How to Leverage Your Passions to Bypass the Entry-level Job

This post is by Kirsten, the polymath behind Multi-Passionate Productivity.

When I arrived in Atlanta to start grad school, I had no job and no connections in the city. What I did have was a grad program that had offered me work study funding, a supremely eclectic background and an interest in several very specific fields within public health. Within two weeks I had applied for ten jobs, interviewed for a couple, and was selected for my top choice, despite what many would call the handicap of having multiple passions on my resume.

This is an essential skill for a multi-passionate person, since—let’s face it—even if you’re entrepreneurially inclined, it’s likely that you’ll find yourself working for someone else at some point during your life. Since this theme came up a few times in the comments on my last Feel Gooder post, I thought I’d take the opportunity to elaborate on exactly how us renaissance men and women can turn our passions into an asset in the job market.

Emphasize broad, transferable skills.

My future employer wanted someone with experience in GIS and quantitative research, which I didn’t really have. But he also wanted someone who could redesign his website, which I definitely could do—and not only could I do it, I’d taught myself the skills I needed to do so. That ability to teach myself and learn quickly was what I emphasized in my cover letter, along with my web skills and the little bit of modeling experience that I did have.

Your future employer probably isn’t going to care that you spent three years learning to create poison dart frog habitats at the zoo, but they’ll be interested to know how well you were able to teach the school groups that came through the exhibits. They also might want to know about the aesthetic skills you picked up in designing the habitats, your ability to find unusual items for the displays, and the organization and budgeting skills that it took for all the habitat pieces to arrive at the same time and to the same place.

Those are the skills you want to highlight on your resume and cover letter—and trust me, your future employer is not going to look at a poison dart frog habitat design position and immediately think, “Oh, he must be good at teaching, organization, and aesthetics!”

Establish your creativity and ability to learn.

Make sure that your resume and cover letter shine with creativity. Your future employer is going to value your ability to make connections and come up with innovative ideas, so make sure they’re on full display. If your passions include web design, consider building a website to showcase exactly who you are. Susan from www.susanhiresaboss.com has a brilliant example of this tactic.

Your self-display also needs to make clear your ability to learn. Your future employer doesn’t expect you to necessarily come to the job with all the skills you need, but they will expect you to learn quickly. Showcase past jobs where you’ve had to pick up new skills, or examples of times where you’ve taught yourself something new.

Find something related, and move toward your passion.

Okay, I’ll admit that it’s not likely you’ll be hired for a job designing poison dart frog habitats without some relevant background experience designing for other amphibians. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost! Start with a job at the zoo, perhaps as an intern teaching visitors about the exhibits. I can hear you now: “Isn’t that the definition of an entry-level job?” Well, sort of, but there are two key differences.

One, your entry level job as an intern gives you the opportunity to interact with the exhibit curators, maybe grab the opportunity to design an educational display or two, and generally learn all about and show your enthusiasm to people who may well be in a position to move you somewhere better suited to your passions. And two, your entry-level job is not permanent. You’ll be leveraging it to find something better suited within months. If you take an entry-level job as a ticket seller at the same zoo, you can bet you won’t have those sorts of opportunities for either learning or advancement.

In my case, I picked a position that would transition into what I was interested in learning about. I started by doing a month or so of web design work and now I’m working in the areas I initially wanted to learn about.

Be selective.

If you’re going to follow your passion, you don’t need to apply for every job you’re remotely qualified for. That’s just a recipe for wasted time and wasted passions. Start first by deciding which passions you want your job to focus on, then structure your searches through that lens. Apply for the positions you find the most interesting and that give you the greatest opportunities to grow and expand. Leave the rest for someone else.

Note that I’m assuming you have some income stream here. Clearly if you’re out of work you won’t be anywhere near as picky, though a lot of what I’ve said in this post can still apply to your situation. Also, take the job for what it is—an income source while you look for something else, not a job you’ll be working at for the rest of your life.

Customize your resume and cover letter.

This one’s a bit of a no-brainer, but nothing sounds as polished and genuine as the cover letter written specifically for your future employer. If you have a personal connection to your future employer, highlight it. Instead of taking a previously written letter and swapping out specific sentences, have a draft letter with bullet points that you build up each time you find a position that you’d love to fill. That way, the language will always be fresh and you’ll never have to worry about accidentally leaving references to Company X in your letter to Company Y. Your resume can be a boilerplate, but before you send it in, think about which of your skills and previous experiences are best suited for this position and move them to the top.

In my case, I’d spoken with a particular professor about six months before I applied to work in his research group. At the time, he recommended a class sequence which I subsequently signed up for, and I put that fact front and center in my cover letter. That was something I couldn’t have said for any other job I applied for in those few weeks, and it added an extra layer of customization to my cover letter.

Show your enthusiasm!

You’re interested in this job because you’re passionate about it, right? Let that show! Enthusiasm can carry you over the edge into a hire when your skills may or may not be up to par. Don’t be afraid to use words like love, passion, learn and opportunity. My enthusiasm has gotten me into jobs I really had no business filling.

I’ll be honest, my job now is pushing me in ways I didn’t anticipate. I’m having to rely heavily on my ability to learn quickly and make connections, and there are days where I wonder if I may finally have bitten off more than I can chew. On the whole, though, I’d much rather be struggling and learning in a job that I’m passionate about than sitting on the outside without a job, or with a job that I’ve mastered and grown bored with. My enthusiasm is still as strong as the day I sent in my cover letter, and my supervisor knows it.

So if you’re multi-passionate and looking to find a new job, take a look at your resume and cover letter writing habits in light of this post. If you’ve used any of these techniques (or others) in the past, I’d love for you to leave a comment and tell us about them. And of course, when you use these ideas to land yourself a job that you think is fascinating, come share your success!

Kirsten is the polymath behind Multi-Passionate Productivity, and she’s also a full time graduate student working with two research groups and running two and a half businesses in addition to MPP. Go here to check out her blog on productivity and organization for multi-passionate people, or join the crowd following the Interactive Novel project over at Written Insight.