Nor can you judge a person by a job title. Job titles were created as extensions of job descriptions. A one or two-word summary of the list of mostly general responsibilities someone could be held accountable to by the person paying them to do work in the Industrial Age.
But…It’s no longer the Industrial Age.
Perhaps job titles are still necessary, but it’s time to knock off the stereotyping of the people the job titles are assigned to. Most didn’t create them—-they came from a common vertical database accumulated over the last two centuries. Unfortunately, they not only restrict the range of creativity and contribution of the person who wears the label, they restrict the perception of the creative value an individual could bring to the table in a different environment.
A Question of Motive
Why would a sales representative in one industry want to engage with people in another industry? It depends. If the people, groups, or organizations suffer from tunnel vision, they automatically assume the rep wants to permeate their walls to sell more products. Why else would they possibly choose to do this instead of smiling and dialing the names on their purchased lead lists?
Collaboration is the new team-building exercise
The Industrial Age is responsible for top-down leadership assigning departmentalized teams to develop technical solutions. Widget quality problems on assembly line 5? Supervisor of assembly line 5 gets called into the factory foreman’s office. The foreman hands the supervisor a list of things to execute to solve the problem and the supervisor returns to initiate the solutions. That entire exchange was possible because the foreman used to be a supervisor—-he/she was promoted up the food chain because of their technical expertise (often even more than their leadership skill).
For the most part, we don’t live in a tangible assembly-line world anymore. We exist in an intangible GLOBAL ECONOMY.
Structure your resume accordingly.
