If My Resume Had Alt text

the alternative title for this post was:

Wanted:
A career in a position with
fantastic coworkers,
incredible benefits,
and tons of learning opportunities.

Well, I am sad to say that my most recent contract has ended, leaving me available for employment. This has put me in a kind of silly mood, reminiscing about the jobs I’ve had, giving them all human names, as if they were people I had once gone on boozy lunches with, rather than just dusty old “job titles” at “companies” paying me “salaries.”

While I am directing my search towards a long-term contract or a full-time role as a part of a creative production team, coordinating the digital artifacts used to build websites, software, advertisements, games, and apps; developing new software to present those creative projects; and managing fellow creatives that do the production needed for the clients to accomplish company goals.

While I have a formal resume with company names and dates and all that ATS-triggering info, something happened to me while I was editing it for the hundredth time to match the keywords/tone to a very creative job description. I was inspired to think of my past roles as people who had a profound influence on me - people who I had once gone on boozy lunches with and written hilarious training presentations for and searched for very specific images to flesh out their projects - and wanted to write a sort of biography of my job history, rather than just a list of dusty old “job titles” at “companies” that formerly paid me “salaries.”

I let my jobs took on personalities of their own, and rather than listing them as “positions in which I helped a company grow and improve and succeed,” I had fun thinking of names that described the personalities of the brands as I remembered them, and writing about them with those personalities in mind. I think of this post as the “alt text” for my actual resume - or maybe just an engaging resume narrative, focusing on the whole experience rather than just listing company names.

Mary Sue

Mary Sue and I worked on one single project, a part of a larger non-profit website where all she needed was someone to jump in, figure out how the software templates worked, and then plug in about 100 team training resources, sorted via tagging, careful naming, and adapting the template’s search capabilities. Mary Sue was generous with her time, honest about what she didn’t understand about the process, and brilliant at communicating what the greater consortium stakeholders *actually* needed rather than the “pie in the sky” conceptual project outline they used for the grant that funded this simple but important resource we built.

BorgCollective

As you can imagine from his name, BorgCollective was cool. As a 9-month gaming production contract, BorgCollective brought constant change, great co-workers, incredible branded images with very specific rules about how and when to use them, and truly intense but essential learning opportunities for my career. I learned so much about alternative versions of production and the ever-changing needs of a HUGE gaming company - and thanks to my teammates, I made the crossover from “creative producer” to “marketing producer” to “games producer” and back several times due to changes within the various departments and my willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Madison

The defining “relationship” of what I look for in a career, working with Madison was an adventure, with the freedom to explore new code, introduce creative projects, and participate in editorial in ways that the production and design teams aren’t always granted. Every day for 6 years, I built endless websites with gorgeous images and incredible writing, all fueled by the ability to indulge my passion for popular culture and focused by the direction of incredible art directors, photographers, and mavericks, including Madison herself. I loved participating in daily editorial meetings with my brilliant and popular-culture-focused, deeply inspiring team. This was the best, most influential moment in my career, and I confess, I’ve been looking for another gal like Madison ever since she left Chicago. I will always treasure the people I met there and the nuances of design, culture, tact, and grace I learned from my cohort at Madison.

MABEL

My long-term career position that ended up being my Covid-19 Layoff Job, Mabel brought me 9 years of consistency, collaborative support, and creative mentorship working in an advertising agency, with a very diverse group of creatives, software developers, engineers, all working together to create millions (literally, millions) of interactive digital projects. I am proud of the work I did with Mabel, and I wish I had kept a portfolio from many of the clients whose projects I produced - the range of templates I adapted with the art directors was dizzying. Because I don’t have the images, or the 1000 words per image to describe everything, I will say that I am proud to have been a valuable contributor to the successful consistency in design and brand identity for nearly a decade of collaborative, creative, innovative work.

Karen

I spent 15 months with Karen, embedded as a creative with her Marketing and Communications department. I came in to exercise my managerial and innovative digital experiences in an environment that had previously hired vendors for all their creative needs. It was a confidence-building, emotional intelligence experiment in which they let me build a fun, diverse, kind of crazy creative department, content management system outline, and innovative website production process from the ground up. Surprisingly, the whole experience wasn’t as daunting as it would have been if I had been told at the beginning: “Hey, let me tell you what we’re gonna try to do together - and which skills and experiences you brought to the table were the real reasons why we asked you to come out with me - it’s not what you really thought.”

THE FUTURE Job - Jane (or John) doe

What will the next job be? I believe it will be a long-term, life-changing, innovative, visionary experience with collaborative and companionable coworkers, incredible and potentially unusually interesting benefits, and, of course, loaded with opportunities to learn, grow, change and mentor others to do the same.

I am looking. And networking. And researching.

I am paying back to the job search karma gods by helping others however I can.

Let’s meet up for a drink and a chat. We’ll connect on LinkedIn, and exchange resumes and leads, as we come across them - I think it could be a great time.