Meet Someone New This Week

Meet someone new in your career this week. Wherever you are, go make it a point to either meet a new person, or learn a new thing about someone that you work with, near, or is in the same field.

I'll be at the PASS Summit this week in Seattle, and one of the things that I make it a point to do when I try to meet new people there. It's easier for me since so many people want to meet me and will come up and say hi, but I do try to stop and say hi when I'm in an elevator or on one of the long escalators in the Washington State Convention Center. Or in line, or at lunch.

Just say "hi, I'm Steve" and ask when they do, or why there came to the event. Or at work, ask someone what they did this weekend, or what they'll do next weekend.

Build or maintain your network this week. It doesn't have to be a daily or weekly thing, but make it a point every month to touch part of your network or grow it.

The Long Road

I gave a keynote talk recently called The Long Road, where I talked about the journey of your career and how you might not end up in the place you expect to be, but that's OK. Modify your career goals as you go.

Networking to Build Business Contacts

The more I learn about building a better career, and the more I talk to people that get new jobs or have success in business, the more I believe that networking is one of the most important things you can do for your career. It just seems to work better, be more reliable, and more effective than any other career improvement strategy. Even blogging, which I think really helps, isn't as effective as having someone that's willing to recommend you.
I never really knew how to go about networking, but a few years ago I attended Don Gabor's seminar at the PASS Summit and it was well worth my money. I learned a lot and have practiced some of his techniques since then. I've even purchased a few of his books, which contain even more information on how to better network and work with others.
If you're attending the 2011 PASS Summit, you can see Don's Networking to Build Business Contacts seminar on Tuesday, Oct 11, from 3-5pm. It doesn't interfere with the other pre-cons, and if you're going to be in town, take this seminar. You will learn some practical tips and exercises you can use to build more contacts, grow your network, and hopefully use it to advance your career at some point. Even if you don't need a job, at some point you will and the time to build a network is before you need it. If you've already registered, call PASS to add this seminar to your registration, or do it on site.
Don has become a friend over the last few years, and was helpful in working on The Mentoring Experiment with me. I find him very insightful and experienced in the world of business and interpersonal interactions and a very interesting person. If you get the chance to sit and talk with Don, take it.

The PASS 2011 Summit

I haven't posted awhile, with this being a busy conference time and I've been working on a few other presentations. I need to get back to posting here, and I have a few drafts in progress, just lacking some time.

I'll be delivering a version of this talk at the 2011 PASS Summit, titling it Branding Yourself for a Dream Job: The Modern Resume.

It's the same talk, or nearly the same, but a different title based on some feedback from various people that were turned off by the idea of "working on their resume."

We will see how it goes, but I would welcome feedback if you are attending the event.

Back Up Your Resume

Don’t make a second copy, though it does make sense for you to keep a second copy of your resume on a separate system. Losing that data would not be good.

However for this post, what I really mean is that you need to be able to talk about the various things you’ve posted on your resume.

 

It’s all Fair Game

If you wrote that you consolidated server instances to save the company $100,000, you should expect to be asked any of these questions:

• How did you know you saved $100k?
• How many servers were consolidated?
• What happened to the old hardware?
• How did you decide which servers to consolidate?
• Did performance suffer? How do you know?

Open ended questions, and not necessarily easy to answer on the spur of the moment if you don’t have stories prepped.

Anything you have on your resume is fair game, so take a few minutes before any interview to review your resume and be ready to talk about anything on it.

 

Build Detailed Stories

At each job, you should have something you are proud of and can tell a story about. These are the chances that you have to build a bond, show some depth to yourself, your career, and your skills.

I

Why you need to write

I love writing. At least now I do. When I was in high school and college, I hated it. However over time I’ve learned to enjoy it, express myself, unload things, and teach people things.

I ran across this post recently from Jason Baptiste on Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write. It talks about the reasons that a person starting their own company might gain from sharing their thoughts and ideas with others, especially about their company.

But it works for employees too.

A lot of the same benefits will  come to you as a worker if you write, especially if you consider yourself to be your own company. You are selling your skills as a service to an employer, and while you shouldn’t have the accounts receivables hassle, you should consider any job a temporary arrangement, an open-ended contract from which you might move on at any time and will move on at some point.

Writing builds skills, it teaches you things, and more importantly, it builds a brand that can help you get that next interview, or even job.

What’s a good sample resume?

I typically don’t include samples in my presentation for one simple reason: I don’t want everyone to copy the sample and start using them.

My philosophy is that you ought to tell your story, make yourself stand out, which means that you should pick and choose from others, but do your own research.

Recently I saw the crew at Brent Ozar PLF post their own sample resumes. While I’m not sure you should copy their formats, I’ll say that Kendra Little’s resume stood out the most to me. It contains essentially a advertisement/cover letter as the first page for Kendra herself. It’s written in plain language with a question that a hiring manager might want to ask and then some details from her career. To me this stands out and it’s one that I bet would get a lot of calls on.

I didn’t love the others, but there are some things you can take from them, which might work for you.

In terms of other samples, ask your friends for theirs, especially the ones that have been successful. Look at what stands out, and ask them what questions they were asked about their resume.

Experience on my Resume

What would I write today, or what’s on my resume? I’ll include an item from one of my last few jobs with a few variations.

Operations DBA - JD Edwards - The JD Edwards SQL Server infrastructure consisted of hundreds of instances that were managed on a daily basis by myself and another DBA. I worked with and coached our team to implement standards across the servers to allow us to proactively monitor the systems. I introduced automated monitoring that went beyond the Patrol software we had purchased, and assisted us in troubleshooting issues. We automated much of our daily work to meet ISO 9001 standards, freeing our time to work with individual clients to help improve the performance of their systems.

It doesn’t say much in terms of details, but this gives an overview of my job, and seems impressive. However I can tailor this for specifics that might help for some jobs

Operations DBA - JD Edwards - to manage several hundred instances of SQL Server with two DBAs, I introduced a standardization and continuous improvement process. I developed scripting solutions to automate the monitoring and baselining of our servers that proactively allowed us to seek out clients and let them know of potential problems and solutions before tickets were raised. We regularly examined servers for consolidation potential to save on hardware refreshes and achieve more efficient use of hardware. We constantly received new instance requests, but less than 2/3 of those required new hardware thanks to these efforts.

Another version that emphasizes costs more and gives a number. I could talk to this in an interview in terms of the process and metrics for measuring the savings.

One more approach:

Server Consolidation - At JD Edwards, each new instance request was examined and the load compared with existing instances using our automated performance monitoring and baseline system. We were able to reduce new purchases of hardware by a third. We were also able to use this system to combine underutilized systems together and free up additional hardware for test and development systems. At Peoplesoft, I managed teams that migrated our large financial and ERP systems from Oracle to DB2, consolidating hardware in a virtualized system at the same time.

ISO 9001 /SOX Compliance - By building a set of processes for daily administration at JD Edwards, we complied with the requirements needed to maintain our ISO certification and meet SOX audits. To simplify this system and allow two people to manage several hundred instances, we developed automated daily reports that could be logged for documentation purposes, and also reduce the need to check each instance. Our reports included checks for backups, job completion, critical errors raised, and uptime to meet our requirements.

Here I’ve taken a different approach to showing my experience by looking at skills instead of jobs. If I were taking another job at a large company who would appreciate these skills, I might take this approach to catch their eye and just list each job at the bottom of my resume.

Tailor Your Resume

The key thing is to show the person that will spend 30 seconds on your resume that you have something to offer. In that sense, think about putting down the skills and experience that will meet their needs, and do it in a way that makes them think it’s worth spending 30 seconds looking at your resume.