This time last week I was at a BCS young professionals group event in London, listening to Owen King, Mark Bloodworth and Marc Holmes talking about how they got to where they are in their careers. Marc’s route meandered into software architecture, Owen knew what he wanted before he even graduated and Mark moved around a lot before finding opportunities through a company restructure to get into the job he wanted. Despite their very different routes, they all had similar advice to the would-be techie: know what you want and go out and get it, because no one else will make the opportunities for you.
Owen talked about submitting articles to the company newsletter and making sure that the communication about his project was excellent – so, by association, his name was at the forefront of people’s minds. He even went as far as to organise mugs (not with his own photo on, as a comms tool). If only my projects had the budget for promotional mugs.
Even without a big budget (or any budget) for that kind of thing, the newsletter advice is good. There are many vehicles that already exist that you can use to promote your projects, and therefore yourself. You can capitalise on being the one who explains that complex project to colleagues through a presentation at the Marketing conference, or the Sales intranet site, without using jargon.
Marc had some other advice about building a reputation: be credible. In the project world that means not raising change requests every five minutes, not increasing the budget too frequently and above all, not committing to dates before you’ve had a chance to plan them out properly. And of course, working the odd miracle here and there to get things done. Essentially, project management credibility is founded on OTOBOS, but who achieves that every time? So being able to explain why you are not OTOBOS in a way that sounds plausible, doesn’t apportion blame and keeps you on good terms with the people around you is also a very useful skill to have.
One in which I sense I’m about to get an awful lot of practice.
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