Features

Promoting Professional Geekery #33 – Help Out In HR

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

So you’re trying to promote professional geekery.  If you work at a company chances are you have an HR department that . . . isn’t.

HR is a tough profession, as is the entire hiring and hiring-related world of careers (which is why I recommend helping out recruiters).  It’s tougher when people don’t exactly get, understand, or otherwise know how to work with some people, like creative, technical, or scientific types.  Like, in short, geeks.

If you’ve ever been at an employer who didn’t “get” you, or worked with someone in a similar situation, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  I’m pretty sure you’ve had one of these experiences, if not both (I’ve had both).

This means less geeks on the right jobs, less happy geeks at the jobs they do have, and an HR department trying to figure out what wen’t wrong.  Yeah, I know, sounds familiar.

So this is where, you, the professional geek come in.  It’s time for you to offer your services to HR so they know how to deal with people like, well . . . you.

  • You can help them understand technical and career issues for potential interviewees – or for that matter help conduct interviews on subjects you understand.
  • You can get them up to date on cultural issues to help them understand if they’re misunderstanding people – or ignoring them.
  • You can set them straight on social media and other geeky things so they don’t make stupid policies.
  • You can advise them on training policies and skills people need to develop.
  • You can act as a bridge to less assertive progeeks to hook them up with HR to solve problems.

You can help your HR department understand and work with people like you.  It means more good hires, more happy fellow geeks, and less bad decisions.  It means more professional geeks doing what they do well.

A few suggestions:

  • Insert yourself into the hiring process to scope out how it’s going and help out.
  • Offer to research and discuss training needs, then present a report most anyone can understand.
  • Run lunch meetups with HR now and then to get to know people (if it’s a big company), and focus on areas they really don’t know.
  • Form a relationship with the people you get along with in HR and see how you can help out.
  • If HR has a wiki for terminology and standards, help out with it.  If not . . . it might be a good idea to start one.
  • Offer to read over policy documents and make suggestions.
  • Offer to read over or even compose job search ads (so you can give realistic feedback).

You may even find that HR could be part of your career, or you might be good enough to help with or even do hires one day.  Sure, you’re helping others, but it might help you out as well!

– Steven Savage

Ask A Progeek: My future or current job?

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And our “Ask A Progeek Question” today is . . .

In filling out an online profile (such as on Linked In), what should you list as your job; the one you have or the one you want?

First, kudos on using online profiles.  They’re pretty much indispensable to the job search.  This has been my normal, pathetic, pimping of LinkedIn.

Now beyond that, what do you do?

First, you put the job you’re actually doing in there.  People aren’t looking for your hopes and dreams (in most cases) and putting something else in there that you’re not can look awful deceptive.

But  . . . you do need to communicate your hopes, skills, and dreams.  So let’s look at ways to do that.

Summary: Many profiles (LinkedIn included) have a summary section.  You can put your hopes/dreams/ambitions in there.

Skills: If you have skills relevant to your ambitions (but not your current job), put them in any skills profiles.

Jobs: If you have a hobby that’s also joblike, you may want to put it in your profile so people can see what you do – and so you can get recommendations.  This is a bit of a fine line as it may make you look like you’re disloyal or splint in your ambitions – or it may make you look ambitious and forward thinking.

This is something I do even though I have a job and a career – I have an entry for my side hobbies so people can learn more about me.  Since it walks the line between hobby and job, I like to include it.

Other Areas: Listings of publications, hobbies, associations, etc. also lets you communicate your interests and ambitions.  If you don’t work in gaming, but belong to the IGDA, that says something.

As always, the goal is to communicate who you are.  You don’t want to say the wrong thing in the wrong place, but you do want to say the right things.

– Steven Savage

Promoting Professional Geekery #32 – A Newsletter?

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(For more Promoting Professional Geekery check the roundup.)

Let me take a moment to praise MailChimp.

For those of you not familiar with it, MailChimp is not a character in an Adult Swim cartoon called “Primate Postal Service,” though that would probably be popular.  Instead, it’s a mailing list and mailing campaign management system with some sweet free options.  Pretty much – it’s a way to run newsletters.

Of course it’s just one way to do it – I myself use it to run my own Geek Beacon.  Based on my experience, I’m noting it’s awful easy to run a newsletter . . .

So you probably see where this is going.

If you want to promote the Professional Geek ideal and lifestyle, you have to share your knowledge and wisdom (of which I’m sure you have at least one if not both).  We’ve discussed blogs and books, but the humble Newsletter is a great way to reach people as well:

  • People have to opt-in to one (so you get an interested audience).
  • It’s delivered right to their email inbox (so it’s hard to ignore).
  • It’s an alternative to having to go to a blog or read a book or soforth.
  • It lets you engage with people very personally (because it’s not necessarily public).
  • It’s easy to put little subscribe widgets on your website(s) which looks cool.

I myself subscribe to several newsletters, and, yes, I actually take time to read them.  There’s some great stuff out there, and it comes right to me.

It’s also way for you to share Professional Geekery.

Think what you can do with it:

  • You can target.  You can focus on a very narrow, given area of interest because people who sign up for something like this are probably actually interested in what you have to say.
  • You can do serial work easily.   You can run continuing series of columns on advice, jobs, careers, a specific career, etc.  People will easily follow it since it’s in their email inbox.
  • You can make it personal.  People respond to (and I find, like) personal tones in email newsletters a lot more – and you may find it more appropriate than blog posts or books.
  • You can gauge interest.  The amount of people who sign up tell you who’s interested in your subject – which may give you other ideas.
  • You’re hard to forget.  Face it, you’re in people’s email inbox.  Don’t abuse that, by the way.

As for your subject?  Well what are you a Progeek about?  Then do a newsletter.  Cosplay and body type, the role of nonfiction writing in a fiction writer’s life, computer careers in your state/province.

A blog or book may not be your thing, but the more intimate, immediate world of the newsletter?  That can let you share your Professional Geekery quite easily with the right people – you may even be more comfortable with it!

Of course this could tie into a blog, or launch a book, or something else.  That’s just one more way to keep spreading the word and encouraging people to make their hobbies their careers.

– Steven Savage