(For more Promoting Professional Geekery, see this Roundup of past columns.)
Several of my promoting Professional Geekery are about how you can encourage Progeekery at a con, from doing a presentation to doing a career track. There’s more you can do.
You can be “Event Support.”
A good career event has a lot of components. I know, I wrote a book on it:
- There’s the right people.
- There’s the handouts.
- There’s various followups like websites.
- There’s audio-visual presentations.
- There’s . . . well everything that doesn’t involve designing or doing the actual event.
Don’t feel like doing any events? Want to help out more? Tackle these areas and help out others doing their con career events.
If you’re a DTP wiz, do handouts. If you’re the video guru you probably already are on AV staff for a con. If you do website stuff you can whip up a quick landing page for post-event contacts. Recruit people. You’ve probably got some skills that people doing career events could use.
You can spread yourself far and wide and help a lot of people. Someone takes a few hours preparing for one panel, where you can bang out a handout or a video schedule for several! You might even find you like this better than getting in front of an audience . . .
There’s also a great career advantage to this – you can match how you help out con professional events with your own skills and interests. This means every event becomes practice, skill-building, and resume-filling – all while having fun and helping your fellow and future progeeks.
And if you can’t go and do or run events, you also feel a bit less guilty since you help out . . .