As I have made job searching my personal brand for the past year, talking about work has slowly but surely taken over my life. Networking coffee chats have become a permanent fixture in my weekly schedule, and whenever I catch up with my friends from uni, the hottest gossip from the weekend and a play-by-play of someone’s latest Hinge date have been overtaken by work crushes, promotions, company restructurings and office drama. Not satisfied with all that, I decided to delve deeper into the realm of sexy jobs (because enough has been said about bullshit jobs and fake email jobs1 and how they are reshaping professional aspirations.
On Unexpected Compliments and Career Advice from Unorthodox Sources
I find that unusual or unexpected compliments are always the ones that seem to stick. I was once told by a (surprisingly polite) drunk man that I was the sexiest picnic blanket he had ever seen. I am reminded of that every time I reach for the backless plaid dress I was wearing on that muggy summer night. In my post-grad, quarter-life crisis, unemployment era, I often find myself asking people for career advice2. A newfound level of agency has left me longing for someone to tell me what to do with my life3. I’ve become embarrassingly earnest, looking to the people I admire for guidance, whether it be a girl a year ahead of me in high school who perpetually had her shit together and had me considering a career in corporate law, or a writer I was newly obsessed with who seemed like a Nora Ephron and Carrie Bradshaw lovechild, dishing out big sister advice after several glasses of wine. When I was told I was pretty and smart enough for a sexy job, I initially laughed it off, but the idea stuck, and I found myself dissecting the term with my friends who had sexy and unsexy jobs alike (contributing my rich takes as someone who had no job at all).
What is a Sexy Job?
I think people have varying ideas of what a sexy job might be. I’ve had to explain myself more than once when trying to convince people to talk to me about their sexy jobs4. A sexy job might be the job itself, and unsexy jobs at sexy places might also make the cut. I have once again done what I do best and taken to the masses (read: put up a question box on my Instagram stories) to try and get to the bottom of this question. Whilst there was some confusion around the term itself (sexy job and sex work might seem pretty similar, but they carry completely different connotations), there was some consensus on what a sexy job entails. Frequently recurring themes included passion and a certain perception of what your job might look like. Main characters have sexy jobs5. Sexy jobs are the ones that get people eagerly asking you to go on as you explain what you do. People with sexy jobs are unfamiliar with the glazed over look and mindless nodding that usually comes along with talking about work (as someone who spent way too much time at Maggie’s6 as a student, I will say that on the bright side, the majority of my financial education came from men in button downs who explained the difference between venture capital and private equity whilst we waited in line for our G&Ts).
You don’t have a Sexy Job, you are a Sexy Job — The Ultimate Litmus Test
This piece would be incomplete without a contribution from the experts themselves, so I reached out to my friends with the sexiest jobs. After all my toiling to come up with a comprehensive definition, the answer was clearly laid out as I looked down at my list. The sexy jobs I covered were in a variety of sectors, but they all had one thing in common: they were an identifier. Whenever I introduced any of these friends to someone new, my pitch was always the same: their name, followed by their job title. I find that what someone does for work is rarely the most interesting thing about them, but when it comes to someone with a sexy job, this rule no longer applies. My friends had a variety of sexy jobs, ranging from F1 engineers to urban farmers to chefs and glossy magazine editors. There were the non-traditionally sexy jobs made sexy by a noble motivation, such as environmental lawyers, or by a sexy place of employment, such as data analysts at big fashion houses.
I’m a Professional Coffee Chatter
Throughout my year of job (and soul) searching, I have had more coffee7 chats than ever before. Sometimes I was applying for a specific role within a company and wanted to learn about the dynamic and have an in, but mostly I was asking for both career and life advice. I wanted to know how people ended up in their current roles, what they considered to be the key elements that got them there, and, probably my favourite, what advice they would give their twenty-year-old selves. When it came to job titles and industries, I reached out to all the usual suspects for a marketing graduate: account executives at agencies, strategists, in-house professionals, as well as some friends8 working in consulting. These conversations helped me define which area I had a specific interest in and which roles would best align with my skills. At many of these coffee chats, however, I found myself talking about this newsletter. Something I started on the side when I was bored out of my mind and going crazy looking at a (predominantly red) postgrad job application spreadsheet. I also broadened my scope; I slid into LinkedIn DMs, reached out to anyone with a cool-sounding job and pestered my friends’ significant others with questions during dinner parties.
Asking the Experts (and maybe getting a job in the process)
I had originally wanted to interview some people with sexy jobs to include in this piece. I had more people with interesting careers in my life than I realised. I had grown up hearing my dad’s wild stories of his time working at MTV before I was born (though I doubt he’d go on the record) and lost count of how many times I explained my mom’s job to friends and airplane seatmates whenever I joined her on a work trip to some random destination9, and though I think revenue and customs are not a particularly sexy field of work (sorry mom), there are some sexy perks (she has been to 83 countries and counting). The more I spoke to people about this project, the more I wanted to share the conversations I was having, and thus, the Sexy Jobs vertical was born. As I was overwhelmed with people dishing out the best career and life advice, I felt like there wasn’t enough room within a single 2000-word email to contain all the good stuff I was getting. I’m not sure if one can make a career out of asking for career advice, but if anyone is expertly suited for the job, it’s me10. For the coming months, tune in to Sexy Jobs with Julia Novis to listen to me ask for professional and life advice, discuss the unglamorous sides of a glamorous career and check out the profiles of the people with the sexiest jobs I know.
Call to action! If you (or anyone you know) has a sexy job and would be open to having a chat about it, please reach out!11
though I would love to have either
and my Substack career peaked when my question was featured on a Feed Me guest lecture
and the confession scene from Fleabag has never felt more relevant
note to self: middle-aged men will give you odd looks when you (a 22-year-old looking to make money) bring up sexy jobs
think whatever the protagonist of a 90s Rom Com might do for a living
a real West London institution: for the uninitiated, head to Chelsea for finance bros and Abba galore
and occasional pint
and I now know more about the Harmonised System than the average customs officer
I’ve probably gotten my 10,000 hours in at this point
at sexyjobsjulia@gmail.com
I can’t wait to listen to “Sexy Jobs with Julia Novis”!