TheBanyanTree: Preparation

[JMoney]

I've had a job interview - the first real one (as opposed to the one that
you have to do because them's the rules) in over three years.  What that
means is that I've had to write all the guff to make myself look as though
I'm the sort of person that job bestowers may wish to interview.  What that
means is that I've been caught up with the whole trying-to-get-a-job
business for about a month.  What that means is that I've thought about, and
done, little else in all that time.

It's during periods like this that I find myself very annoying to have to
live with.  Furthermore, the dogs have been moulting and the relentless
accumulation of household corgi fluff has been depressing to watch as well
as ticklish to the nose.  But I thank God for my dearly beloved youngest
son, who has long excited my admiration by his willingness to clean a toilet
and bathroom.  Though the house may be full of drifts of downy fur at least
the dunny doesn't pong.

Preparation is the key.  Would I have been short-listed for an interview
without having taken pains to present myself in the best possible light,
according to the recommendations of a number of how-to-get-a-job book
authors?  I don't think so.  And the same goes for the interview itself.
One must prepare, prepare, prepare.

So I prepared, prepared, prepared.  And it was awful.  I mean, the people on
the panel could ask anything.  As the saying goes; the biggest fool can ask
a question that the wisest person can't answer.  But I pored over the books,
gleaned the apparent nuggets and figured out a sort of an answer to a
question that was guaranteed to come up somewhere, in some form, in the
interview; why should we give you this job?  What I came up with was only a
sort of an answer because the recommended form of words was something that I
just couldn't get comfortable saying.  But at least I had some reasonably
well-rehearsed points in my mind that might, conceivably (because of all the
rehearsals), get past the blankness that tends to come upon it in such
situations.

And you know what?  They never asked!  Instead, after we'd all said hello,
blah, blah, I was told that they'd be asking me to write some things down,
create lists and definitions and action plans and then speak on them.
That's when I thought to myself, "Poo!"

Actually, that's not what I thought but I'm trying to reduce the frequency
with which I use the s word.  Not that I think (having thought about this
deeply) there's anything wrong with the s word.  It's a perfectly good word
(what's in a phoneme or two?); satisfyingly expletive and only in ill repute
because it's vulgar (ie, common) Anglo-Saxonish rather than upper crust
French or Latin.  But you have to get on with people even if they are
traditionalists who don't think about such things, and I'm digressing.

They wanted a list of all the service delivery agencies within the
Department.  There's a lot of them and I'd reviewed them only two days
before but my mind did its going blank thing after I'd remembered a mere six
or seven.

They wanted a list of tools or techniques for discovering a work unit's
information requirements.  I thanked God that I'd reviewed that section of
my Systems Analysis text and gave them the standard list.

They wanted to know my definition of project success.  I gave them the
text-book answer again, except that I remembered this morning that I forgot
to put in, "within budget".  This is government so that might not be a major
faux pas.

Then there was a request for a list of causes of project failures and
another for an implementation plan for a scenario that didn't look to me as
though it had anything much to do with implementation in an IT sense.  Well.
They weren't asking for IT qualifications, I'm flexible and I've been around
long enough to know that people in one field (say, education) are quite
capable of giving their own very strange meanings to terms (say, cognitive
dissonance) that are well defined in another field (say, psychology) to the
confusion of all.  So I didn't let that throw me completely and just worked
with what the scenario seemed to call for.

And then, after I was told a few things I already knew about how the
department is in disarray and how departmental workers in service delivery
are, therefore, stressed and often unwilling to cooperate fully with their
colleagues who are working on developing information systems, it was over.
Thank the living God!  I could go home and forget about all it.  What a
relief!

I think I did reasonably well.  At least, I didn't come away from there
feeling like I'd made a great fool of myself and would have to shrink with
embarrassment if I ever saw one of the interviewers again.  Whether I get
the job or not it was an interesting experience.  And, frankly, I don't mind
in the slightest if I don't get it.  For one thing, the process was such
that whoever gets it will obviously be someone who knows their stuff, rather
than someone who knows someone, so there will be no reason for me to feel
used and abused because of my failure.  For another, it's a full time job.
I haven't had one of those for 20 years and the thought of having to do one
job all day, every day, five days a week is, to me, scary indeed.

Actually, what I'm worried about now is that I will get it.  Then I'll have
to decide whether I really want it or not.  And a person who would go to so
much trouble to design that sort of job interview might very well be a good
person to work for.  Haven't had one of those for so many years that I can't
remember the last.  Now I have to prepare just in case I have to make a
decision.  Shit!

Janice