Lessons learned from my first post-military rejection
Learning how to make sense of my first post military failure
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When I started business school in September 2018, I knew one person working in the sports industry. I sat down with one of our employer relations managers at the University of Texas, and she mentioned that Nike would be recruiting on campus. That moment started my journey into the industry.
I read Shoe Dog by Nike founder Phil Knight that next week, realizing that Knight was also an Army veteran. One quote will always stick in my mind:
Business is like a war without bullets.
Early on in my career journey, that quote helped me justify that my military experience did matter. It was a quote that I spoke about in my interviews with Nike that winter. While I felt like it was a match made in heaven at the time, I ended up not getting the internship, giving me my first major rejection post-military.
Looking back now, I wish I could have prepared myself better for those interviews. While wearing the brand for my entire life and feeling connected to the book, a quote, and the founder, I was not great about communicating the connection of my military experience to the industry and knowing what skills I needed to demonstrate.
That rejection still stings. As time goes on, I realize that those moments are what brings one back to reality. I went full send for that internship, going to Portland twice to meet and greet with alumni there, learning as much as I can, but I missed that key step mentioned above. Sometimes going all in to something does not work out and that’s okay. It’s common that people will say that lessons are learned the most from failing, but they don’t always talk about how horrible it feels when it happens.
This all happened nearly four years ago. One of the interviewers was kind enough to send some feedback, some of which was incredibly helpful.1 This feedback confirmed my biggest fear and cause of debilitating imposter syndrome: I did not do a great job at connecting my military experience to the role.
To me, it was pretty simple - I worked in IT/radio communications, planning mission critical support across various countries and training areas in the US. Sometimes those areas were mountainous, rugged, and the atmosphere, frequency allocation, and/or equipment were not always friendly to signal officers, making this task pretty hard!
Communicating My Experience
It became clear through this interview process, several other interviews, and networking sessions that my description of my experience did not register to the other side of the conversation. Many years later, I’ve learned how to quickly describe my experience in a way that typically makes sense because I have realized that the skills I used daily in my role in the military are very close to what I do now:
I spent seven years in the Army working in information technology and radio communications, managing teams of up to 30 people. My role could encompass both typical IT work like we have in our offices (email, internet, etc.) to working with radio communications in austere environments. Ultimately, my job was to manage a technical team and translate their work and efforts into a plan that made sense to a nontechnical staff. I have spent the past 4.5 years working at the intersection of sports and technology. Much like my work today, I like to think of myself as a technical bridge between nontechnical and technical teams - the subject matter of my work is just different.
This description has refined over many iterations and experiences, but it tends to work with most people. For anyone transitioning from the military to the civilian world, or just switching industries completely, remember to give yourself grace and time to hone your skills.
Speaking of Skills…
My work at the intersection of sports and technology has required learning new technical or “hard” skills. From teaching myself how to code (R, Python, SQL), use data visualization tools (partial to Tableau), to becoming better at managing spreadsheets and making slide decks, I like to make sure I know how to do something before asking anyone else to do something similar. To this day, I can still look at a terrain map and give a communications plan2, but I did that constantly for most of my seven years in the Army. Here I was trying to start something new from scratch.
When I interviewed for Nike, I was still learning how to read financial statements and do simple mental math regarding market potential and analysis and mapping that back to a strategic framework. The Internet is full of resources to learn how to do all of these things. My recommendation is to make a priority list of what skills are common (they are typically listed in the roles that you desire) and start from list item #1. You will not be an expert, but you will have enough knowledge to understand the capabilities and describe the skills needed. Most growth comes from on the job training as it is.3
You might be thinking at this point…
Wow, Katherine learned all this from one rejection!
That is just not true. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to now say this. It was the first time that rejection hit and started this journey of figuring things out. Here’s just another friendly reminder to keep going.
“...there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine....you've got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people....Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you're willing to stay loyal to it...it's doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success
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Newsflash: Not all feedback is helpful. Take what you need and leave the rest (or delete the email).
These typically fail because equipment breaks or the atmosphere does not cooperate and you typically get yelled at for that, but I digress.
One exception is coding interviews. You’ll definitely need to code for those.