Some people love them (count me in) and some hate them, but analogies are what assist many people in getting their point across where otherwise it would have fallen on deaf ears.

So it was funny for me to read in the Brazen Careerist the other day as Penelope Trunk was making several very valid points about how people should invest in their careers and make decisions that will help them along the way, and to see her use a rather interesting analogy (that of Ashley Dupre – call girl to Eliot Spitzer). As you may imagine several of her reader took umbrage to the reference and somehow lost the nugget of knowledge she was passing along (oops!).

In that it was unfortunate as they failed to understand the point, but it also raises one of the biggest issues any two people have, and that is the ability to effectively communicate. Let’s face it two people who don’t share a common history (brother/sister, best friends, etc.) don’t have a good understanding of the other person, their vocabulary and their sense of humor, and therefore have a huge potential for getting it all wrong during the most innocuous conversations, much less during an interview.

So I’ll continue to compare your career path to grocery lines, and the interview process to dating and you leaving your company to ending a bad marriage because sometimes analogies are the only way to make your point clear without beating people over the head with the message.