“Yeh, I know who you are. You got nothing!” bellowed the gruff CEO at the other end of the line before he slammed the phone down. It was 1997. I was a 33-year-old Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming trying to find a job at the country’s leading commercial air transport consultancy in New York City.
My qualifications: none. My dis-qualifications: many. No Excel, no database skills, no business or air-transport background or financial analysis experience. Still, I was determined to move on from the academy and get into business. So, using print journals, newspapers, and an early text-based (non-GUI) internet search engine called Lynx, I produced a few terrible pieces on the evolving air transport market in Russia.
With those worthless lines on my resume, I approached SH&E. I sent letters (pre-email) to their Park Avenue address explaining how they really needed an aged junior analyst with no relevant skills or experience. I left voicemails. When I finally got through to David Treitel to deliver my elevator pitch, he interrupted me after just a second and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was wasting his and my time.
That was my Jim Carrey moment. Taking his unequivocal “no” as a negotiating tactic, I Dumb & Dumber’ed him—”So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” I was eventually passed on to another partner who was willing to risk hiring me. He thought my background might be of use to help translate and communicate the firm’s often technical work to clients.
In theory, that was a good idea, but it still didn’t work out. I lasted there less than a year. But my time at SH&E was the on-the-job MBA that made my career transition. When I left that position, I had the courage to continue, even if I still lagged in regard to formal skillsets.
In this second episode of an occasional series on transitioning from the humanities to business, I want to make two points. The first is persistence. Set your ego aside. Be realistic about the numbers. Those stories about 100 rejection letters (now emails) for each nibble aren’t merely anecdotes. They are data, particularly now when applying for a job can involve just a few computer keystrokes. In this case, the person I approached had no interest, but he chose (thank you) to pass the resume on to someone rather than just bin it. I see that in my current position all the time. I get resumes passed on to me from others, and I do the same. That informal networking works better in small company environments than in large corporations.
That distinction is also important for career-changers. Large corporation HR departments are designed to weed people out. A career-changer just doesn’t fit the template. Focus initially on small businesses. They offer fewer positions but much more networking and optionality.
Second, my time at SH&E was brutal. There’s no other word for it. But it was worse than it needed to be. I should have been better prepared (Excel, simple database techniques, financial statement analysis, basic accounting). In the mid 1990s, those skills might be hard to come by for someone teaching the humanities in a small college town. Not anymore. They are now available everywhere in the evenings and weekends from the comfort of your home. Avail yourself of them. You don’t need to go to business school or get a CPA. You do need to cover the basics. I did none of that and paid for it during those long nine months.
Several of my LinkedIn connections from the SH&E days can vouch for this story, as can Treitel himself. Despite my crash-and-burn experience at his firm, he ultimately was supportive of my career transition, even if it came partially at his firm’s expense. We remain in touch as political sparring partners at once-a-decade dinners.