Rebuilding the resume, competencies for web strategy
The tool I’m most frequently asked for in this job hunt is my resume. Though I haven’t fully decided what’s next for me, continuing in the web strategy space is a reasonable place to keep looking.
My current resume emphasizes technical leadership with less focus on the strategy side. The result has been many calls for more hardcore web engineering roles, which isn’t the best use of my talents. To get the right focus, I’m currently going through a number of sites to find key areas of focus. Here are the posts I went through:
- The Three Spheres of Web Strategy (Jeremiah Owyang)
- Letters to the Editor: Career Pathing to a Web Strategy Role (Jeremiah Owyang)
- The POST Method: A Systematic Approach to Social Strategy (Josh Bernoff)
- What is a Web Strategist? (Jeremiah Owyang)
- A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008 (Jeremiah Owyang)
- The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs (Jeremiah Owyang)
I’m sure there are many resources I’ve missed (and it’s very Forrester focused), if you have any good ones, please let me know. I started out looking to build a list of competencies, but for the most part Jeremiah Owyang’s three spheres post is a great way to segment and he’s covered the majority. I’ve started adding notes to each.
Community
- User experience (UX)/usability — understand the core concepts and how to apply, test, measure
- information architecture — a large part of my roles since 1997-ish
- social media skills — typically a more active listener than contributor, but working on it
- customer support — where I started my career and a person area of focus throughout career
- community marketing/marketing/product marketing — mostly helped with execution and measurement, though participated in the creation of several campaigns
- ability to listen and be empathetic — a personal strength
Business
- Marketing — understand the core concepts and have participated in the definition of campaigns as well as supporting execution
- advertising — an area requiring more development
- media — strong understanding
- management — 8 years experience
- measurement — understand core concepts and have applied in measuring efforts
- ability to evangelize internally — a personal mission
- process management — a personal passion
- resource management — 8 years experience
- obtain objectives — developed some, extracted the rest
- product development/product management — experience in creating customer-facing sites and applications
- savvy in political maneuvering — develop strong personal network within each organization
- understand the direction and strategy of the company — central to roles for several years
- manage external constituents — managed vendors, consultants, etc.
Technology
- Software Development — strong experience
- Web Development — strong experience
- Web Architecture — strong experience
- Industry Trends — always working to keep current
- experiments with web technology, but understands how to extrapolate and harness a tool — a large part of my passion for the web
My notes on each probably don’t help with my next step — but it’s nice to look at the competencies in relation to how I feel I measure. Now to start mapping specific experiences to these competencies. More to come soon….
What’s next for Kevin?
Typically, I take very few risks. I was taught that you never leave a job unless you already have the next one lined up Recently I realized my career wasn’t going where I wanted. So, I left my job at the beginning of July….
…and I didn’t have a new job lined up yet.
It was a big move for me, but I felt I needed to step out of the mix to get a better perspective. I’ve never been good at sitting still. So, I’m on the hunt for my next adventure.
As conventional wisdom recommends, I reached out to other professionals, my “network.” I’ve worked with many talented people over the years, so there’s no lack of people to talk with. I even went to a “Tweetup” near Boston last week and met some great people who were very open to helping me. It amazes me how many people are willing to help. Everything goes well until we get to the question:
what do you want to do?
Truth is, I’m not sure.
I know it’s hard to find my next great role if I can’t articulate what I want. I’ve been working on the web for a long time. When I started in 1995, it was all about what we could do with the technology. I spent a few years writing applications and supporting web environments. In 2000 I moved into management. Initially responsible just for web engineering, but with increasing exposure and work on the marketing side of the house over the next 8 years.
I’ve seen the move from technology driving business to business driving technology. It’s a good change — I’ve seen too many projects cost a lot of money with little to no return for the business.
My career has also been moving from a focus on technology to business, but I’m not sure where it should go next. Should I go after another web strategy role? make the move to product management for an online product/service? is there something I haven’t thought of yet?
I haven’t found my answer yet, I’ll try to keep you updated as I sort this out.
Scripted support troubleshooting can be painful
A little rant on call centers. I just had a very frustrating experience today with a Voice Over IP (VoiP) company (I’m going to leave off their name as I like them and this is not a commentary on their service, just their support center).
My cable provider had an outage yesterday, our internet was down for at least 6 hours. When it came back up, everything worked except our voip telephone service. It typically takes a few minutes to reset itself. I waited and it didn’t come back, so I called the support number for the company. The first person I spoke with walked me through a scripted series of troubleshooting steps (some of which made little sense from a networking perspective). After about 2 hours the person recommended I go replace the appliance from a retail store. I did that (about 1.5 hours round trip drive — I live in the country).
On the first person’s recommendation I called in to support again to activate the new appliance. After about 30 minutes of this second person not being able to successfully activate the appliance it was time to “hook up my computer” and troubleshoot again. I have been relying on this service as my primary home number for years and trying to do a call over my mobile phone in the country is never easy. It was exactly the same steps as the first call. I finally hung up in frustration, went through the online activation and was up and running in 5 minutes.
I sent an email to the company to let them know how frustrating the experience was. I’ve used their service for years with few problems, but let them know that if I have another support experience like this, I will most likely move to another service.
-k
Jumping into the conversation? Great, now can you sustain it?
Conversation among customers has grown online and marketers realize they need to be part of it. That’s great, but one thing bugs me — why aren’t more people talking about engaging in a way that can be sustained?
I’m not seeing enough conversations on making sure the efforts are sustainable. There’s a post from Sean O’Driscoll called Nuggets form Social Media workshops where he talks about participating in the conversation (section #8). It’s the best advice I’ve heard so far:
Take the time to step back and do the analysis work to understand where the conversations are taking place, how do you categorize them, who are the influencers, what should the internal accountability model be for taking action, ensure you are trained/ready to participate, determine what are you trying to accomplish and how will you sustain the participation. Nothing like deeply listening before you start talking to help ensure what you are doing is “joining the community.” (”Nuggets from Social Media workshops as of late” by Sean O’Driscoll)
Sean is absolutely right. Of course you want to engage in the conversation, but you need to do it in a way that gives you the greatest impact and you can sustain.
I don’t know about you, but for me there is nothing worse than a company jumping into the conversation, then suddenly disappearing. Customers will read into it — and their first reaction won’t be “it’s a shame company x doesn’t have enough people able to participate in this great conversation.”
I’d love to continue this discussion with more specific examples you’ve seen (good or bad). Please share in the comments.
-k
Use your own email address with GMail
I’ve been using GMail as my primary mail client for some time now and have walked a number of people through these steps. For these steps to work, you will need to be able to have your email address (ie. yourname@yourdomain.com) directed to your GMail box (yourname@gmail.com).
- Log in to GMail
- Click Settings
- Click Accounts
- Click Add Another Email Address
- Enter your Name and Email Address
- Click Send Verification
- Verify your email address
- (Optional) You can set this email address to be your default within GMail on the Accounts page by clicking make default.
- (Optional) You can also change your Reply-To settings to use your default email address or to use whichever one the original email was sent to. I have mine set to use the original.
Hope that helps. Contact me if you have any questions on this.
Thanks!
-k
