What’s a “Skills and Projects” Résumé?

As I finish the first month of my time in Praxis, I look back at all the things I have learned through that time. More than anything, I have learned about myself and how I work best.

In general, I believe that thinking about oneself is a destructive and unhelpful pastime. However, I’ve realized that there are really two different ways to think about yourself. Subjectively and objectively. I would argue that most people spend most of the time thinking subjectively about themselves. This accomplishes nothing productive. This is where feelings of doubt, insecurity, pride, narcissism, greed, and many other things root from. You are constantly thinking about yourself. Not as much in ways to improve, but thinking about yourself passively. Conversely, in thinking objectively about oneself, you are able to see what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, how you can learn, what motivates you, etc. Basically, thinking about yourself in terms of action items to improve instead of a hopeless feeling of complacency.

I digress. This is a bigger subject for another post, and I still have to formulate all of my thoughts on the subject, but this month in Praxis, I have learned much about objectively thinking about myself and how I work.

As I prepare for the next month of Praxis, we start with a challenge. Next month, we will be working on a project to showcase the skills that we have. With my newfound learning about myself, I want to work on a project that will best suit this challenge. What are my skills that I want to showcase, and what are some project ideas that will help me display these skills?

First, I want to start with figuring out what skills I want to display to a company. At first glance, it may seem like this is too hard because you don’t know what kind of company you’ll be going after, but I think any person at any experience level can do this, it just might take some work. I want to start by narrowing down what I’m going after as much as possible. Praxis has separated some options nicely into 4 categories. These categories are especially related to tech companies, but I believe with a little research you can separate any business into categories. Here are the four categories I have from Praxis:

Sales | Marketing | Operations/Generalist | Technical

For the sake of the length of this blog post and not boring you to death, I won’t go into detail about each of these categories.

These are the basic category of jobs that I could be going for through Praxis. Each of them with their little nuances. Praxis has a very detailed list of what might be involved in each of these jobs, complete with the pros and cons of each. I think that this is incredibly important when going after any job. So many people look at the outside glory of jobs and never dig down deep to see what the actual work looks like in a job.

For example; I am an incredibly extroverted person. I love talking about new things and challenging people to do things that they have never done before. I love creativity and helping to create value in others’ lives. You might look at that and say that marketing would be perfect for me. After all, isn’t that basically the definition of challenging people to do things that they’ve never done before?

There is a problem, though. Much of marketing is very analytical and takes great patience and constant tinkering with small things to get results you want. I know myself well enough to know that if I had to sit and look at analytics and Facebook ads all day, I would hate my life. Don’t get me wrong, I do still think that there are things that I would love and enjoy about marketing, but for me, it was enough to look at another option.

In the end, I decided that the category that I am most interested in is sales. Though it was actually a close call for me between that and operations. Due to a lack of love for organizational planning, however, sales won out.

Praxis makes it clear that this isn’t like a college degree where you pick one and that’s what you are now stuck in for the rest of your life. This is simply something that looks interesting enough for you to commit to working as hard as you can at it for six months or a year. From there, you can decide your next steps.

So, once you have that more specific category within a company/business, you can now narrow down what skills you want to showcase for that company. As for myself, I have practically no technical experience working in an actual sales role. If I’m honest, at this point, I don’t even know what all is involved in sales. That is why for my project, I both want to showcase some skills that I already have, but also gain some skill in the sales field.

Here are some skills that I want to prove that I have in my project:

Quick learning – this is crucial since I am wanting to go into a role that I don’t have experience in. I want to show companies that I can learn how to do new things like nobody’s business.

People skills – The first thing that they list for sales is that sales is about relationships. Period. I want to demonstrate that I can work with all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

Verbal and written skills – If I’m going to be calling and emailing people, I need to show that I can do that clearly and concisely. After all, communication is difficult at best.

Organizational – I’m going to be talking with hundreds of people working with sales, I need to show that I am organized and able to handle working with many responsibilities.

Creativity – Sales can be a bit of a monotonous job. I want to show them that I will go out of my way to create opportunities and not just go with the flow.

These are just a few skills that I want to showcase. This is neither an exhaustive list nor is it a mandatory list. These are simply just ideas for me to have a base for thinking of a project.

Now that I have some skills that I want to showcase, it’s time to think of some project ideas.

Going into this, I actually had a pretty good idea of a project that I wanted to do, but I want to put my creative hat on and think of some more project ideas so that I don’t miss out on any awesome projects that I could have done.

Project #1: Sell things like a boss. I work on a turkey farm and mechanics shop/salvage yard. There are enough parts and random things laying around the farm that I could stay busy selling them for the next ten years. If I documented this journey and created an online presence for selling things, this would be a great skill going into a sales role.

Project #2: Start a podcast. I could interview people in the sales world and beyond. This would not only show my skill of working with people and communicating well, but I would also gain much knowledge simply just talking with knowledgeable people in the profession. This would help me build a reputation as a knowledgeable person on the subject of sales. While a project like this may seem daunting, there is nothing saying that it has to be something long term. The important part is just picking a length of time I commit to doing it, figure out how many people I’ll interview, then stick to it! (This will most likely be my pick.)

Project #3 – Create value for a company, any company, do it pro-bono and show efficiency in my work. I also just got a job working at a restaurant about 30 minutes from my house. Creating value could mean offering to start an online presence for any of the jobs I’m in, tracking the value. Running advertising and emails to bring in new clients. Building surveys for current clients, asking them how we could have improved what we did, where they heard about us from, etc. While these are more up the marketing alley, they still show that I can create value in a company, and am willing to work outside getting paid to accomplish things that need to be done.

Project #4 – Create content on the subject of sales. This would be similar to the podcast idea, but you would be walking people through your process in understanding sales and how it works. This could be reading books on sales and reviewing the content and ideas presented, it could be writing a daily blog on the subject of sales and your thoughts and ideas in grasping the subject, it could be creating videos that present how sales works and ways to make it more productive. Any of these also help present skills in communication, creativity, and quick learning.

These are just the beginning, and they’re only my ideas. I have maybe eight different ideas here. With a little more creative thinking and another hour, I’m sure you could come up with at least another eight ideas.

Now that I have projects and ideas to go off of, I will spend some time formulating details and a game plan for how to get my project done. Next week, I will come back with a post outlining and detailing what my full plans are for the whole month and what I want to accomplish. I am going into the month as a dumbo in sales, but I’m going to do whatever it takes to come out of the month with confidence and excitement in it.

And hey! If I can live on a turkey farm in the middle of nowhere Missouri gaining skills in doing sales for tech companies, you can gain skills for whatever you want wherever you may be. Who needs college when you have a drive for learning?