It has been 3.5 years since I graduated college and while I am definitely not doing the job I thought I was coming to Georgia to do, in every stretch of my 2005-self's imagination, the past years have been an overwhelming success.

I am not sure what the reason (economy, younger friends graduating, older friends unfulfilled, etc...) but for some reason this summer I got bombarded with questions about how to find the right job.

So I am going to embark on a series of blog posts about work. Upcoming topics include The Interview: It Goes Both Ways and What Does the Job Really Pay: A Look Beyond Money. There might be a few others...

But before we venture into that, we must first recognize what a company exists for: to make money. A company does not exist to employ you. And it does not really exist to provide a service.

It seems somewhere in our coddled generation we got the idea that we go to college and then there will be jobs out there with the sole purpose to employ us. Wrong. The sooner one realizes this, the sooner they will be successful with their job search.

As one prepares for the job search they have to ask one question: am I a person who makes a company money or saves a company money (see #4 in this MSN article). If it is a non-profit or education it is slightly different, the question is do I directly fulfill the mission of the organization or do I save the organization money/resources.

Take for example my bestfriend CJ and I. CJ is a phenomenal salesman. At the age of 26, he is already a top performer in a very large corporation. He brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue annually. He is definitely someone who makes a company money (and a lot of it). I on the other hand am a horrendous salesperson. I just don't have the skills. But I save organizations money like nobody's business. The amount of people (and therefore salary) it would take to replace all the different things I do at my current job would probably at least be three and probably more.

It was the same way when I was 16 and worked at the courthouse in Indiana. I got brought on to help with an influx in tax warrants. They were piling up faster than they could process them. But my value to the organization was that I figured out a way to process them 4x quicker than they were doing before. That saved the courthouse money because they didn't have to hire 4 other people to do the job.

Sometimes these traits stay the same over life (i.e. CJ and I will never trade positions), but other times they change. Take for example Attorneys. When you are fresh out of law school, your value to the practice is that they bill your time for a whole lot more than what they pay you. Thus you are saving the firm money. But as you age in your practice, your value becomes your client portfolio and thus you are paid more due to the business you bring into the firm.

Figuring out your role in an organization is not just monumentally important for the interview process, but also to figure out whether or not you'll be happy with your job. I would be miserable if I had sales quotas. Thus I don't waste my time in the job search for positions like that.

Come back later the week for more on the work series.