I’ve been thinking a great deal these days about how individuals, small businesses, and creative types (authors and writers, artists, dancers, musicians and composers, etc) market themselves, grow professionally, and otherwise make a living, keep food on the table, thrive, not just survive.

My sense is that every professional, regardless of career choice, has to learn how to, as we all used to call it, pound the pavement. This isn’t taught in college. You don’t get this through on-the-job training. It doesn’t matter whether you work for a company, an institution, a non-profit, a university or college, or what size it is. If you don’t consider yourself a “free agent” throughout your career, inside or outside your place of employment, you are going to suffer.

There are fewer full-time, tenured professorships at colleges and universities, and more adjunct professors. I think we all are pretty aware of how tenuous corporate employment is in this globalized world. Early retirement programs occur frequently. Massive layoffs are common. Unions have little power anymore. Government relies on outsourced contractors precisely to avoid more permanently employed workers. Inside an organization, the tyranny of the pyramid-like hierarchy and hollowed out organizations speak for themselves: Fewer positions are available as you climb the corporate ladder.

I read Daniel Pink’s book, Free Agent Nation, more than ten years ago when it was issued. Having been “telecommuting” for years, and encouraged to work away from the office (this inside a Fortune 500 company) several days a month as early as 1982, I found most of Pink’s content quaint, obvious, and useless. Yet he propagated the important lesson that we all need to think like free agents. By 2001, when it first came out, I had been chief editor of several engineering trade publications based in New York City but lived 70 miles away, came into the office one or two days a week, and then in 1997 moved to St. Louis, and ran the content operations “remotely.” In 2000, I jumped into the dot com pool, and quickly stepped out less than a year later, dried myself off, and started my own consulting company.

In short, I’ve operated as an independent inside and outside companies since the 1980s. I’ve had to come up with new ideas, nurture them, get people to buy into them, execute them, market them, sell them, and close, close, close the deal. As if that’s not enough, it doesn’t end there. Then you have to chase the money in the door (what, you think just because you have a contract, someone automatically pays you?). You have to ask for the money on the front end, and not rest easy until the check has cleared the other bank at the other end.

These days, in the creative world, self-marketing has been blown out of proportion, almost, with all the tools at one’s disposal, to “talk” to the world through your “network.” The fact is, the creative world is the world of “rock stars.” If people complain about the 99% vs the 1% in the regular economy, in the creative economy, it’s probably more like 99.999% to 0.0001%. That is, a tiny sliver achieves notoriety either in dollars or acclaim, and the rest either starve, beg for grants, moonlight, work from an academic platform, or live off of someone else.

The bottom line is, if you think you are going to build it and they will come (much as I LOVE “Field of Dreams”), you are depending on dumb luck to bail you out. Ever so rarely does the cream rise to the top. Rather, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Those with the most admired credentials get the leg up, and the rest of the body. Real free agents, those from the sports world (where I suppose the phrase was coined), frankly, have actual agent representatives that do all the heavy lifting. They don’t get paid their commission until their client’s check clears the bank. They don’t eat until the the transaction is complete.

You eat what you kill. Yes, that’s brutal. But it’s true, if you translate not-so-ancient survival skills to modern-day ones.

Were you taught how to survive in the Darwinian world of business in college or high school? I know I wasn’t. And that was four decades ago. 95% of what I learned had nothing to do with the real world, and everything to do with continuing on to graduate school, which I had no intention of doing at the time. The one thing I learned in engineering school was the brutality of discipline. The same goes for my eighteen years in a Fortune 500 corporation. I was forced to take professional development courses in management and sensitivity training, not for my benefit, but mostly intended to protect the company from lawsuits and manage personnel risk.

We might have honed leadership skills in sports, Scouts, clubs, fraternities, class, places of worship, and other outlets. But hunting and gathering, moving money from one person’s pocket to yours (hate to be crass, but whether you are trying to convince someone to put their coins in the Sunday offering plate, selling your self-published book, employed by a corporation, displaying your wares at a crafts fair, or managing a store on main street, that’s what business is), involves so many skills (which can be learned) which aren’t even deemed necessary in academic or corporate circles.

How do you present yourself as a confident creative with high quality content for others, without coming across as an arrogant, self-absorbed prick? Can you become a self-made professional without making everyone around you cringe when you show up?

I often tell my clients, after laboring to get an article in a publication, a report completed, or a presentation ready for an industry meeting, that now the hard part begins. Leveraging that effort so that it gets in front of more eyeballs, contributes more to the marketing effort, generates interest in the company or product or technology, etc., is where the rubber meets the road. Academics just have to list the paper in their c.v. People in the real world have to sell something and then collect the money.

Isn’t it strange that a student’s entire future depends on benchmarks no one gives a crap about after the first hire? I’m talking about grades and standardized test scores.

Have you ever been at a trade show, an arts and crafts fair, an employment fair, or something else where a thousand people are lined up in identical tents or booths promoting something? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed the booth person sitting, waiting in the back for a prospective buyer to approach them. What? You feast on the transaction you close, the deal you negotiate, the sale you make.

Sitting back and waiting is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy!

Sadly, in a world where it’s every professional for him or herself, where every resume has to stand out in the pile on the HR officer’s desk, where every artist is out begging for funds and grants, you better know how to value your story, how to tell your story, and how to get paid for your story. Sometimes you have to do this immediately in an email. Sometimes you have to do this inside a multi-year strategy for getting past the usual gatekeepers.

You better know how to identify your competitive advantage, ask for the money, communicate effectively (and I don’t mean how to do power point presentations, or write a letter, but persuade powerfully without turning off the recipient), sell and market, run a meeting, write contracts, establish trust, promote yourself, paint with numbers, work a crowd, read people, understand the hierarchy and pecking order, cultivate an organization’s corporate culture, and work the government.

If you don’t have these skills, your professional advancement will slow or cease.

My conclusion now, and this after shepherding my two daughters through college and high school and running an independent consulting business, is that young adults, as well seasoned veterans and professionals, require a boot camp of sorts, a boot camp during which “they get their minds right” (to quote a favorite line of mine from the prison movie, “Cool Hand Luke”) about developing the skills you need as an independent.

Today, the hard work begins after you graduate from college, after you take early retirement from the company, after you believe someone who says, “you are so good at this, you should make it a business,” and even after you are hired by some firm.

School does not fully prepare anyone for the real world of work, nor does a corporate career. Thirty years working for one firm means you have a terrific understanding of how to operate in one organization, which may not say much about every other organization you’ll have to deal with as an independent.

Boot camp may sound harsh. But the military does this for good reason. You have to get your mind right about how to survive without becoming someone else’s road kill.