No Place For Ninjas At Work

AP Photo/Junji Kurokawa

When I was a child, every Saturday afternoon, my sister and I would turn on Channel 5 in New York and watch the latest kung-fu movie, complete with bad dubbing and well choreographed fight scenes.  Then we would proceed to become ninjas, complete with black mask, and beat the tar out of each other until our parents came home from the grocery store and punished us for destroying out home.  I’m not sure why they would get so mad; that’s what ninjas do.  I can’t get the image out of my head of Storm Shadow from the GI-Joe cartoon, complete with his traditional ninja garb.  Now, apparently, we can add a business suit to the mix.

I guess we have never outgrown our desire to be a ninja, because suddenly, the word ninja has crept into our job search.  According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, some 800 current or former ninjas have public profiles on LinkedIn.  No longer can we just inform people that we are a social media specialist…and don’t use guru, that’s so passé.  Today, ninja is the term that means specialized skills.  Again, we can simply call them specialists, but what do I know.  A ninja sounds cooler.  Look next to you; Jack from accounting – the one playing Solitaire on his computer – yes, he is actually an accounting ninja.  Bet you didn’t know it from just looking at him.  He’s not wearing a mask.  He doesn’t carry a cool sword, but almost as simultaneously as he missed that the Jack of Spades should be placed on the Queen of Hearts, he did the company’s entire payroll. It took him mere seconds.  Ninja!

Anyone can be a ninja.  I would change my title to Communications Ninja if the business cards saying I was a Communications Manager had not already been printed.  I have a black belt in press pitching.  Decided you need a change, just take the last part of your title out and replace it with ninja.  Unemployed – become a job search ninja and sneak up on a new career.  And yes, there are those who label themselves job search ninjas and yes, if you haven’t realized it by now, the idea of using the word ninja on a professional site, in your career search, or <gasp> on your resume frightens me.  We are still in the middle of an economic crisis that is only starting to show signs of life again.  If you think you can get a job calling yourself an investing ninja assassin, an actual title LinkedIn data scientist Monica Rogati linked to and discussed in a San Francisco Chronicle article, I have some stocks in Lehman Brothers I would like to sell you.

A ninja, as I said earlier, is something we pretended to be when we were children.  It’s time to grow up.  We are in a business world now.  It’s time to act like professionals.  Let’s not bring LinkedIn into the Myspace age, where everyone is 15 and has ninja themed profile pages.  In a world that strives for professionalism, the use of such a childish phrase as ninja may sound cool (it’s not that cool – Vanilla Ice made a song called “Ninja Rap” once…yes…Vanilla Ice), but it devalues the job search and the very careers so many people have worked hard to obtain.

This is just my opinion.  Someone else at Vault may disagree.  The readers may disagree.  Let me know what you think.  Am I over analyzing?  Am I being a buzzkill?  Am I correct?  Or is there a better word to describe experts in their field?  What’s the next best job title – maybe my little nephew can grow up to be a public relations cowboy!