Career development

Mick Miles

1d

Would you accept a job that pays 30% more if it required you to be in the office five days a week instead of working remotely? What would ultimately drive your decision?

7

godfrey biroma
2h
Absolutely yes
madanda ivan
3h
Yes, am so much interested in working and that would probably help me to achieve a lot in life other than sitting in one place at home with less to do... more

Anonymous member

Career development

5h

Have you ever stayed in a job you disliked simply because the market felt too risky to leave? At what point do you decide it's time to move on?

Tim Neja
3h
I try to but people refuse to hire

Career development

4h

Intern's Incredible Work Ethic Backfires After Manager Accuses Them of Trying to 'Oust' the Staff

If you ever did an internship, you'll know how weirdly peripheral it can feel. You're employed, but not permanently. You're part of a company, but are you really? You're being trusted with jobs, but are they really important jobs or are they just tasks that no one else wants to do? And are you even being paid? Well it depends on the company, but if you are it's not likely to be much at... all.

However, as they say, internships could be your ticket to something much bigger. Maybe it's a rite of passage, maybe it's an underpaid role taking advantage of those privileged enough to even take them up - but at the very least, they give you some solid work experience for your resumé. So when the intern in this story landed a role in a bank office they were excited to get started, and with their future firmly ahead of them, they put everything into their work. Eventually the managers even took notice, but the hard work that they were doing? Well it might not have had such positive consequences after all.

Read on to find out what happened.

I am a temporary intern at a bank office.

After a month in, I kicked *** at my job and completed everything they wanted me to do, everything they hired me to do.

So one morning I showed up to work (fifteen minutes late) and I arrived to an empty office.

I meandered over to my desk and there was a sticky note on my monitor that told me there was a meeting going on in the conference room. Great.

Let's see what happened when this intern arrived late to the meeting.

I went over to the conference room and entered just as the department boss was talking. I'm shy and everyone was looking at me: not the best thing to calm my nerves.

I was directed to walk across the room to sit, and all the while all eyes were on me.

I sat down and the boss continued his conversation.

Basically what he said was I made all my coworkers look bad because I outperformed and set the new office standard for work ethic. Hooray for me, right? Wrong.

Uh-oh. Read on to find out what happened next.

When the boss left, the supervisor put the spotlight on me in a room full of people.

My supervisor thanked me, and I was too scared to thank him or say anything. I was frozen with fear like a deer in headlights.

I ended up looking down at the ground without saying a word. I looked dumb and that was incredibly embarrassing.

I left that room and everything went back to normal... I just worry about what my coworkers thought.

It's great that this intern has already made such an impression at the company.

However, it sucks that the boss put them on the spot like that, embarrassing them in front of everyone.

If the work culture isn't great and full of kind people, this could also turn their colleagues against them.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who is told to work a holiday without overtime pay, and how they ended up getting their money.

This person thought that they'd done well, but their management had done terribly.

And others called out the manager for not considering the shy intern's nature.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pointed out that doing a lot of work can sometimes be a negative thing.

If this intern is already showing up the full time permanent colleagues at the company, then they are clearly doing something right. It's great for the intern's resumé and future job prospects that they've already impressed - and even though they might not have enjoyed the feedback at the time, it's at least a sign that they are valued, even if they just work there temporarily. That's no bad thing, since there's a good chance that if they are a good fit for the company, they might be offered a more permanent job down the line.

But the irony of walking in fifteen minutes late to this sort of praise is hilarious, albeit presumably mortifying for the intern. For introverts and shy folk, we don't like being called out in front of everyone, even when it's for a positive thing, and we certainly don't like having a whole room full of eyes on us. It's a shame that the manager chose to give the intern praise in this way though, rather than in a way that might have been more personally preferable, since a good manager would actually consider the employee first.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee whose dietary restrictions caused the whole office to turn against her. more

Career development

6h

programmer struggling through months of failed interviews walks into technical interview convinced he's about to embarrass himself, leaves with a job offer and higher salary: 'i start on monday'

Have job interviews become so brutal that a normal conversation feels surprising?

We can all agree that having a job interview is pretty nerve-racking. Being sat there, waiting for the managers or recruiters to come, it's just unpleasant. There are people out there who know exactly how to handle those moments, whereas others prefer to avoid them as much as possible. When it comes to interviews,... I'm pretty chill. I try to be myself and hope for the best.

I'm not going to lie: of course, I get nervous, and more often than not, it's the event of my day. No matter what I'm doing before or after the interview, I won't stop thinking about it, play speeches in my head, and prepare myself for the weirdest and most twisted questions (that no one really ever asks, to be honest). Needless to say, when I read this story, I totally relate.

If you've been unemployed for a while, or maybe just job searching, interviews are everything. You put so much expectation on them, and on yourself, that you forget they are not only meeting you: you are meeting them, too. I read somewhere that one thing that helps calm your nerves before an interview is understanding that you're interviewing them as well. You have to focus on the company, what they have to offer you, the salary expectation, etc.

I think that, in the end, it's just a normal conversation you're having with a stranger. Nothing crazy. Think about it like small talk. And if everything goes wrong, you just blew the whole thing, you are most likely never going to see them again. So, there's nothing really to lose.

A piece of advice I have for you is to treat interviews as actual practice. Even if you're happy with your current job and don't feel like changing anything, having one interview every couple of months will be helpful if you're ever in the job market again. And I think that is going to really help you see that they are just a conversation, and there's nothing to be afraid of. more

Career development

11h

The University as Giant App

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THEO BAKER'S NEW memoir How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University has drawn unusual attention for a first... book by a previously unknown author, written mostly when he was in his first two years as an undergraduate at Stanford. It is not an SAT-to-riches saga, however; Baker's parents are seasoned New York Times reporters who met when they were at The Washington Post, and Baker himself is a product of Phillips Academy (a.k.a. Andover). He has already brushed off charges that he is a nepo baby. Still, someone who can refer to Professor Robert Reich of Labor Department fame as "Rob Reich" and who can get numerous scientists, lawyers, and journalists to assist his meteoric career at The Stanford Daily certainly reminds us that man does not live by résumés alone.

This catchily titled book, groomed for outsize success, betrays the avuncular touch of a village of Baker fans, from The New York Times to Penguin Press, and from the Stanford quad to Berkeley's Sproul Plaza. He is a Master of the Universe, disguised as a stressed-out, crusading, geeky Jewish kid who coded his way into Stanford and stumbled his way into a best-selling book, a major journalistic award, and national recognition by the time he was 21 years old. The book itself offers a deep dive into Stanford's role as Silicon Valley's tech incubator, a sunlit paradise of Geeks and Greeks. Baker fetishizes Stanford -- its hugely wealthy, stunning campus, its excellence as the national temple of silicon sana in corpore sano -- but he also shows us how venal, fake, immoral, and extractive its heart really is. How to Rule the World offers us the racy joys of television shows like Mad Men or Suits, with a good dose of The Social Network thrown in. There is something oddly retro about its style and about the Stanford it depicts. But this retro aesthetic slowly unfolds into something altogether darker.

The voice at times reminds me of an earlier cult classic in American literature, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), with Baker as Holden Caulfield teleported to Stanford in 2022. He is the all-knowing misfit, the spotter of phonies, the artist as young preppie. He has a mordant wit, and his target is adult pretense in every form, from faux socialites to fake bohemians, from insecure debutantes to Ivy League big men. Baker brings Caulfield's adolescent dyspepsia to the brand-conscious insider terminology, casual hedonism, and barely concealed greed of the most admired students and faculty at Stanford.

This slouchy, self-aware form of retro reportage fits the Stanford milieu in an eerie way, since the university itself, in Baker's vignettes, feels as if it is still stuck in the Eisenhower fifties. It is astoundingly conformist, claustrophobically cheerful, overwhelmingly white in spirit if not in demographics, and tightly regulated in the way that Disneyland, with its special brand of crew-cut good cheer and manicured good behavior, also is. Baker stresses how much Stanford invests in its physical beauty, its extensive panoramas and reality TV gestalt.

The midcentury morphing of the university's reputation from clubby regional institution to national powerhouse is crucially connected with Frederick Terman, dean of the engineering school and later provost, often referred to as "the father of Silicon Valley" because of his role in the university-industry partnership that turned the region into a global digital hub, whose career at Stanford extended for two decades after the end of World War II. One of my own siblings (long deceased) was at Stanford as a graduate student in political science in the early 1960s, and his letters to us offered glimpses of a university that was well on its way to shedding its image as a mostly white, conservative, Republican school for young Californians who wished to read Plato while enjoying fraternity parties. The playgrounds for its trustees were places like what was then known as "Squaw Valley," while fraternity parties still had themes like "Pearl Harbor," with fake tanks and camouflage for decor. Stanford students already spoke about their school as being more "bitchin'" than Harvard, and though the university was not yet the Skunk Works for Silicon Valley, the idea that it was a tech-driven alternative to the Ivy League had already taken root.

This Cold War version of Stanford was best symbolized by the Hoover Institution, which gradually became -- and remains -- a quasi-independent center for the study of the conservative angle on war, diplomacy, and international strategy. It remains the university's political beacon (as Hoover Tower is the heart of the campus), blessing and legitimizing the pedagogical investment in digital funding and innovation. Its current director is Condoleezza Rice, who embodies a tradition of fellows, visitors, and scholars that has included Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, and Milton Friedman. It is a living mecca of conservative thought, with remarkable autonomy under the broad Stanford umbrella. The Hoover Institution does not play a big role in Baker's book, but Rice does make a cameo appearance, showing that the military-industrial alliance still thrives at Stanford and provides ballast for the valley's tech adventurism.

¤

I saw a more mature version of this environment during my stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1984-85. Created in the 1950s as an independent center for sabbatical time for scholars around the country, CASBS was on Stanford land, and became slowly absorbed by the university, of which it is now a fully owned subsidiary. Poised on a hillside overlooking the campus, it had the feeling of an academic dude ranch, with fine food and a nice volleyball court, ideal for a carefully curated cohort of about 40 scholars per year. We lived in various quarters, had access to the university's recreational and library facilities, and were treated as honored sojourners in the suburban delights of Palo Alto.

What I could already see at the time was that Stanford did not hew to the model of Caltech, MIT, and other tech powerhouses that did a lot of work for the Pentagon and whose business models depended on those close ties to military research. Stanford broke this mold and was rapidly becoming a new species of institution, neither a private university nor a fully independent industrial research facility. It was a hybrid, a kind of breeder campus for Silicon Valley, with a growing indifference to the boundaries between its academic and technological functions. Industry powered its enormous wealth, and academic rankings and star faculty were this emperor's new clothes, fig leaves to disguise the school's primary function as a high-tech incubator. But what Stanford has become over the last half century is more than merely that, more than market-focused innovation and digital venture capital. It has become a breeder of students with the Right Stuff, what Baker calls the "Stanford inside Stanford," the superbright students who inhabit the school's secret clubs, keep its tightest gates, and scan freshmen for hidden signs of being the next unicorn. You enter this meta-club as a freshman or sophomore, because the VCs, whose spotters and touts comb the campus, believe that no one can show these superhuman qualities once they are juniors or seniors. By then, they are already helots.

Baker offers a shockingly frank look at a campus that is as tightly governed as a Siberian labor camp -- one perhaps designed by Sergey Brin. Baker reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the administrators go to guard against the smallest chances of drunken, bawdy, or intemperate forms of student life, making a simple campus party harder to organize than a political rally. Consent forms, monitors, and cameras lurk everywhere, and solicitous peers and proctors, like neighborhood grandmas in communist East Germany, report on any behavior likely to taint Stanford's reputation as the dedicated petri dish for Silicon Valley's finest. What Baker details is the stifling reality of Stanford's "War on Fun," the other side of its endless sunshine.

Once again, there is a literary preview of this type of sunny gulag, in Kazuo Ishiguro's heartbreaking 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, in which a sylvan British boarding school called Hailsham harbors students who are really clients cloned to be organ donors. The Ishiguro story was triggered for me by Baker's images of Stanford as a grooming machine, a segregated educational bubble under the techno-eugenic gaze of the likes of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. In this pseudo-academic paddock, pronatalism, life extension, genetic engineering, and AI enjoy a high degree of co-produced credibility. Superrace ideologies, new-wave bionics, and new forms of social Darwinism are easy to read in Baker's sketches of his Stanford classmates, not to mention the faculty, trustees, and unicorn spotters who define and control the Stanford inside Stanford. In this respect, Baker's book is a terrifying act of whistleblowing.

Yet a reader might lose this thread in the more life-size villainy displayed in Baker's battle against Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford from 2016 to 2023, a golden boy of scientific research, administrative leadership, and scholarly prestige. Baker, as a Stanford freshman, threw himself into a massive journalistic effort to show that MTL (as Baker refers to him) was involved in an extended series of scientific frauds. These accusations had been swept under the rug by friends, peers, donors, science journal editors, and university leaders, many of whom enabled MTL to deflect criticism until Baker, writing for The Stanford Daily, got his teeth into him. The narrative of Baker's battle to air the full story of MTL's ethical and fiduciary bankruptcy, and the latter's concerted efforts to throw money and lawyers at Baker and silence those who gave him information, advice, and support, is reason alone to read this book.

MTL himself comes off as vaguely android -- perfectly programmed, never frazzled, a supercharged Master of Science. Baker catches him with his mask down a few times, but only fleetingly. Fired by the Stanford trustees when he became a ticking time bomb threatening the university's biggest asset, its winner-take-all reputation, MTL moved on to promote and lead his own company, Xaira Therapeutics, which raised one billion dollars in 2024, with barely a murmur from its heavyweight Bay Area investors about its founder's tainted scientific record.

What Baker shows beyond any quibbling is that the beating heart of Stanford is its near monopoly on the New Silicon Man, its breeder reactor for the production of unicorns. Every one of these exceptional creatures stands out against the backdrop of a vast army of impostors, wannabes, and failures, who rush seasonally into dreary back offices where they code, test, and market digital products. They arise from the lumpen corps of middle school geeks, leaping into view amid the sunlight of freshman year, and unless they are enormously lucky, they vanish soon after into the murky waters from which they first emerged.

But wait, is Stanford not excellent at everything, including the arts, history, sociology, and competitive athletics, not to mention landscaping, health facilities, and hackathons for the digitally gifted? Theo Baker certainly affirms the Stanford drive to be the best in everything, the Delta Force of the academy. Does this soften his troubling picture of the Stanford inside Stanford, the monomaniacal engine for Silicon Valley's need and greed? It does not. Baker is clear that his biggest scoop is not the investigative work that helped him take down a presidential phony but his risky story about the fatal embrace between the university and Silicon Valley. Considered in that context, the humanities departments and all the other nonengineering fields have value because without them, Stanford would crash in the rankings and become just a vocational school for the digital market.

This is, of course, not a concern unique to Stanford. MIT, Caltech, and Johns Hopkins are all technical powerhouses that feed and nurture their poor cousins in the social sciences and humanities for fear of turning into Georgia Tech or the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Specializing in any form of technological education without the full spectrum of the liberal arts can open a university to comparisons with trade schools in blue-collar fields like optometry and paramedical work, with which no elite academic institution wishes to be associated.

¤

Baker finds himself drawn into the world of his parents and discovers that he is addicted to investigative journalism. Pursuing stories, conducting cloak-and-dagger interviews, and flirting with high-end litigation are more attractive to him than the benefits of membership in the Stanford inside Stanford, to which he also has reliable access. Addressing Stanford's self-positioning as the supreme site of Silicon Valley capitalist realism, and rehearsing his campaign against a former president's scientific fraud, would have been more than enough to make this book a nonfiction blockbuster. What Baker may not have intended, however, is the melancholy allegory his book suggests.

This allegory involves, quite simply, the overwhelming dominance of capital -- or just plain filthy lucre -- at Stanford. Swelling endowments, the endless filling of undergraduate stockings by Silicon Valley VCs, unlimited slush funds and personal gifts for promising freshmen, and bottomless social funds for geek hackathons and promotions all float in an ambient mythology of galactic profits and status orgies. The cars, homes, and personal possessions of the valley aristocracy exceed those of any other zip code, class fragment, or campus ecology in the United States. The Bay Area has surpassed New York City in the number of its billionaires (somewhere between 50 and 60), and virtually all of them have tech roots and traceable ties to the Stanford ecosystem. The remarkable wealth disparities produced by the tech aristocracy have prompted a shift away from conspicuous consumption (whose dynamics were so ably analyzed by that erstwhile Stanford sociologist Thorstein Veblen) to what one luxury realtor has called "stealth wealth," in which home sales have become hard to trace and total privacy, especially for the super-wealthy, is the new meta-commodity.

The untiring fantasy of infinite wealth is written into the cultural constitution of the United States, but its historical variations are considerable. The robber barons, the junk bond kings, and the showbiz elites all make, display, and justify their money differently. It is tempting to connect Donald Trump, his family, and his cronies to the cult of wealth in Silicon Valley, for which Stanford is a feeder and breeder. Both have a megalomaniac, Übermensch ethic, and both appear to worship means over ends. But this convergence can mislead. Trump's wealth and the ethic that drives it are anchored in the so-called "art of the deal," a negotiation that might lead to a contract (or not). It is a zombie token of success that can be parlayed into other deals, large sums of money accruing as the collateral benefit of an endless pyramid of deals.

By contrast, Stanford, as a seedbed for Silicon Valley, operates on the basis of the term sheet, the quintessential tool of the venture capital market that underpins digital innovation. The term sheet is a bet on the future potential of a tech idea, often a piece of software, and of the "terms" under which investors and the start-up founder agree to share their spoils and monetize their interests over time. It is the VC version of a prenup. Baker reports that Stanford freshmen and sophomores who acquire a reputation as supersmart are offered term sheets as well as large start-up funds without even having any specific tech ideas. The bet is on the jockey, not on the horse. Trump's ventures, on the other hand, are simply con jobs, scams that count on "deals" to evaporate before they become binding contracts. To put it in the language of capitalist gluttony, term sheets are appetizers, while deals are the main course. Term sheets are speculative devices in a market searching for black swans, while Trump's money mania is about fixing the market for white swans.

¤

So why should Baker's book unsettle us? What's wrong with a powerhouse of a university being joined at the hip to the newest frontier of the American dream? What's wrong with a winner-take-all school feeding a winner-take-all economy? What's wrong with being the filter and the gate to the money and excitement of Silicon Valley?

We can leave aside the usual laundry list of complaints about Stanford's (and Silicon Valley's) wealth, privilege and exclusivity, and their implications for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. We do not need Theo Baker to serve as our muckraker on these subjects since the truly dystopian possibilities lie elsewhere. The chilling subtext of Baker's book is the impression it conveys of Stanford as a piece of advanced pronatalist technology designed to create the optimal laboratory conditions for selecting, grooming, and developing a remarkable class of quasi-adults. These actants can then be assigned to the most exclusive tech hubs (such as Xaira Therapeutics) to create the advanced biomedical tools to further enhance the life chances and cultural dominance of the very class from which they were initially picked. Is this meritocracy, or clonocracy?

It might be argued that Silicon Valley, like the army, the church, and the American Bar Association, is free to identify, recruit, and train new members as they please. What kind of a university is this, then? A metaphor comes to mind. Stanford is the harbinger of the university-as-giant-app, a networked series of buildings, professors, classrooms, donors, faculty, trustees, and back-office staff designed to turn out a small but predictable number of next-generation tech titans. Like other apps, it feels like a highly engineered tool geared to customer convenience, though only a carefully selected group of human beings is allowed to use the program -- and the real operator is Silicon Valley itself, whose screen taps summon the Stanford within Stanford, fresh from the warehouse. more

Career development

11h

Employers to college students: Never mind that 4.0 GPA. Go out and get a summer job.

College students with any sort of work experience on their résumés are twice as likely to be employed shortly after graduating

Working "in any capacity" during college is "the single strongest predictor of post-graduation employment," according to a recent ZipRecruiter report.

Hiring managers say many applicants for entry-level jobs today lack a critical element on their résumés: work experience... of any sort.

"Any time a résumé is decorated with experience - regardless of what they've done - that will stand out more than the person who is next in line with no experience at all," said Bill Shafransky, a senior wealth adviser at Moneco Advisors in Fairfield, Conn., who has reviewed applications for internships and entry-level hires.

'I can teach somebody how to do a financial spreadsheet. I can teach someone how to do financial modeling. I can't teach somebody how to be personable. I can't teach effort.'Bill Shafransky, Moneco Advisors

Even unrelated, low-skill jobs on a résumé can be valuable for entry-level candidates, reflecting an eagerness to work hard and succeed, Shafransky told MarketWatch. "I can teach somebody how to do a financial spreadsheet. I can teach someone how to do financial modeling. I can't teach somebody how to be personable. I can't teach effort."

Related: I spent months waiting for the perfect job after college. It's one of my biggest regrets.

The share of American students who have jobs has been declining for decades, as many shifted their focus to academics and extracurricular activities. While 30.5% of high-school students and 46.4% of full-time college students were employed in 1993, by 2024, those figures had fallen to 19.8% and 41.4%, respectively, according to the most recent government employment data.

In a 2026 survey by ZipRecruiter, 16% of graduating students and 9% of recent grads had not worked for pay at any point during college.

For many, the decision not to work places them at a significant disadvantage when they graduate into today's competitive job market, where some employers are requiring three to five years of experience even for entry-level jobs.

Others who want to work say getting a foot in the door has been difficult. Teens and parents of teens told MarketWatch that young workers rarely hear back about entry-level service jobs, for instance in food service, unless they have a personal introduction or connection to the employer.

And teens are competing with older workers for similar jobs: People aged 25 and over accounted for 56.9% of minimum-wage workers in 2024.

From the archives (June 2025): Teens from upper-income families are far more likely to work summer jobs than poor teens. What's going on?

Working "in any capacity" during college is "the single strongest predictor of post-graduation employment," a recent ZipRecruiter report concluded.

In ZipRecruiter's survey, 81.6% of recent college grads with work experience - whether that's an internship, part-time job, full-time job, apprenticeship or gig work - were employed shortly after graduating, compared with 40.7% of those who had no experience. Those with experience were also nearly twice as likely, at 20.8%, to have landed a role before receiving their diploma compared with those who didn't work, at 12.7%.

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has been elevated in recent years, hitting 5.6% in March, compared with an average of 4.2% for all workers, according to the New York Fed. Another 41.5% are underemployed, meaning they are working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree.

'Don't wait until graduation. The earlier you get into a real work environment, the better positioned you'll be.'Sneha Puri, Indeed

"When you're looking at the lost opportunity for an 18-year-old not getting a summer job at an ice-cream stand or whatever it may be, having experience on a resume is extremely important in trying to begin a career," ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud said.

"Don't wait until graduation. The earlier you get into a real work environment, the better positioned you'll be," said Sneha Puri, an economist at Indeed. "Work experience before graduating allows you to build skills that are hard to replicate in a classroom."

Related: How teens can turn a summer job into an extra $500,000 in savings when they're older

Why employers look for work experience even for entry-level jobs

Karolyn Leonard, global director of talent acquisition at the marketing company Tms, said her company received almost 700 applications for 36 internship positions this year. More than half of the applicants had some work experience on their résumés, including jobs in food service, other internships or being a student-athlete.

"You want to hire somebody who has had some sort of experience dealing with a manager or co-workers. It's helpful to understand if people have been on a team before" and "have that dependability and reliability," she said.

The company also considers a candidate's grade point average and whether they are studying something related to the position.

Other ways younger candidates can stand out

Still, "not everybody has the ability to go to college and do an internship," Leonard acknowledges. Extracurriculars that "highlight team leadership, whether it's in a sorority or fraternity, or the newspaper, certainly help us see that those individuals are motivated and are more likely to succeed," she said.

In the latest survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 17% of graduating seniors did not participate in an internship or other experiential learning program (such as an apprenticeship, co-op position, study abroad, faculty-led research project, on-campus student work or clinical experience).

For those looking for a place to start, an Indeed post identified dozens of jobs that often don't require prior experience, such as data-entry clerk, veterinary assistant and customer-service representative.

And some teens are turning to entrepreneurship to fill the gap - starting their own car-detailing or landscaping business, for instance. Survey data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that Americans ages 18 to 24 are starting businesses at higher rates than older generations.

Leonard also emphasized the importance of practicing networking skills starting at an early age. "Whether it's your friends, your parents, your parents' friends, your parents' co-workers - there's a lot of people out there who can help you," she said. And even if they don't know of any opportunities, "a lot of people are open to just giving some advice."

Need advice on a money-related issue in your life? MarketWatch's Dollar Signs advice column is here for you. Submit questions anonymously here or write to us at dollarsigns@marketwatch.com.

-Venessa Wong

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

06-20-26 1020ET Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. more

Career development

11h

Are students simultaneously overqualified and underprepared?

A hiring manager recently described a common campus recruitment situation. A student with an impressive résumé including certifications in data analytics, digital marketing, AI tools, and academic competitions appeared exceptional on paper but struggled to frame a messy, real-world business problem without a clear answer.

Underprepared

This is increasingly common across industries. Indian... graduates may be the most credentialed generation yet, with résumés full of courses, specialisations, and digital certifications but many are underprepared for professional realities. According to the India Skills Report 2025, about 54.8% of Indian graduates are considered employable, a modest improvement from roughly 51% the previous year. This contradiction lies at the heart of India's employability paradox: why are students accumulating qualifications faster than their readiness for work is improving?

Part of the answer lies in credential inflation. With the expansion of online learning platforms and short-term certification programmes, students today have unprecedented access to specialised courses. In principle, this democratisation of knowledge is positive. However, the speed with which credentials are accumulated sometimes outpaces the depth with which knowledge is absorbed.

Students may complete modules in analytics, marketing automation, or fintech tools. But when faced with real organisational challenges such as analysing declining customer retention or designing a market-entry strategy, the application of that knowledge often becomes difficult.

Challenges

When recruiters discuss employability gaps, they rarely begin with complaints about technical knowledge. Most graduates today possess basic familiarity with digital tools and management frameworks. The challenge lies elsewhere.

The first is problem framing. Many students are trained to solve structured questions with clearly defined problems but organisational challenges rarely arrive in neat formats. A decline in sales may involve pricing, customer behaviour, supply-chain issues, and internal coordination, all of which require analytical maturity that exam-driven learning rarely develops.

The next is comfort with ambiguity. The modern workplace is rarely linear. Projects evolve, information is incomplete, and solutions require experimentation. Reports such as the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs analysis rank analytical thinking, adaptability, and resilience among the most critical skills today. Yet, many graduates struggle in uncertain environments.

Then comes collaborative maturity. Working in a college group differs from collaboration within a professional organisation. Real teamwork requires negotiating viewpoints, managing disagreements, and sharing accountability ... capabilities that remain underdeveloped in formal education.

Together, these gaps highlight that a deeper insight: the employability challenge is not simply about skills, but about judgement, adaptability, and the ability to operate within complex environments.

Need for change

India's policy framework has recognised the need for change. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 calls for greater interdisciplinarity, experiential learning, and stronger academia-industry integration. Similarly, AICTE initiatives encourage internships, industry immersion, and project-based learning as core elements of higher education. But implementing these ideas requires a deeper shift in institutional thinking.

First, curricula must move beyond disciplinary silos. Real business problems rarely fall neatly into categories such as marketing, finance, or operations. Students need interdisciplinary exposure that integrates multiple perspectives while making decisions.

Second, industry engagement must become continuous rather than occasional. Guest lectures and short internships are useful but cannot be substitutes for sustained exposure to organisational challenges.

Third, institutions must create environments where reflection and iteration are valued. Students should be encouraged not only to succeed but also to analyse failure, revise assumptions, and develop resilience.

Ultimately, higher education must move beyond credential-heavy graduates to individuals who can think critically, collaborate, and adapt. As industries evolve, the true measure of education is not certificates but the depth of understanding and judgement applied to complex situations.

Resolving India's employability paradox requires a shift from qualification density to competence depth. Only when education systems prioritise this transformation will students move from being merely well-qualified to being genuinely prepared for the world they are about to enter.

The writer is President and CEO, Fortune Institute of International Business. more

Career development

13h

Gen Z grad landed a job at LinkedIn by waitressing at a conference full of recruiters and handing out her résumé during breaks -- now she works at Google

Basant Shenouda spent six months after graduating from one of Germany's top universities sliding into recruiters' DMs on LinkedIn and applying for jobs online -- and getting ghosted. So she volunteered to waitress at a conference six hours away, where she handed her résumé to 40 recruiters and landed a job at LinkedIn. Now she's at Google.

"It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring... manager, even virtually -- which used to be a more nontraditional method," the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune. "It's incredibly hard to spotlight yourself."

It's a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers -- so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about.

One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. "It's a really well-known marketing and sales conference in Germany," Shenouda recalls.

"I graduated in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place where the decision-makers I was looking to target were going to be," she explains. "People were even flying in from the U.S., so it was a good networking opportunity."

With that in mind, Shenouda volunteered to clean up glasses at the conference to gain free entry, and traveled over six hours from Cologne to Hamburg by train with a stack of résumés in hand.

During her breaks at the conference, Shenouda put her CV in front of 30 to 40 faces, with the premise that she was looking for feedback on it -- while secretly hoping her bold approach would impress just one recruitment manager. And after a six-month hiring process, it paid off.

"I was one of the only graduates at the conference, and so it was full of opportunities for me," the 29-year-old adds. "I got insight into my résumé, developed a lot of relationships face-to-face (and that was far more effective than networking online) and got my application kick-started for a couple of positions."

One of those positions was in the sales graduate scheme at LinkedIn, where Shenouda worked until 2014, climbing to the role of implementation consultant in Dublin. Now, she's got a coveted spot at Google -- and it's all thanks to volunteering to waitress where the recruiters were at, instead of waiting for a callback.

"When you're a graduate you think everyone's going to say yes to you and things are going work out. But it's a matter of building up resilience," she advises unemployed grads.

"You need to keep reassessing your process so that every no gets you closer to that next yes."

Target the employers that rejected you

There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but Shenouda took a more targeted approach than just hoping to bump into her future employer.

Not only did she draw up a hit list of conferences that hiring managers at her dream employers were going to be at, but she also went face-to-face with those who had rejected her advances online -- LinkedIn's recruiter being one of those.

"I gained feedback from all the companies that rejected me, which allowed me to reapply and get job offers," Shenouda says.

"It really brought me a lot of insight into how I can better distinguish my applications and what gaps I needed to fill to ensure that I made it past the final interview rounds.

"Traditionally, people don't reapply; people don't keep trying and keep reaching out to people and keep maintaining a relationship.

"They [the recruiter] thought those were really good transferable skills for sales, and that's what I ended up doing."

How to convert networking into a job offer

Even if you've made every effort to ensure that you're showing up at all the places hiring managers are, it doesn't guarantee you'll actually get any leads.

Shenouda says she showed her CV to around 200 recruiters across a handful of conferences before having any luck.

Here are some tips she learned along the way to convert networking from just chitchat into something more tangible, like a job interview or offer:

1. Talk impact

Don't worry if promoting yourself to strangers doesn't come naturally. "I was really bad at networking before," Shenouda recalls. Her biggest tip? Talk metrics.

"Now I know how to get someone's attention," she says, adding that that looks like "talking about impact instead of just saying, 'I want a job.'"

Looking back at the elevator pitch that landed her her current role, the Gen Zer says she talked about her wins during a previous internship at Intel.

Likewise, don't be afraid to outline what you want following a conversation with a recruiter.

"I'd always ask the specific question: if they can refer me (for a job), or if they have feedback based on my résumé, or my past interview experience with the company," Shenouda adds.

2. Listen

Want to know which metrics will stand out to the hiring manager at your dream job? Ask them.

"Always focusing your elevator pitch on the other person," Shenouda says.

It may sound counterintuitive to use the few minutes you have to pitch yourself to turn the attention on the recruiter's needs -- but it's a surefire way to closely align your message with what they're looking for.

"If they say they're looking for people who can achieve something like a particular project, make sure you're speaking that language," Shenouda advises.

3. Foster friendships

Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside work.

While getting straight down to business may be beneficial in the short term, for long-term alliances, it's better to forge meaningful connections.

"It's not just about networking," Shenouda notes. "It's about making friends, because that's how you get people to support you."

It's why she recommends connecting with the people you've met on social media, while your face and name are still fresh in their minds -- but don't be a stranger.

Shenouda is still in touch with a Facebook recruiter that she met at a careers event seven years ago and bonded with over their mutual affinity for weightlifting.

"The key to any career success is always the relationships you have -- that is why I have always prioritized networking outside of the traditional job-hunting method."

A version of this story originally published on April 13, 2024.

Have you used an unusual hack to break into your career? Fortune wants to hear from you. Get in touch: [email protected] more

Career development

14h

Why first dates feel more like job interviews than romantic encounters

Dating in 2026 feels less like falling in love and more like applying for a competitive internship. You show up polished, prepared, and armed with rehearsed answers to the same questions.

The butterflies, the excitement, the anticipation of meeting someone new first dates have long been associated with romance and possibility.

Yet for many modern singles, sitting across from a potential partner... can feel less like the beginning of a love story and more like a high-stakes job interview.

Questions about career goals, financial stability, future plans, and personal values often arrive before the appetisers. Instead of simply enjoying each other's company, many people leave first dates feeling evaluated rather than appreciated.

The search for compatibility

Dating has always involved assessing whether two people are a good match. However, in today's fast-paced world, many singles are trying to determine compatibility as quickly as possible.

With busy schedules and countless dating app profiles just a swipe away, people often feel pressured to decide early whether a relationship has long-term potential. As a result, first dates become a fact-finding mission.

Questions such as "Where do you see yourself in five years?" or "Do you want children?" may seem more suited to a recruitment panel than a romantic evening, but they are increasingly common because people want clarity before investing emotionally.

Dating apps have changed expectations

The rise of dating apps has transformed how people approach romance. Before meeting in person, many individuals already know basic information about each other's interests, careers, education, and hobbies.

By the time they sit down for a first date, the focus often shifts from discovering who someone is to verifying whether they match the image created online.

The abundance of options can also create a "shopping mindset," where people feel compelled to assess potential partners quickly and efficiently. Instead of allowing chemistry to develop naturally, dates can become a checklist of qualities and deal-breakers.

Fear of wasting time

Many adults enter the dating scene with clearer relationship goals than previous generations. Whether they want marriage, children, companionship, or personal growth, they often know what they are looking for.

This clarity can be beneficial, but it also creates pressure. Some people feel they must gather as much information as possible during the first meeting to avoid investing time in someone who may not share their goals.

The result is a conversation that can feel more like an interview than an exploration of mutual attraction.

The pressure to present a perfect version of yourself

Job interviews involve selling your strengths while minimising your weaknesses. Many people unconsciously adopt the same approach on first dates.

They carefully select their outfit, rehearse answers to common questions, and highlight their accomplishments while avoiding topics that might make them seem vulnerable.

This desire to impress can create a polished but artificial interaction. Instead of getting to know one another authentically, both people may be focused on managing impressions.

What romance Is missing

The irony is that while practical questions are important, they rarely reveal the most meaningful aspects of a person. Compatibility is not only about shared goals but also about how two people make each other feel.

Humour, kindness, curiosity, emotional intelligence, and the ability to enjoy each other's company often emerge naturally when conversation flows without an agenda.

Some relationship experts argue that the best first dates balance practical considerations with genuine curiosity. Rather than treating the encounter as an assessment, they encourage people to focus on connection, shared experiences, and being present in the moment. more

Career development

14h

Gen Z grad landed LinkedIn job by applying to waitress at conferences, then handed out her résumé during breaks | Fortune

"It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring manager, even virtually -- which used to be a more nontraditional method," the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune. "It's incredibly hard to spotlight yourself."

It's a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring... messages from strangers -- so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about.

One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. "It's a really well-known marketing and sales conference in Germany," Shenouda recalls.

"I graduated in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place where the decision-makers I was looking to target were going to be," she explains. "People were even flying in from the U.S., so it was a good networking opportunity."

With that in mind, Shenouda volunteered to clean up glasses at the conference to gain free entry, and traveled over six hours from Cologne to Hamburg by train with a stack of résumés in hand.

During her breaks at the conference, Shenouda put her CV in front of 30 to 40 faces, with the premise that she was looking for feedback on it -- while secretly hoping her bold approach would impress just one recruitment manager. And after a six-month hiring process, it paid off.

"I was one of the only graduates at the conference, and so it was full of opportunities for me," the 29-year-old adds. "I got insight into my résumé, developed a lot of relationships face-to-face (and that was far more effective than networking online) and got my application kick-started for a couple of positions."

One of those positions was in the sales graduate scheme at LinkedIn, where Shenouda worked until 2014, climbing to the role of implementation consultant in Dublin. Now, she's got a coveted spot at Google -- and it's all thanks to volunteering to waitress where the recruiters were at, instead of waiting for a callback.

"When you're a graduate you think everyone's going to say yes to you and things are going work out. But it's a matter of building up resilience," she advises unemployed grads.

"You need to keep reassessing your process so that every no gets you closer to that next yes."

Target the employers that rejected you

There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but Shenouda took a more targeted approach than just hoping to bump into her future employer.

Not only did she draw up a hit list of conferences that hiring managers at her dream employers were going to be at, but she also went face-to-face with those who had rejected her advances online -- LinkedIn's recruiter being one of those.

"I gained feedback from all the companies that rejected me, which allowed me to reapply and get job offers," Shenouda says.

"It really brought me a lot of insight into how I can better distinguish my applications and what gaps I needed to fill to ensure that I made it past the final interview rounds.

"Traditionally, people don't reapply; people don't keep trying and keep reaching out to people and keep maintaining a relationship.

"They [the recruiter] thought those were really good transferable skills for sales, and that's what I ended up doing."

How to convert networking into a job offer

Even if you've made every effort to ensure that you're showing up at all the places hiring managers are, it doesn't guarantee you'll actually get any leads.

Shenouda says she showed her CV to around 200 recruiters across a handful of conferences before having any luck.

Here are some tips she learned along the way to convert networking from just chitchat into something more tangible, like a job interview or offer:

1. Talk impact

Don't worry if promoting yourself to strangers doesn't come naturally. "I was really bad at networking before," Shenouda recalls. Her biggest tip? Talk metrics.

"Now I know how to get someone's attention," she says, adding that that looks like "talking about impact instead of just saying, 'I want a job.'"

Looking back at the elevator pitch that landed her her current role, the Gen Zer says she talked about her wins during a previous internship at Intel.

Likewise, don't be afraid to outline what you want following a conversation with a recruiter.

"I'd always ask the specific question: if they can refer me (for a job), or if they have feedback based on my résumé, or my past interview experience with the company," Shenouda adds.

2. Listen

Want to know which metrics will stand out to the hiring manager at your dream job? Ask them.

"Always focusing your elevator pitch on the other person," Shenouda says.

It may sound counterintuitive to use the few minutes you have to pitch yourself to turn the attention on the recruiter's needs -- but it's a surefire way to closely align your message with what they're looking for.

"If they say they're looking for people who can achieve something like a particular project, make sure you're speaking that language," Shenouda advises.

3. Foster friendships

Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside work.

While getting straight down to business may be beneficial in the short term, for long-term alliances, it's better to forge meaningful connections.

"It's not just about networking," Shenouda notes. "It's about making friends, because that's how you get people to support you."

It's why she recommends connecting with the people you've met on social media, while your face and name are still fresh in their minds -- but don't be a stranger.

Shenouda is still in touch with a Facebook recruiter that she met at a careers event seven years ago and bonded with over their mutual affinity for weightlifting.

"The key to any career success is always the relationships you have -- that is why I have always prioritized networking outside of the traditional job-hunting method."

A version of this story originally published on April 13, 2024. more

Jenson Lane

Career development

2d

Is job hopping every 2–3 years still the best way to grow your salary, or do employers see it as a red flag? I'm curious whether hiring managers and candidates view this differently.

1

Victor Akanbi
16h
0m
HRM will always find fault with you jumping jobs. I faced similar scenerio in an interview where the senior HR critized my CV having worked for 3... companies in 4 years but the real question is are we supposed to miss opportunity that comes with more growth, more compensation but to just stick to the present role with less growth. more
Hussaian Umar
19h
Am a program manager in a project, which we will be having our close out on 23rd of this month. Am a person with disability. I advocate for people... with disability more

Career development

16h

Every Teen Should Work in the Service Industry

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A few months ago, my older son, who is 15, announced that he wanted to get a job this summer. He actually had made this announcement a year ago, when he was 14 and too young to work anywhere but summer camps, which did not meet his criteria for acceptable employment.... ("Too many annoying kids" was his reason -- hard to argue with that.)

But in the lead-up to this summer, he was insistent: It would be wage servitude or nothing. In May, he printed out 30 copies of his endearingly brief résumé. You hear a lot of bad things about the job market, but I guess it doesn't apply to the absolute entry-level workforce, because after three weeks of "spamming the neighborhood," as he put it, he got a call from a pizza place a few blocks away and was hired to work behind the counter.

I was not expecting this milestone to feel quite so momentous. Starting when they're toddlers, we do our best to teach our children to be cooperative. We try to model respectful behavior, and we try to teach them to be responsible for their actions. We spend years doing this, every single day, to the extent that our personalities rearrange around the teaching of these lessons. But the first true test of whether any of this has really stuck doesn't happen in school, where the intimate authority of parents is replaced by the intimate authority of teachers, or while playing sports, when a kid is embedded in the intimacy of a group of teammates. It's only when a kid gets their first real job that the rubber hits the road.

Will the kid be able to figure out what to do without always having to be told? Will they be able to take the pressure and tolerate an absence of feedback? Will they know not to make excuses for their mistakes? There's no way to predict how any of this will go when you remove the accommodating presence of family and friends and replace them with people for whom your child represents either an asset or a liability.

A kid's first job also marks a boundary of parental influence. Even into the college years, there's a valuable supporting role for conscientious parents to play, hauling stuff to and from the dorm and checking in about big assignments. But you cannot call your child's boss and explain why they were late for work. You cannot ask your child's boss to give them a second chance. Your child's boss's authority supersedes yours, for better or worse. This is unprecedented.

I, for one, am ready to hand over some of my authority and let someone else wield it for a while. But I know parents whose feelings about their children joining the workforce are not as sanguine as mine. For kids under a lot of pressure to mobilize upward (or even to simply maintain their parents' class position), working in the service industry is frowned upon. Several of my son's friends are discouraged by their parents, even forbidden, from getting a service-industry job.

Maybe it's out of a wariness of the influence that a high-intensity social environment can exert on a person. Maybe these parents don't want their children to start self-identifying as a member of the working class. Maybe they're afraid that something will rub off on their children on contact, that they will be infected by an invisible germ of lower-classness that will live inside them forever like chronic Lyme. (Remember, we are living in a time when people's beliefs are becoming less and less rational.) Maybe it's a "mind-set" thing: Aim high from the start, even if that means cosplaying entrepreneurship by developing a fake product that will never actually be sold.

I couldn't disagree more with this position. I worked in the service industry from the age of 15 until I was 24, and during that period I learned most, if not all, of the most valuable professional lessons of my life. While working behind a deli counter and as a line cook, a barista, a barmaid, and a waitress, I learned everything I know about how to make myself useful almost anywhere. In the service industry, you learn about what actually has to happen to produce a nice experience: the prep, the mise, the mopping, the wiping, the grease trap, the breaking down of boxes out back at 11 p.m. This is not romantic work, but it is necessary, and it can't be done by AI. Someone will always have to do it, and even if you're convinced your child is destined for the C-suite or for academic greatness, it is essential, for one's humanity, to understand what goes into making people like you comfortable and happy every day. Ignorance about what it means to serve is inhumane.

Maybe it's because so many people in the service industry are young that this type of work tends to include the kind of mentorship that many white-collar workers yearn for and never receive. (One of the worst things I can imagine for my son is to be hired for a remote-work laptop job where he never meets his bosses or co-workers and is "trained" via a series of interactions with an onboarding chatbot.)

I learned a lot from my first few bosses. They were all Gen-X misfit types who were moody and erratic, but I respected them because they were not corny people. My first boss was Mark, who managed the deli where I worked in high school. He taught me to break down whole chickens into parts and wrote me a sincere and thoughtful letter of recommendation for college. (I didn't get into any of the schools I wanted to go to, but the encouragement meant a lot.)

A couple years later, the sous-chef at the fine-dining restaurant where I worked right after college would order his youngest and slowest cooks (myself among them) to go home and watch obscure B-movies from the '70s and '80s like The Ice Pirates and Billy Jack, on which he would later quiz us. I was the only person who would actually watch them, trying to get on his good side by any means necessary since I knew I was the weakest link on the line.

Working in the service industry in the '90s and 2000s meant you might work with people who had served in the Vietnam War. I assume no one refers to being in the weeds during service as "being in 'Nam'" anymore, but maybe I'm wrong. I had a sous-chef who would hold heads of celery in front of his face in imitation of "the jungle" and would yell at us, while firing orders, that "Charlie's right behind you, moving through that grass in his black pajamas."

Maybe it was the stress of that type of work, or maybe it was that I was young, but I never cared more about pleasing a boss than I did when I was working in service. The people I worked for were usually not college graduates, and most lacked my privilege and the pedigree that I eventually acquired through education. But working for them made it very clear that any airs of superiority I might acquire over the course of my liberal arts education were in fact traces of ignorance. Making assumptions about others' intelligence, I very quickly learned while working alongside people in service, is childish. Shameful, even.

I want my children to learn this lesson for themselves, on practical terms rather than through abstractions that I impart through tedious lectures that they will mostly ignore. This is the real reason I want my children to get work experience in the service industry. As income inequality gets continuously more extreme, there are diminishing opportunities for young people to get to know anyone from outside their class and cultural enclave. Youth sports used to be a place where this could happen, but team sports are so expensive and competitive that it no longer does.

Class segregation is reaching the structural significance that racial segregation once had, to the point where most people don't even think about class anymore -- the power of class exclusion is so powerful that it preordains who we could possibly know. We tend to think now in terms of social values, and as we hunker down against polarization and seek shelter with people like us, we're making it worse.

During the Q&A at last month's live Brooding event, a member of the audience asked for advice on how to discern whether other parents' values matched ours. My answer at the time was that usually it's pretty obvious; we display all kinds of subtle and overt signifiers of our beliefs. What I didn't say, but kept thinking about after the fact, is that maybe we should allow for the possibility that we'd become friendly with someone whose values aren't a perfect match to ours.

There are vanishingly few environments where people from different classes and cultural enclaves mix as equals. Showing up to work in service as a young person is one lasting site of encounter. The types of conversations that happen while setting up or breaking down a shift -- low-stakes, meandering conversations about any number of topics both trivial and heavy, where there's no option to pick up your ball and go home, which forces everyone to try to get along -- this is the literal opposite of the discursive style of, say, social media. Think of it as an analog for the developmental phase of toddlers engaged in parallel play, but for young adults figuring out their beliefs. Who wouldn't want that for their kids?

The world's first trillionaire has now been minted, and the class of people that the writer Dan Brooks calls "Diamond Medallion Americans" are clinging to power and determining through their outrageous economic influence what many people -- especially children -- think of as happiness and success. This is the world our children are coming of age into.

The ambient pop-cultural emphasis on the superrich creates bizarre delusions in children, and it's a distraction, as they get older, from developing realistic expectations about what work is really like. At every pay scale, a lot of work remains (AI be damned) about relationships with other people and one's ability to develop and maintain them. Serving work demands those skills and rewards the teens who develop them young with the sort of intuition and perspective that can make someone a very effective boss someday. more

Career development

21h

Watch: Cape Town graduate's roadside sign opens unexpected doors

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1. Dawn at the Rotary

At 07:07 sharp on a May Monday, Lungelo Ndaba stepped onto the painted refuge island at the V&A Waterfront turn-off. In one hand he held a sign made from two rectangles of supermarket carton, the blunt edges bound with duct tape rescued from a flat-mate's bicycle repair kit.

The... ink was standard ball-point, the letters drawn tall and open so a passing phone could still read them when shrunk to thumbnail size: "B-Tech Town & Regional Planning - NDip Building - Looking for Employment - 062 *** **** ." Eleven words that fitted neatly inside one third of a vertical video frame.

Ndaba had scouted this exact spot for three consecutive mornings, clocking approaching cars, sunrise glare, and peak phone-camera angles. He rehearsed the 46 km/h traffic flow, noted where the median kept him clear of wing-mirrors, and timed the 45-minute window when the rising sun sat low enough behind Devil's Peak to backlight the board without bleaching the lettering. By 07:13 content creator Khanya "Kyeezi" Siyengo had already shot and posted a nine-second reel. Less than four hours later, the same clip sat on every major platform, captioned and remixed, soundtracked to the week's trending amapiano loop.

2. Behind the Cardboard Curtain

* Crafting Visibility* Every visible detail had been stress-tested the night before on a borrowed smartphone. The matte, grey inner side of the carton reflected no glare. The shirt was a plain white golf tee borrowed from a friend; turned inside out, it hid a faded logo and registered as a solid, noise-free block of colour on a compressed 1080×1350 feed. The wording copied the terse syntax of LinkedIn: qualifications first, intent second, contact last. In other words, the sign itself became a spatial resume, laid out with the same hierarchy principles Ndaba learned while plotting zoning layers in his final-year GIS module.

* The Data That Guided Him* For three evenings Ndaba had sat at the Observatory flat window, spreadsheet open, stopwatch running. He recorded light temperature, vehicle velocity, and the average dwell time a driver spent at the traffic light. These measurements produced the single sentence that travelled the internet. The sign never begged; it informed, confident that algorithms reward clarity the way hiring managers reward brevity.

* A Quiet Revolution* While classmates fretted over PDFs and email subject lines, Ndaba engineered a living résumé that updated in real time - one geotagged, timestamped, and auto-verified by sheer public fascination. No passive voice, no pleading. Just facts, framed for a nine-second attention economy.

3. A Country Still Drawing Its Own Map

* Vacancies Without Applicants* South Africa sits on a backlog of 2.7 million houses, yet the South African Council for Planners lists at least 1 400 vacant posts nationwide. Municipal adverts from Ekurhuleni to eThekwini linger unfilled for half a year. Each year the country's planning schools release barely more than 220 new graduates, many of whom cluster in Gauteng metros chasing scarce internships.

* Tools of the Trade* At Durban University of Technology Ndaba mapped shacks along the uMngeni River using a borrowed drone after dark, crunching orthomosaics on a classmate's gaming laptop during scheduled blackouts. His 127-page Spatial Development Framework for Ixopo re-imagined the R612 corridor as a mixed-use spine with biofiltration swales, all stored on a cloud link because coastal humidity killed every external drive he ever owned.

* The Cape Town Gamble* When municipal budgets vanished, he stuffed his certificates into a PVC sleeve, boarded a TransLux coach, and rode 1 645 km to Cape Town. Rumour said the private sector would pay for GIS talent; reality greeted him with the classic loop: entry-level posts require "two years post-qualification experience," internships pay less than taxi fare, and most GIS drafting jobs are quietly off-shored to Manila.

4. Sixty Minutes That Changed a Life

* A Bullet-Point Chronicle*

* 07:13 - Kyeezi uploads the clip.

* 08:06 - His inbox explodes past 300 messages.

* 09:27 - A Woodstock urban-design studio asks for an email via Twitter DM.

* 10:44 - Investec's head of property finance loops Ndaba into an internal thread: "Re: Town Planner for Affordable Housing JV."

* 12:15 - The City of Cape Town logs his ID in a talent pool.

* 13:02 - A Stellenbosch agritech startup invites him to a 15:00 Zoom call.

* 14:11 - His phone dies; he borrows a charger at a Shell Ultra City.

* 14:58 - He logs in from the store's Wi-Fi lounge while N2 traffic drones behind him.

* 16:30 - The startup mails a three-month contract at R18 500, extendable if he can design a 500-unit rollout in Philippi.

* 19:09 - SABC runs the clip on the 7 pm bulletin.

By 21:00 he has replied with a thumbs-up emoji. Two days later, 1 200 legitimate job leads clog his Gmail, all auto-tagged by colour-coded filters he built in half an hour.

5. The Anatomy of a Post-Viral Hunt

* Credential Conversion Fees* SACPLAN registration demands R2 800 and a six-to-eight-week wait. Professional indemnity insurance needs R5 million cover - a premium impossible on an account balance of negative R47.36. The startup's HR office agrees to front both fees, but only if Ndaba upgrades to an EB driver's licence within 90 days; the Bellville driving school quotes R7 900. Viral fame looks effortless; bureaucracy still charges sticker price.

* Spatial Injustice in Real Time* Ndaba's daily commute runs 47 km from Philippi to Techno Park. By car it is 42 minutes at dawn, two hours at dusk. By public transport - three minibus taxis plus one Golden Arrow - he burns 3 h 20 min each way. The same GIS skills that once mapped informal settlements now calculate how containerised micro-housing could wedge into Stellenbosch industrial edges and claw back lost hours for thousands of workers priced out of proximity.

* The Software Stack You Never Saw* Because videos crop fast, the QR code Ndaba taped to the bottom corner never made the final cut. It opens a Carrd site synced to Calendly and a Notion board where every application turns green, amber, or red. IFTTT logs every scan, auto-emailing GPS data so he can chart pedestrian conversion like any decent spatial analyst. The cardboard sign grabbed the world's sympathy; the cloud architecture quietly collected data for version 2.0.

6. Ripple Effects on the Pavement

* Other Graduates, Same Verge* Asemahle Nombanjana stood outside a Queenstown Engen with "Hire me, Eskom" and landed a entry-level transmission-line post in five days. Sipho Mthembu painted his entire Corolla rear windshield with "CIMA part-qualified - seeking articles - call me" and fielded 73 offers. Each case follows the same diffusion curve: the street as billboard, the smartphone as broadcast tower, the comment thread as HR department.

* Thread Becomes Database* Under a viral TikTok comment - fists-folded emoji plus "Our municipalities need planners" - users pasted links to 37 vacancy pages, uploaded scanned salary slips, and one Limpopo municipal manager offered transport stipends. Within 72 hours the thread mutated into the most current public vacancy list in the country. University of Pretoria's final-year Telegram group pinned it as "Jobs Board." Economists call this a thick-market externality: each post lowers the next person's search cost.

* Toward a New Curriculum Vitae* Recruiters at the 2023 South African Planning Institute conference now joke about adding a line to SACPLAN's form: "Describe yourself in the length of a viral reel." The joke is already half-serious. Ndabafication - compressing your entire career into 11 high-impact words - has become a verb among HR circles. The pavement, once a last resort, is now a beta test for résumé grammar itself.

[{"question": "What inspired Lungelo Ndaba's unique job search approach?", "answer": "Faced with the classic dilemma of needing 'two years post-qualification experience' for entry-level jobs and internships paying less than taxi fare, Lungelo Ndaba devised an innovative strategy. He meticulously planned every detail, from the wording on his sign to the optimal location and timing on a busy street corner, to attract attention and overcome traditional hiring barriers."}, {"question": "How did Lungelo Ndaba's sign become a viral sensation?", "answer": "Lungelo Ndaba's sign, crafted from supermarket carton with carefully chosen words and a contact number, was strategically placed at the V&A Waterfront turn-off. Content creator Khanya \"Kyeezi\" Siyengo filmed a nine-second reel of him, which quickly went viral across major platforms, gaining widespread attention and leading to numerous job offers."}, {"question": "What meticulous planning went into Lungelo Ndaba's street corner display?", "answer": "Ndaba's planning was extensive. He scouted the location for three mornings, observing traffic flow, sun glare, and optimal phone-camera angles. He rehearsed the traffic speed and timed his 45-minute window to ensure perfect backlighting. The sign's matte surface, the plain white shirt, and the concise LinkedIn-style wording were all stress-tested for maximum visibility and impact in a compressed video feed."}, {"question": "What challenges did Lungelo Ndaba face in his job search before his viral moment?", "answer": "Despite a significant backlog of 2.7 million houses in South Africa and numerous vacant planning posts, Ndaba, like many graduates, struggled to find employment. He encountered the common 'two years experience' requirement for entry-level roles, underpaying internships, and the offshoring of GIS drafting jobs. His journey included mapping shacks with a borrowed drone and storing his work on a cloud due to environmental factors."}, {"question": "What immediate impact did the viral video have on Lungelo Ndaba's life?", "answer": "Within hours of the video going viral, Lungelo Ndaba's inbox exploded with messages. He received job inquiries from an urban-design studio, Investec's head of property finance, and the City of Cape Town. A Stellenbosch agritech startup invited him for a Zoom call, leading to a three-month contract offer that same day. His story was even featured on SABC's 7 pm bulletin."}, {"question": "What 'ripple effects' did Lungelo Ndaba's innovative approach create?", "answer": "Ndaba's success inspired other graduates to use similar 'street as billboard' tactics, leading to job offers for individuals like Asemahle Nombanjana and Sipho Mthembu. His viral moment also unintentionally created a dynamic, crowdsourced job board on TikTok, with users sharing vacancies and salary information. This phenomenon, dubbed 'Ndabafication,' has even influenced HR circles, leading to discussions about new forms of resumes optimized for the 'nine-second attention economy'."}] more

Richard Sabol

Career development

3d

I work as a gardener and groundskeeper worker at an apartment complex. I take care of the landscaping, order new plants and keep the flower beds looking nice. After this winter two of our four Japanese plum trees died because of the cold. I covered and protected them the same way I always do. So I don't think it was my fault.
Now the management wants me to pay for the two trees. Replacing them... would cost almost my salary. What can I do to protect myself and avoid paying for something that wasn't my fault? I like my job and don't want to lose it.

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Mary Lin
1d
Hypothetical worst case scenario off the top of my head: do you like your job enough to have kept receipts of your faithfulness, get a specialty civil... suit lawyer with billable hours, could countersue for more damages than your lawyer would bill you for, willing to burn that bridge and/or full scorched earth, and go on a blacklist with your Management's six degrees of connection? How committed are you to a mutual hostage situation compelled by somebody else? more
Bonventure Musyoki
1d
Unless the management had seem some sign of negligence from your side, i don't understand why they want you to pay. However, if they insist request... them to be deducting each month from your salary, so that you don't lack cash for personal upkeep at once. more
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