Personal Branding and Resumes Building Your Professional Story

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nur Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Habits. We are Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nur Podcast. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nur and also founder of RB Consulting, where we do, I think they call it, as you refer to it as like, boutique consulting. Basically what we do, we sit down with you, assuming you own a business or are running a business or a department, sit down with you, understand where you're at, what are your needs, what is your current situation, what technology do you have? You have a whole bunch of crap or do you have like one thing and you're trying to figure out how to use it? Are you trying to figure out new things that are out there? All of that comes together and we use simplification, automation, integration, and even sometimes we'll do things like RFPs and walk you through that process to find a way to get you right sized into the technology or the technology right sized into what can serve you best based on your budget, your resources, your market, all of that good stuff so that you get a suit that fits you instead of something you just grabbed off the rack at Walmart. No offense to Walmart and Sam's and all those people. Good thing, bad things. Let's see, good thing. I'll go with bad things first just because yesterday was a good day, bad day kind of thing. My bad day was I was in meetings just back to back to back to back to back. It was just, and people were putting stuff on my calendar. It was a Friday and they were putting stuff on my calendar for late in the afternoon and the funny thing is they were in a different time zone so it was even later for them. These are like late late meetings and they're being put on like they get on the calendar on a Friday at lunchtime. What's sort of good, aside good is that people showed up because a lot of times you do that crickets, you're gonna have nobody show up for your meeting. So it was an exhausting day of meetings where I didn't have a lot of breaks or stuff like that. The good thing is once I got to the end of the day, I got to have one of those little things we went to charity auction thing and I only get too far into it but it's basically short of it. You can look them up Trinity Hope. They do. They work with Haiti and they build schools there and stuff like that. So it's one of those that's like a good band in itself because it's very sad that people have to do go through their lives or what they are but it's also good that we can very easily one of those you know for five cents a day you can help a child eat things like for very little on our part we can help people out. The really good thing about it is just having time to not think about work and not think about our life and think about some other people for a while and do a little bit of you know socializing and things like that just allows you to just literally to unplug and so it was really it was a good way to end a long day and actually a long week. On the challenges, one of the things that we talked about was taking some breaks and making sure that you don't get like two heads down. Now granted Michael mentioned a prior one that the Pomodoro's helped that a lot because they almost they not almost they pretty much force you to at least stop and a lot of times it's when you're done with that you know whether it's 25 or 40 or whatever minutes it is when you do that break at least for me the first habit is to like just you know turn off the little alarm and then stand up or do something. That like regular breaks during the day I've also split up so in the middle of my day instead of staying at my desk working basically doing a working lunch day after day after day as I'll take 10 minutes basically and go you know when I'm in an office I'll go like walk around the building or something just go outside and get some fresh air. If I'm at home I'll go like walk out on the back deck or something like that and just again get some fresh air even if whether it's cold or hot or whatever just like a little change of pace so it's a great habit that is helping me just stay sane in many ways forms and fashions. The to-do list one I've grown this one again just like I did the Pomodoro's I went from one to two and haven't gone to three yet we'll see how that goes. But the list thing is I've really really like refined my list making in the last couple of weeks as I went to the dailies but now I have much more focused which is it's actually sort of returned to my roots as I've gone back to be much more focused when I put together my week that I have for those of you a lot of you I think you would relate very much to like the effect of me creating a bunch of Jira tickets that I'm going to go through this week. Now this is where you know so with Trello or something like that it's where I have literally a list of items like these are the things that I want to go through. I'd sort of gotten away from that because I just had too much stuff and too much change but I've gone back to having that core list like here's some things I want to accomplish and it really does help particularly as I get into the second half of a week of like oh crud I like really need to go back and touch this thing or make some progress on that thing. Just like I needed to make some progress letting Michael talk a little bit and introduce himself so go ahead and introduce yourself to the crowd there Mike. Hey everyone my name is Michael Milosz I'm one of the co-founders of developer NURB building better developers need a one now to speak. Also the founder of Envision QA where we help small to mid-sized businesses elevate their software you know we do software audits but essentially we help companies unlock their software's potential either be it through comprehensive software assessments quality assurance testing reviewing software stacks or even helping you find the right software for your business or build something custom if we can't find something out there for you. Good and bad for the week I'll start with the bad similar to Rob had some things added to my schedule the problem was with these meetings I had to actually drive to them so there was actually some downtime where I couldn't get other work done because I had to drive a vehicle. Downside to that I was not able to batch any of that so I actually lost some time and had to work later in the days because I lost time driving around. Typically on a good day I flip that around I did have a couple good days where I was able to batch a lot of things together so I did not lose time I was able to use the Pomodoro technique and my task list to ensure that I had things lined up to where I was able to stay focused on one particular thing and do it in chunks to where I actually got most of it done in a timely manner I didn't have a lot of overrun so to kind of reset that kind of off week with the drive time I followed our to do to you know our task our goals to kind of stay on track get things back where they need to be and move the dial a little bit further down the road. Bad thing is I can't figure out how to unmute my mic but now I did so this this episode I'm this is sort of a one of those that could actually get very very big but I really want to talk it's really about your resume or your personal brand and in particular I think I want to like focus in on the keeping it up to date kind of of challenge that we have because if you look back like right now look back at just you know take a second look back at what have you done in the last year now what you probably first come up with is things that you've done in the last week or the last quarter maybe if you go back and look at your calendar from this month a year ago and what you were doing what are some of the challenge what were some of the the meetings that you were in or maybe you got like if you're a blog what were you blogging on or if you've got status reports what were your status reports like looking at those you're probably going to be like oh wow I'd forgotten I done that or wow that was like that was a whole year ago or that was only a year ago you know things like that that can be they get lost basically get lost on the shuffle now when we you know we get to a point where we're like frustrated where we work or we get laid off or we're trying to like launch a new business and do some side hustle and get a new customer we get into a mode then of like oh I got to update my resume whatever my resume looks like I need to go you know whether it's my resume whether it's my site whether whatever it is I need to go and make sure that what I'm presenting is where I currently am because with the building better developers that means that you are a better developer today than you were a year ago or two years ago or however long it was that you last got into this searching for work selling myself mode that we have to do from time to time so one of the things that I think can help you is one weekly status or daily status of some sort particularly weekly status and a lot of people like I've talked about people in the past that do like journals and things like that that just for themselves and it could be as simple and actually as useful as a blog that you get to end of the week and you can just nobody else has I think you would find there would be readers that if you just say hey this week this is what I worked on and just give a little brief thing of you while you're still near enough to it to just give a you know if somebody says hey what was this like what was that experience like this week give just a brief paragraph of what that was like you know it's like oh you worked on solving this problem what was that like well you know this is what the problem was I had this thing that I was asked to do and so I wrote some code that did this and I found out in doing that that it was really easy to loop through all this data and then just sum some stuff up and I got the solution or I thought it was gonna be very easy but then I found out that I needed to bring in these three other pieces of data or something just really simple it doesn't have to be you have to go nuts with it the thing is is that if you do that even weekly basis you did a year you got like a book worth of content probably which could be a pain because you're like I'm not gonna put all that in a resume I don't need a resume that's 48 pages long or I don't need a website that has that much stuff but maybe you do from a website point of view in particular if you are in if you're a consultant or if your company is consulting or actually if you want to have a which is I think something that a lot of people are starting to go to that's got a lot value is a an online resume of some sort which could also be something we'd like called linkedin or one of those kinds of places where you have this this work history you have the real estate to be able to actually go fairly deep into some of those things and so I think it's very valuable to take those particularly like a blog is great because you can just say hey I am Rob the developer and if you would like to get a sense of what some of the things I do are here's my blog and you know you can title them by days you can do whatever you want so it's very easy for somebody to actually literally look at a detailed resume of what you do now are they gonna do it probably not but if you highlight it or if you go back like say once a quarter or even once you know every six months twice a year go back take what you look at what you did look at that and summarize it and turn it out you know maybe you know pages and pages information turn it into like a little you know half a page paragraph or you know a half page couple paragraphs or something like that something that is very easy to for somebody to look at and very quickly read particularly if you have a couple you know like a title and maybe like a you know what was the problem how did I solve it doing those in a sentence each something like that and then have a little more detail that kind of stuff is invaluable and it allows you when you get into a point for example let's say you're working at the same company for 20 years and you get laid off and now you have to build a resume that is an almost insurmountable task if you have to go back 20 years and try to build that thing all the way up but if you've been doing this along the way it's gonna allow you to have a resume that you could put together fairly quickly more importantly because I think a lot of us when we talk about personal brand and resume we think about I'm leaving a job or getting a new job if you do this it's gonna help you when you have a review when you get to the end of the year or the end of your review period it's gonna help you say this is what I did and help you properly argue for if you need a raise now if you look at what you did and all you do is like I learned how to play games better or something like that okay you don't deserve a raise but if you said hey I learned this new language I solved this problem I did this major thing for the company those are the things that you want to be able to highlight so that they say wow you bring a lot of value to the table we want to give you more money which I think lots of people like to hear that kind of a review but it really helps us keep um it really like a sanity check on ourselves but also reality check that's like yes we are doing stuff we're making progress and it helps us do better as far as like you know get that raise argue for a promotion or something like that but also I think on the flip side of that is when we get into tough times when we're in like a death march or something like that we can at least look back and say yes we have made progress yes things are moving forward so we don't feel like we're just constantly running into a brick wall just like now I think I've hit my brick wall so I'm gonna like break through and let Michael talk on the other side of this thanks for up so not to get too far out of the box because we could take this many different directions one of the biggest challenges you will have over the years is like Rob say if you've been working for a company for 20 years you've got a lot of information you need to unpack and put on to your resume or update your blog or your website how wherever you promote yourself the trick comes in in those early years too where you only have one or two jobs or you just have college you know what did you do in college you know how do you beef up that resume to show the skills that you have you know if you're just out of college listing your uh the classes you took isn't necessarily the best way to promote yourself what you might want to do is you might want to go through what were some of the big projects I worked on what are some of the accomplishments I did in my classes you know did you write like a Linux system did you write an operating system did you build some websites write some programs you know you can highlight those projects and build that out if you kind of take that mindset as we go through our career any little project you work on or challenge you have that is a good little point to hey write it down put it aside or put it into your list of things that you have done and when you come around to building your resume or building that uh online uh information about yourself to sell yourself you can then kind of go cherry pick this information to kind of put on your resume or put on these forms to kind of promote what it is that you're looking for one of the challenges I have especially since I've been in tech now for well over 20 some years is what do I put on my resume you know if I'm looking to apply for a job if it's a management job if it's a software engineering job what is it that they are really looking for that I am the person that they need to hire the problem I have is you know I've got over six pages of notes I've taken over the years for the different types of jobs different things I've done and so you really don't want to hand them a six page resume they're not going to read it they're only going to read the first page and even then you're lucky if they read that they might even read just the first job and then call it done so what you need to do is you need to highlight what it is that they're looking for that you can bring to the table you know what is it that you bring that you are the right person for the job it could be for a job it could be for a consulting business it could be for whatever why is it that they want you kind of like the old uncle sam thing you know uncle sam wants you for the military you know if you flip that what is it that you bring to the table and then what you need to do is you need to highlight that at the front now I find it interesting that cover letters are coming back these days with a lot of job resumes where in the past I've noticed that those kind of faded out over the years but they're coming back because so many people are can go on these online tools and apply for jobs so they want to know why it is that you want to work for a company so if you are looking for like an AI firm oh hey we are looking for AI developers why is it that you want that job why is it that you want to build AI tools so you kind of take what you have summarize it in a paragraph or two as to what it is that you've done why you are a good fit for the company or for this particular job and then provide your resume but make sure you highlight the skills the tools that you have used that apply to the situation that you're looking at that you're applying for now if you're trying to be generic by building blogs your blogs are going to kind of be your tags so you're going to tag your blogs in such a way that on your main page when you come in it's like here are the things I've done click this tag and here's going to be the articles related to what you've done linkedin is a little bit harder because you can still write blogs but they don't have a great sorting way of like highlighting oh this is for this skill or this skill they do have a good way of listing out your job details and things of that nature but even then it's hard to find what you're looking for if you're an employer going to these sites looking for people you need to stand out so how are you going to stand out so other things you want to do is not just rely on the tools but stand up your own site like rob said write some blogs do an online resume you know one of the fun things is we've been doing developer nerf for so long I can almost point to any given blog or article I've written and say hey I've done this or hey I can do this or we've talked about this if you don't have that start making a list today and start recording yourself just do something write it down record it and then just stick it out there put yourself out there so you can start building that virtual resume and people may just run across you and say hey you look like a person that I might need for this particular job so you may not even be looking but they may find you so these are some of the cool things you can get out of this that might not simply be what you're looking for from the get-go but there's a lot of pros that come from doing things like this I think I want to sort of follow up from that last point I have over the years had more than a couple of times where I have ended up in a job or had a customer that came out of a discussion from a blog article or something like that where it was there was something that I put out there that they were searching or they asked you know like like Michael says like there'll be something in the job description that I'll just point like maybe as my cover letter say oh by the way I just covered this topic you know last month in a blog article or on a mentoring class or something that we did you know some presentation or something like that now you may say that's great if you've got you know 500 blog articles and hundreds of video podcasts or podcast stuff that you've done or you know 800 episodes of a podcast but you know what there was a point when I had zip zero not I had none of that and I started somewhere along the way and the next thing you know I had one and so when I had one they I hope that they what they want is exactly what that one topic was but then I had two and then I had three and over time what you're going to find more importantly than being able to like check off the boxes to you know when you submit a resume or when you apply for a job you know when you write a proposal up for a job more importantly that you have the check boxes when they say have they you know have they done this language have they solved this problem blah blah blah what you have is a way to connect to their problem what you have is a way to start a conversation what you have is a way for them to relate back to you and more importantly to all of this is for them to see what you do how you do it how often you do it get a feel for even if you don't know it they can get a feel for what are your strengths what are the things that you enjoy doing and that makes it so much more likely that you're going to end up in a job that you actually like that it's actually something where you go to work you're like this is what it was born to do because now you're getting what everybody really should be looking for is the resume matching the job your position your skills your experience your personality your the culture that you want to work in matches the job that you're in whether that's as a contract or a consultant whether it's employee whatever it is is making sure that your skills match their needs because honestly if your skills don't match their needs then probably particularly if it's a full-time job it's the thing that's making up taking up most of your time you need to move on because you want to find something where you do fit more comfortably it's just like a pair of clothes if you've got shoes that are comfortable you can walk all day if you've got shoes that are not that comfortable you can walk for an hour and you're going to feel like you're crippled now maybe i'm old and so i'm over dramatizing that but that has happened to me so just watch out get shoes that are comfortable that being said let's talk about the challenge for this one because it really does come from as michael said when you've got pages and pages and pages of stuff and then you're trying to sort back through it or you've got like you know years of calendar entries or status reports you're trying to figure out it's very difficult to do so what i'm going to challenge you to do is start with every day take five minutes maybe you don't have to take very long just write a little synopsis of what i did today do that for seven days and then the bonus basically at the end of the week because we don't work five you know we work usually five days a week on the sixth or seventh day or both of them write a summary of the week same thing it like you may now have you know four or five paragraphs of stuff from the week summarize that down to one paragraph make it like if somebody said what was cool that you did this week what is it that like i'm going to buy you a drink you know if you're old enough to buy a drink or i guess a soda or whatever it is if you can convince me that you like you did work worthy of it this week write that sentence write that paragraph just do that once a week do that for a while and then you know further down the road it'll be things like then take those and then combine those and turn those into something you know that's very digestible like a paragraph because if we do it while we're still in it while it's still fresh it is so much more valuable we're going to get the key points and actually it's going to be very tough as we get further along because we're like wow there's this key thing and that key thing and that key thing and i really want to bring all those together and either you're going to find a way to abstract them or you're going to say i need a blog page and i need to just like throw this stuff out and have like here's what i did but here's the details that you really want to read because they're valuable just like if you send us an email we're going to really want to read it because it is very valuable because this is why we're here is to share with you and to get feedback and figure out what is it that we can do to make you better where are the things that you feel that you can improve that you can some habits that you can build some things that you realize these are things that are like dogging me and slowing me down or impacting my ability to progress on my career roadmap or things like that we want to help you out and if we can't we want to throw that out to the greater community and see if the community can help you out because we may not have those tools but we may be able to find somebody that can so we can bring all that stuff back to you you can do it via email info at developer.com you can contact us on the developer.com site we've got contact form there we've got comment areas everywhere on all of our blog articles likewise on youtube on the developer channel also anywhere that you get podcasts you can leave us feedback there we love it however we get it we consume that we use that to build a better podcast as we move forward that being said it is time for us to build a better day and go out there you do the same go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast you can subscribe on apple podcasts stitcher amazon anywhere that you can find podcasts we are there and remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success