KC hive mind: How to you talk about your job to friends and family?
The “hive mind” scheme is something I am borrowing from lifehacker. The idea: Let the readers decide!
Let’s start the KillerConsultant hive mind with a simple, yet important question.
How do you talk about your job as consultant to friends and family? There are a few aspects to that:
How much to reveal?
We are bound to not disclose details of our engagements by contracts, NDA’s and common sense. So what _can_ you tell? Is it ok to say in which city you are? Do you only state the airport you are flying to? When can you reveal a customer’s name – never, or only when the relationship with your consulting firm is published? When it comes to the type of work you are doing, is it ok to say “I am working in a post merger integration / controlling / marketing strategy project”?
How not to bore them to death?
With all those limitations of what you can tell, how to you make it an interesting story, so that your buddies don’t pity you for the lame job you have? (Given that you do not consider consulting a lame job. If you do, I hope the KC gives you some input on how to change that!) Consulting-lingo is another issue here – do you try to eradicate “deliverable”, “slidedeck”, “key-stakeholder” and all this job-specific vocabulary when explaining what you do to people outside consulting?
How to not make yourself look stupid?
I don’t mean that your friends and family assume you are stupid. But watch their face closely when you have been raving about the latest frequent flyer program for ten minutes, or how you hate this and that airport because you never get good rental car upgrades there… you know what I mean? Consultants’ lifestyle seems to disconnect them a bit from the real world, at least it often seems so from the outside. How do you avoid that?
I am looking forward to your approaches to this!
Of course, you do not need to reveal your real name in the comments if you wish to.
2 comments
[...] the way, I am still crying myself to sleep at night because no-no-no-one has replied to the first KC hive mind yet. I know that there are at LEAST five living people reading this (might be six, have not called [...]
Let’s see this from the family’s perspective. Yes, not knowing much about your job, it often looks like it is just a big game of travelling around, sleeping in nice hotels, getting free rentals cars, collecting status symbols (like nice shiny frequent flyer cards). Your priorities change, you now know things like how to shine your precious leather shoes, you don’t grow a beard anymore because you’re too lazy to shave and I assume that your apartment is in a more orderly state. You change. With the job. Which is a good thing, but for family it is hard to perceive as good at first.
And the fact that you can’t really say a lot about your projects doesn’t make it better. It is understantable, however, that you’re not allowed to give up names during the project. I wonder though what the big deal is about telling about projects afterwards - especially to people who are about as close to the industry as a cat is from starting to bark. What exactly is the danger?
I guess this didn’t help much, but I couldn’t let you cry yourself to sleep at night. I don’t think your girlfriend enjoys that.
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