I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I describe how one student’s internship experience while studying abroad tapped into the power of the hidden job market.
An unexpected opportunity
All Michael Kirkpatrick wanted was to get to Thailand.
It was April of last year, and Kirkpatrick, a student majoring in game programming at Champlain College, wanted to take part in the college’s summer study-abroad program, which provided internships and experiential learning. The company that Champlain worked with to help students land positions was having trouble placing Kirkpatrick because many video-game studios had pulled out of Thailand, or they hired only programmers who spoke Thai. Without an internship, he would get no trip abroad.
Kirkpatrick was losing hope when, at 1 a.m. one Saturday night while hanging out with friends, his phone buzzed. It was a call from the placement company. Would he be willing to go to Asia to work for an aquaculture company that might have a use for his programming skills? Kirkpatrick jumped at the chance — not just because it got him a ticket to Southeast Asia, but also because the job potentially related to growing food and feeding people, something that had always fascinated Kirkpatrick, who was raised around Vermont farming culture.
“Also,” he adds, “saying I spent a summer in Thailand farming catfish is a really cool bragging right.”
But when he arrived in Thailand, Kirkpatrick discovered something he didn’t expect: Aqua Baan, the aquaculture company, wanted him to research the possibility of building a “digital twin.” Basically, it’s a real-time, sensor-enabled digital simulation of what’s happening inside a fish tank. It’s used to monitor operations, run hypothetical scenarios, and train operators on how the temperature and levels of various nutrients might affect the fish. In essence, the company was seeking to “gamify” the process of training operators and managing the tanks.
For Kirkpatrick, the internship opened up a door to a world of hidden jobs.
What is the hidden job market?
Ned Laff and I introduce a series of concepts in Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does, and one of them is the “hidden job market.” Usually that term refers to jobs that are landed through connections: Your friend’s sister alerted you to a job in her company that fits what you were looking for, or a manager reaches out to his colleagues to find someone with the skill sets for a hard-to-fill position. Some say these jobs represent three of every four job openings out there.
In Hacking College, we give the term a twist: Hidden jobs are not just the ones you land through connections; they are also the many unanticipated roles you find deep within an organization. A museum, for example, doesn’t just employ curators and security guards but also people with expertise in audience development, fund raising, retail sales, art valuation, and more. Or consider Proctor & Gamble: It has a team of archivists and “storytellers” who maintain a record of the company’s products and their development, helping to guide future innovation at the company. Video-game companies sometimes employ historians who help the game artists accurately render life in ancient Egypt or the Dark Ages. Some consulting firms use anthropologists to evaluate and improve workplace culture.
Hidden jobs, in our definition, are also found in small- to medium-sized firms that are off the radar of most career centers, and may have unusual or specialized areas of focus that offer unexpected opportunities to students for experiential learning, job shadowing, contacts, and advice. For example, Orfield Laboratories is a “multi-sensory design research laboratory” in Minneapolis, not far from the campuses of Augsburg University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, that assists architects in designing spaces that have more comfortable lighting, acoustics, or temperatures. The company also works with product designers to, say, test new appliances for their noise levels. The lab’s headquarters, in an old studio where both “Funkytown” and Blood on the Tracks were recorded, contains a soundproof room certified by the Guinness World Records as the quietest place on earth.
Orfield Laboratories would be compelling to students studying building design or sound engineering. But it could also be a resource for those in disability studies or public health, as Steve Orfield, the firm’s president and founder, has long studied how environmental factors affect people with sensitivities to stimuli, like those with autism.
Seeing this world of hidden jobs is important for students for a number of reasons: First of all, it opens up opportunities for experiential learning at often-overlooked employers. Further, it shows students that the world is multidisciplinary and helps them see how their skills transfer across different lines of work or different sectors of the economy, giving them the ability to shift and innovate. Much of the college-to-career conversation focuses on big, popular industries, like health care, finance, tech, and so on. By widening the pool of possible employers, students might be able to understand how they can tie their studies in typically undervalued disciplines like anthropology, history, or literature to a variety of roles out there.
Most undergraduate students, who often enter college with a major-equals-job mentality, aren’t really introduced to this way of approaching the world of work — not even at their own institutions, which have their own hidden jobs. Colleges employ not just professors, advisers, and other staff that students expect to encounter, but also people who work in marketing, procurement, energy generation, risk management, and so on — all valuable but often underutilized sources of experience and advice.
And people who guide students aren’t necessarily cognizant of the hidden job market, either. One of our peer reviewers — who, from references in the critique, seemed to come from the world of advising — was surprised by the notion of hidden jobs.
“This term at once called attention to a key deficiency of what career-service offices are able to offer students,” the reviewer wrote, “and reminded me of something I had never focused on, the fact that so many people are employed in ‘granular’ sub-sub-fields that aren’t on career service’s radar.”
For Kirkpatrick, the discovery of a potential link between game programming and aquaculture made him more optimistic about his academic direction.
“Even when coming to Champlain for games, I didn’t necessarily want to do games because something about it just didn’t feel right,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I fit in well.” Although he was a good programmer in high school and enjoyed video games, he felt more drawn to his background as a Boy Scout, his work on Vermont farms, and his love for the outdoors. Many of his peers just wanted to make the next Call of Duty. “Nobody is thinking about tools that they can make — everyone’s doing something within the games industry.”
In Thailand, he worked closely with Aqua Baan’s development team, seeing how his expertise in making playful interfaces could be used to interact with the large sets of data that the fish farms could generate. It was challenging and got him out of the box he felt like he was in, destined only for the gaming industry.
“That summer is when I figured out I can do this for my entire life, and I want to give it a shot,” says Kirkpatrick, who will graduate from Champlain in May. He feels like his world has opened up since the internship, and that he now has an easier time talking with peers and professors about his work and his goals. “I feel like I’m so much happier.”
