Repositioning yourself for the new digital economy

by Thom Holmes

March 26, 2001 —

An open letter to a veteran project manager:

It shouldn't surprise you that others in your situation are planning on changing jobs a lot sooner than they did in previous years. This state of affairs was recently confirmed by a survey conducted by IMCOR, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. According to the survey, 59 percent of executives plan on staying at their current jobs for another 5 years or less, a 15-percent increase since 1996. One might conclude that the new digital economy has something to do with this increase. It would be unwise, however, to believe that you can easily make the jump from a bricks-and-mortar company to an Internet startup simply because you want to.

The employees of a typical Internet company are substantially different from you. This gap stems mainly from the difference in your ages. Remember your first job? It was probably a grind: You were unable to show your stuff, and you were careful not to rock the boat. Well, the latest generation of graduates don't know what that was like, and have thereby empowered themselves to run the show.

Your competition consists of the Net generation:

Unlike their parents, the young people in this generation thrive on collaboration and abhor the notion of a boss. Their first point of reference is the Net. They strive to innovate and require fast results. They love hard work because work, learning, and play coincide. They are creative in unimaginable ways. - Don Tapscott et al.

How do you compete with that? More importantly, how do you blend in? It takes guts and clever self-packaging to retool your bricks-and-mortar experience for the fast-paced world of dot-com ventures. That task becomes even more formidable if you are forced to make a job change before you are ready. So get ready. You have something to offer that the Net generation lacks: neckties and experience. You can get along without the neckties, and hopefully will, but you must present your portfolio of experience in a way that makes sense to the kind of company that is sprouting up to take advantage of Internet opportunities.

So how do you get in the door of an Internet startup and stay there? Start by re-examining what you do for a living. Discover a common experience that unifies your entire career and make it your purpose in life. This is especially important if you have never had first-hand experience with Web projects. You may still be able to market your experience as being highly relevant to a start-up. Perhaps you are a master of new product development, new media publishing, or the launching of new products. Any of these skills represent know-how that might be of value to a start-up company.

In the second part of this article, we will look at some not-so-obvious tactics that may help you land a job with an Internet start-up.

ITworld.com