50 Shades of Resume: Aftermath

50 Shades of Resume is over. It’s been an interesting adventure, met a lot of great people, and I hope you learned some things. I will be doing a roundup afterwards, but I am also a bit tired of looking at resumes right now. I hope you’ll understand.

But what I did want to share is what I learned doing this. If you’re here there’s a good chance you write or blog an you may wonder just what you do – or don’t get out of doing this.

50 Shades of Resume’s goal was multifold:

  • To try a kind of themed writing.
  • To experiment with a long-term writing focus that’s very targeted.
  • To try a project that would involve people in the above.
  • To celebrate my “new” book.

So here’s what came of it:

  • This was really educational for me. If you do some kind of stunt/review pay attention, i’ll educate you. In fact, some of this will come up later.
  • It works if you do it in big pushes – but it will burn you out. I did a majority of these reviews in one day. Yes. One day. That was telling and fascinating, but also a lot of work. However it let me get into the “zone.”
  • Have an organizational structure for any project like this. early on I developed an outline of the basics of a review so I had an idea what to look for and what would work for people.
  • Pace. As cool as this was to do I think fifty in a ROW was honestly a bit much. Maybe every few days would have been better. I could have extended it to a year. But over time I got the impression the audience got a tad saturated.
  • This also helps projectize writing – it’s a good organizational lesson. DOing some kind of “themed writing” project may be good for you if you want to et more organized.
  • People got things out of this – several of the people I reviewed resumes for learned from their work. It’s nice to do one of these projects so they benefit.
  • If you’re looking for site hits, something like this seems unpredictable in the short term. Not sure what’ll happen in the long term.

So that’s what I learned. What’s next? Well, stay tuned, though I’ve got afew more things coming . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.