Resume review: enable your PDFs

As I'm trying to park up some of the PDF resumes I've been sent, I'm finding that I'm not able to mark them up digitally. If you send me a PDF, please be sure to enable the document so that I can make comments on it. (Now, it's entirely possible that there's something wrong with this version of Adobe Acrobat that I have. I go to Tools --> Customize Toolbars --> and I check to activate "Comment and Markup Toolbar", but the window also indicates that that particular toolbar is only available if the document rights are enabled. Any ideas to fix this, or do I just have a crappy version of Adobe on my laptop?)

Thanks for your patience--I've got a day full of meetings tomorrow, so it may be later in the week before I get the first of the resumes up.

Resume review: hang on, I'm doing it...

Okay, so I've been having such an awesome time with my out-of-town company that I haven't had a chance to really review the resumes that have come in. I'll have something up this week--my apologies.

In the meantime, I read in Sunday's Wall Street Journal supplement to the Denver Post that asking for time off is an alternate way to be rewarded when there aren't any raises or bonuses to go around. The article suggested a few ways to do this, the first of which is to ask to use vacation/personal time before you've accrued it. Some employers, they noted, aren't keen on this, because if the employee must be laid off (or leaves) before they've earned that time off, it has to be garnished out of severance or due wages. An alternate way to ask for time off is to present your business case for taking the time--will you have all your work done by the time you leave? Who will handle your duties while you're out? Will it allow you to serve the community/profession/family? If all else fails, you can ask for time off without pay: "I'd like X amount of time off for Y--I'm not asking you to pay me while I'm gone, but I want to make sure that I have a job when I get back."

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, time off instead of a pay raise might be just the perk that could benefit you and your employer in tough times. On the other hand, I'm hesitant to recommend being gone a whole lot--if the company realizes that they do quite well without you, guess who might be out of a job? Thoughts?

Resume review: I called, you answered.

Thanks to all who have sent resumes to review! I'm going to do two this weekend (hopefully--don't quote me on that; I have out of town company coming for eight days) and post the results next week. In the meantime, I'm curious if anyone had any resume help available at their schools, perhaps as part of a student job/leadership/success center-ish thing? I think I attended a one-hour workshop/lecture that was hosted by someone from the student success center at my undergrad school, but then I also recall buying or borrowing a book on writing good resumes back in the late 1990s as I reached the end of my grad school career.

Some schools will offer a workshop with several architects available to look at and critique student resumes; if you have a chance to participate in that, it's a good source of feedback, and sometimes you can even land a job that way. Otherwise, a good book is better than nothing. Other than that, using common sense is key--checking for spelling and grammatical errors is absolutely required, and make sure that you keep your resume to one page. If you have less than five years' experience, and you haven't cured cancer or won the Virgin Galactic prize for creating the Space Elevator, you don't have enough worth talking about to make two pages. Keep it short, simple, and strong--especially good to do in a competitive labor market like the one we're in now.

Have a great weekend, and I'll post some redlined resumes next week!

Resume review: a call for submissions

I recently received a resume from an intern asking me to review it and provide any comments. I'll be reviewing it and marking it up shortly, and I've gotten permission from the intern to post my comments (with identifying info removed) here on Intern 101. If anyone else is willing to have their resume shared on the site, feel free to email it to me. When you send it, be sure to let me know what you're going after with this resume--summer internship, full-time position, any job whatsoever, etc.

Email your resume to me (preferably as a Word document) in my email address in the sidebar. And as always, if you have another topic you'd like to see covered or a question you'd like to have answered, you can email me at the same address.

Paying interns: it's not just a good idea, it's the law

Occasionally, an intern will email me to ask if they should offer to work for a firm for no pay as part of a trial period in order to get a paying job. My answer is always no; the AIA has explicit rules of ethics that dictate that interns must be paid, especially if they do work from which the firm benefits. Turns out that there are legal rules from the Department of Labor that say the same thing. According to the website and an article in the Denver Post edition of the Wall Street Journal Sunday (2/14/10), an unpaid intern:

• must not do work from which the company will directly benefit
• must not displace a regular employee
• must learn beneficial skills that would be similar to what's taught in a vocational school
• must understand that the unpaid internship does not guarantee a job

There are exceptions for those who get school credit for their work; for example, your pay is through school credit but is not monetary, though some firms pay college students a wage that's in addition to the school credits they're supposed to receive. Also, interns must receive overtime pay for any hours worked over 40. (This doesn't count if you're supposed to only work 20 hours a week and you work 25--overtime only happens if you work over 40 hours in a pay period.)

Even if it wasn't a matter of the DOL's say-so and the AIA's ethics, working for free doesn't jive with my own personal ethics. When you work for free, you tell a firm just how much you're worth and just how much you can be bought for. It's the same as asking for less than your equally-qualified colleagues when you all start at the same job. As time passes, you miss out on more and more pay as you work year after year. When you work for less--or for free--you start from behind and will stay behind for the rest of your career. And in a line of work that's notorious for being underpaid, I'm begging all of you not to sell yourselves short.

The ins and outs of socializing at work

As we discussed in a previous post, architecture is one of those college majors and professions that seems to beget a lot of fraternizing in your class or firm. That fraternization isn't just limited to dating, though--you often end up having a lot of work friends who are also your outside-of-work friends. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It does, however, require some consideration about being friends outside of work, regardless of what you do for a living. Some of this is easier to do when you first start at a firm, but it's always good practice to think about who you surround yourself with in your personal life. When I say that, I don't mean that you need to only hang out with upwardly mobile people in your firm, but rather it's a good idea to consider if this person is good for you. Are they pretty positive? Are they super-confrontational or super-passive? Do they blame everyone else for all their failures? Are they irresponsible with their work duties? In short, are they someone you would voluntarily hang out with even if you didn't work together?

It's hard to know until you do hang out with someone. Until you do get to know your coworkers better, just treat them all the same: with respect. The first rule of socializing at work (and the first rule of work in general) is to treat everyone with respect, from the receptionist and cleaning crew to your colleagues and the firm owners. No matter what you end up doing or with you end up being friends, treating everyone with decency is the best way to go. Even if you don't particularly like someone, you can still get work done with no hard feelings.

That being said, most folks generally know how to make friends--be nice, say hi, talk about stuff, hang out, etc. The thing about work friends is that you have to ensure that your friendship does not affect the quality or quantity of work that gets done. While this first rule of socializing at work is to treat everyone decently, the first rule of work is to get your assigned work done, and do it well. Some people will always do a good job, no matter what. But some people will shirk their duties and want you to lie or fudge or cover for them. Some people will complain about situations at work or gossip a lot and want you to engage in those behaviors with them. If you're not comfortable with doing these things, then it's imperative that you speak up and set your boundaries, which can be hard to do with your buddies. Some people will believe that you have to put up with cruddy or unethical behavior out of them because you're "friends", which is why it's doubly important to learn as much as you can about your coworkers before you hang out together outside of work too many times. If you can avoid the whiners and slackers and cheaters before you ever become good buddies with them, then you draw your boundaries with them even more clearly. There's no "if you were my friend, you'd say I was in at 8 when I really came in at 10"--they know they can't even ask you for that favor in the first place.

Even if you have good friends that you work with, and you end up hanging out a lot outside of work, I believe it's still being a good friend to be the voice of reason/neutrality sometimes with your work friends. Occasionally, my work friends (and my husband, with whom I worked for over six years) would hear me complaining about something or someone, and they would either agree with the other person or at least play devil's advocate with me. They didn't automatically side with me just because s/he was my friend or because s/he couldn't stand So-and-So either--they would be tactful but honest. I'd like to think all of my friends would do such a thing for me, whether or not I worked with them.

If you have a question you'd like to have answered or a topic you'd like to see covered in a future post, please post it in the comments or send me an email from the sidebar. Thanks!

The ins and outs of dating at work

I just returned from a long weekend trip to celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary. My husband and I are both architects, and we met at work. We met on my very first day in the office (he had been there for three months), and we hit it off instantly. That was nearly ten years ago; we're still together and still happy together, but it wasn't a walk in the park. We dated, married, worked together, and lived together for six and a half years before my husband decided he wanted a change and went to work at another firm. During that six and a half years, there was a lot of figuring out how to make work and personal life happen in a way that ensured sanity and professionalism at work and no one poisoning anyone else's dinner at home.

Some firms expressly forbid dating a coworker, but I find those policies to be obnoxious, presuming, and unrealistic. First of all, how am I supposed to know who I'm going to get along with and be most attracted to? Second of all, if you've ever been in architecture school, you know that this is a rather in-fraternizing college major--by the time you all graduated, I bet at least half of your architecture class had dated one another at some point. That carries over to our profession as well. At least half of my friends who are architects married another architect, and another quarter to third married someone in a related field--engineer, contractor, plumber or other construction tradesman, landscape architect, or interior designer. It's just how this profession is, and acting like you're not going to meet someone good enough to date at work is unrealistic.

Whether or not your office has this "no office dating" policy, the first rule of office dating is to keep it very quiet. Don't flirt with and talk to each other constantly unless it's actually about business, and if you go to lunch or out for a midafternoon Starbucks run, avoid any kind of intimate contact (holding hands or looping arms together or brushing the other person's cheek or hair). If you really like this person, you'll get to see them outside of work and you can do all the hand-holding and snoodling you want at that time. Don't tell anyone about it (for a long while anyway), and don't be putting up pictures and whatnot of this person at your desk either. When my husband left our office, we had been married for nearly two years, and some people didn't even realize we were dating. They never saw us hanging all over each other, and when we arrived at work in the same car, most folks thought we just lived in the same neighborhood and carpooled.

The reason for the first rule (keep it quiet) is because of the second rule of office dating: make sure you can handle the possibility of this not working out. There are at least four couples I can think of who ended up married after meeting at my office (and then dating), but I can also think of at least four others that didn't pan out. Some of them did very well with continuing to get along, and others got a little messy and became grist for the gossip mill. You don't need rumors and innuendo floating around about you and another person, and you don't need to have either of your jobs jeopardized because you start having spats about how a dimension plan should be laid out, all because you each thought the other was selfish and unable to commit.

The rest of the rules for office dating are a lot like the rules for dating in general. Clear communication and respect for each other does a world of good, especially if you end up having to work together on a project. My husband and I did end up on a couple of projects together, and we realized that it was a terrible, horrible thing; I found his communication skills to be severely lacking and rude, while he felt that I took his critiques of my work too personally. We finally approached our project managers and asked not to work together again, and after another attempt to put us on the same team, the message was finally received loud and clear. This experience caused us to have some serious conversations (and we still have them from time to time) regarding what is respectful and clear communication and what is just being rude and insulting. While my husband has helped me understand and see how not all "rude" communication is personal, I have hopefully helped him see that his has to temper how he talks to others as he moves up the ranks in his office--no one will listen to him if the medium is coarse, even if the message is completely correct and called for. (I'm still working on this....)

I love the fact that my life partner not only understands the work I do, but he also knows some of the people I work with and can provide insight into their behavior (i.e. "Don't worry, he acted like that towards me; he's a jerk to everyone."). But in order to make it work, we had to decide up front how this was going to work and how we would prevent problems that would cost us respect and/or our jobs. Ultimately, it's been one of the best gifts I've ever received from architecture: someone who loves me just as I am and can join me in heckling bad terrazzo trim details in a building while we wait for an elevator.

In some upcoming posts, we'll talk about socializing at work in general and avoiding the gossip mill. In the meantime, if you have a question you'd like to have answered or a topic you'd like to see covered in a future post, please post it in the comments or send me an email from the sidebar. Thanks!