How did George start ''se mettre sur son chemin''?

In Eastern Europe, many of us grew up learning that it is important to aspire to be "someone". After multidisciplinary studies, but primarily in pedagogy and crisis management, and after almost 25 years of work in national or supranational institutions, as an employee in the public administration or as a freelancer, I believe that the difference between the loser and the winner is not given by desire, but action. And action is increasingly driven not by technical skill sets, but by the aspirant's ability to cross-view market challenges and opportunities.

The employee today

This fight to hold a professional position is not easy, nor fair. Former students from different educational systems, some winners from the start, others without understanding that they have no chance, compete with the same desire.

Most of the time, the first screening of candidates is done by robots that analyze keywords in the CV, then comes the selection by a committee, and finally the interview – which can also be preceded or followed by technical tests, and sometimes psychological.

Employers started to prefer professionals who take work seriously, but having a sense of humor and reacting promptly in critical situations. Beyond specific knowledge, the perfect employee must possess a skills set that can be applied anywhere. These are termed transversal skills, because they do not belong to a specific field, and the transversal stands out in a world full of people who know how to do "everything" and essentially nothing in particular, by his/ her unique ability to extract the essential and orient it in the right direction. Transversality plays the role of a decisive currency: it places the holder somewhere at the top, giving him the necessary to win in a competition.

"Learn how to learn": why Guidance is essential

We agree that most of the information needed by modern man is found in open sources - these include all the accessible surroundings, from the Internet, a library, a shop, or a passerby who mechanically tells us where the unmarked store is on Google Maps, or even what time it is. OK, but do we know how to access the open sources, and especially how to interpret them effectively?

Teachers have an essential role in guiding the future professional to understand how to obtain the necessary information in a world saturated with information. It is not cliché and does not require as many financial resources as one would be tempted to think. But it requires passing on a pattern of learning how, what and how much.

Curiosity and creativity are elements that can qualify a person for the status of transversal professional, and they are not found in an educational curricula. Many times, transversal students emerge from in-depth individual study, from a cenacle or club organized in a specific field, and not necessarily from the benches of a faculty, nor even from a vocational school. There is usually a trigger, which from that point directs their attention multi-directionally, beyond the technical field in which they practice.

The moment when several professionals understood that in order to stand out in the crowd, they still needed "that something" to ''mettre sur leur chemin'':

Nina runs a private company. She gets an email newsletter, even has cell phone alerts – yes, VerifiedNews might interest her too, but she's found that there are plenty of times when she needs to do her own creative internet search without calling to someone on the team to get real-time performance. Gradually, she learned to use not only what we call the "surface" Internet, but also the invisible part of the web - public databases, for example - or even the historical web, which contains archived information. It knows that all these results can be returned by geolocation, in a specific language, or a specific file format. Nina is the professional who understood that digital skills enhance her performance in economics and management studies.

Victor began to focus on details in areas other than his profession, but also on outliers in a situation, when he read that an earthquake could mean that a nuclear weapon had been tested in that geographic area. Later, applying interpersonal (especially active listening and collaboration) and analytical (research, data collection and creativity) skills, he perfected ways to quickly identify aspects that were overlooked even by experts, ending up aggregating statistical data for a very well known company.

25 years ago, Natalia worked in a company where they had not enough computers and it was no vast information in the library called 'Internet', so she decided to use an additional channel of documentation consisting in creating her own useful database: she took notes about the outliers, or anything she seemed important in her field. I know you also have an agenda with names, phone numbers, events - that's about it. Natalia defines that period as full of routine daily work, which she liked and from which she especially learned how many things you miss if they are not written down. Professional habits and organization around needs have transformed Natalia into the disciplined professional who acts in a structured way. She is an advocate for a supranational agency.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for me is to write about myself, but I will try: I analyze digital solutions in the context of crisis management, but more than two decades ago I made a simple decision, to attend a journalism school. It was simple because I would have liked to attend such a faculty, even though I was a law student, and it was also simple because Lumini?a Tudor - my friend at the time, now a well known psychologist - knew this school that can be attended in parallel with the faculty. The Internet was little known, people did not have accounts on social media platforms, so I documented myself in a provincial town by observing field investigations at a newspaper, a scandal paper, a radio and a TV station. I was fascinated by the people in the newsroom and tried to learn as much as I could from their organizational, planning and presentation skills, either orally or in writing. The direct interaction during those few months with various social categories and situations forced me to accumulate, to later recognize and understand more easily specific actions and terms, such as disinformation or fake news, along with tools and techniques to maintain influence in a certain field. My teachers at the School of Journalism were a science fiction writer - Aurel C?r??el - and a journalist who worked in the local press - Laura Pumnea.

How can the school or a mentor set a student on the path to elitist professional environments?

Reading and own interpretation of various scenarios trains the analytical brain.

Open source research is the most accessible method for a clear mind with the ability to operationalize structured ways of action in various situations. Integrating and presenting the results of this research individually or in a team develops other skills.

Those in the last category, you don't even know when one needs to use.

I will tell you that George scored 1 out of 10 on his first ''negotiated dictation'' test. The test was in French, a language that George has been learning for only three years, and he did not have the confidence to support his point of view in front of his exercise partner, a native French speaker. After taking the test individually, they negotiated, and handed in only one paper (the teacher deducting 1 point for each mistake, and if they had 14 mistakes the marking would have stopped at 0 of 10). As you can see, this test was about much more than writing from dictation. Next time, with the same partner, George obtained 10 out of 10, the only maximum grade in the class. He explained how he supported and negotiated his opinion: calmly, firmly, with scientific arguments.

What I meant with this story, was to underline that could be situations when the "impostor" can turn out to be better and more scientifically trained than the one whose place is secured by "birth"...

...et George a certainement appris une le?on importante sur "se mettre sur son propre chemin".

The text above was adapted from my article in Romanian, that you can find here.