Hacking Your Career

Hacking Your Career

Last weekend I attended Oggcamp, an annual 2 day un-conference held in the UK and based around the free software and open hardware community. There were 4 tracks giving a wide range of really interesing talks such as: The New Space Race... Mars, An expression of elegance, exploring Base 3 as an alternative to binary, Ubuntu Pi flavour Maker and O.C.D, anxiety and me.

One of the talks that inspired me to write this blog was Hacking your own Career by Stuart Coulson (@spcoulson).

I will try and summarise (as best I can remember as I have been unable to locate the slide deck from the talk) the main points:

• CV's are becoming less relevant in helping you find that next (or first) step within your technology career.
• The HR team spend little time reading it and will probablly not understanding the technical babble.
  So what steps can you take to improve your emploibility prospects?

1. Stay relevant

• Keep your skill upto date. Get certified, if appropriate.
• There are plenty of (free) on-line courses from providers such as: Udacity, Coursera, EDX and even MongoDB university, to name a few. There are plently of oppurtunties online to grow your skills and knowledge and hopefully your career
• Keep your LinkedIn profile upto date with details of completed courses, certifications, etc.

2. Stay professional

• Create seperate social media accounts for your professional output. Have an account(s) relevant to your profession, follow people in this area, post relevant content
• Why not save your cat posts for your personal account(s)

3. Share your knowledge

• Finds way to share your knowledge to the wider world
• Start a blog and share the knowledge you already have. This is a great way to show to potential employeers the breadth and depth of your knowledge
• Code club, go to hackathons
• If you are a coder then set up a GITHUB account(other repository hosting service are available) and share your projects
• Try to attend tech conferences, barcamps and the like as they are an ideal oppurtunity to network, learn and share your knowledge. Why not give a talk!

I have probablly missed some (or all) of his points but I hope that I have not mis-represented the centeral ideas.

I hope this helps – good luck out there!