Cultivated Strategy #1: Why Traditional Qualifications & "Experience" Are A Thing Of The Past

Hey {NAME}, Welcome to the Cultivated Culture family! You've just joined a community where thousands of people are eagerly supporting each other on the journey towards accelerating their careers and their lives. I'm incredibly happy you decided to become a part of it. To get started, I highly recommend reading this article on [How To Get A Job Anywhere With No Connections]() (if you haven't already). It walks through my entire job search philosophy on landing a job you love without traditional "experience," without prior connections, and without applying online. Today we're going to be tackling one of the most frustrating obstacles when it comes to landing your dream job - experience. One of the largest myths that exists in the professional world is the idea that experience can only be gained through traditional means. Many people suffer from the catch-22 of needing experience to be hired, but needing to be hired in order to gain experience. Experience isn’t a formal entity that is earned inside the four walls of a corporate office (although that can be one form of it). It’s the result of taking on a challenge, seeing it through to the end, and learning along the way. I began my career in the medical field. My dream was to work at a world-class tech company, but my current job offered me zero opportunity to gain any relevant experience. I worked in the operating room where the only computers were monitoring heart rates and blood pressure. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I used my time outside of work to learn about digital marketing and developed a foundation for critical industry skills. Once I had the basics down, I dove headfirst into the world of freelancing. I managed my own sales process, landed several clients in a small niche, and went above and beyond for them. Six months later, I had concrete results that I could leverage as “experience.” Here they are on my resume: If you’re interested in marketing, create a social media account or blog and grow a following. If you’re interested in programming, learn the languages and then create a free tool that solves a problem. If you’re interested in sales, leverage your existing skills to create a consulting firm and sell your services. I know that all sounds well and good on paper, so let's take a look at a few examples of real people who went out there and made this happen: 1) After hearing crickets from her online applications, Cam surveys Airbnb's customer base Cam, a student from Northeastern University, wanted a position at Airbnb. She had applied online, reached out to current employees and made connections, but nothing was working. Cam was faced with two choices - give up or find a way to add value they couldn’t ignore. Instead of targeting Airbnb’s employees, she focused on their users. If there’s one person who isn’t afraid to tell you where a company is lacking, it’s their customer, and almost every company has customers/users you can target. Turns out Airbnb’s audience is pretty fired up about two things – the lack of a keyword specific search and how amazingly difficult it is to get in touch with Airbnb’s customer service. Cam hit Facebook and Twitter hard, sourcing data from real customers: She took all of her findings and built out two sets of solutions that aimed to solve the issues that Airbnb's customers were having. Then she packaged up her findings into a deck and fired it back to all of the contacts who didn't respond the first time around... She heard back two days later. 2) Steph hustles her way into a developer job at Khan Academy In October of 2011, Steph set her sights on landing a dev job at Khan Academy. She started by combing through her network and landing a coffee meeting with Elizabeth Slavitt, Khan Academy’s CMO. Steph noted that the meeting “didn’t do anything but get my application looked at (which apparently got the notice/attention of the application reviewers anyways), I didn’t have any connections to people at KA.” Back to the drawing board. Steph attacked the process from a different angle this time, creating a pitch deck instead of a resume ([here’s a link to the full deck](=)). Steph’s deck spoke to why she wanted to work at Khan, how she went about building experience, and highlighted a few problems with Khan’s platform as well as how she proposed to fix them. Steph submitted the deck and shot a note to Elizabeth Slavitt with the update. Four days later, her resume had been accepted and she was invited in for an interview. To further solidify her position, Steph wrote a blog post to help people develop their first Khan Academy exercise. After posting, she submited it to Y Combinator’s Hacker News and asked people to spread the word. The post made it to the front page where Ben Kamens, Khan Academy’s first ever dev and VP of engineering, sees and retweets it. A few weeks later Steph walks out of her final interview with a job offer from Khan Academy. Neither of these ladies had extensive experience or traditional backgrounds in the fields that they wanted to be a part of, but that didn't stop them. Instead, they found ways to learn foundational knowledge using resources online and build experience by creating projects that led to real world results. If a hiring manager has to choose between someone who can do the job on paper and someone who actually went out there and did the job, they're going to take #2 every single time. Moral of the story? Don’t pray for someone to hire you just so you can gain “experience.” Get out there, build your own, and create a reason for your dream company to offer you a job! Coming Up Next - Why Most of Your Online Applications Never Get Responses (and a simple trick to fix it) Tomorrow we're going to be talking about why it's so damn hard to land a job when you apply online. I'm going to pull back the curtain and show you exactly why most of the resumes and applications you submit never get any responses, then I'm going to show you one simple change you can make to start landing interviews without a single online application. Best, Austin PS - If you want to see more highly creative strategies people used to build experience and land their dream job, [check out this quick episode for some real examples from people I've worked with.]( [Cultivated Culture] Land a job you love without applying online. How Can I Help You? [Resume Builder](=) [Landing Referrals]() [LinkedIn](=) [Interviews](=) [LinkedIn]() [Instagram]( You are receiving this email because you subscribed to get more career-related content on [cultivatedculture.com](). 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