How To Sell Yourself | Jack Wagner | TEDxDanielHandHS

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And I think about them a lot, how do people have the creativity to land a specific job? Well, I’ll tell you my case. When I was in the eighth grade, I had an assignment from an English teacher to write a report. It was called an occupation report, and you had to go and investigate a company and figure out what you wanted to do, and then write a report about it. Why wrote a report about becoming a systems engineer with IBM? That was in the eighth grade. Well, eight years later, I got that job. Now you could say that all those years through college and high school I had the passion to become an IBM Employee, and I fulfilled that passion. But that was me. I mean, a lot of people don’t make a career choice in the eighth grade.

But I had other people in my high school, one in particular that had a real passion for something. And I just walked down the hallway here today at Daniel Hand, and I saw a sign up on a board for ultimate frisbee game. Ultimate Frisbee was invented in my high school, and in fact, a classmate of mine created the game. Now he had a passion for frisbee. Well, did that become his career? No, he also had a passion for photography and filmmaking, and he has become one of the prominent filmmakers in Hollywood these days. So yes, he had a passion for frisbee, but he realized his real passion was filmmaking.

There was another student in my high school who was an excellent drummer and a singer. He had a real passion for music. Well, he ended up interviewing and getting a job and became Bruce Springsteen’s drummer. So again, not a bad career choice, a little bit more exciting than working for IBM, right?

Now the other thing about coming up with the career choice is understanding what business wants from students today. And we could say, you know, yes, they want people that are skilled and intelligent and all that stuff. Well, that’s great. However, the world is a much more dynamic place than it was when I entered it into the business world back in 1974. Dealing with the complexities and the ambiguities in business today is very complicated. But there are still some basics that companies look for when they’re trying to hire people.

One is your communication skills. Now when I went through college, I went through an engineering curriculum. The professor that influenced me the most was one of my Humanities professors. Why? Because he taught us how to write and how to communicate. And yes, I had to go through, you know, four years of calculus and differential equations. Believe me, I have never had a differential equations problem present itself to me in my professional career. But I have had to write a lot of letters. I have had to write a lot of reports. I have had to give a lot of presentations. So those skills are more important than a lot of the other skills.

One of the other things that businesses look for is your ability to manage your time. And you might think, oh, you know, it’s really complicated managing my time as a high school student, but it’ll get better. Well, the reality is it gets worse because it gets more and more complicated as you go forward.

And the third and probably most important thing that businesses look for in hiring people is ethics. I often ask my students a lot of times, you know, what’s the one thing that will get you fired from any company faster than anything? And I get a lot of answers like stealing things or lying or not being a good employee. The answer is ethics violations. So companies want people that are ethically sound.

Now after my 34 years in IBM, I went back to my college and taught there for nine years. Now that was not a career choice that I had written down or planned for. I was asked to teach, and I said, wow, that’s something that I never considered. So again, career choices sometimes land in your lap without you thinking about them. But one of the things I always asked my students was, tell me about yourself. And almost immediately, I got an answer. “Can I use notes?” I say, excuse me, you want to use notes to tell me about you? What’s wrong with that equation? Imagine going into the Apple Store after a big announcement, which is about every other week, and saying, oh, I want to learn about this new product, and the salesperson says, oh, okay, let me go get my notes, and I’ll tell you about that product. Doesn’t happen. They know about it. They’re passionate about it. They can talk to you for hours about it as long as you agree to buy it.

So you have to understand yourself in order to sell yourself. Now you might say, I am not putting myself on the market. It’s not a meat market, right? Yes, you are. You are selling yourself to someone no matter what you’re trying to do. Either you’re going into trades or a professional job into a service community, hospitality, whatever it is you want to do, you have to convince someone else to let you do that. And that’s what I mean about selling yourself. But how do you sell yourself if you’re not honest with yourself?

I had a student when I was teaching at NJIT who had convinced himself, he had convinced his parents, and he convinced everyone else that his goal in his life career was to be a player in the NBA. Great. I mean, I had other students that wanted to be professional athletes. Some of them actually did. This kid was not going to be in the NBA. Number one, he wasn’t even playing on the Division One basketball team at our college. Number two, he wasn’t that good at basketball. Number three, he was short. He’s not going to play in the NBA. But he had convinced himself and his parents. His parents actually came to see me to say, you know, why aren’t you encouraging our son? And I finally convinced them, and he

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Finally admitted, “Now I’m not an MBA candidate.” You have to be honest with yourself. Now, that was an obvious one. Usually, the ones you know that you have to come up with are not so visible. That’s why I want you to understand yourselves. Then I want you to figure out how to document yourself and then market yourself. You know, what do you want to do and what do you want to accomplish?

When I was in Middle School, I became very enamored with photography. Photography was my passion. However, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it wasn’t what I wanted to accomplish. I’m still involved with photography, and it’s been a great hobby, but that’s all it was. Now, I knew a good friend of mine that became his career, that became his occupation. That wasn’t what I wanted to do. So what is your big why? What is it you want to do? Understand your strengths, understand your weaknesses, figure out how to put all that together.

Now, that’s a big Bill, and it’s not a one-step process. And guess what? It’s never-ending. So what I did is I put together what I call a selling yourself roadmap. It’s a roadmap to try to figure out and document what your career plan is. Now, it’s constantly changing. What you document today doesn’t work six months from now, doesn’t work a year from now. And I, you know, people say, “Well, you know, if I write all this down, what does it mean? What’s a starting point?” It’s something that you could at least put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, however you’re, you know, so inclined and you want to figure out what are your likes, your hobbies, your interests. What’s your personal strengths and your weaknesses? What are the external opportunities and threats? Some businesses are, you know, primed to go into right now, others you probably want to stay away from, and that list keeps changing.

What’s your value proposition? Why are you the best candidate for whatever? And again, these things change over time. What are your career goals? So you have to understand and document yourself. And then the next step is, okay, how do you market that? Things like your resume, using LinkedIn profiles. I have up there a term called elevator pitch. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s a quick two-minute version of “tell me about yourself.” In other words, if you have an opportunity and you’re in a quote elevator, you could tell somebody what it is you want and what you want to accomplish. But think of it as, you know, you’re standing in line in the Madison CVS, and your friend’s mother is there, and she’s a recruiter for a high-tech firm. If you have a couple of minutes to tell her really what it is you really want to accomplish, maybe you could get her attention and find out that she has internships available.

Cover letters, networking, all these things evolve over time. It’s not like you go through this once and you fill all these forms in and you’re done. What I’m trying to say is you can apply logic to this process and put a little structure around it. The next two steps are your own personal development. It never ends. How well do you communicate? How well do you do time management? Work-life balance. Now, if a company ever tells you, “We have the best work-life management program available,” my response is run. Because no company has work-life balance. You have to figure out what work-life balance means to you. Now, at one point in my life, it meant how many days can I go skiing a year, you know? Then it changed to, okay, now I’ve got a family and a son. All of a sudden, work-life balance changes. And then your professional development again, that never ends. How do you develop yourself professionally? What industry are you interested in? How do you develop those skills? How do you network with people in those industries? You get involved in alumni associations for your colleges. You get internships and co-op programs. Entrepreneurship. Don’t say, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” unless you can follow it up with, “Okay, here’s what I’m interested in being an entrepreneur in.” There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be an entrepreneur, but if you look at all the successful ones, there’s usually a second sentence that says, “Here’s what I want to do.”

And then what external linkages can you form in terms of in the business community? And what are your work experiences? Well, students would ask me, “I spent the last three summers working at McDonald’s. Should I put that on my resume?” And my response was, “Absolutely, yes.” Why? Because it shows a positive work ethic. I don’t care if you were working in McDonald’s or digging ditches, you’re working, you know? And that makes a difference when someone’s looking at you and say whether or not you’re a viable candidate or not. I had students who were Division One athletes, and they didn’t have that on their resume. I said, “Well, being an athlete says you understand time management. You understand leadership. You understand authority, your com–you understand a commitment.” You’re not going to play maybe professional sports in that arena, but you’ve developed all those characteristics. I had a student who actually grew up in Siberia. He was the center of the basketball team at college. Great basketball player. He was also a concert pianist. And what did he end up doing as a career after graduating from NJIT? He went to work in Wall Street because that was his passion. But he had all those other skills to bring to the table.

So that’s why, you know, don’t funnel yourself in early, but work on a plan and keep refining that plan. So it’s up to you. You have to be honest with yourself, you know? Don’t be that one that says, “I want to join the NBA,” but be the one that says, “Here are the things I’m interested in. Let me explore them. Let me figure out how I get there and understand what I want to do and what do I want to accomplish and who can help me down that path?” Because remember, it takes the two of us. You can’t have innovation without imagination. Now, not all these answers are, you know, cast in concrete. How can I go forward with all these unknowns? Well, you can stay where you are, but I encourage you to go forward and figure out those unknowns. Again, thank you for your time. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today, and to me, this was an outstanding session. Thank you, everyone. [Applause]