More than a job. Be it a small company, a cause or a tight-knit group initiative, I’m willing to spend some of my time on Earth and energy with you without compromising on my beliefs.
My brain has always been working overtime for as long as I can remember. I learned how to read, write and count at the age of 2, giving me the keys to this world even before entering kindergarten. I still don’t know which one came first - my brain has always been hungry for stimulation. These needs, along with my adaptation skills, my autonomy and curiosity made me eager to explore new professional settings; this comes at the price of getting bored or frustrated quickly if these needs aren’t being addressed. That’s what might come out of my resume. 12 years after I graduated, I worked for 10 different organizations, public, private, national, international; and in different settings (industry, retail, food, luxuryâŚ). While I sometimes was forced to quit (my subcontracting company lost their agreement, in-house recruitmentâŚ), I most often left of my own will because I got bored in less than a year or I realized we were deeply incompatible: the job description wasn’t matching what I was effectively asked to do or I was frankly disagreeing with the management regarding our values or strategy.
Work is my way to contribute to society, to give back what I benefited from it. I know I’m lucky to be able to feel this way and that I can try to dissociate as much from capitalism as I can. I’m not really an example of the “employee of the month” who aims to climb to the top and working for a company in which I’m just another number kind of freaks me out - this doesn’t mean I can’t be overly invested; but I’ll be for the people and the projects I’m working on that allow me to thrive. However, I’ve never really managed to properly separate my personal from my professional world; these are built upon the same time and energy budget along with the lifeprint I’d like to leave on Earth. This budget and lifeprint concept are tightly tied to my needs but also my beliefs and commitments. These evolved as I grew up and shaped myself by spending my time and energy budget for the organizations I worked for up to this day.
I was born in 1991. My generation is the one which grew up with the new technologies and the Internet. My neurodivergence was helped by being born in a middle-class household which got its first personal computer in 1997 and an Internet connection at the dawn of Y2K. I immediately got used to the machine, learned how it worked and what I could do with it. Eventually, I fell in love with it: from my fingertips, I could reach a complete new virtual world: I could feed my brain with everything I could find and never feel frustrated with unquenchable thirst for something new, I could communicate, exchange, be creative, play some video games and whatnot. For once, I had the feeling I didn’t have to adapt and fit in, but I could explore this world by myself, on my own terms. Obviously, 25 years later, if I bathed in this internet popular culture, I can only feel sorry seeing how capitalism took hold of this world. Without all the real world’s guardrails, the cyberspace got plagued at lightning pace by but not only the ads, the merchandising and psychological schemes so the capitalism can run wild. One of my main commitments is to fight for a fair, ethical and predation-free cyberspace, both physical and psychological; promoting free and open-source software, national or European companies, technologies and assets, better regulation, inform and share my knowledge around the real costs of our digital way of life: social and environmental; and if it’s not too late, protect at all costs what’s left of our ties with the digital world, so it stays being a fascinating universe and not a way to subdue humanity. I’m aware that this sets me far away from the usual human in their thirties looking for a job profile. Thus, I decided to use my creativity, my interest for writing and my authenticity to the benefit of my employability. This work will lead to a LinkedIn post and a revamp of my resume which will be web-based (using the same framework as this website).
LinkedIn, where should I start? This “professional” social network which gets worse everyday and its easy-to-manipulate algorithm nonetheless keeps the crown for being relevant when you’re looking for a job in tech-related fields. It also allows to post some more lengthy content instead of text nuggets. Despite this illusion of choice, I believe LinkedIn is the best place to find what I’m looking for. Willing to stay true to myself, I didn’t want to shape the post so it would be algorithm-friendly, I didn’t make use of AI and I couldn’t care less about being politically correct. As I loathe being labelled and being forced to follow some arbitrary rules “just because they are like so”, I aimed to reach one’s mind as they read these words, my personality overflowing, no matter how they would be found. The idea of using Bernie Sanders’ meme which came up to me when I went through one of my frequent absence of mind (for a lack of better word) short sequences would allow me to show off my internet culture and joke about being fluent in English. What mattered the most was that the post had both the form and function. While I’m aware that I have a wider skill set and interests than what I could practice and what was expected from me at work, I wanted to showcase this skill and mindset like it would make me legitimate to not be considered like another numbered line in a budget-related Excel file any longer.
All these questions I kept asking myself brought me to take some skill and behavioural assessments, so I could get a proper review of my needs, my strengths and motives. While I wasnât surprised at all by the different outcomes, it has been reassuring to realize that I know myself pretty well by now. Today, Iâm not looking for a killer job with a dream pay check and title, but for a position where I can be autonomous and altruist, and where I can solve problems instead of maintaining the status quo. My fulfilment doesnât come from money or social status. What makes the difference and what matters is who and why I work for and towards.