Guilding the lily

I wrote an opinion piece in this month's Revolution, but they edited out some of my 'funnier' jokes, so here is the unedited version. Yes, I know, the shorter version probably is better!

Guilding the lily

One of my first ever jobs was as a picker at a chicken farm. In essence, my job involved walking into a chicken shed, picking up six chickens, walking out of the shed and putting them into a crate. As a job it did have its limitations (one of which was that we were served a meal before our shift which invariably consisted of some variation of chicken) – but a major advantage was that in casual conversation it was pretty easy to explain my job to a stranger.

Over the years my working conditions have slightly improved, my diet is more varied, but my job titles and those of my colleagues have become more and more obscure. Does the woman in the street really have the faintest idea what an Information Architect actually does? Or a Usability Consultant… or a Flash Designer?

Alongside strange job titles comes a fog of even more mysterious jargon. We’re currently working on a training scheme for our graduate intake, so asked for some feedback from the previous year’s intake. The consistent feedback is that new entrants to the agency spend the first few weeks not having the first idea what anyone else is talking about.

Why do we do this? The answer I think comes in the decline of the guild system.

Once upon a time, those of us going into trade would cheerfully apprentice ourselves into the appropriate guild. The City of London publishes a convenient alphabetical list of guilds, from apothecaries through to woolmen, stopping off at bowyers, cordwainers, farriers, horners, fletchers, paviors, scriveners, wheelwrights, loriners, haberdashers and farriers.

Guilds didn’t just provide training; they also safeguarded wages. You couldn’t just pitch up in London and set yourself up as a scrivener or a cordwainer – you had to see through the appropriate apprenticeship period.

By contrast – and with due respect to my peers – you pretty much could pitch up at any agency and call yourself a planning director or a usability consultant. What’s to stop you? The main barrier to entry I suspect is simply being able to talk in jargon and keep a straight face. “I need to get the user process flow diagrams sorted out before I can finish these wireframes.” Of course you do!

Will jargon and strange job titles be enough to safeguard our cosy careers in the future? Of course it will! One of my favourite slides is all about ‘conversion attribution modelling’: surely only about 10 people in the world have a clue what I am on about?

And when it comes to jargon, our ultimate weapon is the acronym. What buying model shall we favour on this media plan? CPA or CPC, CPM or CPT? Oh drat, the last two are the same – but who would ever notice?
We can learn much from our colleagues in the IT community. They have trumped the simple acronym with even more obscure recursive acronyms! A recursive acronym is defined by Wikipedia as “an abbreviation that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands”. To put it another way, a recursive acronym is an in-joke at the expense of the poor innocent who ever ask what it means.

Great examples include LAME – Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder (hey, but even funnier, it is an MP3 encoder) or PINE which stands intriguingly for Pine Is Not Elm.

So we don’t need guilds, thank you very much. Absolutely anyone can work here, once they’ve spent a few years figuring out the job titles, jargon and acronyms. So long as they can put up with no one ever understanding what they do at work…