One thing I want to do is provide you with some specific ideas of things you can
do to improve your skills and get what you want out of your career. So today I’m
going to give you a few ideas of things you can do to be more intentional about
building your career (or *gasp* “personal brand”).
I didn’t start out intentionally seeking/tracking followers, but over time I
learned a few things that could gain me a wider reach. I realized that by
intentionally building upon my career and my personal brand I felt like I had
more job security. After building enough of a following, I’m much less worried
about what would happen if I were to suddenly be let go from my job. I could
just send you all an email and send out a tweet and because I’ve developed a
following of you good people who seem to think I know what I’m doing 1) people
would see it and 2) people would care. It also makes me feel more confident that
I don’t have to do a job that I would rather not do and I can have the
flexibility to choose between multiple great options. This is a great position
for a husband and father of four to be in.
So here are a few things that I’ve done that have worked out pretty well for me
and I think could be reproducible for many of you.
Whether you’re building your clout inside your company or outside, communicating
your accomplishments is really important. You may have saved the company from
financial ruin by fixing that critical bug last night, but if nobody knows the
scope of what you did or even that you’re the one who did it then you’re not
going to receive the credit. You don’t have to be all cocky about it (that’s
pretty annoying), and if you weren’t the only one who helped make something
happen make sure you give credit where it’s due. At the end of the day, make
sure that people understand the value that you’re creating.
I’m not talking about getting paid for the same work by two different companies
(that is probably a really bad idea and illegal I’m guessing). What I am saying
is that if someone at work asks you a question about testing a react component,
then maybe you can share your answer in a public gist on GitHub and send it to
your co-worker as well as twitter. Just an idea there. I do this ALL. THE. TIME.
I get questions about getting noticed and recognized a lot. Remember that it
takes a very long time to get noticed and when you only have a few dozen
followers on twitter or other platforms your awesome content can never seem to
get to the right places. But I can tell you that even when someone shares
awesome content with me, I’m less likely to look at it if I can tell they’ve
been spamming it out to everyone they can think of or they bug me about it a
lot.
Respect people and their time. They may not always be able to help you or give
your stuff the time of day. But be patient and keep creating things that are
solving real problems YOU are experiencing, and eventually that will resonate
with enough people that they don’t want to miss your next big value add.
If you’re publishing to a domain you don’t control, then you should consider
making a change. I was luckily grandfathered into Medium’s custom domain thing
before they stopped doing that which is why my medium blog is at
blog.kentcdodds.com rather than medium.com/@kentcdodds. I am planning on
moving off of medium soon (UPDATE, I did:
Goodbye Medium) and when I do I’ll easily be able to
redirect all my blog posts to my new custom platform because I own the domain
name that all the links on twitter and elsewhere are pointing to.
This is also why I care so much about having
a URL shortener.
When I switched from tinyletter.com to buttondown.email and then to
convertkit.com, I was able to simply update kcd.im/news to point to the new
sign-up page and all existing links started taking people to the right place.
Owning the domain and sharing links to domains that you own can be very
powerful.
This is very anecdotal, but I’ve found that the time of day/week that you share
your content can have an impact on who sees it. Consider that nobody’s looking
at twitter on Friday evenings and people often don’t look at articles over the
weekends (there’s a reason most newsletters are sent during the week days). I
typically try to announce my stuff earlier in the week and often in the morning
before many people in the US really get to working and before many people on the
other side of the pacific go to sleep.
People often need to see your avatar associated with useful content multiple
times before they realize that they like what you’re producing. So pushing out
consistent useful stuff on multiple platforms is really helpful. As a part of
this, using a consistent name and avatar (that actually looks like you if
possible… I realize this is a luxury that some people do not have due to
terrible stalker situations 🙁) across platforms that you rarely change (mine
has been the same for… a long time) can really help people recognize who you
are and associate your content with you on each of those platforms. Also, having
a consistent username across those platforms is also helpful.
Another note about consistency is to consider the message you’re trying to
communicate to your audience and stick to that message as much as you can. Maybe
leave the cat and baby pictures for other platforms or accounts (I realize that
nobody’s a mono-dimensional person and we should embrace our multi-dimensional
selves, but this is just something that I’ve noticed has an affect on my
effectiveness at reaching people so I thought I’d mention it).
As an example, I’ve recently gotten into writing a novel. I’ve tweeted about it
a lot. I decided that I’m going to get more serious about this novel writing
stuff and will probably be tweeting about it more, so I created
a new twitter account @kent_writes for the purpose.
This one carries with it the assumption that you actually have problems which
don’t already have solutions. The npm ecosystem is full of solutions and you can
probably find solutions to many use cases already. Don’t bother spending a lot
of time building the next “redux simplifier” package because there are a million
of those out there and frankly I don’t personally find them interesting at all.
And don’t invent problems just so you can create solutions to them. Nobody will
care. Contribute to existing solutions, and solve problems where there are no
solutions or the existing solutions are lacking.
Building your career clout/personal brand is important and takes a lot of time.
Be patient and humble. Lift others up and help people in your own way.
Eventually you will get recognized for it. I’m not saying you won’t fall prey to
our societies natural and unfortunate biases. Many people have to deal with
those on a regular basis and it’s totally not fair. Keep working at it though
and you will find success.
Call to action:
Choose one of the following things to do this week to be intentional about
building your career:
- Write the blog post you wish existed last week when you were learning
something new - Answer your co-worker’s question in a public space (YouTube, gist, etc.) and
share it - Write an email to your higher-ups describing the role you and your team mates
played in a recently completed project. Tell them you just want to share
something you were proud of and that you love working at a place where you can
tackle such challenges. - Go for a walk (sometimes you just need to take care of yourself and think)
