So, what does an employer think/believe when they see that I have a degree in English?
I'm beginning to believe that some feel that I must be extremely creative and have an amazing ability to think outside the box.
Honestly, for me at least, it means that I love to read and I enjoy writing. And by writing I mean writing about what I'm interested in. Writing in a style that I am most comfortable with, mainly what you see here.
It does not mean I have the ability to creatively come up with a new and streamlined way of sending information back to our clients.
I am a copycat. I take someone else's idea and tweak it a bit. I find it difficult to pull new creative ideas truly of my own out of my head.
I also over analyze and take in a number of factors of how I understand the current system to work and why it is that way. In this case, we've been sending similar work to our client for 3 years. It has be slowly tweaked and changed as requests have been made by our client. Could it be streamlined? You bet. Does our client want that? I kinda doubt it. What I would propose to streamline our client would have to take in good faith that info we didn't give them wasn't needed to be given but was seen by us. (If that makes sense.) As it stands, that trust is minimal in this given case. Thus my over analyzing and knowing possibly too much.
The trick? To force myself to throw something out there that is completely wild and disregard most of what I know. It also requires me to ignore the likelihood that my final idea will be rejected, if not by my superiors than most certainly by our client.
I know at this point that I cannot tell my superior why this is a bad idea, as it seems I'm good at explaining why I shouldn't have/need to do "x". So to avoid that I will attempt to come up with some radical new idea.
What sucks? The first sample I gave, with the help of a fellow co-worker, I thought was at least a good step in the right direction. It wasn't so drastic of a change that both parties would hate it, but it was more streamlined and I think flowed better, making it easier to pick out the info wanted. It was completely shot down. I was told to not consult with fellow processors. I was told to "use your creativity".
(I can only assume that she believes I have creativity based on my degree? This assumption also comes from when the project initially started I was informed it would allow me to put to use my writing skills. Let's be clear, a list of bullet points and fill in the blanks does not constitute writing skills, in fact it would seem to be to be the opposite.)
My creativity does not carry over into the workforce very well. I am a horrible office monkey. I do not play well with others in the corporate world, nor do I dress the part. It is that one should dress for the job they want, not the one they have. I believe most would assume that to mean, at least in the corporate world, to dress business professional if you find yourself a processor and the dress code is jeans and a nice shirt and dress shoes. I dress in jeans, questionable nice shirts and I wear hiking shoes. I don't wear makeup. I wear brightly colored hand warmers, and do very little with my hair. I dress for the job I want, which isn't in the corporate office world. I do my job well. But I'd do it even better in the comfort of my home in PJs at 4am.
So what is creativity? It is more than an English Degree. It is not always what someone else wants you to be. My creativity lives inside my head. I would give you colors and abstract ideas. I would give you incomplete sentences and assume that you're smart enough to know what I'm talking about. I would cut our reports in half, because the client has the guidelines on their end, they see what we see.
Do you like me? Check Yes or No.
