Glossary
Every term this course coins, one per week, with what it actually means and which skill it is smuggling.
Twelve terms, one per teaching week
A course that has invented its own jargon for career advice is, admittedly, part of the joke. The glosses are not: each one attaches to something you have to be able to do, and each links back to the week that teaches it.
They also refer to each other. Receipt debt is what the plausibility budget is spent on; seamwork is the audit of the truthfloor you set in week 1.
Coined week by week, in teaching order
The lexicon
- Week 01truthfloor
The lowest claim you could make about yourself and still defend it in a room containing someone able to check. Most CVs are written a full storey above their author's truthfloor, which is survivable right up until the follow-up question.
- Week 02reqspeak
The dialect job advertisements are written in. Every ad is four documents stapled together: legal boilerplate, a wishlist nobody expects met, the work you would actually do, and an accidental confession about the last person who held the job.
- Week 03gapshape
Not how large the distance between you and the role is, but what shape it has — which parts close in a fortnight, which take a year, and which you will simply have to say out loud. The specific version is the one you can plan against.
- Week 04receipt debt
The accumulated distance between the claims on your materials and the evidence you could produce for them inside ninety seconds. Invisible until somebody says show me, at which point it is charged in full.
- Week 05the load-bearing anecdote
The one story you have told well enough that it holds up under four different questions without buckling. You need three, not twelve. Preparing is not dishonest; improvising badly is not more authentic.
- Week 06artefact varnish
The layer of finish sitting between your work and the person assessing it. Thin varnish makes real work legible. Thick varnish conceals that there is not much underneath, and anyone who hires for a living can tell the difference by touch.
- Week 07the pre-warmed stranger
Somebody you have never met who nevertheless has a specific reason to reply, because you did the reading first. Warm one stranger properly rather than mailing forty, and expect silence, which is the standard reply and not a verdict.
- Week 08plausibility budget
The finite quantity of unevidenced claim a single document or conversation can carry before none of it is believed. The budget is shared, which is why one indefensible buzzword discredits the true sentence beside it.
- Week 09interview weather
The conditions of the room you did not create and cannot change. You prepare the parts you control: structure, examples, the questions you ask, and recovery from one bad answer. Everything else is weather, and weather is not a verdict on your worth.
- Week 10the negotiation flinch
The half-second in which your face answers the salary question before you do. Entry-level negotiation is narrower than the internet claims but it is never zero, and the flinch is what costs you the parts that were available.
- Week 11competence lag
The interval between being hired for a role and being able to perform it: normal, universal, and almost never mentioned at the offer stage. Pretending you have no lag is the fastest way to lengthen it.
- Week 12seamwork
The join between the version of you that was performed and the version that quietly became true, and the labour of deciding what to do about it. Seamwork is the audit: keep what is honest scaffolding, and go and learn the rest.