Social Media Round-Up, November 2017

When I was returning to the airport following a one-day meeting in Dallas, my Uber driver began a conversation on how to best go about entering the IT workforce. He had graduated from engineering college and had completed additional post graduate studies in business focused on project management. His goal? Join an up-and-coming IT company to do QA. On the surface, a rather simple goal but as with any first-steps taken entering a profession, it isn’t always as easy as it may first appear to get that first job.

Our conversations quickly turned to LinkedIn – he was busily upgrading his profile and searching through lists of LinkedIn groups to see which ones he should join and then, looking to start conversations himself to better network and to get his name out there in front of potential managers and recruiters. Seems that nothing really has changed – if you want to advance your career, you really do have to do much of the heavy lifting yourself.

In today’s highly networked world, the good jobs continue to go to those who really are “insiders” and who have nurtured their professional networks to where nearly everyone in their sphere of interests knows their name. Individual branding? You bet, and where social media has really made a difference as the net can now be cast so much wider and potential opportunities for career advancement recognized a lot sooner.

Two of the blog sites where I am “syndicated” and where I post regularly happen to be Banking Tech and ATMmarketplace. From time to time you will see me promoting a post on one LinkedIN group or another. These sites too are where I work in the message of NonStop as often as I can and where, more often than not, I get pushback on why I keep referencing HPE, NonStop and indeed, the NonStop vendor community. It is a case, of course, of not pushing too hard on any of this as the first goal of any blogger is to make it past the editor, but of late, the number of posts has steadily grown.

For example, a post I wrote for Banking Tech after last year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp that featured my own observations about HPE and NonStop took an unussually long time to gain approval and it was only after I gave the staff at Banking Tech an overview of just how many big financial institutions run NonStop systems today that they gave in and published the post. It was also helpful to my cause that they could see how many LinkedIn groups there are these days that have a distinctive NonStop flavor about them – something too I aggressively reinforced with the Banking Tech staff. If you missed that post or can’t recall the specifics, check out the post:

Time has proved good for HPE and NonStop; banks everywhere can run networks, 24×7!

And if you aren’t familiar with either of these publications, directed at financial institutions, then check out:

http://www.bankingtech.com/?s=Pyalla
https://www.atmmarketplace.com/editors/richard-buckle/

Whether you are an Uber driver fresh out of college or a more mature IT professional looking for career advancement or even, just staying relevant in today’s world of IT, you absolutely have to network. And this became a theme of mine over the past couple of weeks and if you missed any of the related posts to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, then maybe it is worth taking another look at the blog site and checking out:

Volunteering, networking and blogging – it all helps!
NonStop – a time to mentor!

There are many more posts on social media on this topic – anyone who is a regular reader of LinkedIn may find updates and promotions for similar articles flooding their inbox on occasion – a sort of self-help for IT professionals. But then again, there is never any substitute for actually getting out there among your peers and this is where social media only represents a starting point. A place where you can see which events may prove valuable as you look to advance your career! And for now, it’s all about the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp and the opportunity it presents for each of us to shine before our peers. So yes, hope to see as many of you as I can and should we catch up then yes, of course, let’s have a chat about just how you are going about showcasing your social media presence!

Cheers,

Richard