The subject of my career has been under discussion of late. Not that I have any plans to change it – but rather the conversation has concerned how I might wish to communicate what it is that I do, and that’s something that I have always struggled with.
It came up, among other things, against a backdrop of a different conversation about Wikipedia, what constitutes ‘notable’ and the advantage, in that particular domain, that an accomplished person who is known for a long, sustained and deep involvement in a very narrow field of interest might have over someone who has done a lot of interesting, but perhaps more laterally-connected things.
There was a decent period of my life a while back where I could simply say “I’m a professor” the way you might say I’m a plumber, a programmer or a surgeon. One word jobs have the advantage of satisfactorily and comprehensively answering the single most common superficial line of social questioning. But that one-word response was never a complete or even terribly descriptive summation of what it is I do. Besides, I always find answers that shut down conversations so much less interesting than answers that open them up.
A friend of mine is a highly respected recruiter and human resources executive who worked for many years at one of the largest technology giants on the planet. She once spent some time giving me some feedback about my CV which could essentially be summed up as “no, it’s still far too long – try again”.
Apparently, if you’re looking at page count, one is a good number. Two is acceptable. Your CV is not the movie, it’s the trailer.
But the truth is that for me, a genuine, thoughtful and truthful answer to “what do you do?” will always be more than a list of one-word job titles. More than can fit on a single page.
I did go for a time where I described myself as a ‘generalist’, but that has overtones of someone who dabbles inexpertly in random and unconnected fields. I’d like to think that’s not me, and I would argue that there are a couple of fairly clear and somewhat related threads that connect a lot of what I do in a meaningful way.
I also considered using the phrase ‘portfolio career’, but again, the potential reading of that is someone with either a limited attention span or, worse, limited ongoing suitability as an employee. While I might occasionally be distracted by shiny objects, I do like to think that if it’s me you want in the job, then I am best placed to give you value for money and determined to do so.
The trouble, if trouble is the correct word, is that what I do is never particularly well-described by what my job is, even though it’s always precisely the thing that makes me good at my job.
It might sometimes take some explaining, but the task is always in service of the goal.
But what I do is interesting. And while interesting is one word, it’s not a one-word job title. Interesting is not a sentence. Interesting is always a story. And in this particular case, it’s a series of very many stories that, when taken together, all add up to a coherent narrative.
So, like a Scheherazade for the LinkedIn world, I thought that rather than try and bullet point my career, I would do one of the things that I am, of all the things, most interested in doing: I would tell stories.
Specifically, I would give voice to each of the projects that I have created, undertaken or been involved in that have been interesting to me – in a way that I hope will be interesting to you. These are the things that I have done that you might not necessarily have guessed from what it said on my business card or email signature, but which make up the substance of my career.
I want to chronicle the experiments, adventures and moon shots, not the job titles or position descriptions. Whether that narrative is ‘notable’ will be a question for Wikipedians. My job is simply to try to make it half as interesting to you in the retelling as it was to me going through it at the time.
So what follows is perhaps the longest and one of the most unorthodox CVs you might encounter. Perhaps even the worst. Curriculum Vitae Verbis Pluribus. Too many words. Fortunately, I’m not currently looking for a job.
It involves music, travel, research, media production, writing, technology, culture, policy, broadcasting, consultancy, the odd bit of peril, not a small amount of whisky and always some of the best people you could ever hope to meet – some of whom you’ve heard of, seen on TV or whose records you own.
It’ll be episodic: one project equals one story equals one post – and with any luck, it’ll also be regular. I’ll do my best – though what with one thing and another, predictions about the future are somewhat more fraught than usual right now.
I’ll start with a ‘music for social change’ project I worked on in India with a youth development worker, a record producer, an archivist, some pop musicians and a group of brilliant street kids with big voices. That’ll be the post that follows this one.
But I’ll go back way before then to my career in New Zealand where I’m from, go through my decade in Britain where I’m also from and come right up to the present day with my business, labs and board membership here in Sweden where, these days, I’m from.
Though not, of course, in that order.
Maybe, once this is complete, I will be able to put together a satisfactory CV, each one-line entry an HTML link to a post on this site. That might not exactly constitute ‘two birds with one stone’ – and nor is it exactly in keeping with CV conventions, but it is, at least, tidy and modern, which I guess makes it aptly Scandinavian.
Pictured above: Me with BBC 6Music host and pop music legend Tom Robinson as we were about to lead a London Songwriters weekend event back in 2009. There’s a story in that.
