Selling Your True Skillset in Interviews
At an interview this week for a web developer position I found myself under-selling my potential contribution to the organisation in one broad area. That was in my usability and accessibility skills. Interface design. This surprised me because the prepared interview questions which were handed to me prior to the formal interview directly asked about these two related areas and they were probably key to my true value proposition. Meanwhile, the emphasis in the position for server-side scripting and other back end skills led me to feel a need to bolster my weak points rather than push forward my true skillset.
It would be a hard position to fill with only one person. I find very few server side programmers have strong skillsets in front end technologies, or interface design for that matter, and they definately very rarely care about usability or accessibility. I don’t envy their job in having to fill the position. If I were the employer seeking strong skillsets in both areas I’d seriously consider job share with separate responsibilities and perhaps some small overlap for keeping both people on the same path.
So why didn’t I just start going on about Fitt’s Law or Gestalt Principles or have a rant about perception or attribution or make an effort to explain the influence of culture and language on the usability of interfaces (for example directionality of text or meaning of colour)? Why didn’t I push the conversation toward WCAG 1.0 issues and the discussion revolving around WCAG 2 versus the WCAG Sumarai? I could have mentioned methodologies like wireframing, prototyping and generating user centric designs with personas, mood boards and card sorting.
After all our local web audience is international and the paradigms of the web have significantly changed over recent years – it is no longer an Anglo-American domain. In Australia, for example, if Mandarin is included, the second most common language in Australia is Chinese and the 2001 Census reported [PDF 32KB] that in Sydney only 66% of people speak only english at home. The same Census data showed that one fifth of Australia’s population were born overseas.
While I’m a reasonable programmer in a very general sense I’d be hard pushed to sell myself in that role as an expert. If you ever run into a hardcore PHP, Java or C programmer, for example, it becomes pretty clear those silos of knowledge are specialised. Whereas I’m a generalist to some extent with an interest in web standards, usability, accessibility and how people interact with interfaces.
One of the things that does surprise me in web development is that not a lot of people are widely educated (or widely read even) on the broader technologies we’re working with – web standards, networking, protocols, general computing knowledge, how it all works (for example packets, requests and responses, or CGI), UNIX knowledge, security, mobile technologies, scripting, design principles, accessibility, usability, marketing, information architecture (and the list goes on). While nobody can know even something about everything nowdays I believe its that general broad knowledge and interest that enhances my benefit to an organisation.
As a back end programmer I will probably always be the guy who’s churning out moderate solutions at a moderate pace. Its not my specialty at all. But in other areas I can probably offer a lot more than I could sell in a half hour interview put on the spot, too. Meanwhile, I guess all one can do is hope the right messages went through the communication channels and my strengths and weaknesses were apparent. I actually do have some knowledge about usability and accessibility. I actually know a fair amount about the subject.
