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Take a look at stories from our Women Who Can to learn from their experiences in
common situations. If there's a situation we should cover in future interviews tell us about it. |
Your situation |
Her Situation |
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There's a job I want to apply for I think I can do it, but I'm not senior enough for the position.
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I learned to check open positions that were 2-3 levels above and one level below my level. Higher was because a hiring manager sometimes knows skills when s/he sees them and the level is a guide and I was looking for growth opportunity. Lower because sometimes a manager doesn’t know what they need and they have discretion over what level the person is hired into though it’s important in this case to know future scope for the position. I never let the formal requirement hold me back from reaching out to the hiring manager for a conversation.
As a manager I was always thinking about different talent mixes for my teams. The recruitment tools required a level/standard job title to be in the job profile, and yet I hired individuals that didn’t meet the initial job description because of the right talent reaching out to me. Consultant
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I've just moved to a new job and I don't understand what they're talking about. Did I make a mistake?
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Shelia Jordon, Senior VP at Cisco, experienced a moment of doubting her decision when she had moved from Disney to Cisco. She recalls coming out of a marketing meeting overwhelmed with new industry jargon that she thought, "Oh my gosh, they don't speak English. What are they talking about? I used to be smart." Her advice is to be patient with yourself and to trust that you will learn the new environment like you did your last one.
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I'm good at what I do and am afraid of doing something I don't know how to do
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Van Kralingen, was in organizational development and stepped up to face her fear when she moved to large-scale re-engineering and cost-reduction consulting jobs. "When you get really good at something. it's hard to give it up" she said. "... What I've seen in many women's careers is they hang onto something too long in order to be expert". She says IBM addresses this by pushing people to do what it calls "lily-padding" which is moving people to laterally to areas outside their expertise.
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I need a favor from someone to help me get started but don't know how to get access
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Linda Cohn go her start as a sports journalist by making a video to promote her skills and talents. She needed access to resources to make a video to promote her skills. It was harder to get access to resources back then. She ended up persuading a local television crew to film something for her in exchange for cookies. She wrote a script and did a five minute sportscast and then sent the tape out to where she wanted to be. This lead to her getting her job with KIRO-TV in Seattle.
LInda Cohn, American sportscaster and ESPN's SportsCenter Anchor, from The Cornell Daily Sun |
Are we missing a situation you want to see? Tell us about it.
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