What are the responsibilities and job description for the Community Osmosis: Watch, ask, and learn your way into a new tech role position at This Week in Community?
Nothing is permanent but change. Finding a new job role in tech is tough. It’s harder than it has ever been. Entry level roles have disappeared and when they do pop up they require at least two years experience. It’s inbox zero for thousands of candidates who’ve sent hundreds of applications. Finding a new role in tech is exhausting and can feel like a full-time job in its own right.
Force quit. While a lot of us might want to quit the entire system and work in an industry far away from tech, it’s tricky to pinpoint exactly why it’s hard to land a new job. There are countless factors which I won’t go into in this post. What I do know is that community is a career companion, and there are specific actions you can take with it to secure your next role well in advance of applying.
Play to your strengths. Early on in my tech career during performance reviews I was often asked to focus on developing the skills I didn’t have and needed to have. There’s a difference between want and need that I find interesting. Something you want is more motivating than something you need. But if you need something to progress in your career, how do you identify turning a need into a want? I recommend playing to your strengths. Self reflection is hard yet tools exist to help, such as CliftonStrengths. You could solicit feedback from your peers. Or you could create a Claude skill to help you reflect on what you’re good at and what you enjoy, mapping it against what you need and want.
Build on them. Building on what you’re naturally good at is much easier than starting to develop a skill from scratch. That’s not to say you shouldn’t but theres’s something helpful about focusing on your strengths.
Knowledge thirst. The musician Prince and the author Charles Dickens didn’t become legends just because of 10,000 hours of practice. They mastered their crafts by going beyond 10,000 hours of practice and by studying their peers. They were obsessed with observing what was going on in their respective times, soaking up everything around them like a sponge. A kind of osmosis of knowledge and experience. While Prince and Dickens ended up as two highly talented, inimitable legends, the point isn’t that we mere mortals can ever match their capabilities, it’s that if we focus on and learn from the people around us like a sponge, we become more employable.
Gut feeling. For those currently employed you’ll likely know when the time is right to shift role. It’ll become an insatiable itch with an unavoidable scratch. The challenge is often about what role to change into. A natural step up in seniority? A move into people management? Switch to a different domain industry? Switch to a completely different role type? It's important to keep your options open, but there comes a time when you need to take action into the unknown and see what happens.
Community Osmosis. Which brings us back to osmosis. Showing up in your favourite tech community is a brilliant way to get a sense of other role types. You might have an idea of those roles based on your experience of working with colleagues who have a different role to yours. A word of caution: learning from colleagues can be challenging when bias and workplace power dynamics are at play. The same company lens can have an interesting effect on our perception of what a role entails.
So what do you do? You go find people outside of your organisation who are doing a role that you’re interested in. Observe how they show up in tech communities. Spot what they share and talk about. Better still, ask to speak with them. Continue to take notes and spot patterns. Connect those patterns to your strengths. Keep showing up because it takes time. This is Community Osmosis in action.
Try this community confidence activity
Force quit. While a lot of us might want to quit the entire system and work in an industry far away from tech, it’s tricky to pinpoint exactly why it’s hard to land a new job. There are countless factors which I won’t go into in this post. What I do know is that community is a career companion, and there are specific actions you can take with it to secure your next role well in advance of applying.
Play to your strengths. Early on in my tech career during performance reviews I was often asked to focus on developing the skills I didn’t have and needed to have. There’s a difference between want and need that I find interesting. Something you want is more motivating than something you need. But if you need something to progress in your career, how do you identify turning a need into a want? I recommend playing to your strengths. Self reflection is hard yet tools exist to help, such as CliftonStrengths. You could solicit feedback from your peers. Or you could create a Claude skill to help you reflect on what you’re good at and what you enjoy, mapping it against what you need and want.
Build on them. Building on what you’re naturally good at is much easier than starting to develop a skill from scratch. That’s not to say you shouldn’t but theres’s something helpful about focusing on your strengths.
Knowledge thirst. The musician Prince and the author Charles Dickens didn’t become legends just because of 10,000 hours of practice. They mastered their crafts by going beyond 10,000 hours of practice and by studying their peers. They were obsessed with observing what was going on in their respective times, soaking up everything around them like a sponge. A kind of osmosis of knowledge and experience. While Prince and Dickens ended up as two highly talented, inimitable legends, the point isn’t that we mere mortals can ever match their capabilities, it’s that if we focus on and learn from the people around us like a sponge, we become more employable.
Gut feeling. For those currently employed you’ll likely know when the time is right to shift role. It’ll become an insatiable itch with an unavoidable scratch. The challenge is often about what role to change into. A natural step up in seniority? A move into people management? Switch to a different domain industry? Switch to a completely different role type? It's important to keep your options open, but there comes a time when you need to take action into the unknown and see what happens.
Community Osmosis. Which brings us back to osmosis. Showing up in your favourite tech community is a brilliant way to get a sense of other role types. You might have an idea of those roles based on your experience of working with colleagues who have a different role to yours. A word of caution: learning from colleagues can be challenging when bias and workplace power dynamics are at play. The same company lens can have an interesting effect on our perception of what a role entails.
So what do you do? You go find people outside of your organisation who are doing a role that you’re interested in. Observe how they show up in tech communities. Spot what they share and talk about. Better still, ask to speak with them. Continue to take notes and spot patterns. Connect those patterns to your strengths. Keep showing up because it takes time. This is Community Osmosis in action.
Try this community confidence activity
- Find three people who are in a tech role you’re interested in pursuing.
- Ask to speak with them on a video call, get permission to record the conversation.
- Have the calls, ask tonnes of questions about what the role entails, likes, dislikes, unexpected things, key skills etc.
- Celebrate having had three calls 🎉
- Create a skill* with an AI tool, like Claude. Develop the skill to spot patterns in the three meeting transcripts and to build multiple role profiles based on the identified patterns.
- Create a Claude strength profile skill to help you identify and document your skills.
- Create a profile matcher skill that takes the output of the role profile skill and cross checks it with your strength profile skill output.
- Reflect on the profile matcher output and work on your next steps.
- I acknowledge dual use of the word ”skill“ here which is confusing so hopefully it makes sense. Let me know if it doesn’t. 📧