What do you do?

The first thing people often ask at networking events (after asking your name) is often ‘what do you do?’

And the thing of interest—what people are intrigued by—isn’t so much the adjectives—which often mean very little and are, of course, rather impersonal—but instead, what definitions people come up with to describe what they do.

Consider the difference between someone who says they’re “a marketer,” plain and flatly, and someone who says:

“My job is to help people make more-informed decisions by reaching targeted audiences with information that's relevant to what they’re searching for.”

That’s a mouthful. But it also gets to the crux of what they do. Both what they really do and how they feel about it.

Communicating you’re “a marketer” means very little. It might mean you’re a marketer who’s lost their soul for SEO. Or one’s who’s jaded with the system. Or one who will do everything they can—unprincipled as it might be—to win a short-term, vanity-metric focused game that puts them (or their company) in the spotlight.

It does little to let someone know how you spend your 8 hours a day, if you even care about it, or if you seem like someone who might be worth getting to know.

That's what a real job description ought to look like.

One that includes what you do and why it matters. Not just your job title.