The Family Business

Used to be that you would grow up and go into the family business.  All of that knowledge that you gain as a child, a teen, a young adult -listening to the problems that your parents encountered and solved....It's all gone.  It accounts for nothing anymore.

You can't put on your resume that you grew up in the family business and that counted for experience.

You can't put that down.  No one counts that as learned experience.

How is that any less valuable than the textbook knowledge that you get in school?

I think it's really sad that all of that knowledge that we used to gain for 18+ years of our existence no longer matters.

Who wouldn't love to be able to put down 18 years of experience on their resume!?

In fact, you're looked at rather oddly if you "go into the family business"...unless it's the mob or you're rich or something.  But if you were to get a job where you worked along side your mom or your dad for years- that would seem odd to people.

It's sad that I don't get to count any of that experience.

In fact, nowadays, I don't get to count even my years of experience.  Jobs require you to get a degree or certification to prove you can type and file, much less be a business analyst.  I really blame Cisco and Microsoft- their "Certified Engineer" programs were frankly required if you wanted to work on the code for those products- they're just not logical.  You NEEDED the certification to get the training that you couldn't get anywhere else.

That was before the days of the internet, though.

Certifications were for those jobs that you HAD to apprentice for- not the jobs that you could gain experience on-the-job.

Now there's tons of information at my fingertips- I just have to know how to find it.

It's really quite shocking, actually, that there isn't a Googling certification.  I think that might actually be one of the more useful certifications- how do you find the information you need...and then what do you do with it once you've found it.

In the meantime, I have an IQ of 153, a Bachelor's degree in Pre-Medical Biology, a Master's degree in Molecular Medicine, 15 years of experience as an IT Business Analyst, 5 years of experience as a college professor....

...and I'm not qualified for any job anymore.