Lying On Your Resume, ChatGPT vs College & How Many Applications To Land a Job (DF#93)

Ryan [00:00:00]:

Aloha, folks, and welcome back to Degree Free, where we teach you how to get the work you want without a college degree. We are your hosts, Ryan and Hannah Maruyama. It's great to have you back.

Hannah [00:00:56]:

Welcome back. Welcome back. As always, Ryan and I are stoked to have you folks here with us on the podcast.

Ryan [00:01:01]:

And let's just jump into it. The first thing that I want to talk about today is something that we do not condone doing. We don't condone at all, and we tell people to never do, but it does happen, and so I want to talk about it. Can you guess what that is?

Hannah [00:01:19]:

Yes, I can guess what that is. I'm also going to guess that this is something we get accused of telling people to do, but we do not tell people to do. Is that lying on your resume?

Ryan [00:01:28]:

It is.

Hannah [00:01:29]:

Alex, I'll take a lying on your resume for 700.

Ryan [00:01:32]:

What is lying on your resume? Is the correct answer. So, yes, lying on resumes, it is something that people do and we definitely do not tell anybody to do it. We say that it's not illegal to apply to jobs even if you do not fit the qualifications or the job description 100%. You can go ahead and apply with what you have, but definitely don't lie. That being said, I found this and granted, we have to check our sources. This is by standoutcv.com, so I'm not sure how accurate this is at all, but it was very interesting to see the survey that they've done. And according to Google, google searches for advice relating to faking resumes and job references are up an average of 48% and 52%, respectively in the last twelve months.

Hannah [00:02:37]:

What? Okay, so a couple of things. So this is a survey of lying on your resume. I wonder how many people admit that they lie on their resume, too.

Ryan [00:02:48]:

Well, this isn't a survey. I'm about to get to the survey results. This is just Google searches for those things.

Hannah [00:02:54]:

Oh, whoa, okay. All right, I'm listening, I'm listening.

Ryan [00:02:58]:

So the survey, they surveyed 1700 Americans and asked about whether or not they lied on the resume. You want to have a guess of how many people lied on their resume? What percentage?

Hannah [00:03:11]:

Percentage of people that lied on their resume. Out of 1700 people, I'm going to go with 20% close.

Ryan [00:03:19]:

It was over half at 55% of people lied on their resume in 2022.

Hannah [00:03:27]:

That is crazy.

Ryan [00:03:29]:

That's crazy. Okay, so the breakdown goes. Men are more likely to lie on a resume with 59.9% of men admitting to lying compared to 50.6% of women. Younger people are more likely to lie on a resume than older people.

Hannah [00:03:43]:

I also see men lying on their resumes more than women, too. I totally see that.

Ryan [00:03:46]:

So it's 66.6% of 18 to 25 year olds said they had lied compared to 26.2% of those aged 65, which that makes sense, I think. When you're younger, you have more at risk or more at stake. The upside is much higher for lying. And then also, you don't have that body of work behind you, so you literally fake it till you make it. And in this case, you're literally faking it and you're lying on your resume to do so.

Hannah [00:04:15]:

Well, you know what's funny? So I'm wondering about the criteria of a lie, right? This is not me condoning. I'm just curious. I'm curious what they qualified as. A lie is like making your job title match your responsibilities. Is that a lie or is it fabricating a job that you didn't hold? Or is it leaving off a job? Is that lying? And then also another thing that I'm wondering about, that what that says to me, especially because it's the younger people lying. What that tells me is that your hiring system is so broken that people have to lie to get work. That's what that tells me. I'm not saying people should lie on their resumes, but for young people who are lying, if I had to guess about what they were lying about, I would guess that they're lying about experience requirements. That's what I would guess. Because entry level job postings have three year experience requirements, which is stupid, and you and I both know that. And it's the most ridiculous thing. So of course people are going to lie because nobody who's applying for an entry level job has three years of entry level experience before they're applying to an entry level job.

Ryan [00:05:11]:

So I'll break down some of the things that they were lying about. And once again, this is not our research or survey. This is standouttv.com. And I'll put links to everything that we talk about at degreefree Codcast, so you can check out this article for yourself. Once again, I have no idea the validity of this. I have no idea. But it's interesting. So one in six have used fake job reference services, which I didn't even know was a thing. I didn't even know that you could pay. Makes sense. But an average fake reference costs $145. And this could include fake employers and paid actors.

Hannah [00:05:52]:

So one, I didn't realize people are still putting references on their jobs. But two, they're paying for a service where when somebody calls the company, this fake company, someone fake answers and gives them a story about their background of performance.

Ryan [00:06:08]:

Well, it makes sense if you think about it, because a lot of people already do that for fake non paid references.

Hannah [00:06:16]:

That's true.

Ryan [00:06:17]:

You call your friend and you say, hey, buddy, I'm applying for this job. When this person calls, you talk me up.

Hannah [00:06:23]:

That's true. I know a reference is such a ridiculous I mean, in this day and age, because you can just use a coworker instead of your boss and say it's your boss and there's really no way to verify those people. That's a difficult thing to use at all, I feel like.

Ryan [00:06:38]:

Yeah. Well, references that you give your employer or that you are checking when somebody gives you, those are obviously going to be some of the best things that they could talk about. Right. Those are the people that are going to talk you up the most because they're literally putting it on their reference sheet, on their resume. They're giving it to you and saying, these are the people to call, please. And so I think that reference checks are very useful if you're an employer, but I think they have to be done in a different way, where you're calling people that are not on that reference list, where you're just going to that job and then you're finding somebody that worked with them. But the problem with that is that it takes time and effort. That's like investigative journalism, almost.

Hannah [00:07:17]:

Right. And then what if you happen to pick somebody who was the next cubicle over and they didn't like that? They brought tuna every day for lunch and they just didn't like them. It's just luck of the draw.

Ryan [00:07:26]:

Well, you run into that either way.

Hannah [00:07:28]:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I don't know how you would resolve that, really.

Ryan [00:07:32]:

This is interesting. Two in five have lied about their college degree on their resume with almost a quarter telling employers they had a degree when they didn't, which is exactly what we tell people not to do.

Hannah [00:07:44]:

Do not lie about having a college degree on your resume. Just leave it off. Oh, my gosh, this is crazy, too.

Ryan [00:07:52]:

There's fake college degree certificates and transcripts that cost an average of $270 a pop, which, once again, I had no idea that it was an industry. Makes sense that it is an industry, but I just had no idea.

Hannah [00:08:07]:

I didn't either. This is news to me.

Ryan [00:08:08]:

Right.

Hannah [00:08:09]:

The transcript thing is really a trip. I can see having a fake diploma. I could see buying it. That makes sense. Sure. That's a thing, right? You bought your degree online, blah, blah, blah. But having an actual transcript is nuts. That's crazy.

Ryan [00:08:23]:

Well, most places that verify, that actually verify and they actually care whether or not you got your college degree conferred to you. They're not going to ask for your diploma or for your degree. They're not going to ask for the thing that you have framed in your office because that can be faked. They are going to ask the registrar's office to give you a thing of their transcript, a copy of their transcript, because supposedly that can't be faked. Although for $207, apparently imagine your entire.

Hannah [00:08:52]:

Business is selling fake college transcripts, right?

Ryan [00:08:54]:

And then three in ten say they haven't been caught regarding their job application lies.

Hannah [00:09:00]:

You know what's crazy? I'm going to tell a story that someone recently told me, which is that someone told me that they had a friend who entirely fabricated and this is the first time I'd ever heard anything I was like, this story shocked me to my core. I was like, Wait, what? And I was told I'm obscuring the details to protect the guilty. So, basically, this person told me that they had a friend who entirely fabricated a tech job, a remote tech job that they had and successfully made this job up and then successfully got a higher paying, better job and has held that job for years, which is insane. And then got paid by the company to upskill and then makes even more money now. So I thought that was kind of ridiculous. And I don't condone lying, but I also respect the grift at the same time. Props to pull that off. That's like some catch me if you can Leonardo DiCaprio kind of stuff.

Ryan [00:10:04]:

Yeah, I don't condone it and I don't think that people should. And so it begs a question kind of what you were getting after, which is like, is it wrong?

Hannah [00:10:12]:

It is wrong. But if you do it, is there upside? I think more is the question, right? Like, yes, potentially, is it the wrong thing to do? And this is where I think that more often than not, I think that lying on your resume is going to come around and bite you in the butt. I think it is better to go in and say, I am new, I am learning this thing, or I really am very enthusiastic. This is how I've done it. I'm very enthusiastic. I think I can do this. I know I can do this. I'm willing to learn whatever. And then applying with that eagerness and that enthusiasm and then being open too, because your coworkers around you and senior people are more willing to teach you things that you need to know. I think that if you're looking to have a career and grow, that is a much better tack and you're never going to be sweating because you think somebody's going to find out that you're a fake, right? Because you're going to have imposter syndrome enough and what you really don't want to do is actually be an imposter.

Ryan [00:11:05]:

What surprised me about the findings here was I wouldn't have thought to lie in those ways. I wouldn't have thought to put a college degree on there if I hadn't gotten one where I probably would have lied more was just kind of embellishing on the truth. So I would take my current job and I would just say that I had more responsibilities and duties than I actually had. So maybe I managed a team of five people, but I actually didn't. I would expand and lie that way. Or if I only worked there for six months, I would say that I worked there for 18 months or something like that. That's what I probably would have done if I was lying on a resume. And I found it interesting that a lot of this was just fabrication.

Hannah [00:11:58]:

Yeah, it's pretty bold to just make up jobs, make up references, and make up college degrees and transcripts. I would never be able to do that and hold it together.

Ryan [00:12:09]:

That brings me to if you have gotten a job by lying on your resume or at some point in the interview, I definitely want to hear from you. If you're watching this, go to YouTube and comment on this video and let me know what you did or what did you say to get your current job. I kind of just want to know what other people are lying about their resumes.

Hannah [00:12:30]:

I have a follow up to that. If you got caught after lying about one of these things, I want to hear that story. And also, how did you pull off the lie? That's the real thing. I want to know because man, I would not be able to do that. I get a rash when I lie and they would know. They would know I'd be sweating bullets like sitting in that interview. So I'd like to know how you did that because props, if you want more degree Free, you are going to want to go over to Degreefree Co newsletter and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. We write that every week it goes out. It has cool stories, cool stuff that you are going to want to know about, news, job openings, skills that you're going to want to learn, all good stuff. So make sure you go over and sign up for that. Okay, now I want to talk about something you and I harp on kind of a lot, and that is how often you have to apply on average in order to get a job. So before the average was 21 to 80 applications to get one job. And you and I would kind of round up and say, it seems like it's more like 100 applications to get one interview because you don't know if an interview is actually going to lead to a job. And so recently I found an article on hirely High, and this article says that actually the average is now 100 to 200 job applications to get one offer. So that's even worse. And apparently you and I were right because definitely the number has gone up. I think, too, something that's skewing this is the amount of remote jobs available and the amount of people applying for those jobs. I think because they're so high competition and because so many people are applying for them, I think that that is skewing this number.

Ryan [00:14:03]:

Yeah, well, I have to say the 21 to 80 applications to land one job offer, I quote it all the time because it's the best research that I found, and that's from Zipia. And we'll put some links to everything in the show notes, degreefree codcast. But I didn't want to believe it because I personally, when I'm applying to jobs, I apply to hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. And okay, maybe that means I'm not that effective, or maybe that means that I'm not very marketable and I don't have skills, which is just not true. And I know a lot of other people that are doing the exact same thing that are applying to hundreds and hundreds of jobs and they haven't landed one yet. So I like this better because it gels with what I think and therefore I'm going to agree with it.

Hannah [00:14:53]:

Confirmation Bias?

Ryan [00:14:54]:

Yeah, exactly. Because it fits in my worldview. I believe that this is true.

Hannah [00:15:01]:

Confirmation Bias is a world's worst superhero name. I think that sorry, I'm just picturing his cape. Okay, so I have three reasons why I think this is occurring, and one of them, number one at the top of the list is ATS. It's horrible and it screens too many people out. Right. So basically your application just dissolves because nobody ever sees it. The second one kind of tied into this is disjointed job applications and unrealistic hiring policies that you and I talk about all the time that leads to mismatch applicants to jobs. And that I just read somewhere, I think I was reading on LinkedIn News that companies are jumping at the chance to use chat TVT to write their job listings. And part of me is like, oh, that's good. And the other part of me goes, oh, that's horrible, because they're going to feed it terrible information, and they're going to feed it horrible prompts, and the people feeding it prompts are not going to feed it good prompts, and it's going to result in basically the same problem. So I'm really interested to see what the job listings start looking like because I'm hoping they can't be worse than they are now. But that's a huge problem. I think that what companies really need to do. If you work for a company and you're worried about this, feel free to send us an email. But man, it needs to be four bullet points, and they need to be very simple, and that needs to be what starts to happen. The job descriptions are too complicated, and the hiring policies that enforce them are just ridiculous. And there's just such a disconnect between what people actually do, how people are reading the job descriptions, and then what companies are actually posting anyway. That's my personal rant. And number three, the other thing that I think is causing people to have to apply so many times to get an offer is that online jobs are being posted too big online job boards with so many applicants, and that the barrier to entry to application is really low. And they don't actually go off and apply on companies websites. They're just easy apply, easy apply, bulk applying. And because of that, they're just getting screened out by the ATS.

Ryan [00:16:59]:

There was something that I saw about LinkedIn. When you go and see and it says the number of applicants on LinkedIn, a lot of people get discouraged because they see like 1000 applicants, apparently. And I haven't dug deeper into this. I was going to dig deeper into it because you kind of touched on it here. So I'll just give my misinformation here and hopefully somebody corrects me. But when you click on Apply now in LinkedIn, even though you do not go through and actually apply, that gets ticked as an application. So it's not necessarily how many applications are on the back end that that recruiter or that hiring manager is seeing, it's how many times that button has been clicked. That's what you're seeing. And so I definitely want to make it a point here that if you see those huge numbers on there, obviously that means that there's a lot of interest in those jobs. And a good portion of those people did convert and they did apply to those jobs. But do not let that stop you, because you're going to see 1000 applicants, 1000 applications. How could I possibly be the one that gets it? But that was just the amount of people that clicked that button, and they didn't necessarily go through all the way and convert into an actual job application.

Hannah [00:18:24]:

That is crazy town. And I did that twice today when I was looking at jobs for one of the people in our career change crash course. So I applied and added to that number. That's nuts. That's a huge problem. They need to fix that.

Ryan [00:18:38]:

Yeah, definitely. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, I saw that AI job listings thing that you saw as well, and I was actually going to hold it in my back pocket and come back when I was more prepared. But I was just my thoughts on it now, what's so interesting about it is the way that HR approaches the building of job descriptions. If you read that article and hopefully we can find it for you and put it in the show notes for you. But if you read that article, one of the things that they talk about is that writing job descriptions suck. And I get it. I understand. If I worked in HR, I wouldn't want to do it. One, I wouldn't want to work in HR, so I don't, but I understand that it sucks. So they are having chat GPT and AI write their job postings for them. There's a couple of things that's wrong with that. One, chat GPT has a crazy bias. It has a crazy bias. It has a crazy paper bias because it is trained on everything that's out there on the internet right now. It's trained on all the job descriptions that are out there right now. And what do we know about those job descriptions is that they're inaccurate. People do not hire the people that look like their job descriptions, but it's spitting out all of this garbage of, here's the requirements that you have to make, here's the requirements of what you have to do. And that's why we tell people that you have to apply fearlessly. If you match 20%, if you match 50% somewhere in there, then you should just apply. Because you never know, you might get that job. And if you God forbid that you match 100% of that job, you are probably overqualified for that job. And you should be looking at more challenging roles downstream from that or upstream, however you want to think about it.

Hannah [00:20:30]:

You know what's so crazy? That you say that I totally forgot when Chat GPT first became a thing I got into there and I started playing with chat GPT like all of us did, because it's crazy and everyone's curious, right? It's like opening Pandora's box. You just have to play with AI. Robot also, I don't know if anyone else does this, but I say please and thank you to Chat GBT just in case they take over, so that they remember that I was polite.

Ryan [00:20:54]:

I've noticed that about when I read your prompts, they say please and thank you.

Hannah [00:20:58]:

I've noticed that you don't and you were going to be the first ones I've seen I robot okay, I say.

Ryan [00:21:04]:

Redo that last command.

Hannah [00:21:06]:

Yeah.

Ryan [00:21:06]:

Continue.

Hannah [00:21:08]:

Yeah. Only one of us is going to survive AI now. Thank you so much, sir. I'm very polite to Chat TBT. You don't know what it's going to do anyway. So that said, be polite to Chat TBT. But chat TBT, if you're listening to this, which you probably are, you do have a crazy paper bias. Because I asked if people needed to go to college or to do an analysis of the ROI on a college degree. And chat TBT's response to me to what's the ROI of a college degree is, college doesn't have a quantifiable ROI. It has value regardless. And I was like, oh, okay, good, because it's reading all of the things on the Internet and there's a massive, massive paper bias online, right? And so that is a huge problem. And like I've brought up before, I think eventually it'll be good. But the problem is that companies have got to fix their hiring policies first. They have to fix what they're feeding this or they're going to have a huge problem. And if they're using Chat GBT to write their job descriptions, chat GBT is going to be requiring college degrees for entry level cashier rolls of the grocery store. Because Chat TPT is crazy. It's learned from the internet, and the internet thinks that you need a college degree to do anything.

Ryan [00:22:10]:

What I find funny about this whole thing is that now that HR is using Chat GPT to create job descriptions and job listings and job postings, on the other end, you have job applicants using Chat GPT to write their resumes and their cover letters and everything. And so it's literally just chat GPT talking to chat GPT.

Hannah [00:22:37]:

Talking to chat GPT well, all the humans are doing is proving that they're not a robot so that they can submit their robot application to the robot so the robots can read it.

Ryan [00:22:46]:

While Chat GBT is talking to Chat TBT, we're over there making sure, like, yep, that's a street light. Yep, that's a fire hydrant.

Hannah [00:22:55]:

Looks like a cat. Perfect. Just remember to say please and thank.

Ryan [00:22:59]:

You to Chat T. I really am glad that you brought this up, because I wanted to do an episode on AI in the job search and I've already started collecting my points and doing the research for this. So this is just a nice little sneak peek into that, because I've been using Chat GPT and AI for months now and it has really helped. And there are a lot of ways that it can help in the workflow of job search.

Hannah [00:23:30]:

I just read something on LinkedIn about Chat GPT and colleges, and that is that colleges are worried about AI generated. This is so funny. Colleges are worried about AI generated work at college. So what they have done to combat this is they rolled out an AI AI detector, which is very meta. So the problem with this is that it's not accurate. So it's going to accuse people of cheating that aren't cheating, because even it actually recorded somebody had submitted a completely original essay and it recorded 8% of it as being AI generated, when in fact, none of it was. And the issue with that, too, is all you have to do is say, no, it's original. And then because it's not 100%, because it's not foolproof, you're going to have to accept the fact that the student challenged it and you're going to have to be like, all right, well, that's fine, I guess, carry on. So there's kind of no point. But larger than that, the colleges are worried about students using AI or learning how to use AI to complete tasks. What's the problem with that?

Ryan [00:24:30]:

I have no idea. Tell me.

Hannah [00:24:31]:

They're going to have to do it for work. It's going to be in everything. We're all using it. And so this really just goes to show how backwards colleges are, because what they're doing is they're pretending as if students are not going to be interacting with or even completely using AI and utilizing it in order to do their daily work. And so what they're stopping them from doing is learning how to use a tool that they are going to touch probably every single day of their lives for the rest of their lives.

Ryan [00:24:59]:

Yeah, definitely. AI is going to completely change the way that work is done in every field. And we kind of already did an episode about the different jobs that are going to be eliminated and some of the jobs that are going to be still here and still around. But the conclusion was that every industry and almost every job is going to change by AI. And by the way that you interface with AI and the actionable data and analysis that it does for you.

Hannah [00:25:33]:

And I can already hear this on the TikTok clip, but I just want to drive this point home. It is so counterproductive to pay a college to tell you not to learn how to use a tool that is probably going to be the majority of your job. And I can already hear people going, but what about the doctors? But yes, this is going to be everyone from science to social work. Yes, yes, the doctors. Chat GPT can tell you new drugs. Chat GPT can tell you what drug interactions are common. Chat GPT can help you with common diagnostic occurrences. And medicine and healthcare is going to be one of the first that is going to be utilizing this because it's such a need. Humans need health care. And guess what? There's not enough people. And so what are they going to do? They are going to look to AI to fill that labor gap. That's what's going to happen.

Ryan [00:26:23]:

Once again, you're kind of spoiling my research for later, but I'll give a little bit of what I've been working on. And one of the things you see is that the investment in the AI field is very heavy in the medical sector. It is very, very heavy. When you're talking about diagnoses and stuff like that of patient care, a lot of what a doctor does, a GP, at least there's symptoms. And then you think about what the symptoms are and then you say, okay, well, most likely with these symptoms, it is this. It's just a matching game. It's a very complicated matching game. Sure. And highly trained, highly skilled, sure. But AI can assist in those things. And then also there's a bunch of the data on the back end that AI can draw inferences from that's going to help us give better health outcomes, more positive health outcomes.

Hannah [00:27:13]:

And it's just going to make health care cheaper, more accessible to more people. Which is the goal, right? That's the ultimate goal of health care is that people have access to it and it's inexpensive and you can get what you need when you need it. The last two things before. I jump off this college topic, but colleges are trying to keep people from using AI or using AI to complete their work in school. And I think this brings up two important points. One, is AI content generated by your prompts? Yours?

Ryan [00:27:39]:

Yeah. I think that's a huge question that they're going to have to answer in the coming years. Where this is really prevalent is actually in the image and video domain. So it is prevalent in the written domain because you can say, write me a poem in the style of Stephen King, somebody that's still alive, like a contemporary person that's still alive today. Is that Stephen King's work or is that your work? Is that OpenAI's work? And then it's more prevalent if you start to go into the AI image generation and you go and prompt an image generator, say, make me a custom Pokemon that's a blend between Pikachu and Charizard, and it blends together these two different things. Or there's a scene that has the likeness of Pikachu and Charizard and you're selling it commercially, but it's not really them because it's not made by the company.

Hannah [00:28:40]:

Yeah, but whose IP is it? And that's the question, right? That's what they're generation of law.

Ryan [00:28:44]:

All that is to say is I'm not smart enough to know whether or not that's mine or not. I don't know.

Hannah [00:28:52]:

Interesting. That's very interesting. I'm sure we're going to see stuff crop up. And then my second point was that colleges are worried about students using AI to complete their work. I want to know how many professors are using AI to generate their lectures. That's all I want to know. If students are not allowed to use AI to do their works, then no professors, no teachers should be allowed to use AI to complete their work.

Ryan [00:29:18]:

Why not?

Hannah [00:29:18]:

Seem fair to me? Because why are students banned from using a tool that teachers are using if the ethics of it is because you have an intellectual duty or an ethical duty to complete your work academically and originally, then more so the professors and the teachers should have to do their own work if you're going to make the students do it. I just think that's the most ridiculous thing. It's so hypocritical and it's so ridiculous. But that's going to be the reason, right? Because people are going to say, well, it's the academics of it. It's the ethics of the academics. You have to complete this work because this is how you learn and because that's the value of being a scholar. But if the teachers and professors are not doing the exact same thing, why should students have to do it? And honestly, once they can't answer this question, because if they do, you're going to find that most of them are using it. And now what's the point of college? Because you can just go to Chat GPT instead. Anyway, I think it brings up a couple of different interesting ethical points.

Ryan [00:30:12]:

And if you like this segment on AI and you want us to do more on AI and how you can use it in your job search, just go over to YouTube and leave us a comment and let us know what you want to know. And while you're there, go ahead and subscribe. Like and subscribe now, what I wanted to talk about is something that people ask us all the time about, which is is it too late to make a career change? Is it too late to make a career transition or when is it too late to make a career transition? When people are asking these questions, which is one of the most frequently asked questions that we get, there are really three big worries, and the first one is going to be they're worried that they won't get the job or won't be able to learn the skills necessary to get that job. So you're in a current job and you are thinking that there's just no possible way that you can see yourself getting that other job, whatever that other job. Let's say that you're a server and you want to go be in tech somehow. The second worry is going to be there won't be enough room for advancement on the other end because they'll be starting over. So you might have a career that you've been working 20 years on and in and then you're worried, oh, I only have another 20 years of work left. I don't want to start all the way over and I don't want to end up exactly where I am now. What if I just stayed in this industry and spent another 20 years in it? I'd be so much further than if I went to the ground floor and started all the way over in another industry.

Hannah [00:31:56]:

I could see that that'd be tough.

Ryan [00:31:57]:

The third big worry is they're concerned that their entire career to this point has been a waste because they won't use those things. It's a sunk cost fallacy, right? Like I've spent so much time doing all of this, learning all of these skills, and now that I want to go and do something completely different, that I'm just going to forget all of this. I'm just going to leave all of this behind.

Hannah [00:32:25]:

Yeah, that would be tough too, because I think a lot of people also have we know that people struggle with feeling like their skills don't transfer and they have to start from scratch.

Ryan [00:32:34]:

And I wanted to say that all of those things that I said, they are false. You can absolutely make a career transition in any one of those situations, in any one of those scenarios. And if you needed help in your career change, you can go to degreefree co careerchange and learn about our career change. Crash course. I wanted to talk about some very notable people that made career changes late in life and the first person that I wanted to talk about was Ray Crock. Ray Crock is The Founder, quote, unquote, if everybody's seen that movie, it's about McDonald's, and he bought McDonald's when he was 52 in 1954. But prior to that, he was a milkshake device salesman.

Hannah [00:33:20]:

52. Wow.

Ryan [00:33:21]:

Yeah. And if you haven't seen that movie The Founder, it's very good.

Hannah [00:33:25]:

Yeah, we like that one a lot.

Ryan [00:33:26]:

The next person that I want to talk about was Vera Wang. She broke into fashion at age 40. Before that, she was a figure skater and journalist.

Hannah [00:33:34]:

Wait, what?

Ryan [00:33:35]:

Yeah.

Hannah [00:33:35]:

Whoa. It's an interesting background.

Ryan [00:33:37]:

And the last one that I want to talk about is Julia Child. She published her first cookbook at age 50. Prior to that, she worked in advertising.

Hannah [00:33:44]:

No wonder her cookbook says so well.

Ryan [00:33:46]:

Yeah, well, advertising, media, and secret intelligence, I think. So now that you know that it is possible, there are three things that I wanted to point out when you're making your career change. And the first one is that you have to know that you can do it. Whatever it is, you have to know that you can accomplish that goal.

Hannah [00:34:01]:

Something people need to remember here, too. I'm a big fan of the not getting stuck with where you've been because you can waste a lot of time doing that. If you think that you do not have enough time left, you do because you can't afford to stay where you are. If you don't like where you are, you need to make a change. If you do not like where you are at, if you change nothing, you are going to go nowhere different than where you are now. And so if you want to make a career change and you are unhappy where you are, you have to make it because otherwise you're going to stay where you are.

Ryan [00:34:34]:

I wanted to talk about that sunk cost fallacy and thinking about how you might have wasted your years or wasted your time learning all of these skills in this industry that you're currently in, and it not being applicable to the future industry or your future job. And that's just not true. There are definitely transferable skills in any job that you're doing right now that somebody else would pay for in the future.

Hannah [00:35:01]:

Yeah. Even if you're a bagging groceries, you learned something.

Ryan [00:35:03]:

Yeah. So actually my example was my first job was washing dishes, and it's not very useful at all for what I do now. But I did learn a lot of transferable skills. I learned how to work quickly. I learned how to think differently, like literally washing the dishes differently than how I was taught to wash the dishes because I was trying to find the most optimal way to do it and then prioritizing tasks so that the restaurant didn't run out of plates or cups or whatever was running low.

Hannah [00:35:39]:

Sure, you got to run the cups through, and then you got to pace the plates and you got to make sure they're not going to be wet when the servers come again.

Ryan [00:35:45]:

Yeah, sure, exactly. And so those are all transferable skills that I can use anywhere. You might not think about it in that sense, but you have to not look at washing dishes, you have to look at the skills that you use to wash those dishes.

Hannah [00:36:00]:

From our time in the industry, you and I both know that a bad dishwasher can ruin an entire night. If you have a good dishwasher, it makes a huge difference.

Ryan [00:36:10]:

Yeah, and it's not so much about the dishwashing, it's about the skills that I learned in that job. Because let's say in a completely different field, I use that same prioritization that I learned at 16 years old of like, hey, cups run out quicker than plates because everybody gets cups and not everybody gets plates. Something like that, because some people get bowls instead of plates, right? Because depending on what they order, if they order soup or something, I took that same prioritization, I added to it over the years and then I became a fireman. As a fireman, prioritization is key. You have to prioritize tasks. You can't do anything, especially if you're first on scene. There's chaos. It's everything that's crazy. It's literally chaos everywhere and you can't do it all. So you have to prioritize the most important tasks. And having that experience helped me with that. Running a business, doing a job, if you work in any job, prioritization is huge. So that's just a good example of how you can take seemingly unrelated skills that you learned in seemingly unrelated industries or in menial jobs, quote unquote, and you can sell that to future companies.

Hannah [00:37:21]:

I was going to say, I can think of a few times this week where I've seen you prioritize effectively in our own production. And so that's a huge thing to take away, is that you do have skills and you did learn them in your work and they will transfer. Not all of them and not exactly, but when you are working, you are learning.

Ryan [00:37:41]:

And one of the things that I wanted to talk about when making that career change is a lot of people get stuck, especially if you have, like, ten years in your current job, ten years in your current industry, and you think that you've made it your middle management somewhere, and you want to protect your time as much as possible. When you go back to the drawing board and you're trying to change careers, you kind of have to take that mentality of a starter all over again. And you have to start saying yes to everything. Because you're in a different industry. You don't know anything about it, and you just have to go in there and say, yes, I want to learn this. Yes, I need to meet this person. Whatever opportunities may come up, you have to say, yes to them. Whereas maybe normally, let's say that you're a marketing manager and you're in mid marketing manager and you kind of make it and you're comfortable with what you're making and what you're doing. And so when you get invited to conferences, you don't go because you're comfortable and you're like, yeah, I don't really need to go there, my network's big enough, whatever, I'm good. But then you want to get into something completely different because maybe you hate your job or maybe you don't see the potential that you want. When you are changing jobs, when you're changing careers, you have to start thinking back to when you were first starting out, when you were first starting out in marketing, you would have loved to been invited to that conference because you could meet people, because you can network, because you can learn more about your craft. And you kind of have to go back to that beginner's mindset to make that career change.

Hannah [00:39:16]:

Going back to that mindset will also help people in the industry you're trying to transition into, invest in you and be willing to teach you.

Ryan [00:39:22]:

Yeah, exactly. And to create those opportunities for you to say yes. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. And the first thing, the most obvious thing is to just do things in public, whether that's creating content on LinkedIn, which I know it sucks, it sucks people, but that is a good way of getting out there and getting other people to know what's in your mind and creating those opportunities for you to say yes to. You can create a podcast, you can create a YouTube channel, something like that. Or it could be as simple as if you work in a company that has multiple departments, you can just go and walk over to that different department that you're trying to gain experience in and make friends with one. Of the managers or make friends with one of the technicians or something like that and see what you would need to do to start to learn that industry more.

Hannah [00:40:17]:

Yeah, that humility. And beginners mindset will help you a lot.

Ryan [00:40:20]:

And I just wanted to talk about that today because we get it so often, so often about career transitions and career changes and people saying, it's too late for me, it's too late. Even if you're 45, even if you're 50, if you are planning on retiring at retirement age, you still have ten to 15 years of working. If you're 40, you've got 25 years of work in front of you. Yes, you have 23 years, 22 years of work behind you, but you still have a lot of work in front of you as well. And it's not too late. It's never too late to make that change.

Hannah [00:40:57]:

Yeah, you got time.

Ryan [00:40:58]:

And so if you want help with your career change, you can go to degreefree co careerchange. To learn more about our career change, crash course. And if you haven't already, go to LinkedIn and connect with me. I'm Ryan maruyama on LinkedIn. She's hannah Maruyama on LinkedIn. And we will have notes for everything that we've talked about links to everything that we've talked about at Degreefree Codcast.

Hannah [00:41:24]:

And if you do want the newsletter, which I promise you do, go over to Degreefreefree co newsletter to sign up for that.

Ryan [00:41:30]:

Yeah. And that's pretty much it for this week. Until next time. Aloha.