skills

Geek Job Guru: Skill Spread

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What lets you do your job and carry out your career? Well you could say your position, connections, etc. But I’m talking actual productivity, and what lets you actually do things is skills.

When it comes to skills, that’s a huge part of our career. We measure them with tests. We get certifications to show we have them. We get rated on the job or by clients. We seek them out or develop them. In short, a big part of your career is the ability to do something.

So more skills is good for you because it’s good for your career. Ehancing skills is good for you because skills are good.  And so on.

Now we geeks in many ways are people with multiple careers. Sure we have what pays the bills, we also have our hobbies, and many of us have something in between. Your average highly active geek-type is probably doing two or three jobs at any time, and in many cases only one of them actually pays the bills.  Sadly for some that’s “barely” pays the bills, so enhancing what we can do is even more important.

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Behind The Scenes And Loving It

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So at the start of June I finished editing Serdar‘s next book, Flight of the Vajra.

Now you’ve heard him talk about it here, so you may be curious. All I can say is, yes, actually, it’s really good and will be well worth your time. I won’t go into much detail as it’s A) his book, and B) I want to discuss about how it relates to your career because that’s what I do here.

I’m a big, big advocate of using hobbies in jobs as you’ve kind of guessed by the fact i’ve been at this blog for five years. One of the things we miss though is that some of our hobbyist/amateur skills are relevant, but not spectacular.

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Publishing: The New Skill

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Published using Nook for the first time for my latest book.  It was about as easy as Kindle, with a few less international options.  That’s pretty promising, as I’d usually have Lulu.com do the job.

It’s still a pain to self-publish merely for the amount of options, platforms, and issues one has to face.  There’s what to put the document in when you write, any conversions you have to make, then what tool to publish it in (I go from Libre Office to Jutoh myself).  It’s nice to be able to self-publish, but I wouldn’t call it simple.

The strange thing is self-publishing is basically it’s own skillset.  It’s not a gateway to easy publishing if you’re a writer since you’ve got to be more than a writer – or hire someone that can do the conversions for you.  Yes, the barrier to entry is far lower, but what was once insurmountable financially or business-wise is still a challenge because you need the skills to self-publish.

Writing well is still never enough.  The barriers and challenges to publishing have changed and even lowered, but they’re still there.  Success is still a lot of work.

– 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/.