Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

People can learn. A little basic vocabulary plus the desire to work hard means they are qualified to move into something new.

Years ago, a young woman told me about how she wanted to move into a Spanish linguist job. She had an English-Spanish dictionary and some books written in Spanish. She read as far as she could, looked up a word, repeat. This was incredibly slow and difficult, but that is how she started to teach herself.

Recently, I moved into a side area of a field that was relatively new to me. I faced the same thing as this young woman faced years ago. Read a little, hit a new term, study that term, resume reading, repeat.

I did an exercise a few weekends ago where I was transforming a text file from one format to another. I did so in the Python programming language. I Googled much about Python and regular expressions. To do so meant I needed the vocabulary to query Google. I had obtained that vocabulary a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Hey recruiters! Judging job candidates? Do they have enough vocabulary to start? Do they have enough desire to go through the above, slow, difficult procedure? If the answers are, “Yes,” they are qualified.