That short paragraph describes what I have come to understand about my education and career. Up until this point in the year, I had been working endlessly to developing a perfect plan for my future. Then, just last week, I went on two job shadows, and I realized there was major flaw in my approach. Everything changes. Only by hearing the crazy happenstances in the journeys of the people I job shadowed, learning how industries have evolved insanely over short periods of time, and noticing how my own perspective shifted throughout all of this did I realize just how important it is to be able to prepare for change. In this post, I will be outlining my general experiences during these job shadows, and how taking part in them helped me realize how I will plan for, effectively evaluate my options with, and adapt to changes which may come up with these career paths.
REACHING OUT
How can you make a unit out of a job shadow? Don’t you just show up and watch a person work? That may be the case for your average job shadow, but PLP never keeps things that simple. Instead of just doing them with a family friend or getting the teachers to make the contacts, we had to develop plans, reach out to the people who we wanted to job shadow, arrange dates with them, and on top of all of this, I had the personal added challenge of keeping in the loop with another classmate. Yeah, on top of all of the other work I was doing at this time, it felt a little crazy.
Luckily, Ms. Willemse was willing to give me a helping hand. Looking at some of my personal traits such which I had learned about from previous PGP assignments, such as my flexible nature, my problem solving skills, and the current demand and financial prospects of jobs, I decided the two areas of focus I would be most interested in would be law and marketing.
After pitching these career interests to her, she listed some potential contacts for me to look into. I decided I wanted to go forwards with both of them, and this quickly led to writing emails. Here was our first one:
Although the actual contacting of our job shadows ended up being pretty easy, there were challenges in other aspects of the project. One of these (something which I had mentioned before in previous projects such as Destination Imagination) was keeping on top of everyone’s schedules and informing all parties about changes. Doing this though gave me insight into the organization skills I will need to have in my future career.
It took a lot of arranging dates, clarifications, and diving headfirst into the world of public transport to get things going, but we were soon ready to meet our contacts…
INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY LEGAL CLINIC
The first of my two job shadows took place on a rather sunny Monday morning. Logan, my classmate, and I arrived at 8:45 a.m. in eastern Vancouver to a small door and plaque:
The inside of the clinic however, was much more impressive:
Unfortunately, our Job Shadow Contact, Mark Gervin, had to cancel as he had an unexpected court appearance, but we got to meet with legal assistant Sukhraj Padda for a tour of the office:
Luckily, Sukhraj had a lot to talk about outside of the law field, such as about the history and function of this particular clinic. He informed us with information such as the significance of the humming bird as their symbol:
The inclusion and celebration of this diverse culture was something which I admired deeply about this particular location, but there were other things in our visit with Sukhraj which were of interest to me. One of these is the innate problem solving and critical thinking nature of law. These are two areas which I already have a skill set developed in, and find them to be a highlight my current work. These, along with the financial security of the law field, were the things which drew me to it in the first place.
However, Sukhraj also explained that there is a lot more to being a lawyer than just that. First and foremost, you need legal knowledge. A lot of it. This is something that I have virtually none of now, and would need to develop through years of schooling. You also have to have incredible writing skills, the ability to communicate with people in a highly professional manner, and pay a fine attention to detail; all skills that I have been improving at, but still need a good amount of work on.
After he had said everything he had to say, it was our turn to ask the questions. Although he couldn’t answer some of the specific ones I had prepared for Mark, he gave us helpful insight where he could. One of the questions he answered was “What does a day in the life of a person in the law field look like?”. His answer outlined the following for a law student articling in hopes of becoming a lawyer:
I would say that his best response in relation to my interests came from the question “What kind of people go into law?”. In asking this, I was looking to get some insight into whether this career direction would fit my personality and interest type of a strategic INTP, but I got an answer more focused on the motivations of a lawyer. However, this information was invaluable none the less. He explained that although yes, stereotypical money focused lawyers do exist, many enter the field to do something where they can challenge themselves, solve problems, and create a meaningful contribution to society. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but keeping myself challenged and creating a meaningful product are two things which actually matter a lot to me, and will consider this in whatever career I end up pursuing.
The bulk of our tour involved exploring the office and touching on the base, intriguing side of being a lawyer. Once we went into a room for a private interview however, some of the not so exciting details were revealed. We were told that the most prominent job of a lawyer is writing specific, repetitive contracts, with no room for creativity or innovation. This was an instant red flag for me, as specific, concrete, detail focused work that doesn’t give me room to express my creative side is something which I strongly dislike.
Hearing about this has made me decide to put law on the back burner for now, but I may bring it back up one day in the form of a law degree; something which can be applied to pretty much any career field.
POUND AND GRAIN ADVERTISING AGENCY
Less than 24 hours after returning from my first job shadow, I was off on my second one. Daniel, another one of my classmates, and I rolled up to a tall building centred around the middle of Vancouver at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and walked into a world of wonder…
This is Pound and Grain; a cutting edge digital marketing agency which has taken big and small business by storm in recent years. They have another office sourced in Toronto, and work with numerous big ticket clients such as Telus, Viacom, Arc’teryx.
At first my mind was focused on the incredible interior of this location, but this quickly shifted after we met Tara, our contact and one of the companies’ co-founders. Through her calm exterior despite her obviously overflowing workload and plethora of interesting information she shared with us, I was given a great starting point for where the day would take us.
Our schedule ended up looking like this:
To kick off the day, Daniel and I got front table seats at a scheduling meeting which reached out to contacts from the Ontarian branch:
Right off the bat, I noticed that even the highest ranking people here had a much more casual, go with the flow vibe than what I saw in law. This was something I was quite happy to see, as I was worried that all careers required the professionalism of Law.
After this, we got have meetings with individuals and teams who worked on different aspects of marketing projects. These included the strategists, the technical director, the creatives, and the account lead:
Each of these teams had something unique to show us, but there were some general themes that I noticed throughout. One was that no matter what they specialized in, everyone seemed to have a constant stream of diverse, challenging, and exciting tasks. These they completed at a hectic pace, and all contributed to launching a product of some sort (web interface, campaign, physical product, etc.) into the world. These are some of my favourite aspects of my current work in the PLP program, and would love to see this transfer into my career. It also seemed that everybody had to have the skills of critical thinking, creative design, organization, and analyzation; areas which I excel in.
Another thing that I liked was the balance of collaboration and independence. Instead of being forced to complete specific tasks together, like the synergy involved in a job such as construction, it seemed like everyone would get together to pitch their ideas, talk to clients, and then go off and work alone. They also would have the freedom to choose when and how they could work on these tasks, but were still guided by the higher-ups in the general progress. This, once again, sounds like my favourite aspects of PLP.
Just hearing about that, you may think that this job sounds like a perfect fit for me. Although it does seem like an excellent field to consider, there are still a few things that don’t sit quite right. One of which, is the fact that specialization is required. Something that I love about PLP right now is that we are constantly learning new skills, trying new mediums of creation, and changing directions at the drop of a dime. I have never been one to master a specific skill, and feel that this would be quite the limiting constraint.
There was also the issue that some of the main skills one needs to go into marketing are working efficiently, communication, and advanced technological ability. Technology skills are something I could learn pretty quickly with a couple of courses, but efficient work and group communication are some of the biggest areas to improve upon in my current life. Unlike the law field however, none of these factors are severe red flags.
Throughout the day, things went pretty smoothly. We got to watch work in action, witness future projects, and of course ask tons of questions. There were three in particular that I got excellent responses to. One of these related to a topic I heard brought up throughout the day; freelancing. No one ever told us what that meant, and so I felt it was fit to ask. It turns out, that freelancing is basically running your own, solo marketing agency, and I realized instantly upon hearing this that this would eliminate the need to specialize and the frequency of communication to some extent (as you are running your finances, your creative direction, etc.). I am now considering this as a viable option for my future.
Another question with a great response (stemming off of my INTP personality type) was “Can someone an introvert in marketing”? I had always thought one of the that the major obstacles for me to face in a career like this would be that I am not the loud extroverted stereotypical sales person type, but it turns out this isn’t exactly needed in marketing. Depending on your role, you can customize the amount of extroverting that you make part of your daily life, and are working more on designing then actually pushing your campaign out there.