Now that the Communists are the best Capitalists, and the leading Capitalists have all turned Socialist, finding a job can be difficult and confusing on New Zilland's tremendously level playing fields. To this end I have pieced togethor the following tract of brilliance to help you better understand the Kiwi employment psyche, thoroughly wrapped up as it is in intellectual No8 wire.
Grab a cold beer now lest you get too mentally caught up in all of this.
(Over)qualifications - one of the biggest bugbears in this city today is the spurious growth of the annoyingly over-qualified professional. We need team players in this country, not overly opinionated know-it-all Nellies - we already have enough people fully qualified in that particular area - Rodney Hide, John Banks and that weird mayor over the bridge (Andrew something?) all spring immediately to mind. Overqualified people tend to upset team spirit by setting high personal standards and frankly we have no need of this kind of tall-poppy syndrome around here. No, we much prefer barely literate semi-qualified proactive people speckled within a clever chiaroscuro of well connected has-beens, powerless yet delusional management, Directors' nephews and driving it all, from every corner of every back office in this Supercity, qualified yet part-time mums.
Overseas of course, people do tend to fall into this trap, and I am sure in London they would no doubt simply employ the best qualified people for any particular role. Quel recipe pour disastre! Fortunately here in NZ, snuggling amidst our poorly insulated and slightly leaky homes, we cling steadfastly to more of a No.8 wire philosophy in doing everything ourselves, pushing back the growing hordes of embarrassingly over-qualified professionals and focusing bravely on the big picture by not getting overly lost in the spurious detail of it all. Little wonder we have always seemed to cleverly sneak in well below that radar of excellence.
Proactivity - be proactive and bung this word into your resume as quick as a wink. It can be difficult to be proactive at times, since to the best of my knowledge nobody actually has a hard and fast grasp on what this actually means. As far as I can make out, it means something like "being active before you have actually begun being active", presumably in a tremendously active and overtly energetic fashion. Sales and Marketing people do it all the time. Overqualified foreigners simply do not grasp this; little wonder that they find it so hard to fit in here. Do you fly about the office making things happen before anyone is even vaguely ready for it? Congratulations, we need you now or possibly even before now, for example sometime last Tuesday.
We should note that the more proactive of proactivists seem to engage in strenuous activity even before any proactivity has been mentally envisaged, much less physically activated, so jolly good show on that front. Good on them for showing up the slower and better qualified professionals with their dreary and endless focus on spurious detail and their telling failure to fully grasp the big old picture.
State Your Qualifications Simply - Remember that the older generations have no particular understanding and much less interest in this new fan dangled NCEA system. Even writing about the NCEA prompts the eyes to glaze over and all we truly know is that origami somehow gains you extra curricular points. Apparently it's all about being a team player and not upsetting other people, especially the teachers who no longer want to be weighed down during their extended holiday periods by writing reports or marking exams. That's all we need to know, well that and the fact that you happen to be the Director's nephew, so just don't not bore us with any spurious detail. Talk about the cricket, focus on the big picture and remember, there are whole fleets of taxi-driving Iranian brain surgeons, Indian nuclear physicists and Egyptian mathematicians out there. Moreover order fries virtually anywhere in this good city and you will be rapidly served by well qualified Media Studies graduates, many from Selwyn College, nestled like small poppies within noble fields of honours graduates in such rapidly diverging fields as Conflict Resolution, Lesbian Break Dancing (you get free trips on this one) or Champagne Socialist Constructivism.
Where did a university education ever get David Bain? Or for that matter Christine Rankin who cleverly fixed up her own employment situation by focusing on dysfunctional Maori families, whilst admittedly coming from an abusive Pakeha family herself. Jolly good show. In not overtly focusing on her own issues and telling it like it is about others, we can all happily get back to smacking the living crap out of our youngsters because, hey, it never did me any harm (apart from the mild dyslexia and blurry vision that I am experiencing right at this moment). Nothing wrong with a good old smack on the fufu, and once again JK has brilliantly steered away from any overly qualified pools of talent by directly honing in on the rapidly diminishing, yet avidly proactive, hardly-qualified-at-all individuals and paying them well over $1,000 an hour to lead us straight out of this nasty old recession, despite her glaringly obvious record of financial mismanagement. If you are a middle-aged woman and wanting to get anywhere in this country it would pay to invest in a really good set of baubly earrings and please do lower that cleavage lest someone thinks you are not sexy and serious enough.
Certainly one would would never get this kind of level playing field overseas.
French? Don't be. It's been a tough old rugby season and frankly we won't be needing any more reminding of it until well after the next RWC semi-final.
Do Not Stare Directors Directly in the Eye - Directors in this city have endured decades of power outages, Australasianisations, the fluctuating Kiwi, Chinese manufacturing, Japanese Eurodashis, cleverly duplicitous Free Trade Agreements and even the rapidly emerging fact that nobody understands how Kiwi Saver works any more - even the overqualified argumentative foreign dude down in the far cubicle. These Directors, relentlessly urging on flocks of recalcitrant proactivists, simply do not have time for your personal baggage, so stow it. The bulk of Kiwi Directors are in fact mildly psychotic and may well crack when you stare them down. That guy floating around the harbour in a suitcase - actually a jovial mineral water vendor, so please do be warned.
Accents - thank goodness we don't even have one which is an amazingly blessed situation to be in when you consider that we are in fact the only quasi-nation on this earth,and certainly the only within the Southern Hemisphere, to have no trace of any accent at all. This can be a difficult situation to find ourselves in since other English speaking accents (and frankly who even cares about the rest of the world) are rapidly diverging away with their weirdo accents to the point where they somehow find it difficult to actually understand ours, eh.
I just can't believe that the Australians, the Irish and the Canadians have actually fallen into this trap but there you go, many nations have not been as proactive as us on this front and obviously their furious focus on the boring old detail has led them far astray. I think this has been one of the differentiating points between us and those Australians with their sad old delusions of adequacy because, in having no trace of any discernible accent, we are far less parochial and not at all one-eyed like they are. There they go again, relentlessly sucked deep into the whirlpool of endless comparison between the two countries - I mean really who cares?
Overseas Experience - this is a difficult one posing as it does endless comparisons between Kiwis and the Australians. Clearly any overseas experience undergone in the UK can only be a good thing as it raises standards, whereas years spent in Australia tend to suggest parochialism and the fact that our quasi-economy has indeed failed, also that you are a deserter who was foolish enough to come back and you probably deserve to be shot. This being said overseas qualified people are clearly more valuable than Kiwi graduates as they have far more authority and less student loans to pay off, so this is why, as our best doctors, engineers, scientists,teachers and nurses all desert the country in droves they have been steadily replaced by higher-paid yet at times overly-qualified foreigners.
I think somehow those Aussies are jealous over the fact that we opened our markets up years ago, rapidly leveled all playing fields and have long jumped the hurdle of vapid colonialist mental paralysis.
Cricket - are you a hopeless and dysfunctional loser? Just learn about cricket and people will find a use for you. Even if you have no actual knowledge of cricket, try mumbling vague things about the new ball during the interview and just see how popular you become. Crowds of people will push through the door of the boardroom, mill about you, and your promised googling of scores and statistics will inspire and invigorate the entire management team.
We are incredibly on top of things in this country, despite being clearly at the bottom of the world.
The recession only started through the deluded pipe dreams of some drug-crazed Hedge Fund Manager so thank goodness we have one of the best Hedge Fund Managers of all time to inspire us and lead us straight out of this financial quagmire.
Finally, in summation, and chiefly due to the fact that my beer has now been fully drained, I conclude that finding a job is super tough right now in the super city, so super suck it in. I trust this missive has shed some light up your tunnel and just remember, in New Zilland it's not what you know that really counts - it's more what you don't know.
kiaora.
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