them to my goal. In addition, having a positive attitude, being persistent, creating good habits and being accountable, have provided a strong foundation that has enabled me to grow in many positive ways throughout my career.”
