career

Skill Portability: Representative Skills and Portability

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(9/17/2016 – These posts have been expanded in a book, Skill Portability: A Guide To Moving Skills Between Jobs)

So we’re discussing how you can port skills from job to job and career to career.  I use the acronym DARE to represent the different kinds of Skill Portability – Direct, Advantageous, Representative, and Enhancing.  I’ve already covered Direct and Advantageous, so it’s time to get to Representative.

There are some skills that really don’t matter to the job.  They may not even provide any advantages.  They could be irrelevant, they could be in your past, they could be from a previous career.

Think of the skills that you leave behind when you move up in the world.  Project Managers that were once Engineers no longer program.

Think of the skills that change when you switch professions.  That old software package you used at one publisher isn’t used at the new one.

Think of the skills that change with time.  Those computer language that no longer are the hip thing to write in, the database no one uses, the vendor long gone and bought out.

These skills and knowledges sound useless, left to the necropolis of past careers and past experiences, but they’re not useless it all.  They speak of what you did, of how you got where you are.  They tell stories of who you were and what you became, and the speak, in a way of what you may be.

In short, they’re Representative of who you are and of your career and life trajectory.  They speak of you – you just don’t use them anymore.

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Status On My Next Book

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Well my next book – which is really more of a booklet  – is out of editing.

My plan is to take some of my past Fan To Pro columns on job searching and improve and enhance them to form a tight guide to oddities on the job search.  It’s gone pretty well, and I expect to be publishing sometime in November.

I’ve had great feedback from my pre-readers and I think it’ll be very useful for folks on the job search, especially those who want to try and get out of a rut or take their job search skills a bit farther.  I’ll probably be pricing it pretty cheaply as an e-book.  Not sure I want to do a physical book, but more on that later.

It’s a bit under 40 pages, and doing it’s been interesting:

First, I really feel the idea of using blog content as the seed for a book actually works.  I wasn’t initially sure about the idea (I mean, why not just do a reprint?), but instead it’s like the original posts are the basis for another useful form.  What works as a blog post in my ranty-coach didactic style doesn’t work as a book, and what you can do in a book and a blog differs.

Secondly, after you get feedback on a series of blog posts and/or look over your work, you can incorporate that into the based-on work, and this ads a lot of value.

Third, it’s a way to make your content accessible in a  different manner.  People don’t want to have to go back to your blog all the time, or have to find printouts, or whatever.  You can give things to people in a different useful format.

Fourth, and something I hope to explore later, if you’re producing a physical object (a book or magazine), there’s something new to leave for posterity.  Something that can be passed on, put on a shelf, gifted easily.  There’s something satisfying about that.  This may not happen with this book – but we’ll see.

So hang in there, it’ coming . . . and starting to wonder how I present these books on my sites, so suggestions welcome . . .

– Steven Savage

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