Blogging – The way to showcase your work

I used to notice and wonder how engineers are always crazy about maintaining their GitHub profiles. Its because that is where they show the work that they have been part of or have contributed to. But being in Support we have limited work related to Pull Requests etc.to use GitHub as our work graph or timeline.

So, I used to think of the alternatives where I could talk about the work that I have been doing in Support. It was never a question on whether I should blog about work or career, it was more about how do I take my work out there?

I wanted to start small and build interest in writing before I invested in maintaining my own blog. So, I started writing for Kayako’s blog. It worked well and helped me to build confidence. I learnt the art of blogging while working with our Growth and Marketing team. Later on,I signed up for Medium account and started writing there about my work experiences and general topics.

The passion for writing kept on growing. I wrote for Support Driven’s writing challenge, guest blogs for Freshdesk and Nicereply, and also thanks to Supported Content  which provides me even more diverse topics to write on. By now, I was ready to have my own blog too where I wanted to list all my work and career related experiences through blog posts. There were two reasons why I wanted to go for it:

• One, it would have helped me to take my work and learnings to a bigger audience.
• Second, because it can work as a good replacement to traditional resumes.

Some of the reasons why I think we should all write about our work and career is because:

• Someone who is just starting their career can learn from your experience. They don’t have to waste their time in pacing up their career by hit and trial method when they can learn from your experiences already.
• I believe that the best practices for every industry change over time and they should actually. The more people write about these best practices at their work, the more standard they become for others to try and get results.
• For instance, if you have written a blog explaining how attending a particular conference helped you in your career, someone out there can use it to convince their management to support them to attend those conferences.
• People can learn from each other as to how different companies are using certain processes and workflows. Helpdesks are the biggest example. No two companies use them in the same way but if people write how they use them, it can help them streamline workflows better by learning from each other.

I’d say that I can’t stress enough on the importance of writing about work or career related topics. It not only shows a timeline of how you have improved over time in your career but it also helps other people.