Perform well in jobs after 3 months training

[liberty]

Some jobs are done people with really little training in the specific field, like for example
- CEO: They often have a lot of experience in another field, but have little or no education in management.
- Project or Product manager. Programmers often step into that after getting tired of coding or design.
- Quantitative analyst: They often have experience as programmers, with minimal education in statistics, economics etc
- Teacher: Many people are really good teachers, although they have no training in pedagogy, and probably also little training in what they teach (which makes them better teachers: The best teacher is just one level above you). (On the contrary: There are teachers with Ph.D. and 30 years teaching experience that are a really bad match for XX101).
- Programmer: Many get a junior level job after a 3 - 6 months online training
- Copy writer
- Journalist

I believe that if you are intelligent and have some experience in analytical thinking and problem solving, general life experience, and some talent for the specific job, you could do well in a lot of jobs with just little bit of job-specific training.

I don't really know where I wanna go with this thread, but it's interesting that the, arguably, most skill-demanding job, CEO, doesn't require training. There should be possible to enter a lot of jobs after just 3 month training, the most important is general skills, or what do you think?

What jobs do you think you could do well after little bit of training? I think I would do pretty well as quant analyst, product manager, CEO, CFO, lawyer in a specific field (lawyers often specialize, even though the education is general, with many courses they never use in their jobs), accountant and psychologist.

[jacob]

Well, it would be possible to set up a matrix that lists the number N months it takes to retrain for field Y for someone with M years of experience in X.

I posit that the entries are not ~3 months for all rows and columns. Some fields are just further apart from each other. It is often not the content of the field as much as the mode of thinking that matters and the latter may take years to develop. (Or not be required at all insofar all the job requires is a warm body.) In some fields the opposite holds in which the structure of the thoughts are not particularly deep but there is a lot of information. Journalists tend to be rather good at Trivial Pursuit for example.

The matrix might not even be symmetric. For example, it would likely take less time for a physics professor to become a professor in French than the other way around.

A more general point is that a lot of jobs are actually rather simple when it comes down to it. That is, they could be performed by 13 year olds if it came to that.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Reminds me of this story.

Legend has it that Picasso was at a Paris market when an admirer approached and asked if he could do a quick sketch on a paper napkin for her. Picasso politely agreed, promptly created a drawing, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a million Francs.

The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!”
“No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.”

[liberty]

That is, they could be performed by 13 year olds if it came to that.

Like for example "Project Manager":
- "Hey, how are you doing on the report spreadsheet? The customer needs it tomorrow!"
- "Oh, you don't have the license to IntelliJ, I will fix it."
- "I will organize a Teambuilding Paintball session tomorrow!"
- "Oh, The customer says he can't delete the topics in our app. I will write a Jira task for that and assign it to a developer."
- "We have Employee talks next week, so please set some goals for the next year!! The goals need to be S.M.A.R.T, remember that".

It's fun to think of how all these high paid tasks could all be done by a 13 year old. I'm pretty sure a 13, or at least 16 or 18 year old, with a fresh mind, open for new ideas, would be a better PM than most PMs with 20 years of industry experience.

[zbigi]

This is how PMing often looks like from the employee perspective. There are, however, other facets to the job as well. Esp. in large organizations, you're constantly navigating organizational politics, i.e. other managers exerting some kind of pressure on you and your team ("do this for us", "publicly declare support of our idea X" etc.), or your boss shouting that you're a effing moron because your team didn't deliver on time (mind you, PMs do not get to shout on their individual contributors, but higher managers generally get to shout on their manager underlings). The job requires a lot of skill in my opinion, I for one could not do it well - it required building up a lot of skills that I was not interested in having.

[liberty]

Yeah, but these are just general skills that an 18 year old might have, as well? What skills do a PM have that an intelligent 18 year old couldn't have?

[zbigi]

An intelligent 18 year old will probably not have the emotional maturity, resilience and interpersonal skills required to grind it out as a PM. They will probably either rage-quit or be hated by everyone and marginalised/fired.

The problem for the intelligent 18 year old is that, these pre-requisited cannot be "reasoned out" with superior intelligence, but need to be acquired through practice and emulation of good role models. So, an 18 year old a in year 1800 might have had what it takes to be a PM, because they effectively started their adulthoods much earlier than today, but the 18 year olds of today are effectively large children. Their only saving grace would be having a very good role models (parents etc.) to emulate during childhood years.

[liberty]

Hahaha. Yeah, probably, but I'm pretty sure you may find some 18 year olds who have acquired these skills. Better if they work in another no-education-required role first, like sales or customer support. Then the emotional mature ones can move on to project management.