Forging ahead at SxSW
December 1st, 2009
First, the big news: Andrea Hill and I will be jointly leading one of the core conversations at South By Southwest. Cool, huhn? Even better, our conversation will be focused on managing your career and figuring out how to pursue opportunities, something that’s been at the forefront of both of our minds recently. But before I extrapolate more on where we’re going with this, let me first show you what our session will be all about:
Forging Your Ideal Career
You’ve proven you’re a great developer / designer. How do you rise above the production floor to share your ideas and insights, and drive the solution rather than simply implementing it? Presenters will share their strategies for cultivating your career and attaining personal satisfaction while still keeping a steady paycheck!
- What if you feel your company’s career path is not for you?
- How do you position yourself as what you want to be doing, versus what you’re currently doing?
- How can networking help?
- What opportunities exist outside work?
- Forget work-life balance: how do you maintain paid work-unpaid work balance?
- How do you get support from your organization for your outside activities?
- What ideas do you share with your employer, versus keeping them to yourself?
- Wherein lies the problem: Your career, your job, or your company?
- When is it time to leave?
- How do you move on without burning bridges?
Personally, I find this ironically appropriate because I recently left an employer whom I absolutely loved in favor of a new opportunity, but I digress…
Now that we’ve been chosen (muchas gracias), we’ve entered into a tacit agreement with the organizers that we will help them make this years’ SxSW as awesome as humanly possible. No pressure, right? Well, they’ve also thrown us a bit of a curve ball in that we’ve been asked to lead a discussion (Known as a Core Conversation) rather than holding a joint presentation. This means no A/V equipment, and the content coming from the discourse rather than the presentation.
After thinking about it for a bit, I really feel this is a much better format for the topic. Consider: Careers are very personal things, and for either of us to claim that we have all the answers is just a mite bit arrogant. So rather than proclaim to be career management experts (which we’re not), we’re just two people with applicable history who are willing to seek out guidance from others with similar experiences.
Yet it’s also extremely important to frame what the topic is NOT. This is not a way for you to get out of a stifling company, nor a way for you to get your unappreciative boss fired. This is especially not a forum where you can bitch about lazy coworkers who are holding you back. This is a forum where we discuss how to frame your career goals, evaluate your current situation for opportunities, and move from there.
Which brings me to you, our readers, as we’re looking for feedback and information to help us lay the foundations. We’re looking for any kind of feedback- experiences, questions, data- everything from real experiences about why you made a career based move to silly topics about your lucky teddy bear. Spit it out, we’d love to know it.
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