Gotta get the hell up out of here.

May 16, 2012 1:59 PM

What are productive ways to use a year off from work if I want to make myself more marketable, skilled, and noteworthy?

I have a good finance job but lack of passion and a sort of unpleasant culture has started to burn me out. If I stick it out until the end of the year, I could have about $75k saved up to take some time off, recharge, and make myself more marketable for the stuff I WANT to do.

What I want to do: work at a startup, start my own lifestyle business, or invest in startups (as an employee of a fund, incubator, etc). I have the business background, but it seems like I'm lacking a certain rock star/free thinker/risk taker/domain expert vibe that the places I'd like to work are looking for. In addition, with a finance background, I don't have the specific hard skills that a lot of these employers are looking for (e.g. marketing/social media experience, sales, programming). Pure finance people trying to get into these jobs are a dime a dozen, so leveraging just that won't help.

Some ideas I've had for using portions of this time:
*travel to Latin America on the cheap and volunteer in an economic development capacity and make my conversational Spanish fluent (this is for mental peace, cool points, and to increase the geography of my marketability, too)
*learn to build websites and simple web apps and SEO/social media market the shit out of them and use these to build a personal brand
*go to every startup event I can find and network my ass off
*do an unpaid internship with a startup or VC/accelerator/etc
*take a shitty sales job to learn to be a badass salesperson
*figure out some minimally-capital-intensive ideas for businesses to start and "lean startup" them

I'd appreciate more suggestions and any potential pros and cons of my strategy, but I'm not listening to any bullshit about "you should be happy to even HAVE a job." Life's too short to do something you don't love, especially when you're young AND so close to being able to do it. Obviously, I would continue to apply for the jobs I want while doing this.

Additional deets: female, 20s, NYC, no debt, smart, extra personable, but unproven.

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Congratulations, you're doing great!

The first thing I thought of was Unpaid Intership with a firm you admire but is currently out of your wheelhouse.

I also like your Latin America on the cheap and volunteering. Learning Spanish can only help.

I used to be a sales person in Miami and even a bit of the language and cultural understanding gives you a HUGE leg up in doing business with Latin America.

Don't get a sales job, especially if you don't like what's involved with sales. Take a great sales job, in your field, so you can rub shoulders with customers and really speak to them, but that won't make you a badass. Being a badass makes you a badass. I was the badest assed salesperson in Telecommunications there for awhile and I'm telling you, I was born with it.

You are so lucky to have these options. Were it me, I vote for Latin America. Now is a great time for an adventure.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 2:13 PM on May 16, 2012

Very interesting question. Just one thought: you should also pose this question on Quora.com. The folks on there are particularly startup-oriented.

Also, personable + business-y suggests biz dev to me. Which might not be ideal for a super-early-stage startup but could be good for a slightly more mature one.
posted by CruiseSavvy at 2:47 PM on May 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

: "Pure finance people trying to get into these jobs are a dime a dozen, so leveraging just that won't help."

: " Obviously, I would continue to apply for the jobs I want while doing this."

I don't know how much I can say without knowing what jobs you want and what background you have (all "business" tells me is "not a programmer"), but my guess is that your biggest selling point right now is that you can live off your savings. So it's cheap (in capital) to hire you. Can you also prove that it would be cheap (in time) to manage you?

One of the barriers to new people going into start-ups as employees rather than founders is that many start-ups are reluctant to invest any time training, mentoring, or guiding inexperienced hires. (You can see a similar pattern as a result of "up-or-out" policies in finance, consulting, and law for example, where a few giants will take in hordes of interns or junior associates and spit most of them back out again to be snapped up by smaller companies on the strength of their newfound experience.)

Have you considered recent ex-start-ups? Companies like (I do not work for and am not paid to promote any of these) Palantir, for example, will give you some of the start-up culture but because they have the resources of a much larger organization they may be more willing to take a chance in their hiring. Also, your finance background would probably then be relevant, because one of their flagship products is marketed to quantitative analysts in finance.
posted by d. z. wang at 3:29 PM on May 16, 2012

Why not start your own startup? You can live on $75k for a couple years and get some partners if you need an idea man/ creative/ rock star type. Look at it as experience gained.

I can't imagine any better way to make yourself attractive to another startup!
posted by fshgrl at 4:48 PM on May 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Chilean government runs a start-up incubator called Start-Up Chile which attracts a lot of promising new businesses from the US. You could try getting a job with one of those, and tick several of your boxes (Latin America, Spanish, start-up experience/community) at once. Other countries may have similar incubators, though the Chilean one is particularly well-regarded worldwide.
posted by pickingupsticks at 5:13 PM on May 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

I think travelling to learn Spanish is a great, great idea-- fun, eye-opening, and genuinely marketable! Just make sure to be diligent about the language-learning if that's what you want; it's way easy in any country to stick with foreigners and only end up learning food words...
posted by threeants at 6:33 PM on May 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

work at a startup, start my own lifestyle business, or invest in startups (as an employee of a fund, incubator, etc

These are three very different things.

And anything that involves actual programming is a very different thing again.

If you're not completely sold on working for a startup, I'd suggest looking into doing an MBA, maybe abroad. Doing an MBA you learn some new skills, get to do a bunch of networking, find out about a lot of different industries and roles, and get to do various projects and internships that can help you get a foot in the door. Also it looks good on the CV for most business careers, though maybe not for startups. It also used to be a way into the VC scene, though I'm not sure if that's still true.
posted by philipy at 10:34 AM on May 17, 2012