Competitive Advantage
How to Get the Job When You Don’t Have the Experience
“The Permission Paradox” – You can’t get the job without the experience but you can’t get the experience without the job – is one of the great career Catch-22s.
I came across this article on Linkedin, while I was scrolling for jobs. Almost every job I came across required 3-5 years of professional experience. How can I have experience if I cant get a first job? Well, James Citrin, author of The Career Playbook, tells you how in just 5 steps. Reading this article gave me confidence that not all requirements are so black and white.
James gives a few pointers that stuck with me after reading:
1. Be willing to start at the bottom. Just because we have a degree, doesn’t mean we should automatically get a high paid salary in a fortune 500 company. Sometimes you need to work up the ladder.
2. Re-imagine your experience. Have you ever planned a spring break with your friends? That counts as some type of “project managing” right? It was your responsibility to collect money, work with budgets, and research unknown variables of the trip.
To those of you who are still searching for jobs or have already gotten an offer, have you used creative stories like these in interviews to fill an under qualified job requirement?
Sustainable Competitive Advantage through IT Innovation
Today in class, we debated the commoditization of information technology, an idea largely attributed to author Nicholas Carr. Our debate piqued my interest, so I aimed to investigate what businesspeople and technologists thought about Carr’s bold statement. My search brought me to page 99 of Carr’s personal blog, which gave me insight into just how large of a “splash” the article made in the business and technical communities. Unsurprisingly, the most fiery rebuttals came from heads of organizations centered around IT innovation (“IT ‘Is’ the Business”-type companies). Carr provides a link to an article detailing the manner in which Intel’s CEO “fires back” with an opposing viewpoint. Carr subsequently quotes Bill Gates as proclaiming that IT would not matter only if technology were perfect or simply could not be improved further; both conditions, obviously, do not describe contemporary IT.
In my exploration of the topic, I became more sure of my own stance. Particularly, I dislike Carr’s claim that IT is “no longer a source of advantage at the firm level.” Through innovation, a company can certainly gain a short-lived advantage over other firms. Perhaps what Carr more precisely means (at the risk of putting words in his mouth) is that IT alone does not result in a sustainable competitive advantage, a condition that many of us are discussing in BA4101. In other words, a single IT innovation only results in a limited and brief advantage over rivals.
To prompt further discussion, I offer this question: how can a business encourage and attain sustainable IT innovation? What types of cultural, financial, and motivating factors might promote such an endeavor?
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