I’ve written before about how law is one of the few professions in which pessimism pays off. The more problems you can foresee, the more disasters you can envision, the more likely you will be to keep your client out of a legal quagmire.

But that personality trait is one of the single biggest obstacles to an alternative legal career search. Because instead of hope, you see certain doom to all of your efforts to do something different.

Even among well-adjusted, non-depressed people, job searching is plain hard. You need perseverance and creativity, and a definite willingness to throw a bunch of crap onto the job search wall and see what sticks. You don’t control much of the process.

Lawyer pessimism sabotages the process of career change in ways both subtle and obvious. It’s obvious when you don’t send a resume for a known job listing because you think there will be so many more applicants more qualified than you.

But the pessimism sneaks into your thinking by controlling your perceptions of what you might even be qualified for. As lawyers, we want proof of skills and talents. And not just any proof will do—that’s where the pessimism comes in. It has to be unassailable, court-grade proof that you are, for example, a quick learner. The fact that you can absorb a metric ton of information about contact lens solution marketing, for example, from a document review means nothing to many lawyers. Because (and here’s the pessimism talking) you haven’t done that marketing work yourself, you haven’t taken classes in marketing, and you certainly couldn’t pass yourself off as a marketing expert to anyone who knows diddly about marketing.

Note that all those good reasons don’t have anything to do with whether you actually absorbed, processed, and can apply all the knowledge you just plowed through—knowledge gained as an incident to your main work, at that. None of those reasons speak to whether you do, in fact, learn quickly.

Don’t let pessimism take your career search for an unjoy-ride. Distract it by asking pessimism to work out where you could move to save some money, and whether you could trade in your nice shiny current car for something a little less shiny, but paid for. Stuff like that.

Then you and hope need to go off in a corner while pessimism is busy, and dream up some what-if scenarios. What if my resume lands in the hands of someone who has switched careers like I want to? What if the shoe-in for a job I want completely botches the interview through arrogance or complacency? And then, make some moves according to those hopes and dreams. No, they won’t all work out, but it only takes one of them to work out, and see your career search bear some well-deserved fruit.

Have you fought the good fight against pessimism, and won even one tiny victory? Are you in the midst of a battle with pessimism right now? Comment or email me, and let’s share strategies with the community of alternative legal career seekers.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who writes, edits, and contemplates life for a living. Sometimes she even coaches lawyers who want to work on writing. You can reach her at jalveyATwordsolutions.com.

If you’re unhappy in law because you

• hate the lack of creativity in it,
• despise having to show each tiny piss-ante step of reasoning when it’s freaking OBVIOUS how you got there,
• get bored and pissed with all the pointless bickering back and forth about commas and such–except when you’re really exorcised about something you wrote,
• rail at all the ridiculous workplace rules about listening to music on your computer (for example),
• seethe at the dress codes with such specific rules about flip-flops v. sandals,
• billing time is the albatross of your existence, plus
• buckling down to work often feels impossible, even though you know you should,
• miss deadline often, and
• are late to work often

you may want to contemplate whether an evaluation for ADD makes sense.

Post-it pile on ADDer desk

I’ll write another post about my theory that ADD is hugely underdiagnosed among attorneys, but here are some experiences to get you thinking.

Real-life ADD symptoms in lawyers

Looking back, I had ADD symptoms out the yin-yang when I started practicing. They included things like:

Spending hours customizing my calendar display options. By picking all the pretty colors and fun sounds for reminders, I was (unconsciously) trying to increase the stimulation of my organizing tools, so that maybe they would interest me enough to use them.

Spending great amounts of time avoiding writing memos by futzing with fonts, and adjusting all the colors in various templates and in track changes. Same reason as the calendar color/sound obsession.

Hating, moaning, whining and bitching about keeping track of my work in 15 minute increments. Two reasons time tracking drove me nuts that are ADD-related: ADD brains are supersonic when they’re “on,” so I would get six hours worth of work done in half that time, and essentially got penalized for it; and 2) OMG, having to track what I was doing??? With my brain flitting everywhere and not staying neatly inside the task box at hand, I felt dishonest and stressed about my billable time. Not to mention the whole horror of keeping track of details that bored me stiff.

Arriving late to the office constantly. Now, DC is a late city where it’s normal to hit the office at 9, so I was only slightly later than many of my colleagues. But one of the traits of ADDers is their energy cycle, as nature’s night owls. Many are all but non-functional until mid-morning, have a great burst of energy over lunch-time, seriously slump until late afternoon, and then pick back up again around 5 for a few hours. I unconciously adapted to this circadian rythym by arriving late to the office (around 9:30), either bringing lunch or buying a quick sammich and working through lunch, getting coffee around 3pm, futzing around for a while, and really starting to focus on work about 5 or 5:30 for two or four more hours. (Yeah, I was single then.) In a law firm, with its work-all-the-time mentality, this did not seem unusual, but once I started working in corporate America, it rubbed a LOT of people the wrong way. Especially the 8am-in-the-office types, who strangely enough were usually the executives at the top of the food chain.

Being clueless about organizing a case file. I had no idea what was important. I grasped the idea that correspondence should be in reverse chron order, but that was about it. And I was beyond irritated that no one thought to instruct associates in how to organize their part of the case. How were we supposed to just KNOW?

Performing very inconsistently. One day, I could write a section of a brief that went into the final version almost untouched. The next, I could barely research my way out of a corner. Performance issues plague ADDers, because their brains are, in fact, not consistent performers.

Missing deadlines, even reasonable ones. I knew I was avoiding work, and I tried countless books on how to organize and prioritize. They sounded great in theory, but never worked in practice. Do the hard tasks for your day first–are you kidding me? I barely knew my name then. Do the most important tasks before lunch? Well, that kinda worked, if the phone didn’t ring, people didn’t drop by by office, I didn’t get a lunch invitation for noon instead of, say, 1:30, and I didn’t get too many emails. Or, if I didn’t decide I needed another cup of coffee.

Deadlines being the only way work got done. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I do not understand people who can see that they have a week to get a project done, and who then actually START WORKING ON IT. Only when I had almost no chance of meeting a deadline, and terror struck deep in my heart, would I actually start work on a project. Part of this was due to the then-unconscious ADD need to make things more interesting (the adrenaline rush), and part due to the ADD trait of having a very poor sense of how long things actually take. Time is a very elastic concept to most ADDers.

Desk always piled precariously. In all my professional life, I’ve had a neat desk for about 30 days total. By neat, I mean folders in a pile related to only one case, and only three piles on my desk, with no trail of post-its wandering from my bulletin board to my computer to around my keyboard then spilling over to any space available (book spines, say). Actually, 30 days is probably a generous estimate.

Now in isolation, many of these experiences are normal reactions to a punitive, dysfunctional law firm environment. But when you have many of these issues simultaneously, that’s when you start wondering about ADD. Most people would recognize a couple of these traits, but it’s the ones who see themselves in nearly all of them that probably have some degree of ADD, or at least should investigate a bit further.

So what do you think–anything I’ve discussed ring a bell for you? What are your ADD-driven work habits that drive you nuts? Drop me a comment or send me an email, I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who is getting better at showing up on time. But if she’s writing, time becomes stretchy, and all bets are off. You can email her at jalveyATwordsolutionsDOTbiz.

One of my dear friends is working her way out of law. Now, for most of my friends, this would not be surprising. But for this particular friend, I was completely staggered. She has the perfect personality for law. I don’t mean that as a slam. I mean that she is able to keep her cool in trying circumstances, doesn’t get overly ruffled by emotional or even mean outbursts, is very smart and very capable. But she’s had it.

Why now? Because she’s fed up with getting shit on, to be honest.

The way that law firms, particularly, let dysfunctional assholes ruin the workplace is unconscionable. I have seen it in law firm after law firm, firsthand, and heard about it even more. I cannot advise anyone unhappy in law to ignore this salient, widespread fact. It’s not just about finding a better fit, it’s about escaping the dysfunctional shit that is daily life in Biglaw, and often in Mediumlaw and Smallaw too.

In my friend’s case, she is tired of working for a blame-shifter who gets her to do great client development presentations, and then tells her she’s not invited to the meeting. Who can’t be bothered to answer her questions about a particular agreement, a type which she has rarely worked on, and then goes ballistic when it’s not perfect. You all know the type.  There’s just not a personality cure for this kind of behavior, people. And the sad truth is that law firm leaders are about money, and then money, and then lip service about pro bono as long as it can make the firm some money via training their young lawyers without having to spend on training. Unless a partner is a huge lawsuit risk for gender or race discrimination (again, money), law firm leaders will put up with the pricks in their midst, so long as they have decent billables. Everyone knows it, and it hasn’t changed in decades. Don’t count on the current economic crisis to change that, when everyone is scared about–you guessed it–money.

And this particular soapbox is leading me somewhere. I’m done with trying not to be too offensive and abrasive about law firm and corporate misbehavior. (What, you couldn’t tell I was holding back?) I’m not marketing writing training to law firms any more. I don’t want to deal with all their dysfunction.

So hold on to your hats, dear readers. It’s going to get fun around here.

I was reading a new book to my son tonight, “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.” I picked it out mainly because he adores the Three Little Pigs fairy tale, and I figured it would be in the same vein, but with a more sympathetic view of the wolves.

Oh, how marvelously wrong I was. I’ll give you the plot summary.

Little wolves set out to build a house for themselves. They start with bricks. Enter Big Bad Pig, who can’t blow the house down. So he quickly fetches a sledgehammer and knocks it straight down. House #2, concrete. BBP, pneumatic drill. House #3, barbed wire, iron bars, armor plates, heavy metal padlocks, Plexiglass and some reinforced steel chains. BBP, dynamite. Finally, the wolves say, “Something must be wrong with our building materials. We have to try something different. But what?”

And then, a flamingo comes along pushing a wheelbarrow full of . . . flowers.

I’m pretty sure I appreciated this story a lot more than my son.

I’m not going to spoil the ending, save to say it is a fantastic lesson about how useless an arms race is.

And what does this possibly have to do with alternative legal careers? Only everything.

Lawyers, and indeed our whole culture, is steeped in the idea that we must fight fire with fire. Opposing counsel sends out third party subpoenas? We send out even more. Didn’t get the job you wanted? It must be lack of credentials, so you need to go get more.

Please, reconsider. It is possible to become an artist without going to art school, a journalist without going to J-school, a spiritual leader without going to divinity school, an executive without getting an MBA. Of course, if you want to become an MD or a CPA, you are going to need that specialized schooling, for credentialing. But unless you absolutely need a credential to be in a field, you can probably find a way to get to that new career without another expensive stamp on your passport. The stamp is an external validation that you’re qualified.

What you really need to succeed in your new endeavor, though, is internal validation. Internal validation is deceptively simple: do what it is you want to do. Make art, write articles that include interviews, get in touch with your Creator, seek out opportunities that require more than legal acumen.

What do you think you could do this week that would give you some of that internal validation? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Admit it–if you’re thinking about leaving the law, you have felt EXACTLY like CareerBuilder’s brilliantly subversive commercial from the SuperBowl: “If you make loads of money, but hate going to work every day, your coworkers don’t respect you, you always wish you were somewhere else, you cry constantly, you daydream of punching small animals, and you sit next to this guy . . .  it’s probably time. As a rule.”

So what do you do, aside from watch the commercial a few dozen times and forward it to all your similarly discontented friends? (I am exceeding grateful YouTube hadn’t been invented when I was still practicing, because I know I would have spent entire weeks on it then.)

How about write up a list of 10 jobs you would love to try if only you could. I won’t even ask you to tackle the daunting task of explaining why, exactly, you can’t do these jobs. Just make the list. We can talk logistics another time. After you write the list, be open to receiving information about them, from whatever source. As in, if your secret list includes becoming a chef, and your honey surprises you with a Valentine’s Day dinner at a high-end restaurant kitchen or cooking classes, well, just go with it. Listen. You don’t have to do anything else.

Yes, I’m back. I didn’t really go away, but let’s just say that the intermission was longer than anticipated.

One of my favorite characters lately is Thursday Next, from the Next Octology series by Jasper Fforde. (Several reviewers call the series “Harry Potter for grownups.” Possibly this means I’m not really a grownup, since I love Harry Potter. But I digress.) For various and sundry extremely good reasons, Thursday spends a couple years hiding away from the real world in Bookworld. When she returns, most of her acquaintances and friends ask, “Have you been in prison?”

I mention this because I share the same name as a woman who lives maybe 10 miles from me. Just before I moved from the DC area to Tennessee, this other Jennifer Alvey was accused of killing her 20-month old daughter in 2005. She admitted that she had shaken her adopted daughter and caused the girl’s head to hit a coffee table and fracture. The other Jennifer Alvey pled guilty to reckless homicide in June 2008, and is awaiting sentencing.

At the time, I didn’t think too much about the consequences that sad episode might cause for me. Yes, she and I not only had the same unusual name, we also were fairly close in age–I’m in my early 40s and she is in her late 30s. And in 2005, my son was a toddler. But if you read the stories (silly assumption #1) you would see that she had lived in Tennessee for quite a while; I moved here in 2006. Also, the other Jennifer had married into the Alvey name, while I was born with it. Though she probably is a distant relative; the Alveys in western Kentucky immigrated en masse from eastern Maryland around 200 years ago, and the branch that didn’t move on to Chicago or Texas has stayed centered around western Kentucky. (More geneaology than you needed to know!)

But a client-someone I knew from several years ago, but had lost touch with-while looking to get back in touch with me stumbled across the stories, and for a while thought maybe I had gone rather bad.

That story of mistaken identity ended happily enough, since he persevered through some mutual acquaintances. Though I do wonder if some resumes I’ve sent out have been deleted on the assumption I’m a convict, rather than a contrarian.

Just in case, though, let me tell you that my son is just fine, but if he doesn’t stop pestering our very tolerant kitten hourly, he might have to go to his room for another time out.

I’m sure the other Jennifer Alvey wishes she could say the same for her daughter. When I read about those situations, I’m always reminded of a saying, “You’re not a bad parent if you occasionally think about killing your children, only if you act on that thought.” May we all be given the grace to think before we act.

When I was thinking about leaving law, I focused a lot on all the things I would lose:

• Money
• Status
• Long hours
• Working weekends regularly
• Achingly boring work
• Colleagues who were anything but collegial
• A known career path
• Did I mention money?

I was right about nearly all of those things. But the most amazing things about my new career were the unanticipated gains. At the top of the list, how much better I felt doing work I actually enjoyed. My soul ditched the gazillion-pound albatross it had been lugging around while doing work it despised. I had no idea how heavy that burden was until it wasn’t there.

The other biggie for me was discovering the pleasure of working with people who weren’t pathological naysayers. People who had hope, optimism, and a positive outlook on life. As Martin Seligman points out in his book, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, law is the only profession in which the most successful members are quite pessimistic (see the Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy? chapter). It’s understandable, because the job of a lawyer is to look for the downside and protect against it.

But if you have a creative bone in your body, law firms in particular are a completely toxic environment. Creative folk do their best work when hopeful and optimistic. Even if you’re writing about awful topics like suicide, the creative part of your brain is happy, because it’s making a new story, though an individual character may not be doing so hot. Creativity is not born of fear, but good lawyers often are. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. Yet I did not truly understand the implications of those facts for my psyche for a very long time, until I had already committed to leaving law and jumped. So I thought I’d share with you, in case it helps you screw up the courage to make the leap. If the legal environment is destroying you, know that another environment really will be better.

So Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal axed 37 attorneys not long ago. Plus another 90 or so support staff. If you are one of those people and reading this, my condolences to you. Getting laid off sucks, no matter how bad the job.

[Aside: Don't miss this funkalicious article in the WaPo written by a guy who got laid off and has yet to find a job.]

Of course the question always arises, couldn’t the partners have sucked it up and taken a bit of a pay cut so that other attorneys wouldn’t be out on their duffs? After all, it’s the economy and likely will bounce back, and the firm will need these folks again.

Let me share some insight I got once when talking to a partner I used to work for. He called himself “part of the working rich,” and yes he was seriously whining about it. While not all partners share that view, how many do you think do? I imagine quite a few, maybe even the majority of BigLaw partners. They don’t see having vacation homes, expensive primary residences, expensive cars, expensive travel, etc., etc. as something optional—they’ve earned it, is the feeling I always got from partners.

So that is one part of the why partners won’t take salary cuts. Plus, many are mortgaged to the hilt. A pay cut would make them cut into their lifestyle. Ain’t happening.

Another reason also stems from a sense of entitlement, but this one is more about associate pay. Namely, the whole lock-step system of salary based on number of years out of law school. Law firms are locked into some big salary increases for associates every year, and one of the few ways to cut attorney payroll costs is to cut, well, the number of attorneys. Because giving no raises seems out of the question for most firms. They fear the people they want to keep will get irate and leave for greener pastures.

I know, it’s heresy to suggest that associates be compensated by merit. They’ve demonstrated their merit by getting good grades in law school and working at a BigLaw firm, right? And they’re going to work lots of hours, so they deserve that salary guarantee.

Except, that kind of logic really doesn’t work in today’s economic climate. And in the end, it doesn’t really benefit associates. Partnership is a black box in part because associates don’t get honest feedback soon enough. Instituting merit compensation could certainly help clear up some of the mystery. (Of course, it would require actual honesty during reviews, which could be wildly unrealistic.) I mean, isn’t that how most professionals know how they’re doing, they get raises or don’t?

Granted, merit compensation could be (and in many firms, would be) abused. But so what else is new? (Lawyers finding ways to abuse other lawyers—tell me it ain’t so.) The billable hours system is a lousy way to live for just about everyone involved.

And, not feeling guaranteed a salary increase would actually be good for associates, because they wouldn’t feel it’s such a risk to try something else without such a high-salary guarantee. Merit salary would help them see those guarantees are worthless, anyway. More on that next time.

No, this isn’t a rant about legal education (though I should do about a dozen of those, shouldn’t I?) It’s about how our educational system pushes bright, talented kids to pursue crap they don’t honestly have a passion for. Like, say, law. And all too many of you know how that ends up—talented people who are depressed, miserable, and not really making use of their innate talents and abilities. Bleah, all the way around.

I got to thinking about this when I read a debate in Jay Matthews’ column in the WaPo, over the education of really and truly gifted kids—the kind who read The Hobbit in first grade, and get it; the kind who can do calculus in sixth grade. THAT KIND of gifted, not just smarter-than-the-average student type of gifted.

Specifically, Matthews was writing about, and readers responding to, the situation of a very bright kid in one of the Virginia suburbs of DC, who has already tested out of basically a year’s worth of college coursework before he has graduated high school. His GPA kind of stinks for his level of ability (a 3.25), largely because he often didn’t complete assignments. Because of that, several colleges have turned up their noses at him, including UVA. He has gotten admitted and a scholarship to some places, and most likely he’ll do OK. I hope so, because the world clearly needs some talented chemical engineers to get us out of our current environmental morass, among other things.

What really got me going were the letter-writers who all rode in on their high horses about how critically important it was that brilliant people FOLLOW THE RULES and do homework and assignments. Because, yanno, you have to follow rules in life and where will you end up if you can’t follow rules? I mean, you might become some derelict like Albert Einstein, for God’s sake. Or even Galileo.

The letter that pissed me off the absolute most was the one from some petty little mother named Madeleine French. OK, I should not call her petty or little, because I don’t know her. But her letter comes off that way. She talks about how one of her daughters, who seems from the letter to be bright and capable, but probably not gifted on a seriously high level, was in a quandary with what she was going to do with her life after graduating from William and Mary. Here’s the exact quote:

When my older daughter, a senior at William and Mary, declared in January that she “didn’t know what to do with the rest of (her) life,” I was positively apoplectic. Her story has a happy ending, too: she’ll be starting law school at Villanova next fall.

I have an alternate interpretation of that happy ending: Here’s yet another person who got pushed into law because it pleased her parents. Within six years, she will more than likely be miserable in law, if the experiences of so many former lawyers I know are any indication. Oh yeah, another victory for mindless societal conformity. Just what the world needs, another lawyer. (Note to anyone considering a counseling or psychology degree: GO FOR IT!!! You have an unending client base with lawyers.)

So let me get this straight, Madeleine French: Your highest and best ambition for your beloved daughter is that she become a cog in the wheel of corporate America?

This kind of fixation on credentials equaling success or quality makes me UTTERLY BATSHIT. Good grades do not imply genius; they simply say that the student had an ability to comprehend the materials and be diligent enough mastering them, and jumping through whatever pedagogical hoops there are to demonstrate that. Now, for most average and slightly above average students, the system works OK, I suppose. And, oh how great and glorious, we get a new generation of people who have been taught how to conform.

[Check out a really great talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how conformity in schools is ruining creativity in kids, just when society is going to need it the most. Also, here’s another great post about the topic at Quinn Creative.]

While our educational system is great for the societal institutions that need conformity to function—government, large corporations, schools, and of course, law firms—conformity doesn’t do much to promote innovation and real, honest-to-God advances and changes in the world. Too bad. With the current environmental, financial, and fuel crises, not to mention the failing war on terrorism, we could really use some original, highly creative thinking to get us out of this sad mess.

Oh, but wait! The original thinkers got ground down by having to dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, so they have gorgeous penmanship but are also deeply convinced that no one gives a shit about their brilliant solutions. Since the message of conformity is that deviation is not only worthless, but very, very bad. So they blog and eek out a living somehow, maybe even as a lawyer, while their real talents lie wasting away.

Of course some conformity is necessary for society to function. But right now, we’ve completely overdosed on it as a society. We’re testing our children to death and giving them homework largely to make us feel better, because there’s no evidence that homework produces better learning. (As a personal aside, the 3^rd graders at my son’s Montessori school do not ever have homework, and yet regularly blow the lid off Tennessee’s standardized tests. The schools that pass out homework like Ritalin, their record is much more mixed, even in wealthy areas. Not that I think standardized tests do much to demonstrate good education. Good teaching to test, maybe. . . but passion for learning, no. And, the United States with its reams of homework still ranks 24^th out of 29 developed nations in math education.)

The hostility toward accommodating truly gifted kids by giving them a pass on homework that is the equivalent of reading Dick and Jane as a high school seniors baffles me. We’re quite willing to accommodate learning disabilities, and give some kids longer to complete tests, for example. And we should be doing that. But why can’t it work the other way? Why can’t we just say, OK, extremely gifted/genius student, you can choose your homework, just get your teacher’s approval first? Seems a lot better result for everyone involved—genius kid gets challenged, contributes to class, teacher gets her jollies from having some kind of homework completed, and society ultimately gets an even more productive genius.

The only ones who lose are the bureaucratic noodges. Oh, darn. Well, they can always go to law school.

So the question of whether to dumb down your resume came up on the Career Track chat on washingtonpost.com. Specifically, the question was whether to leave off advanced degrees.

Here’s the short version of the debate:

I was having trouble getting a job and so began leaving off my MA thinking that employers would think I’m too young to have one (I was 23). Long story short, after doing so I received 5 offers for interviews and got a job. Few months later I told my boss about that casually and he laughed and told me I never would have been hired if he knew because he would have thought I’d want too much money. Unfortunately our society punishes very educated individuals sometimes.

When you are transitioning as a lawyer to nearly any other career field, you’re going to have to tackle this beast: Employers fear that you’ll want too much money, simply because you have a JD. I definitely ran up against this. It is now easier to at least get some interviews, now that I am four jobs deep in publishing—I’ve been out of law practice so long, even the more clueless employers probably figure I can’t easily go back to practicing law.

But boy, I wish I could have figured out a good way to leave off that JD when I was transitioning out of law. Even with functional resumes, which I think are a must for career changers, there’s going to be this three-year gap between college and your first real job (assuming you went full-time to law school. If you went at night, it would be much easier to leave off the JD). I suppose if you listed summer jobs during those years, it might not catch a hiring manager’s eye.

[To digress: that’s the weird thing about resume reviews. On the one hand, all the “experts” say that potential employers only spend 60 seconds, max, looking at a resume. And yet, a tiny typo toward the bottom of the page is supposedly the kiss of death. The truth is somewhere in between.]

One strategy I did use with some success is to include a professional summary at the top, emphasizing things like analytic skills, strategic thinking, quick learner, etc. Next, I had a section called “Representative Achievements,” which discussed results and specific projects, not job titles. So something boring to other attorneys, like supervising a document review, was retooled into “Supervised team of attorneys and paralegals to review 100+ boxes of documents in three months, coming in before deadline and under budget.” Definitely corporate-speak, but much better than legal-speak for job-hunting purposes.

Anyone else with some good ways to emphasize transferable skills and downplay degrees? Please post in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.