A couple of years ago, during a bout of post-university unemployment, I found myself sat on a bench in a small square parallel to the Mall; a long stretch of road leading up to Buckingham Palace in central London.
On the bench I was rehearsing like I’d never rehearsed before. In ten minutes time I had to enter one of the enormous converted townhouses behind me and, above and beyond my graduate peers, sell myself to a recruitment agency.
I had to convince them that my so-so university qualifications, the grades I’d achieved while studying over the past three years (and of course all my years of schooling up to that point) should give me the right to work for their company, the right to bring in clients under their name, and the right to, let’s be honest, put food on the table.
I needn’t have bothered.
Once inside we were ushered into what I can only assume to have been a child’s bedroom in a previous life. Six of us crammed ourselves into this room which our closest neighbour, Queen Elizabeth II, would have been ashamed to have called her broom cupboard.
After initial cramped formalities were out of the way the interviewer handed around some six CVs (resumes) of varying quality. On leaving the room he asked us, in groups of two, to evaluate each CV and rank them from most employable to least.
This is the point in which we dug our own grave.
Upon squeezing his way back into the room, the interviewer asked what we had come up with.
Each group, without fail, had ranked the CVs containing greater experience above those displaying higher grades.
This left a dilemma for the interviewer. After we has all spent some time explaining in quite some detail why we would choose experience far and beyond grades (just keep digging, just keep digging) he came out with a line that, in all fairness to him, was simply begging to be asked…
“If you all favour experience over grades, why should I hire you graduates?”
I’m unsure whether any of us in that tiny room were offered a job that day. I certainly wasn’t. What I did get out of the experience however, was the conscious realisation that despite how important it is to do well in school and achieve good grades; ultimately, experience trumps all.
During my current part-time job we receive a couple of CV applications each day. The moment I pick one up I skip directly to the big bold title labelled ‘experience’. It’s rare for me to take more than a second glance at the just as big, but nowhere near as exciting label marked ‘education’.
Education is incredibly important (the understatement of the century), but if all you have to offer a company, a freelance agency, or a business start-up, is your education, they have nothing tangible to hold onto, to grasp how well you are going to work for them.
Talk is cheap. Expecting your grades to do the talking for you to cover up your lack of experience won’t fool anybody. We’ve all heard the phrase “actions speak louder than words”, but not so many of us act upon it.
If, two years ago when I started this blog I had instead decided to put it off and simply ‘talk about’ starting a blog in the future, where would I be now? Not writing these very words and pushing it out to an ever-growing audience, no doubt.
If, last year you had decided not to run a TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) class in Indonesia, where would you be now? Not preparing yourself for a second TEFL year in Turkey, no doubt.
Actions speak louder than words. Educate yourself, then skip directly to the big bold title labeled experience.
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