EP 272: Complete Career Pivot. No Industry Connections. $15K + Negotiated.

Welcome to this podcast episode where we have a special guest. Justin's gonna share with us his journey. He's had a lot of success in the past few months and he's had a lot of breakthroughs. Can't wait to get into it. Hey there, I'm Natalie Fisher. I'm a 6-figure business builder, a mom of a 2-year-old, the recoverer of a 10-year narcissistic relationship, and now in a super healthy one. And most of all, I'm a human who's figuring this out with you. This podcast is about how to use your mind to thrive in your career and create the subconscious breakthroughs that you need to get there. The subconscious blocks that you don't even know you have to achieving your highest levels of earning and your best zone of genius moments and days in the flow. That is my goal for you. Let's dive into the episode. And before we dive into today's episode, I want to remind you that I'm the coach who is always going to point you back in the direction of your own wisdom. And so before we get started, I want to remind you, listen Listen to your own wisdom first. This means listen to yourself first and me second, and anyone else for that matter. Take what resonates and throw away what doesn't unapologetically. I won't be mad. I won't be offended. In fact, I will be proud of you for doing so because I know from a lot of personal experience that anything is only as effective as the amount of resonance that it has within your uniquely built brain. And something is only going to work if it feels right to you and if you believe in it, or if you want to do the work to believe in it. And that's what I'm here to help you do. Your inner wisdom is infinitely more valuable than mine when it comes to getting your outcomes and for what you are here to do on this planet. So I'm here to help you steer that wisdom in the most powerful way possible. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so glad you're here, part of this. I'm so glad we're here on the planet at the same time. Let's dive into today's episode.

I am currently an analytics engineer, which is along the lines of data engineering, but it was an interesting journey to get here because my previous role on my resume is still currently a tutor. I came from this background where I long ago was in bioengineering and I realized As I was applying to jobs in that field, that I was no longer excited about even getting an interview. I got an interview at a company that I would've been one of my top companies now. And that's when I like realized I just finished an interview at a company that's on that list and I'm not excited about it at all. And I was at the point where I don't even care if they get back to me because this is just not exciting to me at all. I did not like the work anymore. I didn't like the culture. I went through several different paths. I looked into systems engineering. I looked into a couple other things and maybe resonated for a year or so, but then I was like, eh, not really that either. My degree is in biomedical engineering and I had been working with data and complex data for a long time. Yeah. So started working on data stuff.

This is one thing that I find a lot of people struggle with is they don't know how to figure out what they actually want. What would you advise someone if they're in that state right now where I wanna change, but I don't really know what I want? How would you suggest they go about that?

I think the 2 things that were helpful at that point were Trying out new things. I think just diving into something that is way over your head, but see if it's something that you are even interested in learning how to do. The second is talking to people that have that role. I even tell people now, it's like I was talking to one of my coworkers yesterday who's got a child who is going to be going to universities to see what kind of schools she likes. I was telling him the most important thing to do is to talk to someone who's not the tour guide, talk to some random student that goes there and start out by asking, what don't you like about this? Because when I ask people what sucks about the job you're doing right now, if the worst possible part of that job is something that you're like, yeah, it's fine with me, then maybe this is a good place to—

Yeah, that's a good place to start. That's a really good filter right off the bat.

By the time I came into your program, I had already been spending a lot of time applying to jobs. I was applying, but the people I had talked to did not give me great advice. They're just like, oh, go ahead. You can apply to these jobs. You'll get something. It didn't happen. And it was very obvious now why it didn't happen. Really, I should have connected to more people or gone to an event where I can talk to people and tell them what I'm doing. But I didn't go to any networking events within the field. The people I knew were still all in biotech. The advice I was getting wasn't great. I feel like I wasted a whole lot of time. And at some point I'd felt defeated and was going to give up on that whole thing altogether. I was looking into project management and things like that. I didn't really find that as interesting. Where I was is I had found a bootcamp that had a really high Employment rate from graduation. And I enrolled in that. I knew how to do a lot of this stuff already. This was just a lot more exposure and I figured having that network would be great. They had really high placement and that just coincided with my finishing the bootcamp was one month before all the mass layoffs started, that specific field. Here I am, just finished the bootcamp. Now my competition is all the people who've had this role for years and just got laid off, and they're going to get hired before someone who has no on-the-job experience. My peers that are still trying to get jobs as data analysts are still having difficulty getting those roles because there were just so many people in a data science role or a data analytics role. Even senior analysts wanting to take just anything that gives them an income. It makes sense. As an employer, you want to hire the non-risky employee. Hire someone that came from a good company that has been doing this for years versus someone who came out of a bootcamp who has some projects. Who are you going to hire? Who are you going to interview?

So how did you do it?

Everyone on LinkedIn is saying the same thing.

Mm-hmm.

System is broken. The application system is broken, especially right now, because in this field they post a job and there were days when I would watch the job get posted at 8:00 AM and by 2:00 PM they had to pull the job posting down because it had over 2,000 applicants. Even if say 90% of them are unqualified, that still means they've got a lot of people To consider an interview. When you've got hundreds of applicants, you're trying to narrow it down. So 10% of 200 applicants is 20 people. That's a great amount of people to— that you could go through their resumes and really look at them and interview them and such. When you've got 2,000 applicants, 10% of that is still 200 people, not a feasible amount of people to assess. So when I came into the program, I Felt defeated. I'm like, this is going to be years before this whole situation changes. Plus, this is the advent of AI becoming ubiquitous. So all of the people are now like doom and gloom. This is going to take all of our roles. It's not even going to be necessary anymore. I don't think many of the roles have been eliminated and they are rehiring in that field. But part of the program that resonated the most with me was the value part of it.

You implemented the VCVC method, the value creation, value communication part. You really ran with that.

Yeah. And that was the biggest part. I was trying to assess if I looked at my own resume, because my previous experience was in tutoring, I can hands down show I brought a lot of value to that company, but it's not directly applicable to the value of the companies I am applying. You can talk to my old supervisor, you can talk to the company owner, you can ask them about what I did with data to help their company. But bottom line is my primary experience there was as a, like, customer-facing person whose value is brought in my knowledge of the material I was teaching. It wasn't part of my job, but part of what I did was also use data to help better the company across them. So I started by just reaching out to people who I knew would need some kind of consulting on data stuff. It's like, if I can help, if I can communicate with people who don't want to understand, then imagine trying to explain something to someone who does want to understand. And so I started getting clients. I had one client I was working on like decoding patent information and talking, explaining through part of their shareholders and stakeholders how this algorithm works and how if you wanted to update the patent, what kind of things you would have to do. To make changes. I had some other clients. I was getting a handful of clients that were— it was enough to be able to say on my resume, a role in this field. I just needed any kind of transaction to be able to say I have a client. Now, most paid me market value.

So you showed value ahead of time. It helped them answer a question, gave them value upfront.

And then after that, like, I hated spending most of my time trying to market myself because what I really want to be doing is hard coding and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm.

At one point I realized my competition with data analysts is not going to really change. There are always going to be like far more people that are still looking for jobs or getting better jobs in this field. I realized I needed a better medium to connect to people. Around that time, one of the people who does like courses in data engineering on LinkedIn was offering a free one through YouTube. And I figured maybe if I do this thing, because he was talking about how few people actually make it to the end of his course. I'm like, that sounds great because I will definitely make it to the end. So if I can learn about this, and this was what I even told my wife, is this is my plan. If I can learn about this, then one of these data engineers who's trying to get a better position in data engineering will recognize what I am capable of doing and they can hire me as their analyst. That was my goal. I'm not trying to become a data engineer. I'm trying to learn about what they're doing so someone could hire me.

So that you could support them with the value that you're offering.

That is exactly what happened. A little bit better. I was not hired as an analyst because I was able to demonstrate that I am capable of doing data engineering. One of the people who was also in this was much better at what he was doing, gave my name to someone that he knew was hiring, and now we work together, analytics engineer, doing Literally stuff that I learned in those bootcamps on it, and it's been a lot of fun.

I love hearing about all the problems that you solved along the way, because this is how I'm breaking down the process that I help people with. You break down one problem, you see, okay, this is what I'm dealing with. This is my hypothesis as to how I'm gonna solve it. You take action on that. It's really like you're laying it out really clearly here as to how you get to the point where you've gotten to.

In terms of this bootcamp, the free one. 30,000 people registered, fewer than 200 completed it, which was less than 1%.

Wow. That really has to show what you believe about yourself. You obviously have core beliefs about your capability that are really showing up. You're like, oh, you tell me lots of people don't finish. I feel like that across the board had to have taken a front seat in your mindset to have to go get through all the obstacles that it takes to actually get to where you are. And that's something that a lot of people can't withstand. They would've given up, they would've changed course, they would've changed their mind about what career they were gonna go after. What would you say is like your core belief about yourself if you were to put it into words?

I know generally what I am capable of. I do underestimate what I'm capable of doing, but On the whole, I've got a pretty good sense of what I know, what I don't know, and how to get from point A to point B.

Do you wanna provide any more detail on the conversations that you had or how you approached the conversations or your mindset around when you were going to the events or talking to people?

Yeah, there's further development with the story during the interview process. This happens all the time. I was told I was gonna hear back at one point. And then that point passed and then I was very stressed out. I live in Chicago. I go to this Chicago data meetup group all the time. I was complaining to people about, I had 2 interviews that week. One of them went horribly. It felt like it went horribly because I really overcomplicated the technical part of the interview. Mm-hmm. I was invited to an HR interview and the CTO, the Director of data, the hiring manager, and the HR person who just said hi-bye. And then they made me do a verbal technical interview halfway through it, which my mind wasn't even on that wavelength. I felt like I was making it extremely overcomplicated. And so while I was talking to some other people that I know at this Chicago meetup, I'm complaining about How I felt like this went and like how it was overcomplicated. Then they're like, a couple of them were like, oh wait, so what you just explained is how I would do it. Because while it's complicated for that role, it's actually a better way of doing it. And then all of a sudden I've got people telling me, I know of someone who's hiring for this other role and someone who like we are hiring for this role. It's like all of a sudden, just by talking about a problem instead of saying, hi, this is what I do, this is like what I'm trying to communicate, I'm actually showing value in a different way by having a conversation of what would typically be day-to-day work. That was something that I didn't really understand until that happened.

Because at that moment you were like coworkers. You were asking them to give input there and then they feel engaged in the conversation and invested in what you're doing or what you're explaining.

Yeah. And that's the biggest things that I wish I had known before is when you are networking, you're not creating value with your elevator pitch. If it comes up to me, a networking thing, and they tell me stuff that they've worked on, stuff that they've done. That's nice.

Yeah. You're like,

interesting. But if they ask me for a job referral, don't actually know what you're capable of doing. It's not until you're having a conversation and you're trying to troubleshoot a problem or help somebody else troubleshoot through their problem, you actually have to find a way to get past just the introductions and the niceties. I had some really interesting projects early on. One of them was our group capstone project when I was like going into the data analyst stuff. We decided to do something on injuries from the NFL because as the one person pointed out, there are only 2 types of Americans. There are those who love talking about the NFL and football and those who pretend to like talking about football because they don't want to look Like they don't like football.

The second one.

Anyone that we are applying to will probably think this is interesting or pretend like they find it interesting. The whole thing and made a really detailed analysis, used a lot of data science. And at one point while I was presenting it, somebody asked, this is great, but if I'm an investor, how am I gonna make money off of this information?

What's their return gonna be? I mean, yeah, that question was a breakthrough for you, which is Like how you came to that other thing. You're like, yeah, I wanna do something meaningful, but it has to make money, right? When you came to me and you started my program, you used the VCVC method. If you wanna elaborate on how you used that or how you implemented that, and was there anything else from the program that you took and implemented that you would say was useful to you?

The congruence and the VCVC were the biggest. Congruence was Thinking about what I want to do, ignoring how long it has been since you started applying.

Yeah, I remember that's something that we had conversations about, the data in the job hunt that you need to ignore.

That was another thing that I personally decided, and it's funny because I'm in the field of data, I was not going to keep track of any of that ever. Because I don't find it inspiring.

Yeah. And it's not useful. Like data isn't useful if it doesn't give you like information that you can use.

Right. We're not talking about a logical system. We're talking about job application process. It has too many variables that you can't account for. The biggest variable is your competition, and that's data that you cannot get. You have no idea who else applied for that job and who else is interviewing while you are interviewing.

So what would, what data would you recommend someone track?

Their mood?

Yeah. It's like their emotional, like day-to-day, how are they feeling throughout the day? A lot right now, people are saying, are having that feeling of like, jobs are really hard to get. It's very competitive. The market is really hard. How did you as a top performer get past that thinking? What did you think about instead? And what would you offer to people who are thinking that right now?

If it's something you really want, you have to keep going for it.

Regardless of conditions and circumstances.

Regardless of conditions and circumstances, if you really want it, you will continue.

It's still gonna happen if you want it and you've decided, and that's the path you're going to take. Yeah. Amazing. The other thing I wanted to ask you was about salary negotiation for people right now, 'cause that's another thing people will say is like, oh, you can't negotiate in this market. You can't like ask for more. Like you just gotta be happy with what you get. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that 'cause I know that you did negotiate successfully and that many people Are having some bad thinking that doesn't support them right now. Yeah. You wouldn't have taken the steps you did to get to the results you did.

I talked to numerous people and the majority of the consensus was do not negotiate, just take what they offer. But around that same time, I actually did get a different offer. Like I got another job offer.

Oh, so you had 2 roles and 2 offers at the same time?

I was able to negotiate based on that. One was a contract role, the other one was full-time role. And so the pay was very different because you don't get insurance, you don't get benefits when it's a contract role. And so I was very clear about that, but that's what I was able to use to leverage because I just couldn't justify it. It was within my It was not within market value for the role. It would've been difficult, but I know there are companies that will offer something that is below market value. If it's below market value, you can negotiate back. But even, even knowing, like I had the other offer, my brother was like, don't.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember cuz we had the coaching on that and he, he had told you that people had rescinded offers because they negotiated.

Yeah. I just decided I'm gonna do it. I felt like. My understanding of the people that I had talked to were not the kind of vindictive people who are gonna say no, and now we're gonna rescind the offer.

Yeah, exactly. 'Cause that's what I was saying. It's like if you're negotiating collaboratively and you're going in there honestly trying to make it work for both of you so that you can do your best work and be happy, obviously they want, they want you to be happy too, 'cause that means you're gonna do a better job for them. So yeah. Yeah. And would you do anything differently if you were to go back?

For that part of it? No.

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So negotiating in this market, what would you say to tell someone who's afraid to?

Get a sense of who you were talking to.

Yeah. Good answer.

Like if you had rapport, then yes. If you're going to be talking to someone who it's like the person behind the curtain, like, and you have no idea, Mm-hmm. then maybe, or talk to the HR person. Usually HR people are, will be honest with whether yay or nay. I've been in a different like role where like they're Earlier on where the HR person was like really gung-ho about hiring the right people. And it seemed like he was willing to like advocate for the applicant where I've definitely dealt with other companies and places where you're not dealing with someone who's advocating for you. You are— just another cog in their machine and they want to get through the process as seamlessly as possible. So.

Yeah, I think that speaks a lot to the culture too. It's like how they trained their HR. They trained them to say no, tell them no, or have trained them to say, well, we wanna make it work so that there's a win-win. I think it speaks a lot to the culture.

Yeah, it might not even be HR. It might be like the hiring manager. So it's like if you have rapport with the person you're asking, Mm-hmm. They will probably know whether or not it's a good idea, advise against it or not, but it's a tough call. I think for most people, through what I have read from other people on LinkedIn, especially within or without, or with outside of HR stuff, is the majority of people will negotiate for their salary.

Yeah.

The, it doesn't have to be the actual salary. It could be bonuses. It could be—

Yeah, exactly.

It could be other stuff, but—

Yeah.

I think it is a minority of companies now that still have people that I wanna say, like, with the archaic thinking that if you are negotiating your salary, that you are just greedy.

Yeah, no, I haven't come across any like that. And it's like, even I had a client who was like, oh yeah, they said that they don't negotiate, but I like just ignored that and started asking some questions about flexibility anyway. And they entertained the conversation. Oh yeah. So it, I definitely think people expect you to negotiate. They definitely expect that if they find someone they want and now they really want this person, they've invested time, energy. They're gonna do what they can to make it work. And—

I mean, like, I know, um, someone who like basically just negotiated more days off, days to work from home.

Yeah. And that's huge cuz that's saving commute time, saving—

If we're allowing you one day to work from home, why can't it be 2 days to work from home if that's gonna break this offer?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You can't raise the benefits, you can't raise days off, but

Yeah. There's always more flexibility than you think. Amazing. All right. Was there anything else you wanted to add?

I don't think so.

All right. Thank you so much for spending the time and sharing all your wisdom, and I can't wait for people to hear it.

Yeah. Thank you.