Advice

Pro-Fan Pride: The Joy of Knowing

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What makes you great as a profan/progeek – or a fan/geek/otaku that wants to turn their hobbies into a job?

The fact that you know this.

Seriously.  You, from your love of anime to your disturbingly deep knowledge of sports statistics, have an idea of just what you want to do with your life.  Your fanfic, fanart, web pages, blog posts, reviews, what have you all give you a bloody good idea of just what you should be doing in your career.

Right now you're lucky.  Right now you have direction.  Right now you have something you care passionately, deeply, obsessively about and will push yourself to achieve.  It could be anything from finishing a video game to writing a web page.

But you care and you know what you want to do.

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Job Research: Look for the Best Of

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You have any trouble finding the right resources for your job and career?

If you're the average progeek, there's two situations:

  • You haven't done enough research, and when you do you are overwhelmed with the books, websites, meetups, and other resources and have no idea to start.
  • You have done the research long ago, and you're still painfully aware of just how much stuff there is out there you can use to find a job, research a career, etc.

One of the problems we progeeks face is, being information-oriented one way or another, being plugged in, is that we're swept away by a flood of options when we do career research.  Sure, we're great at surfing the web, mining amazon, and finding local event boards, but we have no idea where to start.

We could go do everything, and read everything, but we just don't have the time.

We could be very selective, but we worry we'll miss something.

We have frankly, no idea where to even start

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Cultural Awareness and Careers

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In my average day I deal with people from five different countries, individuals in four different time zones, and have work shared between three different countries.  These numbers add up to make me one very busy person walking what feels like an infinite amount of very fine lines.

Whatever your work is, especially if you're a progeek, odds are you are going to have to deal with people from many different countries and cultures.  We are in a global economy (in case you haven't heard), the world is a much smaller place thanks to communications technologies, and with this economy, everyone wants a piece of the economic pie.

On top of all of that if you're in any kind of large city or development zone, like the greater Toronto area, the Baltimore-DC corridor, or Silicon Valley, then you almost certainly will work with people from all over the world.  You may not be aware of it or think about it, but take a moment and ask yourselves about the backgrounds of your co-workers and clients.

What this means is that you'd better get culturally aware.

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