adventures-of-alice:

cracktastic:

vrabia:

prairie-grass:

a-spoon-is-born:

intrikate88:

elodieunderglass:

one thing I want to say today relates to my current job. (As you guys know, I’ve left off working in science labs to work an office job in sci comm. My role is kind of … nebulous and involves a lot of “oh, Elodie can help you with that, she does weird stuff. Train Elodie on that.”)

Because it’s an office job, the mentality is for everyone to present their workflows as incredibly difficult and skilled, requiring a lot of training and experience to do properly. Which is fair enough! These skills are difficult!

“Elodie, today we are going to train you to use… A HIGHLY COMPLICATED AND DIFFICULT WEBSITE INTERFACE. You will need to take a lot of notes and pay careful attention, because it is extremely advanced. ARE YOU READY”

“… This is WordPress.”

“…No it isn’t! it says something different at the top. And it’s very complicated, it’s not something you can just know already.”

“Nah son, don’t worry, it’s WordPress. I mean, God knows I don’t blog much, but I can manage me a bit of WordPress, it’s cool.”

“No. You can’t. Don’t worry, it’s very difficult. Now sit still and be trained on how to upload a photo to WordPress.”

“All right.”

—-

“Elodie, do you think that you can MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA? It is INCREDIBLY HARD and may involve THE HASHTAGS”

“… I think I’ll manage.”

—-

“Elodie, can you put a HYPERLINK in a thing? Think about it before you answer.”

“Is it like a BBCode kind of thing, with the boxy bracket things, or do you want it in HTML, with like angley bracket things?”

“It is a button that you press that says HYPERLINK.”

“I can do this thing for you.”

—-

“Elodie, can you write a punchy summary that will make people want to click on a special link that says “read more” to read all of the text?“

“Probably?”

—-

“Elodie, this is how to use TAGS on CONTENT. TAGS on CONTENT are important because – because of THINGS. Things that are too arcane and mysterious for anyone below the level of Manager to know.”

“Cool, I can tag stuff for you.”

—-

“Elodie, this is obviously a ridiculous question, but can you edit videos?”

“Not very well, and only if you want to make it look like there is sexual tension between characters from different forms of visual media, or perhaps to make a trailer for a fanfiction? Which is not necessarily a good use of my time and I’m not sure why I felt it was so cool to do to begin with…”

“What?”

“Actually, upon further reflection: no. No. Nope. I can’t edit videos. They’re completely beyond me. Not in my wheelhouse. Hate videos. Hate them. No innate skill whatsoever.”

“That’s what we thought”

—-

“Elodie?! You can use PHOTOSHOP?!”

“Yeah, I mean, I usually just use Pixlr. It’s free, it’s online, it’s powerful, you don’t have to download anything…”

“but you are not a GRAPHIC DESIGNER!!”

“Er… no.”

“Next you’ll be telling us you can MAKE AN ANIMATED PICTURE.”

“I mean, I haven’t really done a lot of it since Livejournal, and they weren’t that good anyway, but yeah… I can do you reaction images.”

“THAT IS WITCHCRAFT”

“Yes. Definitely.”

—-

What I’m trying to say is: a lot of people talk a lot of crap about what we Millenials do on the Internet, because there is NO CAPITALISTIC VALUE in the screwing around we do with our friends. “Ughh why are you ALWAYS on the computer?” our parents whined.

“How did you make the text go all slanty like that?” our bosses wonder.

We have decades of experience in Photoshop. We know how to communicate; we can make people across the planet care about our problems. We know how to edit media to make two characters look like they’re having the sexual tensions. We can make people read our posts, follow us, share our content. We run and manage our own websites – and make them pretty. We moderate conversations, enforce commenting policies, manage compromises, lead battles, encourage peace, defend ourselves from attack, inspire others, and foster incredible levels of communication.

We produce our art. We advertise our art. We engage with others through our art. We accept constructive criticism and dismiss destructive trolling of our art. We improve our art. Our art gets better.

We narrate our stories.

All by ourselves. Our pretty blog backgrounds, custom-edited themes, tasteful graphics, punchy content, clever gifs, our snappy putdowns and smart-ass text posts, even our familiarity with fonts and composition – all of these skills we’ve casually accumulated for fun/approval are MINDBLOWING LEVELS OF COMPETENCE IN THE WORKFORCE.

When these skills are sold to you – when they’re packaged and marketed, and when you pay to consume them and have the Elders rate you on them – they are incredibly valuable. They are Media and Communications degrees. They are marketing internships. They are leadership workshops. They are graphics design modules. They are web design courses. They are programming courses. We are good at this shit; we have it nailed down.

You can’t put “fandom” or “blogging” on your CV, but you deserve to. You should get this credit. You should claim this power and authority.

Claim these skills. They are valuable. They are important.

Everything you have ever done is a part of your powerful makings.

I want to second what elodieunderglass has to say here, because it’s so true. You want to buff up your resume or your LinkedIn page? 

-if you know enough html to do <i>this is italic text</i>, then you understand HTML and can pretty much call yourself a Junior Developer

-if you ever wanted to customize your LJ or tumblr and copied someone’s CSS code and then went in and tweaked font color and added your own header image? You understand CSS and again, you can put Junior Developer in your LinkedIn title. 

-if you can use twitter and tumblr and put hashtags and regular tags on stuff, you’re a Social Media Manager. If you can get people to follow you and comment back, you have Demonstrated Social Media Efficacy.

-if you can use Photoshop (or Pixlr!) to make five million pictures of Natalie Dormer really pretty, you are a Photo Editor. 

-if you can migrate some of your Photoshop skills to InDesign, you are a Production Editor with demonstrable skills in Layout For Print Publications

-if you want to look even more impressive and pick up an easy job that mostly involves googling bits of code to copy and fuck around with, go play on CodeAcademy and get yourself qualified in not just HTML and CSS, but also JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and others. Again, this makes you a Software/Applications Developer.

The only reason you’re given the impression that these are jobs for really smart brogrammers with masters degrees in computer science is because scary jargon keeps people out. Look stuff up, and you’ll find out you already know a ton of this material. I promise you, you’re more qualified for tech/developer jobs than a lot of the people actually working at firms that focus on those kind of jobs. 

^

Often in my job people ask me if I can do something, and if I respond with, ‘No, but I’m sure I could find out how,’ they look at me like my head just rotated 360 degrees. One thing about being on the internet in this age is that you have experienced how you can just google something and you’ll probably find a youtube tutorial.

Don’t know how to use the Puppetwarp in Photoshop? *20 minutes later and some cursing included* Okay, now I do.

Don’t know how to knit? *ten minutes later* totes pro.

A lot of people bag our generation but there’s so much to be said for the sheer amount of information we’re used to absorbing and parsing. Don’t underestimate that, either!

OK entry-level kids, listen. ‘I don’t know how to do this but just give me 20 minutes’ is probably the most important, career-advancing thing you can say at your workplace because not only does it show that you’re adaptable and proactive and any number of dumb buzzwords that happen to be popular in The Industry these days. BUT If you build up on it over time, it will also pretty much make you indispensable, which is so important in an unstable job market. 

Consider this: unless you get a job with a super-successful startup where your boss is like 25, chances are you’re going to land in company where the higher-ups are in their 40s-50s, thus belonging to that particular generation that habitually puts down millenials for having No Experience of Real Life. Except in a workplace environment this means they expect that they have to train you on every single little thing, aka waste time and resources on you, aka see you as a soooort of useful nuisance who’s there to do the little menial jobs no one else wants to do. This is where the last to come first to go thing comes from really.

What your crusty 50+ y/o bosses don’t realize is that ‘being on the computer’ all day, you inherently develop a thing called rapid skill acquisition. Yeah, it sounds fancy (so fancy you can put it in your CV) but most of the time, as the previous comments point out, it just involves Google and YT tutorials. You’ll be surprised how many highbrow professionals don’t actually do this, b/c they reached the top and feel like they have a secure position and basically fall so behind on things that a 20 y/o intern can out-skill them, or quickly learn to out-skill them any day of the week. Most likely they’re not aware of this. And no, it’s not as out there as it sounds. Consider you’re talking to people who think you need training to use WordPress. Imagine what telling them you can use a blogging platform to create an easy to update professional looking website for fucking free will do to them. Imagine telling them you can make gorgeous graphics from scratch, update the company logo or design some rad business cards. THERE IS SO MUCH YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT THEY DON’T KNOW CAN BE DONE. 

A couple of years ago I interned for a research centre where I did this all the time. Three weeks in they called me to sign an employment contract that tripled my pay and I got to go everywhere with them and meet important people in my field, it was great. My 23 y/o brother, who doesn’t have a single solitary hour of formal training in PR/marketing or IT in his degree, interned as marketing assistant for a small IT company and was so quick to catch on that they hired him after the internship and by the end of the year he’d already helped increase their turnover. Eight months, unpaid internship included, and he made them more money! That kid is never going to get fired!

Also learn some programming/web design. Seriously. I see these self-taught 16 y/o kids making gorgeous Tumblr themes from scratch and I’m like. You are al fucking wizards. Not even out of highschool yet and you’re pretty much set up for a job that potentially pays in the 6 digits. 

You are smart and you are creative and you are amazing! You need to be brave and confident and capitalize on that because you’ve got what it takes and more. Fuck the jargon, you’ve got the skills.

All of this. Also, don’t be afraid of job requirements that say “must have a BA in Mass Media and 10+ experience in the Youtubez” or some stupid shit like that. Most companies are making it up as they go when it comes to anything digital. They have no idea what it takes to be a social media manager or a web developer, so they copy-pasted the requirements from someone else. Apply anyway. Quantify your skills & experience using their words and then show them what you can do. Right now, especially in the media industry, all the big-wigs at the top are sending corporate mandates to HIRE PEOPLE LIKE YOU because they are so afraid of the ~digital future~ making them insignificant. Claim your space. You likely have more practical experience than half the people working in the field.

Honey, let me tell you something. I am an Administrative Assistant for an audit unit. Auditors, who use God knows what programs to do their analysis. They’re cool. Then you have the managers. Who oversee the auditors. Who I have to handhold to do every little thing in Word, Excel, and Outlook. Because they don’t understand anything. “Alice, how do you add a watermark?” “Alice, can you add a graph in Word that shows this information?” “Alice, I can’t get the borders to stay on one page only and not the whole document.” My answer? “I’ll fix it before I give it to the Chief Auditor. Just make a note.” By the way, if you’ve ever in your life read and made some sort of suggestion to your friends’ essays, reports, or anything, regardless of high school, college, or university level, you have the skill Quality Control. Trust me. 

This.