Communicating Better

I wrote an editorial that was published today on Building Better Communication Skills and it talks about the need to improve your communication skills. Specifically I talk about writing, since that is the type of communication that we seem to do the most often.

I recommend blogging as a way to improve your skills. To me, blogging is a no-brainer, and it's easy. It can take some time and effort, but you don't have to feel pressured to get it done at a particular time. I'd recommend that you do it at least every other week, but when you write inside that two weeks is up to you. You can do it late at night, you can do it on the weekends, at lunch, and even in a bunch of separate sessions. Unlike something like Toastmasters, you have more flexibility.

I have a whole set of posts on blogging, with different ideas and techniques. I would urge you to consider setting up a blog and working on improving your writing skills. You'll use them often in your career, and being able to clearly express your opinions, thoughts, and knowledge, is very important to growing your career.

Looking Forward to the New Year

What do you want to do in 2011? Now is the time that you should be looking forward in the new year, and setting some goals for your career. Think about the types of things that you would like to accomplish in your career, and write them down.

As you think about your career, consider whether you will look for a new job or not, whether you want a promotion, or if you would like to move into a new career area. Then think about what steps you can take to move in those directions and set those as goals. Then set some metrics that you can use to measure if you are moving in the direction that you want.

Just be sure that you also set reminders to check on your resume or online profile and update it as your grow your career.

A Tale of Four Blogs

How do you build content from ideas? Here’s a short look at what I’ve done.

I ran into this blog at 37 Signals. Read it and note the content, it’s short, basically a quote, so with that in mind…

I wrote a post on this blog called “What You Practice” in which I said that you can gain some self-awareness for your blog and career.

I wrote a personal post called “What You Practice” in which I noted that life is short, and working on what you write about is important.

In my business blog, “What You Practice” talks about the need to think about money, in keeping with the original idea of the 37 Signals post.

I actually even got another post for this blog on “Tag Clouds” from this idea. I had been meaning to write it, but this inspired me.

When you have an idea, think about it from different perspectives, and look at the ways that you can talk about what occurred to you. It doesn’t have to be something you read, but it could be something that you came up with yourself, but an idea ought to be able to spawn a few different posts.

What You Practice

I saw a very interesting blog at 37 Signals on this quote
“The things you do more often are the things you’re going to get good at. …”
It’s by Jason Fried from an interview on the new workplace for the new normal.
One of the reasons that I highly recommend tag clouds for your blog, is that tag clouds let you see what you are really writing about. The stuff you write about often is likely the stuff that interests you. Whether that’s a part of your job or not, your passion will often shine through over time with a set of topics that you often write about.
What does that mean? It means that maybe you want to refocus your career, or training, in the areas that drive you. The largest items in your tag cloud.

Tag Clouds

What’s a tag cloud? It’s a visualization of the tags that are used in your blog posts. As you can see to the right, this is the tag cloud for my SQLServerCentral blog. It can be hard to read, but a few things stand out in the cloud. “SQLSaturday” and “SQLServerCentral” as well as “T-SQL” are all fairly large.

About two years ago I was looking through this cloud and noticed that my tag cloud featured these tags are the largest:

• business
• e-readers
• energy
• SQLServerCentral

That was interesting to me. I hadn’t realized that I spent so much time on those topics. I had expected that I was writing about SQL Server more.

So I made a few changes. I started a business blog, and moved more business focused posts there. I also moved the energy and reading stuff more to my personal blog. I also started to focus more on T-SQL writing, trying to both keep up my skills as well as ensure that I was actually including T-SQL information in my blog. I still want to be seen as a DBA, so I made sure to focus there.

I think that a tag cloud is a great way to better understand yourself, and understand what you’re writing about. Or maybe, what you’re not writing about.

As an FYI, here’s a blogspot tutorial for a tag cloud.

2011 Presentations

I’ve submitted the Modern Resume to a few places in 2011. If you’re interested in seeing it live, here are places it will likely be given.

• SQL Saturday #45, Louisville, KY - Jan 22, 2011
• SQL Saturday #60, Cleveland OH - Feb 5, 2011
• SQL Saturday #66, Colorado Springs, CO, Feb 12, 2011
• Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta, Denver, CO - Mar 5, 2011
• SQL Saturday #67, Chicago, IL - March 26, 2011
• SQL Saturday #63, Dallas, TX - Apr 2, 2011

The Modern Resume Presentation

I’m always tweaking the presentation, adding new things, and after my last event in New York,

I decided to try and be more consistent with this, so I’m saving the current version of the abstract here so that I can easily find it, and get feedback on what people think of the description.

The Abstract

Learn practical ways in this session that you can use to build your career brand and stand out from the crowd. Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral, shares some of the ways in which he has successfully grown his career over the years. Steve will present tips and tricks for using social networking sites, blogging, volunteering, leadership, and more to your advantage. He also has a few resume hints to help you find a great job that fits you.

My Bio

Steve Jones has been working with SQL Server since 1991 and been a DBA in a variety of large and small companies and industries. In 2001 Steve founded SQLServerCentral with two partners and has been publishing technical articles and facilitating discussions among SQL Server professionals ever since. He currently is the full time editor of SQLServerCentral, owned by Red Gate Software.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/way0utwest