organization

The Other Side Of Career Planning

by

If it hasn't been apparent from eighteen months of writing about it, I'm very big on career planning.  I'm all for the organized life plan, the schedule, the milestones everything.  I don't think it's because I'm a Project Manager – though the experience probably doesn't hurt.

We all know why we're supposed to plan our careers:

  • It helps us get things done.
  • It helps us set and reach goals.
  • It lets us evaluate and measure progress.
  • Our lack of organization doesn't drive our friends and family nuts.

In that list, and in most of our minds, there is one thing missing about just why we plan our careers and indeed our lives.

That is because our plans also tell us what we're not doing.

Read more

Convention Idea: Call It Out

by

The roundup of convention ideas is here.

You want to call out your convention activities for fan-to-pro stuff.  But how to do it?  A lot of things can stand in your way:

  • A minicon might be a bit much.  After all you've got to run a con within a con and you might not have the material – or organizational structure to do it.
  • You have a huge amount of programming, and things can easily get lost.
  • Your convention is so diverse that its easy for anything to get lost in the shuffle.
  • Your introduction of the pro-fan panels is new and you're worried they may get lost in the shuffle.

What you want to do is make your pro-fan panels obvious and easily accessible and recognizable by those who are interested.  Here's a few things to try:

  • Have a separate "pro events" or "career events" sheet or booklet.  Call out the events, what they are, and their times.  You can even add some extra career resources on the sheet.  Include it with the schedule and your usual swag-bag.
  • Change your signs.  Maybe your signs for events can have icons, mascots, colors, etc. that call out just what's going on for panels that are pro-fan
  • Icons in the program book.  This is something I'd like to see done more – program books and schedules could use icons to call out panels of given interest.  From checkboxes to little logos to wingdings, different events could have different icons when listed.
  • Cross-promote.  Make sure people doing your profan panels note there are others.

Call out your profan activities.  It may even give you ideas how to call out other activities of different kinds.

– Steven Savage

Fandom: The Project Edge

by

You're a geek, a fangirl, fanboy, otaku, otariiman, sports nut, etc.  You're in a job search.  You'd like to leverage your fannish interests for your next job, but you're busy trying to get the whole search thing working right.

Good job searches are like projects – organized, measured, evaluated, with goals in mind.  Being a fan, you're probably far better at this than many people – and maybe more than you realize.

If you feel disorganized or aren't sure how to approach your job search, step back for a moment and look at the fannish projects you've done.

  • Did you organize a convention or part of a convention?
  • Do you oversee and run a role-play group?
  • Do you manage a community with events?
  • Do you sit down and reguarly and consistently make AMVs, fanfic, fanart, etc.?

Then guess what – you know how to do a project.  In fact, I'd lay odds that everyone reading this right now is, on average, better at organizing and getting results than they realize.  It's just that this is so often expressed in our hobbies and fannish activities that we never realize, frankly, how good we are at it.

So, if you're trying to organize your job search (and organized job searches are successful job searches), step back for a moment and look at what you organized in your hobbies.  What lessons did you learn?  What skills do you have?  Who can you call on for help?  What resources did you use?

If you want that geeky job, make your job search a project.  To make that project, take a moment and look at your hobbies and the projects you've done there.  You're probably far more organized than you ever realized – leverage that.

– Steven Savage