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Crossposted from DemocraticGAIN.org

The Washington Post’s Ian Shapira wrote a must-read last week about former campaign workers moving to DC to look for a job in the Administration.

“Flocking to the District’s creative-class encampments of Mount Pleasant, the U Street corridor and Dupont and Logan circles, people in their 20s and 30s — those, that is, with a liberal bent — are prowling progressive Wiki pages and joining Google groups in the hunt for an Obama job. Those already employed elsewhere are secretly uploading their résumés to whitehouse.gov, while others are quitting their jobs to concentrate on the search.

Some are deft anglers: Melody Mathews, 29, a former Obama field worker-turned-Navy contractor, co-hosted a celebratory dinner recently at Old Ebbitt Grill that included top Army brass with whom she campaigned. Her hope is that they will get presidential appointments and, in turn, hire her. Others, such as Noland Chambliss, 25, a former Obama deputy field director, are in come-down mode. He applied for a position in the Energy Department but hasn’t heard anything for months. So he has applied for a job at a pizza shop near his shared house off U Street NW.”

Something to keep in mind, there were comparable numbers of Obama campaign staff to the number of government positions that could be filled by non-civil service. Add in non-OFA, but allied staff, and the numbers are not in the favor of the job seeker. Many of these non-civil service jobs do not relate well to campaign skills, since they are highly policy based.

A word of advice to those of you with your heart set on working in the Administration:  Don’t forget that President Obama will be in office until January 20th, 2013, and at the rate he (and the potential opposition) is going, January 20th, 2017.  That leaves 4, if not 8 years, to get the chance to serve.  There will be time for many people to start in Administration jobs years down the line.

So, in the meantime, try finding some jobs at organizations that will help support the President’s agenda or help maintain the majority in Congress.  Administration jobs have a notoriously high burn-out rate, and you’ll have time to serve at some point, if not today.  And if you are growing your skillsets and network in other roles, you’ll be in a better position for a better job when your turn comes.

administration, finding a job

One of the things I do, and I recommend people do as much as they can, is to help friends find jobs.  It helps create loyalty, backchannels into other organizations, and promotes yourself as a person who can be “helpful” to people in need.  You never know when the shoe will be on the other foot.  And it’s a nice thing to do.

One of the largest issues I’ve seen when people send me a resume, or talk about why they should be at X or Y job is a focus on where they have worked, rather than what they have done.  A clear and public example can be seen in Rahaf Harfoush, who worked on the Obama new media team for a few months.  That detail was included in her bio along with previous social media research work to create a bio that lead her to be promoted as an Obama strategist at schools and other institutes she worked on.  In the New Republic, details of her involvement in the campaign leaked out.  What did she actually do for the campaign?

For the last three months of the campaign, “The Foush” was an unpaid volunteer at the Obama headquarters in Chicago, where her regular duties essentially involved approving mybarackobama.com comments and groups. There were two to three dozen people doing similar work, but she was somewhat unique in that she had a background in social media.

So. Member of Obama New Media Team.  Intern-level site moderator.

Personally, I’ve seen other resumes and had other conversations with people new to DC who have a false expectation that people will hire based on where they worked, and not what they’ve done.  When looking at a resume, and evaluating your previous experiences, here is some of what I would look at and emphasize:

• District size of your campaign (or at least the part of the campaign you were assigned to manage).
• Number of staff reporting to you.
• Budget you were responsible for spending and/or raising.
• Your responsibilities (not department or principle responsibilities).
• Measured results (raised X money, recruited X volunteers, contacted X voters X times, etc).

If you keep these concepts in mind, you will have a much better idea where in the world you are. If you want an example, take a look at my resume and see how the bullets talk, not the organizations I’ve worked for. 

Many people this year will be working in New Jersey and Virginia for their odd-year elections, and will add to their resume by doing higher level stuff for lower level candidates.  If you think you need to work on doing higher level stuff, working on the lower level campaigns a good way to set yourself up to do higher level stuff for higher level candidates in 2010.

job search

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Great video showing how American President has evolved.

history, president, youtube

I try doing this every year, although last year didn’t exactly work due to the morons who allowed the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd (seriously, 10 days after Chirstmas?, give the candidates and their staff time to spend with priority #1 - their families).

So, here is the big list of things of this year.

• Finished the Richardson campaign in early January.
• Moved in a very convoluted matter back to the east.  I stopped, in order, with all my stuff in my car, Las Vegas, Chino, Orange County, San Diego, side trip to Mexican border, Los Angelos, Santa Cruz (via PCH), San Franscisco, Park City Utah, Boulder CO, Des Moines, Detroit with a side trip to the Canadian border, Atlantic City.  Then after two days, I got bored, so I drove to Redding via NYC, to Boston, then back to AC.
• Moved into an awesome place in an awesome neighborhood.  Plus, in the first time since my second year of college, I had ceilings that I couldn’t accidently hit with my head.
• Started a great hybrid job, working for Democratic GAIN and Mission Control.  Basically, I help the professionals in politics, and send mail asking voters to employ politicians who employ my friends.
• Restarted GSPM.  Took three classes over the summer.  Got an A in Polling and Law of Politics, and a B+ in ethics.  Guess that says something.  Only two more classes left so I can finish my 15 class program over 4.5 years.
• Started Kickball. Mayhem insues.
• Lost 10lbs.
• Go to Austin for Netroots Nation.
• Went to the 5 year reunion for my high school.  Find out most folks went into financial services, one week before the September crash. And I thought politics was the unstable industry.
• For the last week, go back to the great state of Connecticut to help purify New England.  Mission is accomplished. Jim Himes is going to Congress, unseating the last Republican left in America.  Overall, my firm plays a part in 14 of the 26 Democratic house pickups in 2008. We also sent pieces with bullet holes in them to hunters in support of Obama.  Among other things.

I’ll probably add to this list.  But it’s been a great year for me personally.  Onto 2009!

2008, Democratic GAIN, GSPM, Himes, kickball, Mission Control, road trip, travel, year in review

Merry Christmas!

bailout, christmas

Things I want on the next iPhone.

• Better Camera - There is a lot of real estate on the back of the phone that could be used to make a high quality camera.  While I doubt it could compete with stand-alones, basic optical zoom, auto-zoom, stabilization, and flash, it’d get most of the way there.
• Turn by Turn GPS - Another redundacy that could easily be fixed.  Also, you wouldn’t have to worry about your GPS getting stolen (like mine. twice.)
• Integrated radio export - Helps with compatibility with external players, like cars.
• Solar power(!) - Not my idea.  But this is awesome.
• To Do list Exchange -I abuse it. Do want it. Also would be great if it’d integrate with flagging emails.
• Better Battery
• Copy and Paste

iphone, wishlist

I decided to move my main site over to WordPress.  Here is why.

• MovableType started to require multi-user sites to use pay lisences.
• Integrated updates of plugins and program.  This means that updating is pressing a button, not unpacking the archive, making sure the update is up, testing, breaking, etc.
• More plugins which are free.
• Using a dynamic PHP/MySQL-based CMS for presentation is much quicker to updated than a CGI-bin creation of static files is more appropriate for a large corporate blog then a tiny one like mine.
• Better autosave and WYSWIG.  Not like I need either, but the quicker the better.
• Custom fields

I need to figure out what design I should do.  MT is easy for taking a comp and building it out.  WP’s templates are based on raw PHP code, which feels extremely old school to me — my first non WYSWIG site I did updating for - collegedems.com (under an old design) required handcoding within the php code with includes.

So pardon the dust while things move around.

movabletype, websites, wordpress

It won’t let me embed it on here for some reasons, but here it is.  Seems a bit shorter than previous years, and covers less.  I do like their ever optomistic view of the upcoming year.  I hope in 10 years, they’ll still be up.  It would be awesome if I could see one of these for 1998 or so.

jib jab, videos

I’m playing around with Wordpress. I grew up using MovableType, since version 2, including managing CollegeDems.com, Democrats.org, and a variety of small sites for friends. It looks as if SixApart has decided to build their program to cater to the large scale media blogs (WashingtonPost.com, Time.com, etc). Thing is, Wordpress seems to be much better for smaller stuff, like my personal blog.

Still playing around, but what do you think?

movabletype, tech, wordpress