What makes someone good at your profession?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Are you a marine biologist? Then what makes someone a good marine biologist?

While I’m studying to become a lawyer, I don’t have a good idea of what makes someone a good lawyer yet. So instead I’ll talk about some of the other jobs I’ve had.

Student - I’ve been a student for 18 years now. This should count as a profession. The best students are always aware of what the professor wants from them. If they don’t know what’s expected from them by the way the professor teaches the course (i.e. they have a bad professor), then they’ll ask the professor directly what he or she expects. You can tell if someone is a good student if they ask a lot of questions about the professor instead of the course topic.

In law school, not everyone is smart, but everyone is a good student. If you want to save money on doing a background check on a law school professor, just ask some students what they know about him. The level of detail can sometimes be frighting.

Once you know that, you’re golden. Sometimes you can get a professor that just wants to hear his words regurgitated back to him. If you know this, then you can decide for yourself how much you want to learn the material. At other times you’ll get a professor that has a political bend. Just make sure all your exam essays lean left if the professor does.

I became aware of this once I asked two of my classmates how they did on an exam in a course on ethnic studies. The first student answered the questions honestly and got a C. The second student told me that he answered all the questions with the understanding that, “the white man was the devil.” Meaning that all the right answers were answers where white people did not look good. It was apparent that the professor was racist once he nonchalantly mentioned that the Jews ran the media. The student that did good was Jewish, and he was offended, but he knew that a racist professor meant a very easy final exam. The student that actually learned ethnic studies couldn’t do anything about his exam and had to accept the C.

I suspect a lot of smart people get discouraged by bad professors, just because they don’t know how to be good students.

Retail- I worked in retail for five years. The best retailers learn what to do when something goes wrong. After that it’s just a matter of placing all your efforts in avoiding problems that can’t easily be fixed.

If you’ve worked in a store that has a lotto machine, the only things you need to remember are that mega millions and lotto tickets can’t be canceled, tickets can’t be canceled after the numbers come out, and once you scan a ticket to pay out, you have to pay the customer if the amount is under $600. For all other mistakes you can just cancel the ticket. If you know what to do when you can’t cancel the ticket, then using the lotto machine becomes very easy.

2

I think this is an excellent idea for a thread. I agree with your opinion on what makes a good student. I am an excellent student, and by that I don’t just mean I get good grades, I mean I have learned to get good grades in the most efficient way possible. The only problem is that sometimes professors are not clear at all about their expectations, even when you ask them directly. I have had two such professors in the last year and they make me want to put a drill through my skull.

I do wish being a student could be a profession (academia doesn’t count-that’s too much work. I mean just sitting in a classroom absorbing information and having interesting discussions about it.) The problem is, I have spent the last 27 years of my life learning how to be a student, and now that I am on the cusp of an actual career I am discovering all of that effort has nothing to do with being in an actual job. The thought of being judged on anything other than academic merit is pretty freaking terrifying. In the professional world, I know approximately nothing.

I’m studying to be a social worker. I’m in the minority, but my top criteria for whether someone is good at this job are whether or not they are a good scientist, whether they can evaluate the merits of research and whether they actively implement interventions based on the best evidence available. Social workers like this do exist, and their numbers are growing, but they are still a rare breed. We are a well-meaning bunch, but a lot of us really don’t get the concept of science and why it matters in this fight. I get very upset about it if I think about it too much.

Secondary to this, skills amenable to being a good social worker include: to see the big picture, particularly as it relates to issues of social justice; identify and isolate the various factors going into a problem and create a targeted strategy for addressing each one; to understand systems and how they interact; and to be able to make decisions quickly and efficiently. That is true on both the macro and micro levels. They also have a degree of detachment from their work that insulates them from stress and helps them be more objective practitioners. Doing this work well is actually very difficult. Thank goodness it pays so well!

3

Architect– I think a good Architect is well rounded and has a wide variety of skill sets. From technical to visual to economic. Being a generalist is more important then being a specialist.

Many young Architects I have seen seem to focus on one skill set at the expense of being adequately trained in all of them. Specialization in boom times is great but in times like today it will kill you. But those young Architects who are good in design, good at graphic programs, good at knowing what is important to drawn and what isn’t important, and basically good in a wide variety of skill sets are those folks we are retaining. If you only did construction drawings then we aren’t keeping you as there are an overabundance of people with that skill set right now and not enough work to employ them all.

In my opinion having all those skill sets helps inform you about the variety of issues you will confront you as an Architect. Knowing ‘why’ the developer or the bank is asking for ‘x’ document will help you know what is important and what is not important to put on the drawing. Seeing something built, or talking directly to the mason will help inform you about what information is needed and more importantly, what isnt’ needed on the drawings. Actually recognizing that the developer is only paying the firm a very small amount of money and adjusting what is produced is critical to survival today.

I think this skill is probably important for many fields. Being ‘good’ at a large number of tasks is more important then being ‘great’ at just a few skills.

4

A good teacher needs to believe that good teaching makes kids smarter. This seems obvious, but lots of people–including not a few teachers–are pretty fatalistic about learning: there’s a real belief out there that the smart ones will do fine regardless and the others are hopeless. I think this is because people are bad at remembering where and how they learned things: once we know something, it seems inevitable that we would eventually know it. Teachers have to fight that instinct and have faith in what they do.

A good teacher understands all the different ways people come to understand whatever subject they are teaching, and redirects all the misunderstandings early in the process. A normal rookie mistake is to teach the course as you wish it had been taught to you, to be the perfect teacher you never had. Good teachers move past that and learn to be the best possible teacher to everyone, and they pay attention to how people learn until they figure out all the weird misunderstanding and conflations and transpositions of ideas that they, themselves, would never had made.

People may argue with me about this, but I think a good teacher has a gift for analogy. People learn very, very well through analogy and being able to construct them as needed seems to me to be almost essential.

More than anything else, however, a good teacher has a strong, charismatic personality. That doesn’t mean you have to be beautiful, or cool, or even likable. But you have to be interesting, and you have to have the knack of making people care what you think. Bad teachers try to replicate this by being stingy with praise, thinking that rarity will give it value. But rarity in and of itself does nothing: Dodo poop is rare but I don’t want any. What gives praise value is having some sort of attraction to its source.

5

A good editor has the ability to see both the forest and the trees.

The big picture is the overall vision for the work. Sometimes that involves developing and implementing a plan for bringing together numerous disparate elements that need to function together, as for an issue of a magazine. Sometimes it’s insuring that a particular article or story both fits into the overall work – if you’re editing one story, what function does that story serve with regard to the stuff before and after it? – *and *that it functions as a stand-alone piece, that it has all the elements it needs and presents them in an order that makes sense.

The small picture is the details of spelling and punctuation. A good editor can blast through a piece of prose correcting all the grammar, etc., and removing extraneous verbiage, in no time at all. (Just about all first drafts – including mine – are way wordier than they need to be.) And, yes, a good editor is a prescriptivist, following the traditional rules of grammar and the style guide the publication uses. (Note: I’m talking nonfiction only, those rules might be slightly relaxed in some fiction.)

Then, having done all that, you need to recheck the big picture, and then recheck the small picture. Repeat until the point at which anyone less anal would have run screaming into the night – i.e., until it’s damn close to perfect.

Basically, an editor serves as the reader’s proxy and advocate. He or she makes sure the material does what it’s supposed to do (provide information, entertain), that it does it interestingly, efficiently (no unnecessary or irrelevant material), and accurately (no mistakes in content, of course, but also no mistakes of presentation that would mislead or distract the reader – a mispunctuated sentence can bring a reader to a screeching WTF halt).

You are probably not aware of the editor when he or she has done the job properly – but if you’re reading a published piece of prose (i.e., not a blog post) and you’re thinking “damn, this person cannot write” or “this doesn’t make sense,” the editor has fucked up.

I am a decent writer – I am a very, very good editor.

6

Lawyer is a bit too broad a category to give a useful answer. A successful corporate attorney at a big firm might be quite different from a good public defender who in turn might have a different skillset from a virtuoso personal injury lawyer. And in any of those jobs, you might be more focused on client and case development, or legal research and writing, or actual trial advocacy – all of which require different skills, and often skills that aren’t commonly joined, like charisma and bookishness.

Maybe other lawyers will chime in about some of these other skills. But having spent the last two years reading other lawyer’s briefs (about 300-400 of them), I’ll offer my perspective on what it takes to be good at brief-writing:

Surprisingly, a few fundamental skills separate the top 10%-20% of legal writers from the rest. Like all writers, a lawyer must write clearly and concisely with an understanding of the reader. And clear writing requires clear thinking.

Often, failure to think clearly is a failure of objectivity, rather than logic. A legal writer must be able to understand an argument’s weaknesses and strengths, regardless of which side is offering it. Similar objectivity is needed to read cases and accurately summarize their holdings and reasoning. Fair analysis of the precedent includes the ability to identify what is settled law and what is not.

Finally, among the basics, I would include the recognition that the legal writer’s goal is to persuade a judge, rather than engage in needless combat with opposing counsel. Too many lawyers write as if the target audience is a drinking buddy or a debate coach instead of someone tasked with picking the winner based on who is actually correct. Lawyers tend to be combative and overly self-confident when it comes to debating ideas, so success means harnessing the useful sides of those traits while maintaining the humility necessary to be a clear thinker and persuasive writer.

The advanced skill, which separates the top 1% from the people with a firm grasp of the basics, is the ability to craft arguments about unsettled law that are persuasive and not just convenient. In addition to making smart arguments based on synthesis of other precedents and policy implications, this means the ability to write in a persuasive style, including intelligent use of metaphor, word order, and word choice. Sometimes, a cleverly chosen, evocative analogy can make all the difference in a close case (see, e.g., the “Statue of Autocracy” argument in Summum).

In my experience, the best lawyers also understand what makes judges at each level tick and use those common motivations in crafting arguments. For example, recognizing that the main motivator of a trial court judge is often resolving a case as quickly and cleanly as possible, a good trial court brief-writer will provide a judge with as many easy outs as possible, and make it appear that it would be more work for the judge to take the opponent’s position. Many lawyers don’t understand that what motivates judges is often less the judge’s policy preferences and more the things that motivate everyone in their jobs: approval of supervisors (i.e. the judges who sit above them), time management, respect of colleagues, etc. Smart lawyers use those things to their advantage in deciding how to approach the argument in a case.

7

I’m a freelance grant proposal writer for non-profits. There are several keys to success in this line of work. This turned out to be more of a how-to than a who-you-need-to-be. But who you need to be is someone who can do this stuff.

Not necessarily in this order:

You must be an excellent salesman IN WRITING. You have to be a good writer, clear, concise, injecting emotion but backing it up with facts. You must look at the project from the potential funder’s pov- lose any sense of “entitlement” that the organization probably has (“We help underprivileged ______'s, so the public OWES us.”)

Did I mention “concise”? The request should be no more than two pages. You can back it up with a multi-page history of the organization, financials, testimonials, pictures of the underprivileged _______'s you serve. But the request (purpose and the specific amount requested) should be in the first paragraph, or even the first sentence of your two-page request.

Assume that the potential funder reading your proposal knows NOTHING about the organization or the underprivileged ______'s that you help. NO JARGON and NONONO ACRONYMS! Ever. Except maybe USA… people usually know what that stands for (although it could be USA Network…). Don’t even refer to your organization by an acronym. Spell out “William Poppergill Memorial Charter School and Roller Rink,” “Oak Valley Community Orchestra and Glee Club,” “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”- and spell the name out every time you refer to it in your text. When people read acronyms that they can’t interpret, they get really annoyed. You don’t want people to be annoyed when they read your proposal. Don’t make the reader work to understand.

You need to be familiar with the funding community- corporations and private foundations. You have to ask for the CORRECT and APPROPRIATE amount of money- a SPECIFIC amount for a SPECIFIC need. For private foundations, go to Guidestar.org and look up their IRS Form 990. There you will see how much they give. If a funder typically makes grants in the $7k to $10k range, don’t ask for $150k, unless you want to give them a good laugh.

You have to know what this funder is interested in- children, drug rehab, health, women’s issues, environmental causes. You will also see this on the IRS Form 990. Often on their web sites, they’ll tell you: we’re into elementary education or helping the homeless. So don’t apply to THEM to save the rain forest.

You have to follow the directions and guidelines put out by the funding source. If they say don’t contact them, then don’t! (Unless you have a board member who is sleeping with one of their board members, then that might be okay, as long as it’s kept under cover(s), as it were.) If they DO welcome contact, then by all means, encourage your client to make contact and establish a relationship.

Submitting the request: if they want an original and 11 copies on blue paper, 1" margins, 12-point type, that’s what you give 'em. If it has to be submitted online, do that. Note all attachments that they want and if it’s an online application, scan your financials, IRS letter, board list, whatever, and convert them to PDF’s so you can upload. Follow the directions. And some directions are clearer than others. Give yourself plenty of time and assume something is going to go wrong during the submission process. Leave time to contact the funder and fix the problem… if they have broken links, or other stuff that doesn’t work. (This has happened to me numerous times, but I am a perpetual Early Bird, and it has never caused me to miss a deadline.)

Take deadlines seriously. 'Nuff said on that.

The funder is looking for reasons to eliminate you, to turn you down, to drop you in file 13. They get lots and lots of requests. Yours must stand out by the quality of the writing, the urgency/importance (not always the same thing) of the cause, the reasonableness of the request (including the $$ asked for), concrete outcomes that have a positive impact on the community in a way that is in alignment with the goals and objectives of the funder.

To me all of these seem like common sense, but maybe not. This is 32 years of experience talkin’.

8

I’m a librarian. To be a competent librarian you need a wide knowledge base, not necessarily a deep one, but you need a deep knowledge of your resources and finding aids. You need to know if you have it (hopefully off the top of your head) and where to start looking for it, and if you don’t have it you need to know who does have it and how to get it from them.

To be a good librarian you also have to have a lot of patience, a deep commitment to public service, and a light touch. You need to be able to calibrate your answer to the patron and their level of knowledge (and inherent stupidity.) You need to have a sixth sense about the question the patron actually needs answered, as opposed to the one that actually came out of their mouth. You need to be a multitasking whiz. Possibly most importantly, you need to know when to quit and say “That’s it, this is all we got.” You also have to be able to navigate a hostile bureaucracy and handle “other duties as assigned”.

To be a happy librarian you have to actually like people. I am competent and good but not always happy. :slight_smile:

9

A common thread probably running through all descriptions of good work is that it is easier described than performed. But it’s surprising how often people neglect the fundamentals of their jobs, even when they have the capacity to do them if they tried.

Following directions is a funny one. The same is true of the law. Lawyers often just plain fail to follow the straightforward directions for filing briefs, etc.

10

All good tips for how to be a good Reference Librarian.

To be a good Acquisitions Librarian you need to know what’s in your current collection inside and out, what are the most popular items, what’s been recently released and what’s coming out soon. And then you have to square all of that information with the desires and needs of your user population.

If you can juggle all of those things and produce a collection the public loves, you’ll know it from the heavy stream of compliments and the constant putdowns of other libraries that don’t have a good Acquisitions Librarian.

11

Sadly, while I have lots of examples of what makes a bad nurse, I have very few so far on what makes a *good *nurse. But I’m still a student, so I guess that’s okay for now.

Any doper nurses want to chime in? I’d love to learn this before I graduate, but it seems unlikely with the structure of nursing instruction. The best bit of advice I’ve gotten was here on the Dope, where a Doper nurse reassured me that getting my license shouldn’t be viewed as a license to nurse, but rather a license to* learn how to be* a nurse.

So far, I’ve noted that good nurses are very organized, have an ability to multitask, and use these skills to give themselves time to actually be with patients. They think ahead and anticipate problems, getting the tools they need ready before they’re ever needed. They realize that the family of a patient is as much their patient as the patient. They also understand that their physical presence is more healing and comforting than any medical technology we have. This last one is especially valuable to me as a student. I’ve found that simply sitting with a patient for 10 minutes, whether I do anything or not, is often more effective at pain relief than all the drugs I could give someone (and I’m both grateful I have the opportunity to do that and frightened that most nurses honestly don’t seem to have those 10 minutes that student nurses do).

Also, and this one makes me mad, the most effective nurses have a gift for talking to clients and making them think they’ve said something, while actually promising nothing at all (in terms of discharge dates, times for testing, medication changes, etc.). This makes me mad because the hospital should be able to make things like this run more smoothly, but I’ve already learned that the only correct answer to, “Am I going home today?” is “Well, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? I sure hope you get to go home soon!” :frowning:

Oh, and good nurses are good to their CNAs. I’ve seen who *really *makes the floor run, and it ain’t the guy in the suit!

12

No, acquisitions is one of those things where if you do a bad job you get complaints but if you do a good one nobody notices, because of course the library has it! Why wouldn’t the library have it?

We just had a guy spitting fire because we decided to buy only one new urban farming periodical. I mean, fine and all that we got one subscription, but he did not see why on earth we wouldn’t get four more just for him. You can’t win.

13

Sorry. But I’m always getting compliments for my DVD and music CD collections. Apparently I’m awesome. :cool:

14

Evidently! We must suck - everybody tells us how beautiful our ugly-ass library is and how nice our surly librarians are, but nobody has anything nice to say about the collection, even the periodicals collection which I know is amazing and can honestly tell you I have not seen equaled in a public library.

15

First, overall, Manda Jo, your post makes me think a lot, which is something I’m used to with your posts, and something I appreciate a lot.

This is hard to do sometimes, but it’s almost become a mantra for me: I tell kids all the time that I want them to leave in the afternoon smarter than when they came in in the morning. I think most of them believe me, but some of them don’t, and they’re the big challenges.

Tied to this, I think, is the temptation to teach to your own strengths. I’m personally very good verbally and mathematically, but I lack a lot of spatial and visual skills, and my teaching therefore tends to run heavily verbal and mathematical. I’m constantly looking for ways to provide students with spatial/visual access to knowledge, but it’s definitely a weak spot for me.

Interesting. This is probably my strongest place as a teacher, my ability to analogize extemporaneously. I think you’re very right: if I can show students what a particular form of intellectual leap looks like via an analogy, they’re much more confident in trying to make that same leap themselves.

Definitely true. My own charisma waxes and wanes with my energy level, as I believe is common, and the other mistake people often make (that I sometimes make) is trying to substitute volume for charisma. There are days when I’m just too exhausted to turn on the Dorkness Show, and I find myself having to raise my voice to get attention; those days definitely feel like failures.

I’m deeply immersed in National Board certification right now, and I think they have a pretty interesting take on what a good teacher is like. Their description is along the lines of: good teachers know each student, know the student’s strengths and weaknesses, design lessons that will enable each student to learn at their highest level, evaluate student learning in detail, and use that evaluation in the next iteration of this process.

16

I’d say that the wide (but not necessarily deep) knowledge base has to come along with some intellectual curiosity and a knack for puzzle solving-- most of the reference interviews, troubleshooting, and playing in the MARC records that I’ve done have required a combination of the three for me to be successful. Oh, and being able to get the patron to not lie or refuse to help me clarify their search query when doing a reference interview.

17

I’m a game designer with Sony. My job is to help smaller development teams who are making games for us – spotting design holes, suggesting improvements, filling in gaps in their skill sets – so I’ve been able to observe how a lot of different designers work.

Creativity is important, but not as important as most people think. Churning out lots and lots of random ideas tends to be a really inefficient way to work.

The single most important skill that a designer can have is the ability to “look through” the rules – to be able to study a design on paper and understand how it will play. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Most people can imagine how a game will play if it’s similar to something that already exists. But being able to imagine the nuances of something completely new is a lot harder. Tracing the causal connection between a particular rule and its resulting gameplay effects is often an extremely twisty and obscure process. Even inside the industry, most people can’t do it.

But if you can, then you have a tremendously powerful tool at your disposal. Because you can use it to work backwards. Instead of trying a bunch of stuff at random until something works, you can deliberately design your rules to evoke a particular experience for the player. You can say “I want the game to play like THIS, so I need to have a rule over here that does THIS.” It lets you operate methodically, instead of by trial and error – which has a huge effect on finishing on time and on budget.

18

I’m a (frontend) web developer.

The best web developers are the ones who know which tools to use and when to use them. Fancy CSS3 and HTML5 stuff that basically shuts out IE6? Awesome for your portfolio or that popular Myspace band. Government site? Not so much. You have to code for Internet Explorer.

The best web developers are the ones that keep track of new technologies but don’t hop on the bandwagon immediately. They see a new tool may be useful, but they can also see the pitfalls before they go wild with implementing it. For example, I knew a programmer who discovered how easy keeping things stored in XML files and parsing those was. The problem came in when everything else on the project was done with MySQL databases. Different database types don’t talk to each other very easily.

The best web developers keep lots of code snippets so they don’t write the same code over and over and over. But they are also open to rewriting their code snippets.

The best web developers know when to build something themselves and when to use premade alternatives. Seriously, your pride will not be lost forever if you use someone else’s jQuery plugin if it suits your needs.

The best web developers know when to say a project is complete to the client’s standards. This means you may need to let your HTML and CSS validation go. It’s okay, really. If you have one transparent PNG background that you throw the AlphaImage thinger for IE6 in the CSS for, that’s fine. It won’t validate, but the client doesn’t care because their background will look purty.

19

As I described in the OP, being a smart student means you can do a lot less work than everyone else. That becomes a disadvantage once you go to work.

At work knowing what to do becomes half the battle. It takes intelligence to know what to do, and then hard work to actually pull it off.

“The funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without ever having to do any work.” - Jeff Winger, Community, Pilot.

20

Cpincidentally, we just went through an exercise at work involving identifying core skills needs to do a given job. My job got these ones:

  • Excellent verbal communication skills
  • Deftness, flexibility, and skill in dealing with different types of people
  • Ability to work without any direct supervision
  • General understanding of the operational systems of businesses
  • Specific understanding of standards
  • Clear and unambiguous understanding and commitment to ethics (really, it’s specifically important to my job)
  • Strong written communication skills