20190420.0430

Another of the training courses LinkedIn has suggested for me is one titled Developing Your Professional Image. It seems to be another instance of the platform misrecognizing my presentation on itself--and there is not really any chance that it is sending me a message I might not want to hear. For as I watched the introductory video clip, which lays out the course's ideas and rationale, I noted that it is aimed explicitly and specifically at new and soon-to-be college graduates who need to transition from campus life to life outside it. I have long since graduate college, and repeatedly; I am fourteen years past my bachelor's, twelve past my master's, and seven past my doctorate as I write this. I am two years at my present agency, and even if I am still peripherally involved in academe, it is not as a student sitting in the rows of desks or lost amid a large lecture hall. I am clearly not the target audience of the course.
That said, I may well still review the materials when I have world enough and time. I know that I continue to dress for the most part as I did while I was working to be a full-time academic--and, as I was doing so in the humanities, that meant more for ease of use and comfort than for any particular professional identity. I favor polo shirts and either jeans or khaki slacks; I've been described as dressing like foodservice management, generally, even though it has tended to come across to many of my students and no few of my colleagues as a bit stuffy. While living in The City, though, I generally did a bit better, if not much, favoring button-up long-sleeve shirts worn with their collars open. (I try not to wear a tie; closing my collars usually does not work well for me, and leaving the collar open with a tie on strikes my eye as strange and unwelcome.) What I have seen about people in the kind of position I expect to be taking on soon shows me that that is fairly standard attire in the field in my part of the world.
If I am going to make an effort to appear more professional, to look more like I belong in the line of work I mean to go into before too long, I should probably start by dressing more like the people in that line of work. I'm not necessarily fond of the idea of doing as much ironing as that, but I'm less fond of the idea of spending the money to have others do that work for me; I guess I'll have to handle it. And if that is all I have to do, then I am in a good place to move ahead, I think.