Career bootstrapping for young people: an alternative strategy

At a Satellite coffee shop here in ABQ yesterday, I heard a guy I knew to be a successful local businessman giving a 24 year old fella advice on breaking into business after college.  He focused on how he should look, dress and act.  I kept waiting for him to get past the surficial stuff but, alas, he kept going on about how to shape shift into something acceptable to the corporate stereotype.

So, in a fit of my occassional righteousness, I stood up, looked at the the advice-giving guy and said, "Don't forget to tell him about deed" and walked to the other end of the coffee shop to continue my work.  To his credit, the business guy understood my point and immediately translated my point to the young man.

So, the point of all this is, yes, it's a good idea to start combing your hair, but it's also important to think beyond just "getting" that first job out of college.

1. Think in terms of "infiltrating" a business.  By that I mean, be determined to learn how the company works, from its ultimate business plan to how it implements that plan in manufacturing, sales and elsewhere.  Position yourself physically -- where you start in the organization.  Believe it or not, the mail room is a great way to achieve that, assuming there are still mail rooms in businesses.  As far as your "insertion point" goes, your ideal vision of that first job may not serve you best.  Ivory tower positions have their consequences.  "Big picture" ignorance is one of them.
2. Start on the manufacturing side of your ultimate goal.  From that perspective, you'll see the reality of things.  As a wanna-be software developer, I saw how the company hired hordes of young developers from colleges around the Bay Area and those kids never had any idea what happened to their software after it was handed off.
3. Then, the hard part, which goes hand-in-hand with big pay-offs, is to figure out the weaknesses in the system and find something you think you could improve.  Find a "coach" within the programming group, or general management, and tell them what you're seeing.  See if they'll advise you on a strategy.  For me, it was a fella named Mark Wong who said, "We're drowning in our current workload.  Here's a programming book.  Teach yourself how to program in our language and build a program for that missing process."

So, that's what worked for my career.  By shaving a couple of days off of how things went from design to manufacturing, I got noticed, promoted and even sent to school by the company to become a full engineer.  In today's world, if you're doing the software thing, I highly recommend you pick a company that has truly adopted the Agile methodology.  It's fundamental basis in transparency amongst contributing teams undermines the ivory tower thing.  Just make sure it's a true Agile culture.

So there it is.  I know times have changed.  But my gut tells me that this kind of career strategy is still a valid option.  Just be sure to comb your hair, for goodness sake!