David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

A friend and I were talking last night about careers and various goals. Some people want to run a large organization, others want to go as far from an organization as possible. There is a satisfaction that many take in working with a single company and focusing for many years on efforts there, and others want to work in a very lightweight roll away from a company and not have any specific day-to-day activities with any one company.

Regardless of all of these work goals and any career paths that you might have in mind there is one goal that everyone should work on but yet few do; your personal brand.

The concept might honestly sound funny to most people. It is easy to confuse personal branding with attention seeking and a shot at stardom or at least your 15 minutes of fame. But that is simply not it, although many famous individuals do have strong personal branding.

You know you have attained strong personal branding when you are irreplaceable with someone else who has similar talents or job description and this is largely recognized in your community.

Take Jeff Pulver for example; Jeff has excellent personal branding. When you want to meet with Jeff then you want to meet with Jeff. There isn’t a substitute. Sure there are other entrepreneurial people out there, but his unique talents, social network, and success make him a one of a kind. He is not famous. He is not a household name. Yet for those that know him there is no replacement. Many of the top people on twitter could also be thought of in this way. From Robert Scoble to Chris Brogan to iJustine, they have each created their own unmistakable personal brand that could not be substituted or replaced by another person with the same ‘job title’.

The paths to getting here there are infinite. It is not a matter of only being the best at something, but being pretty good at something, a great communicator, well liked and overall respected. Getting good at something is a great start, but also doing something special is another strong starting point.

Think about getting past your job title. You are not a photographer, consultant, planner, actor, musician or business-person. You are you and the goal is for at least your larger social community to recognize that.

When you attain this you, in my opinion, have attained the best job of them all; being yourself.

It seems that development and IT have a bad wrap online for being places that you can’t make a dime. Yes, after the bust things got tight. This isn’t the same as 2001 however, this is 2007. If you’re still living on your mom’s couch after the past 6 years when you lost your job working for that startup in 2000, then it’s your fault not the industry’s fault.

I keep seeing whining people on Digg/Slashdot/etc saying, “You can’t make money as a programmer” or “there are no jobs”. I hate to call them out, but they must have no resume or skills. If anyone (really, anyone worldwide) is a good worker, that can produce solid code, and is a Python/Zope/Plone ninja, then I have a job for you! And well paying too!

Maybe you learned Cobol or Fortran and just never moved past that, or all you know how to do is reset passwords and answer the phone. Well, in that case your job has been outsourced. That’s your fault. If you have skills, experience, and can work reasonably with people… then there’s job. You just aren’t looking for them.

I have realized that people online just complain about their personal situation and make it seem as if it’s an entire industry that’s flawed. Tech is growing people. Maybe not in Idaho, but if you’re in SF/Boston/NYC/etc… then you’re fine.