Invitation

“Dear Nicholas,

“I’m very pleased to tell you that we are now in a position to start the recruitment process for the position of Head of our new Brussels office. We will not be advertising this position but would like to invite you to apply.”

This was waiting for me when I finally got to my inbox this evening after 24 hours off the internet. Potential New Employer is a guy who has started a new organisation acting as a foreign affairs consultancy for deserving international causes. We’ve been in dialogue for the last year and a half about my potentially working for him. I know from other sources that he has been given a grant specifically to hire a Brussels office head. I doubt very much that he has invited anyone else to apply for the job, or will do unless I say no or he changes his mind. So the ball is now in my court. The money would be a bit less than I am currently getting, but other considerations (discussed below) make that less of an issue than it might be.

Where I Am

I was offered my current job in March 2002 and started work in May. I set myself the following goals that I hoped to achieve:

• Open an office in the South Caucasus; publish our first reports on Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then on Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia
• Carry out work on Moldova
• If at all possible, do some work on Cyprus
• Close out our offices in Bosnia and Macedonia, local political situation allowing

I have achieved all of these except publishing a report on Abkhazia, but the draft of that is in my inbox (though inaccessible as this Budapest cybercafe doesn’t run Office). Plus management keeps on muttering about closing out the Serbia office, which would leave me with rather less to do. Plus I hate editing which is a very major part of the job. (Plus management’s cyclonic temperament is at times just a little wearying, and quite possibly worth taking a pay cut to escape.) Basically, I’ve done what I set out to do in my curent job, and it doesn’t look like there are other avenues for me to explore. The most obvious thing would be to work on Belarus and the north Caucasus, but that would need someone with better Russian than me.

How To Move On

Years ago I read What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles, which is the best career planning self-help book I have ever read. It doesn’t work for everyone, and a lot of people will find his homespun evangelical philosophy a bit off-putting, but if you can ignore the tone the content is, I think, incredibly useful. Bolles’ message can be summed up as follows:

1. Know your best and most fulfilling transferable skills.
2. Know what kind of work you want to do and what field you would most enjoy working in.
3. Talk to people who are doing the work you want to do. Find out how they like the work, how they found their job.
4. Do some research, then, in your chosen geographical area on those organizations which interest you, to find what they do and what kinds of problems/challenges they or their industry are wrestling with.
5. Then identify and seek out the person who actually has the power to hire you for the job you want; use your personal contacts – everyone you know – to get in to see him or her.
6. Show this person with the power to hire you how you can help the company solve its problems/needs/challenges and how you would stand out as one employee in a hundred.
7. Don’t take rejection personally. Remember, there are two kinds of employers out there: those who will be bothered by your handicaps – age, background, inexperience, etc. – and those who won’t be and will hire you, so long as you can do the job. If you get rejected by the first kind of employer, keep persevering until you find the second.
8. In all of this, cut no corners and take no shortcuts.

That’s basically how I got my first job in Brussels, and also how I’ve got to this stage with Potential New Employer. (With the slight exception that Bolles doesn’t envisage the employer opening a brand new office in the place where you want to be.)

Plan B

As luck would have it, NATO have just advertised a new post on their website which looks pretty appropriate. I think I shall apply for it anyway as a backstop; things probably will work out with Potential new Employer, but they might not. I’ve applied for NATO jobs twice before, without success, so I am not placing too much expectation on that one.

Anyway, interesting times…