Future planning on easy mode - Danielle Main

hey everybody I'm Danielle Maine I'm going to present a talk today I want to say thanks to our sponsors first of all what a really great Facebook here if you know the people that work at these places even better tell them things besides is awesome we're very thankful to have them here so my talk is called future plan and easy mode I think that something that we all experience and maybe don't love doing is finding new jobs and sometimes that's not your choice sometimes that choice is made for you you graduate college and suddenly you have to pay bills for example maybe your company leaves you off there's a couple of reasons that are not great opportunities for you to have to stretch that skills their first time um so using that muscle to your advantage is a super easy way to uh just bone up on that skill so here's my name my pronouns uh the nice word for indolent or excuse me the nice word for lazy is in Dolan I love doing things that are very efficient but I don't really like doing a lot of work on things if I don't have to uh more information about me our big topics today are kind of these three pillars uh support system documentation and do it yourself so the first thing I'm going to talk about is the support system I think it's super important to make sure that you have people around you that support you and want to make sure that you are the best human that you can possibly be um I have a ton of really awesome co-workers and farmer co-workers other consequence of me volunteering in other ways in the organizations I volunteer for besides as you can tell set KC Eric kind of asks everybody to do whatever they can to make this organization really awesome so I would highly encourage you to find whatever that volunteer opportunity is sometimes after your church sometimes that's with your neighbors whatever that is find that for you um something that I've noticed uh as a direct consequence of me volunteering is that I'm able to make really awesome great friends because I'm uh pretty well known in the set KC world for example for doing a resume gloves if you've got a terrible resume that's 25 pages long recruiters aren't going to want to talk to you um has anyone had that experience in the past no callbacks on submitting jobs yeah it's not fun um so make new friends find out the feedback from them that's positive sometimes that feedback can be kind of painful but it's really nice when you're able to get that feedback and then turn that into something constructive I would also recommend to seek out industry organizations a couple of organizations that I'm affiliated with Issa identity squared different certification bodies have different things but it's pretty important to just make sure that if there is a certain certified body in your organization um so just go to those meetings meet those people figure out the problems that they're encountering try to figure out how you can use that to your advantage maybe there's uh job opportunities that they're going to talk about um sometimes that is a new technology that you're not familiar with just enjoy the uh the new Don't Be Afraid this is the hard part documentation who likes documentation in this room I mean there's a couple of you but we're strange folks um so what I would say for documentation is create a wish list talk about what things you are looking for in a job or what you're not looking for in a job sometimes you want to work in person because that's how you are more um productive maybe you've got a home life that either doesn't have room doesn't have time doesn't have space for you to be working from home so you want a job that you can work in person at um sometimes you don't work weekends so find that job too make a wish list of what your top maybe 10 or 5 or you know just start that list figure out what you want in a job figure out we don't want to end a job I don't want to work 80 hours a week for example I don't know many people that do but for me that's a deal breaker um the other thing that I would highly recommend is to record The Hunt sometimes it can be really deflating to send out like hundreds of resumes or job applications and not hear anything back if you can't keep track of that in a very reasonable like measured way it's going to be either something you avoid or something you don't do well so what I like to do is make like an Excel spreadsheet right like the date you applied to something the title that you applied to the company maybe a link to the job posting the name of the recruiter that you've talked to um any notes like you have a friend that works there um there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of quantify what you've done but that will keep you organized and allow you to pick that up when you've got 10 minutes to look at that list versus spending and agonizing two hours trying to figure out hey who did I last hear from when I applied for that job at Uber or whatever that may be I think kind of also another painful thing is to record your wins um we all do really great things as people but sometimes it is hard for us to um take that Reflection Point and remember like the positive things that you've done it's really easy for us to remember the things we've done poorly for example or the mistakes that we've made um everyone's made mistakes that's okay but if we don't take time to turn that around into something positive and say hey this quarter I achieved this metric or this goal or finished this project um for everyone that's going to be something different so if you're a developer maybe you work with friends if you work at an organization that does like quarterly reviews maybe take that time to use that quarter to quantify like your successes um so everyone's going to have a different Cajuns and that's okay sometimes it's also okay to skip them but try to set like a regular reminder to write down your wins this is the really fun part I really enjoy doing technology things not at my job so there's a number of different ways that you can use like your own interest and your own um kind of your hobby space your home lab whatever that is and turn that into an experience builder for your resume so have you done it professionally is something that a lot of applications are going to ask you about maybe you want to get into network security but you've never been in a network role before like at a corporate level you've probably mess with your home Wi-Fi now so talk about things that you've done maybe at your home lab or problems that you've encountered where you've tried to uh you know maybe you've tried to solve a problem but you've made it worse or you had to learn something new to get to that end goal um something I hear in a lot of career coaching sessions that I have is this question tell me about a time recruiters like to use uh you know scenarios to try to get you to explain um a time that you've either encountered a problem or exhibited a behavior you can use your DIY experience your home life experience to answer those questions tell me about a time you've had an issue where you were presented a problem you initially didn't see well setting up your relatives printer over the phone can be a bit of a challenge you can talk about those times when maybe things didn't go as you expected because the person on the other end of the phone didn't have any idea what you were talking about um so I would say just try to make sure that you're framing um your experience not just in like the stuff you've done corporately and like received a uh you know a paycheck for I think it's super important to just turn that around and say hey I do have experience doing this I ruined my home Wi-Fi several times but this is how I learned about it and this is where I've grown home Labs also don't to be super expensive I think something that a lot of people think is that to have um any experience at home it has to be on a great great scale for a couple of bucks you can get a Raspberry Pi you can get um anything really a Micro Center you can take home doesn't have to be like a million dollars shirt small you don't have to have an Enterprise budget to like have the same problems believe me problems exist large and small on all budget scales you really don't have to spend a lot of money for that um I also would think that being intimidated by having that would prevent you from like dipping your toe into a new technology don't let that be the case buy the thing just Google the out of it and then watch YouTube videos on where you went wrong it's okay someone else has already had this problem and you're not Reinventing the wheel here learn from other people so I would say whatever you do just be open to new experiences talk to people who have done the same things you've done or maybe things that you hope to do in the future um and then we can together conquer new problems I'm sure that a lot of you are working on technology today that did not exist 10 years ago the technology changes but the problems don't we have to solve them in new ways and by having new people in the room we're able to do that this is my Twitter handle you guys can come find me after uh let's go eat some barbecue I need to do something any questions don't worry not a question but um good advice and one of the best things that that someone told me when I started Burns was record things wins as they come because our reviews are at the end of the year yep how are you going to remember at the end of the year what you won in January yep 100 I tried to like on a monthly basis set aside just a little bit of time to talk about things that um like I'm working on today that I expect to maybe want to talk about in the future that I've like learned that were like something that I'm working on that's new um I think that a lot of times it's really easy to remember the mistakes at that year cycle but it's really hard to remember all those tiny wins on the way so 100 I think so does everybody have like a Brack book or something that they write their like wins down in start one start a virtual one start a piece of paper don't put it on a corporate computer don't put it on your work email you'll lose it the day that you leave that organization you will forget to take that because you're really excited about the new job you won't remember so make sure you turn that into an opportunities that you can take that with you and then just continue growing that's what I would recommend any other questions awesome well you guys can find me on Twitter I'm also in the betterment village um we are wonderful people we like to talk about Mental Health financial planning advice if you were in the talk before this one uh and you know we're all here to be better people find better jobs awesome let's go to barbecue guys thank you have a good day