GigaOM » Collaboration

How Do You Develop Your Skills?

Dawn Foster — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:00:35 +0000

During the early days of my career, I relied on training classes as a way to learn new skills or brush up on older skills that I haven’t used in a while. The advantage of taking a training class is that it forces you to step out of work and focus on the topic for a predefined length of time. However, even with a number of exercises during the class, you don’t get enough practice time to really master a skill. You have to be ready to use what you’ve learned and apply it to a real project if you want to get biggest benefit out of that training. Additionally, as a freelancer, any time that I take off work for a training class is time that I’m not billing clients or developing my business.

Developing a work skill isn’t that different from training for a sport. If you want to perform well during the game (or client project), you need to spend time practicing in between games (or client projects). It isn’t just the new skills that need to be practiced and applied, you also have to practice those skills that you’ve already mastered if you want to maintain your expertise over longer periods of time. I’ve been working with online communities for years, and I spent a significant amount of my time doing hands-on community management and community building. However, most of my recent consulting has been primarily strategic in nature, so I spend the bulk of my time working with clients to develop online community strategies. As a result, I spend less time doing and more time advising. This doesn’t mean that I neglect my skills development. There are a few good ways to make sure that you keep those skills up to date.

Client projects. I try to occasionally take on client projects that give me more hands-on and tactical responsibilities that pull me out of a strictly advisory role and into a more of the day-to-day work. The reality is that I can charge more for the strategic work than the tactical assignments, but this option allows me to make some money while also keeping my skills sharp. This is one of the best ways to make sure that you don’t lose those hard-earned skills without sacrificing too much income.

Side projects. I’ve spent time talking about my love / hate relationship with my side projects and the time that they consume, but side projects do have a purpose. They allow me to practice my skills while building something that I find fun and interesting. While client projects are limited to the needs of any particular client, side projects are meant to serve your needs and are only limited by your imagination. In the past, these side projects have taken a variety of forms with everything from helping to start a small location-based web startup to a variety of blogs with user contributed content that I’ve used to practice community skills like recruiting participants, community evangelism and promotion, and more. I started my latest side project over Thanksgiving (focused on getting people to contribute pictures of their crazy neighbors). The most important thing is to make sure that these side projects feel more like fun than like work — do something interesting.

Volunteer work. I also spend quite a bit of time volunteering for a non-profit organization here in Portland that organizes free events for the technology community. This gives me a chance to practice those skills that involve getting real people from online communities to interact in the real world. Volunteer work is a great way to give something to a cause that you support while also helping make sure that you don’t let your skills languish.

How do you practice your skills and keep them up to date?

Photo by Flickr user Javi Motomachi used under Creative Commons.

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Give Something Back: Online Volunteer Opportunities

Celine Roque — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:00:46 +0000

Web work doesn’t necessarily involve earning an income. Through the Internet, we can give back to the global community and do a different kind of online work — volunteering. Here are some ways to use a little of your time to help others.

Look for organizations that you can work with online. Many non-profit organizations have some volunteers working only through the Internet. The United Nations has a database of online opportunities for which you can apply. NABUUR is another online volunteering platform that connects local communities with online volunteers. For both sites, you can choose from a variety of tasks, including research, translation, writing, design and much more.

Just remember that if you’re going to work with an organization on a specific project, such as redesigning its web site or setting up an online marketing campaign, treat them as you would your regular clients. Have a contract ready, make a list of deliverables, and define the project scope so that everything is clear to both parties. Also, be aware of the disadvantages that can come with working on projects for free.

Offer your help to non-profit web sites. If you have an erratic schedule and can’t make specific time commitments to an organization, you can turn to web sites that are looking for volunteers. If you’re a programmer, you can help fix bugs on an open-source application. For book lovers, proofreading for Project Gutenberg and reading for Librivox are good options.

If you prefer to work independently, you can use message boards and social networks to answer tech questions for free, or even upload tutorial videos to share your expertise.

Use social media to promote causes you care about. Most web workers are usually very active on social media sites and have blogs. You can easily use these tools to direct your contacts to the causes and issues you care about. Through this you can help raise awareness, find new donors, or encourage other people to volunteer.

Participate in online movements. There are several cause-oriented online activities that you can participate in, such as Blog Action Day , Stand Up or Train for Humanity.

If you’re interested in doing volunteer web work, here are some additional resources that can help:

Myths About Online Volunteering from Coyote Communications.
Virtual Volunteering Resources from ServiceLeader.org
Volunteer Match allows you to search for organizations you can work with.

Cause-oriented web work can be very fulfilling, both emotionally and professionally. Go on, get involved!

Have you ever considered online volunteering? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Image by ilco from sxc.hu

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Praise-based Economy: How Much Are You a Part of It?

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:00:27 +0000

I came across this very interesting BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker last week, which discusses how willing we are to do free work online, without even trying to receive monetary compensation for our efforts. Instead, he argues, we’re looking for different kinds of payback.

The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.

For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.

The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.

Part of my work day, everyday, is uncompensated. It involves building my personal brand through any number of activities, including Tweeting, blogging, commenting, and writing for friends’ websites. The idea being, of course, that all of these things represent a certain kind of investment.

But is that really the reason I do these things, or is it just an excuse that makes it seem more reasonable in a money-based society? If I look closer at the sorts of activities I do everyday without expecting any kind of immediate or directly correlated rewards, I’m less sure of my motivations. If I’m honest, many of the things I do, I do to earn the respect of my peers, first and foremost.

There’s no doubt that it also helps build my personal brand, but the point is that that isn’t the driving factor behind it. There’s even a huge chunk of work that I would probably grow tired of if it were compensated monetarily. The dangled carrot of eventual respect is what keeps me at it, and for some projects, there is no better motivator, in my opinion.

How much of your day would say is taken up with uncompensated web work? What do you see as your motivation for doing these things? What do you think about companies trying to capitalize on this kind of labor?

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