Advice

Promoting Professional Geekery #48 – Use Your Progeeky Viewpoint On Geeky Events

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(For more Promoting Professional Geekery, see this Roundup of past columns.)

Geek events are great for careers – they let you attend career events, network, etc.  You know I’m a big backer of going progeek at conventions and more.  I kind of write about it obsessively.

But there’s also a way to help people who do the events to make it pay off for their career no matter what they do.

That may sound odd – after all running a Hetalia game contest or a panel on the history of Star Trek may not sound that professional.  But it’s really all in perspective – you can help people see the professional potential in what they do.

See, running a con, running a fannish event, running a club, takes a lot of skills and abilities.  A lot of events are like businesses, or seminars, or other supposedly “professional” things.  The experiences of doing them could be valuable to careers – as long as people know how to leverage them and portray them to clients and employers.

That’s where you come in with this professionally geeky potential – helping people see the opportunities.

See you, the progeek, can look at these events and help people realize how to use them.  It just takes a little perspective, training your eye to see the opportunities out there.  For instance:

  • If people work together at a well-run con, they should act as references for each other.  It’s literally like working together.
  • People who do specific geeky events should put their skills on their resumes (and note their hobbies in more details).
  • Geeks who publish various progeeky/geeky things should put them on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, use samples, etc.

You can probably think of many more opportunities right now just looking at that list.  For that matter, you can probably think of a few friends who should be sprucing up their resumes right about now.

This is because you have the experience to see the professional, and thus progeeky potential in people.  So start taking that unique viewpoint into fannish groups, cons, gaming teams, and more.  Start looking for the professional potential – and helping people realize it.

It’s all around you.  Trust me, I know . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/

 

 

 

Use Your Skills On The Job Search

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So you’ve got all these skills and abilities and geektastic inclinations.  You want to use them on the job search, and so you put them on a resume or talk about them.  Let me suggest you take it a bit further.

I suggest you make your job search a way of leveraging your progeek skills and interests.  In fact I suggest you try basing some of it on what you do anyway.

Read more

Just Go Buy A Copy Of Make Magazine Already

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I would like to very strongly recommend you give a look at Make Magazine (http://makezine.com/).

I have a friend who’s into Maker culture.  He also is the reason I now lust for a 3D printer, and he got me to go to Maker Faire (http://makerfaire.com/).  One of my interests now is to examine the connections and possible connections between geek and maker culture.

In that spirit, trust me, go buy a copy of this and take a look at it and see if it’s you.

Essentially it’s a collection of projects, reviews, and interesting stories by Makers doing what they do – making, repairing, and molding stuff at home.  It’s science, imagination, engineering, cooking, and double-reverse Mythbusters fused together in what is essentially a publication of applied home mad science.  Decorative LEDs, books on fermentation, furniture from PVC, it’s all there.

Why you should check it out?

  • Well it’s pretty cool.
  • It’s pure geek culture, even if Maker culture is both geeky and it’s own distinct thing.
  • There are a lot of things you probably have not heard about that you bloody well should as a geek.  Programmers should know about systems like the Arduino.  Cosplayers can find amazing tools and gizmos.  Science geeks will just pass out with pleasure.
  • It’a an examination of an evolving culture – finding out about the Makers has taught me a lot about an evolving “literati” culture.
  • It’s a way to understand how people leverage and spread knowledge, and modern knowledge.  Just notice how a guy can make a toy with his understanding 3D modeling and a 3D printer, upload it to a site, then everyone can make it.  Now multiply that . . .

Now my “make” is books and cooking, not Quadracopters or coffee makers that turn on via the internet.  But it’s still valuable for me (and exposes me to a lot of fascinating tech).  Give it a shot.

And, yes, I plan to explore Geek/Maker/Career intersections more.  You’ve been warned.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/