My passion in life is jobs.

I find them fascinating: it's the intersection of human emotion, desire and dreams, and the more mathematical world of economics, markets, supply and demand. The field requires empathy, tough love, and a knowledge of human psychology while also profitably employing left-brain skills like econometrics, data analysis, and statistical studies of human behavior. I stumbled into jobs a decade ago and embraced what I found there: a calling that is rewarding, meaningful, and damn hard. Which makes it fun, worthwhile, and a job where I find myself wishing for more hours in the day. It scratches everything that itches on me.

And so I've been getting more and more requests to speak on the topic of "jobs" these days. It's not that I've solved the problem by any stretch of the imagination — we still have a lot of work to do here at TheLadders — but that the job search is so ridiculously opaque and frustrating and confusing that professionals like you have an enormous appetite for understanding it better.

"Speaking at the Kellogg Career Symposium"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

So this weekend found me hopping on a plane down to Dallas (and avoiding Snowmageddon here on the East Coast!) at the invitation of your fellow TheLadders subscriber, Nelson Hsu, to speak at the Kellogg Career Symposium at SMU. Nelson and his wife Kim were gracious hosts, and I relished the chance to speak to the 160 attendees at the Saturday sessions.

I prefer to build presentations around images — a picture really is worth a thousand words. Especially on a Saturday morning, people don't want to be squinting to try and read your bullet point #7. So my standard presentation now is 152 slides, and other than title pages, a quote from a famous economist, and a final slide with my ten best tips for the professional job hunt... all images, no words.

"Saturday morning and the coffee's run out. I hope they had enough caffeine already!"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

For this crowd of career-minded professionals, I addressed:

• The origins of jobs (when you think about, people didn't really send in their resume to become a peasant);
• Freelancers (derived from mercenary horseback soldiers that carried lances, hence "free agent lancers");
• How the newspapers dominated recruiting for 150 years, and
• How Monster.com's 1999 Superbowl commercial marked the beginning of the end for the Help-Wanted section in the newspaper. (When was the last time you applied to a help-wanted ad in the paper?)
• What the death of corporate loyalty means for you in planning your own career path;
• The approach you should take when selling the next five years of your work (for the typical TheLadders subscriber, this represents almost $1 mm in earnings);
• And how the Internet has made job information widely available, but, counter-intuitively, the job hunt itself much more difficult.

Whew! Seems like a lot to get through, but you actually already know more of this than you realize, and in the hour of presentation and Q&A, we had a lot of laughs and hopefully we all learned something.

"With my host, your fellow TheLadders.com subscriber Nelson Hsu"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

So if you have a club, an MBA alumni association, a trade group, or professional association that you'd like me to speak to, please remember that we prioritize requests from you, our TheLadders.com subscribers, first. Whether it's a couple hundred or a couple thousand, I'd love to meet you in person. Please send details along to:

speakerrequest@theladders.com

And I'll look forward to seeing you in your town soon!