Do You Have What It Takes… Do I? -Jill Johnson

From the time I entered high school, I was already preparing for college. I too my first ACT at fourteen years old. All of my classes over the next four years were to prepare me for college, and then my college classes went on to prepare me for the real world. In theory, this is what the education system is designed for. However, in my experience, a lot of formal education is priming you for the resume test.

In the hunt for internships and jobs, there is no more important document than, the resume. I and my university counter parts spend countless hours trying to blend the right amount of work, service, and experience and splash it across one page that will catch our future employer’s attention. The resume in its essence only captures a part of what the US employers expect from their hires. The US values what you know, how well you are educated, how hard you are willing to work. It’s the American dream after all, work hard and be successful. It’s not shocking that that mentality would bleed over into the hiring process.

That is what I expected when I arrived at g4g in Brussels as well, to work hard, prove what I know, and hopefully learn a little more too. I was slightly surprised to find that nobody seemed to care very much about my qualifications when I arrived. My resume had been reviewed of course, but nobody wanted to know what I knew, they wanted to see what I could do. That doesn’t sound like a big difference. Knowing means you can do. But the European job market seemed at its core to value something different than what I was accustomed to seeing.

You still had to have a degree of course, but creativity, independence, and problem-solving skills were valued far above the name on your diploma. After all, a degree just meant you took the classes, not that you can do the job. Never once was I asked to regurgitate facts, I was however tasked daily with solving problems on my own. Data gathering, organization, budget issues, pandemic cancellations all were tasked to me at one point or another with the simple instruction: work it out.

At first being given a task I had never encountered before without any explanation was daunting, but after the due adjustment period I found I was more productive this way. I was learning to be autonomous. This is not to say that the US system is flawed. Going to a good school matters, getting the right degree matters, working hard matters the most out of all three. But at the end of the day the attitude of personal responsibility and tenacious problem solving is something we could use a little more of on our side of the pond. I found I worked much better giving a project a go completely on my own first, before being told step by step how to do it.

There are hundreds of ways to approach data organization, there are even more methods of displaying it. The chance to do something my own way felt empowering, and made me more confident in my ability to tackle unfamiliar problems.

At the end of the day the US and European job markets still pretty similarly, but I hope in the ever more connected world we can learn a little more from each other about what makes the most successful hire. (And I hope they hire me).