Thought Picnic: Trepidations of Friday

Let it not be Friday yet

The Fridays come with a regularity that breeds more concern than relief. It is usually not the end of a working week but the end of a week when innumerable applications have been successively and promptly followed by rejections for all sorts of reasons.

Qualified and experienced as I am, the tales of rejection get more incredible by the day you almost want to let out a nicely phrased expletive of annoyance and anger with that element of a put-down to say you are none too pleased.

However, one must exercise restraint because these people - recruiters are essentially the gate-keepers to the jobs I am looking for, they are the three-headed rabid and drooling dog retained as sentinel by companies that do not want to get involved in the minutiae of negotiating the quality from the quantity before they are presented subjectively with people the recruiters think might be suited to the role.

A collision course

The hurdles I am presented with daily range from my being expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades, my being too qualified, my not being exposed enough to bleeding-edge technologies or even my not being able to drive.

Having worked in international organisations of well over 10,000 users, sometimes as many as 60,000 seats, there is enough work of specialism involved that one cannot be spread too thin, rather, you have knowledge of what you need from other skills or teams.

Obviously, it will be difficult to conceal a career spanning over 2 decades doing amazing stuff and much as one has done the mundane, if you are offered the knowledge cheap don't assume I am so driven by greed to jump at the next best opportunity, some of us are still bound by old-fashioned principles of keeping to contracts, doing our best and standing as exemplary gentlemen - if only some people will believe the best of the few than the worst of the many to include the blameless.

Bleeding-edge technologies are fun for the great features they bring and over time we who have experience have mostly contributed to how things have eventually turned out, be it office software or back-end systems, each progressive upgrade has brought glee and fun - we would most likely test the products through beta but rarely get to use the products in production until the business has exhausted the software and hardware cycle they are in.

Back-end delivery systems might be easy to deploy, the front-end is however fraught with more difficulty and that is for reasons of user awareness and broader support systems to accommodate issues, then there is compatibility with legacy system or if you are ahead of your customer base but have to share media and data with them - considerations you should not be dealing with long after you have put out your new toys and found out that no one else can play with you. 

People like me pre-empt this all the time and plan transitions that will benefit the business rather than grind it to a halt.

Wizened with time

People like me bring much more to the table, beyond ability we have awareness, discernment, understanding and experience that comes with constant application, recognition, adjustment, review, remodelling and solution.

A good deal of this will not show in a CV, it comes expressed in discussion, usually at interview. It is possible that we are selling ourselves so short that the one glance at our CVs without certain buzzwords or keywords puts us out of the running in favour of those who have perfected the sell but will not have the goods to deliver.

So, as we approach every Friday, I wonder again how well I have done or how badly I have let the week slip away once again - Thank God for everyday but for a while, I have not expressed the worker's relief of – TGI-Friday.