Vitamin P

Vitamin P? When I made Aliyah, people told me it was hard to get a job without Vitamin P—“P” for “Protekzia”, meaning knowing someone on the inside. They used to say “Who needs Protekzia when you have friends?”

That is both true, in Israel as well as elsewhere in the world, and false, also in Israel and the rest of the world.

I arrived in Israel, knowing no one but the man I had jilted (who I then married two months later). Today I have a broad network of friends, acquaintances and colleagues collected over my years in the country. It takes time, but it happens, IF you go out and make it happen.

Let me tell you how I developed that network, and then how you can do the same even more easily than I did.

One day when my older daughter was just 2, I ran into a neighbor outside my apartment. She had just been for a job interview but it didn’t suit her and she suggested I call them. I took the part time clerical job. My boss Yoni left a short time later for a hi-tech startup. I stuck it for about a year, learning to use an early PC with its early word processor. The pay was less than my babysitting cost, so I left.

A few months later Yoni called me: he had heard I was going to the US and wanted me to hand carry a letter. Yeah, that was a thing in the 80s and no, I wasn’t going to the US. He ended up hiring me as a technical writer (what that was, I had no idea) at his startup. I learned a lot about software design and technical writing. After about a year, a colleague told me to call her husband, a senior engineer in solar energy. He hired me. I learned a lot about solar energy, construction, and engineering documentation. The day  it went bankrupt, a former colleague passed my name to his boss Yossi and I was hired at another hi-tech company, in digital TV. New field, new things to learn.

After 17 years there, I returned to solar energy working for that same engineer, now head of a new company. The next few years took me through several different jobs, mostly in solar energy, even a stint as a consultant at the same company. All found through former colleagues.

When I was fired last year, I called everyone I could think of. Yossi, from all those years ago, connected me to the social tech place where I have been working.

My Vitamin P came from all these steps, all the people I worked with in all those different places.

You probably had your own network where you used to live. It too was built from connections, alumni organizations, family, friends and colleagues. The “old boy network” works just fine, if you can plug into it.

You will get there in Israel too. But today there are shortcuts. There are organizations like Nefesh b’Nefesh or Yad l’Olim, and individual people like Hillel Fuld who delight in connecting potential olim to potential jobs. There is LinkedIn, WhatsApp groups, even Facebook, to connect you.

The most important thing you have to do is be flexible. Talk to them all. Consider what skills you have, consider where they can take you, even if it isn’t what you did before. My BA in linguistics (!) somehow led me into an engineering-centric career in the wildly different fields of solar energy and digital television. It might all be due to Doris Breslow, the 10^th grade English teacher who taught me how to understand and write what I had understood. You too have a set of skills you have developed all these years: what can you do with it here? That’s up to you.

Best of luck.