a.k.a. V.J.

High-school graduation season recently wrapped up here in Central New York. I don’t know any of this year’s grads, but seeing the signs and balloons around town makes me a bit melancholy. I felt the same way when I watched SUNY Oswego’s graduation ceremony last month. Graduations are hopeful times, but they can also be fraught with angst. Young people are going out into an increasingly complex, chaotic, and some would say bleak world. Sometimes, I feel a little anxious for those kids.

I occasionally get asked for career advice from the students in my classes. I have also been known to give such advice without being asked. Most of my students are looking for guidance on how to get started in a career in marketing or certain things they can do while still in college to prepare for a career path they have in mind. That kind of advice is pretty straightforward, and I have some basic pointers that I don’t think many marketing practitioners would argue with. But when it comes to managing and navigating a career over the long haul, I’m not sure I know any more than anyone else. I’m not even sure if “careers” as I understood the concept when I was young really even exist anymore in today’s world.

My father retired from the Birds-Eye division of General Foods after 38 years of service to that company. That type of career arc certainly doesn’t exist anymore. (For that matter, the Birds-Eye division of General Foods doesn’t exist anymore either, but that’s a different post.) The idea of working multiple decades for the same employer was already dying out around the time Dad retired in 1987. At some point between then and now, it seems like even the idea of working for most of one’s life in the same industry became less of a norm. Technology disrupts, industries die and sprout up, the economy waxes and wanes, companies come and go, and workers bob around like flotsam and jetsam in the wake of all of it.

It’s not all dire, though. There are a lot of benefits to changing jobs and being forced to reinvent oneself. It can be exciting and rejuvenating. It’s also scary as hell.

For my part, I’ve changed jobs plenty of times in the last three decades — and only once was I the party on the receiving end of the breakup. But while I’ve changed titles and companies, the type of work I’ve done has been pretty tightly focused in a few interrelated areas: media, advertising, market research, general marketing, and the teaching of all of the above. Someone looking at my resume would see a pretty coherent and direct throughline with every job I’ve had since I graduated from college in 1990. Oddly, that consistency was never by design or through directed effort.

I listened to an interview once with Steven Van Zandt where he was talking about the early days of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. He said something to the effect that people will often praise him and the rest of the band for sticking with their dream through the early years of struggle and seeing it through to success. But the reality, according to him, was that they really didn’t have any other skills or career options. They stuck with rock ‘n roll mostly because it was all they knew how to do. I feel the same way about my career.

I never started out with any specific goals or aspirations. I found a job out of college that was somewhat related to my major. From there, every new job I got was at least somewhat related to the previous one. I never had the desire, or had the need thrust upon me, to start all over again in a completely new career path. I might have wanted to move on from specific employers, or from where a job was located, but I was always perfectly content to stay within a narrow little cluster of niches, and there was always something available within that cluster to move on to.

The way I just described my path doesn’t sound very exciting, inspiring, or particularly brave on my part, but that was never the point. I was pretty happy along most steps of the way and remain happy with the current state of my professional life, a little more than a decade away from retirement. Ultimately, I think that’s about the most that any of us can hope for in a career.

That said, my unsolicited advice to this year’s crop of graduates is as follows: Forget about titles or the perceived prestige of certain companies or cities. Find something that pays the bills, that you can eventually get good at, and that doesn’t give you massive amounts of agita on a day-to-day basis. Do your best, pay your dues, learn, grow, don’t dwell on setbacks, respect the customer, and try not to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass to the people you work with.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for the class of 2023. Best of luck.