Working, but daydreaming of a better job?

What if you could just chat with a colleague, maybe at a conference, and hear the magic words, “Hey, we’d love it if you’d come work for us”? When you get into a spirited professional conversation, career magic happens. (Click here to tweet this thought.)

It’d be much easier if you already knew plenty of colleagues who could tell you if their workplace is awesome — or awful. And put in a good word for you. But you don’t know people at every company. Most of us don’t network as much as we should.

Your challenge is to get your foot in the door, get to know the company and get them to know you, without the knuckle-biting stress of an interview.

Here’s a trick few people have tried, simple as it sounds. But it works.

1. Find a colleague in a company, someone with a cool job at your level. If you’re a senior software engineer, for example, look for another senior software engineer.

2. Ferret out their email address, then cold-email them. Introduce yourself and give a link to an online profile or two; they’ll most likely answer. They enjoy chatting with other smart professionals. (That’s you, right?)

3. Set up a phone call and maybe grab a coffee. The two of you can talk about your profession and experiences on the job.

They’re your peers, not managers or HR people. You can trust them to tell it like it is.

The groundbreaking career book What Color is Your Parachute? suggested the unemployed should do informational interviews to ask experienced professionals about opportunities in the industry.

You, the employed professional, should do informational interviews from a position of strength. You have the skills employers need. Talking with you is a privilege.

You can chat with your colleague about the technical side of your job: “We’ve been diving deeper into JavaScript recently.” They can also tell you about their workplace: “There’s lots of adrenaline here, and it’s sometimes a bit draining. But the people are top-notch, and we never go beyond 40 hours in a week.”

Employers want these conversations; they’re sick of mass-spammed irrelevant resumes

Employers have started using a straightforward but underestimated recruiting trick: offering access to their top professionals to attract their peers. They want to make it easy to send those cold-emails.

This sort of friendly conversation goes beyond the usual dull interview questions to find ideal pairings. Will Critchlow, CEO of the digital marketing agency Distilled, says, “We love hiring people who are passionate about working for us specifically.”

And Critchlow isn’t worried engineers lack sales skills. “We find that the right people just want the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to work here,” he says.

Don’t be shy to contact an interesting company. The Internet startup Kloudless, of Berkley, CA, draws in candidates this way. CEO Eliot Sun says that cold-emailers love hearing about the corporate culture and end up choosing Kloudless over larger companies across the Bay.

Interesting colleagues are more effective in attracting top candidates than boring job ads

If you’re among the lucky few who are completely happy where you are, consider volunteering yourself as a company ambassador. If it’s done right, you’ll get a great opportunity to talk to smart people across the industry and bring the best ones on board.

Many companies already have some sort of ambassador program, but even if not, it’s simple.

Here are the steps:

1. Ask your manager to set up a small ad highlighting you at the company’s careers page, with your name, title, photo and online profiles like GitHub, LinkedIn or StackOverflow so other professionals want to talk to you.

2. Potential candidates send you a message, with a few of their own professional profiles, to prove they’re worth talking to.

3. Your manager or HR screens each contact. You’re busy, but you enjoy talking to smart, experienced professionals, and it’s their messages that’ll get through to you. About one to three of these contacts a week is ideal.

4. You answer briefly. If you and the incoming contact hit it off, you can do a phone call or lunch. And maybe, if it goes really well, refer them for a job interview.

This way is better for everyone. If you’re a potential candidate considering a new job, you go into discussions with the confidence that insiders already support you. If you’re an ambassador, you get to talk to some fascinating potential colleagues and create a rapport as you pass the good ones on for interviews. What could be better?

Josh Fox decided that peer-contact programs should be fast and simple for employers and software developers, so he created an easy way for employers to provide an ambassador program, based on FiveYearItch.com. If you’re an employer who’s considered the idea of an ambassador service, please be in touch.

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The post A Networking Trick That Could Help You Find Your Next Job appeared first on Brazen Life.

You never know when the next recession will come or when you’ll be out of a job and scrambling for the next one.

So if you have a stable job, take advantage of the power that it gives you—and prepare yourself for the vicissitudes of fate with these five tips:

1. Be a ninja, not a peasant

If you read professional blogs on the Internet, you’re exposed to a world of rockstar ninjas who blog, tweet, connect to hundreds of contacts on social networks, attend professional conferences, write open source, launch startups and jump from job to exciting job.

It’s a distorted image. The ninjas are a tiny percentage of the population of knowledge workers, but you see their writings, their open source and their online profiles.

The vast majority of software engineers, IT professionals and other knowledge workers are the peasants of the industry, doing their job and doing it well, but with no intention of playing the game.

Sorry, but being a ninja is no longer optional. The days when an IT prole could labor anonymously for decades in the code mines are over. You need to sell yourself and build your brand, or you’ll be out when your skills get stale and the crunch comes.

And if you want one thing to start with, put your professional presence online. The resume of the future, as “Ecogrrl” Aimee Fahey points out, will be composed of links to your online self, so build an online self. You can start out quietly and anonymously at first, but start building.

2. Look for a better job

Arrange to get poached. It’s fun!

A good salesperson is always selling. The biggest asset you’ll ever sell is your labor, so always be on your toes to find the best new job possible. Maybe the job you have now is good. But it may disappear at any moment.

Hunting actively is time-consuming. You also don’t want to look desperate; you should be playing hard to get. Passively receiving serious offers is a lot easier and keeps you up to date on your opportunities in the job market.

3. Learn to connect worldwide

It used to be enough to develop good relations with your coworkers in the office or to build your freelance business with contacts across town. But the trend, despite Marissa Meyer’s recent announcement at Yahoo!, is to work with colleagues worldwide, whether from home or the office.

Recently, some companies have been building all-remote teams, even for functions like development, which used to be the last to remain office-based. As Larry Silverman, CTO of TrackAbout, has described, this leads to very different hiring considerations, and you need to be ready for that.

Make yourself remote-ready by learning to collaborate using remote tools. Your current stable job, where the boss trusts your work and can loosen the leash, is the best place to gradually move your work off-site and position yourself as a denizen of cyberspace, not your office cubicle.

4. Negotiate a better job for yourself

Your boss needs you doing the good work that you’re doing. But if she knows that you may jump ship (and you should always have her wondering if that’s a possibility), she should be prepared to let you move up to new responsibilities and enhanced compensation. It’s not just a question of getting a more interesting job or a bigger salary. In today’s fast-moving job market, you must stay up to date or find yourself left behind.

Remember: the boss is not giving you work. You are giving the boss work, and she will offer you exactly what you can negotiate out of her. Mark Herschberg, a BetaBeat Most Poachable Player, offers some tips on this, but the key point is that job offers from a new employer and the package you are getting now from your current employer are opening positions for a discussion, not final offers.

5. Get yourself a better job title

A title is just a word or three, but when hiring managers spend less than a minute on a resume on average, those are some very important words. “VP of Development” looks a lot better than “Team Leader,” no matter what the actual responsibilities.

Patrick McCuller’s book How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers is aimed at hiring managers, but it can give you some fascinating insights into how these managers think. A relevant job title for each new job is one of the crucial elements they look for, as a title is just a way of summarizing the responsibilities of a position in a brief phrase. Don’t make stuff up, but the moment you get the boss to agree to a new title, feel free to flaunt it.

The pace of technology is accelerating, and you will have to accelerate with it. The economy is becoming concentrated in fewer hands. This means that more people remain unemployed while a select few get ahead by running the new technology-driven economy.

Be one of them. Be a ninja, not a peasant. Learn new things. Get some eye candy for that resume. And always—always—keep your eye on the job market.

Josh Fox has long wondered why experienced software engineers and other IT professionals stick so long at one job. He helped create FiveYearItch.com to help them anonymously receive job offers that meet their requirements.

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The post 5 Genius Ways to Better Your Career By Leveraging the Job You Already Have appeared first on Brazen Life.

How many years until you should ditch a job? It’s a tough question.

If you leave a new job within a year, you risk being labeled flaky, especially if it ends up being a pattern (like staggering between three jobs in as many years). On the other hand, if you hang on too long, you risk being labelled a slug. Slug, as in going nowhere interesting, fast.

After the three-year mark, you start getting that creeping sensation down your spine. Then, after about five years, you know the pressure’s on. This is particularly true for software engineers and others who live at the bleeding edge: holding on to your current advantage in a given technology will put you at a disadvantage when that technology goes obsolete.

You’re ahead of the game at this point—you’ve shown that you’re stable, and at the same time, by sniffing around for other opportunities after three to five years, you show you’re active enough to keep an eye out for new challenges.

But looking for a job takes energy. Your boss likes you. You’re comfortable. Do you have it in you for a search?

Setting the energy dial to low can actually work in your favor. Playing hard-to-get is a good tactic in employment, just as in romance. It’s better to be the hunted than the hunter.

Consider these four reasons to open yourself up to job offers:

1. Your job might not be as secure as you think

Building security and loyalty by staying at a job for a long time is something from another generation. Particularly if you are a technologist, your job might actually get less secure over time as your outdated skills reach obsolescence. But if you leverage your demonstrated abilities in one technology while it’s still hot, employers will be glad to have you help them as they too move to the latest thing.

2. Variety demonstrates growth

Companies like Microsoft like to lay off people who are too “long at level.” Four years on a job is around where the value tops out. Having some variety in your background shows that you are staying active.

3. You risk burnout

You’ll likely burn yourself out at your job if you hang on too long. Luckily, burnout can be good for you—if you use the burnout in one job to motivate yourself into finding to find a better one.

4. Most significant career boosts happen when you change jobs

All it takes is a single good employer who thinks you can fill bigger shoes, and you’ve stepped up.

So scratch that little itch that’s telling you to get yourself moving. Relax; experienced pros like you are in demand. Just open yourself up to the possibilities, and you can take your career in a new direction.

Josh Fox has long wondered why experienced software engineers stick so long at one job. He  helped create FiveYearItch.com to help them receive job offers that meet their stated requirements.

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The post 4 Reasons to Leave Your Job Even if You’re Comfortable appeared first on Brazen Life.

By collegial, I mean knowing who the good professionals are and supporting them.

It’s common in a lot of professions. Farmers know the other farmers in the district. They help each other, and each neighbor has a reputation, for better or worse. Owners of local businesses have Rotary Clubs, which helps them figure out exactly who to trust to make a deal. Doctors recommend specialists to their patients.

But we software developers, project managers and technical writers have next to none of this. Bosses make decisions about our futures, not other professionals.

It seems to me that we could stand to be a little more like doctors and lawyers — professionals who rule their industries.

Co-workers know who’s good. This social capital can and should become the core of our virtual CVs.

And it starts with collegiality.

OK, I didn’t mean we should support all of our colleagues. Some of them really are jackasses. But among the jackasses are a few geniuses, a few pearls decorating our cubicle dungheap.

The usual advice is that you need to promote yourself, to blog and tweet, to buff your LinkedIn profile. But some of us signed up for job descriptions other than self-marketing.

Think of it this way: You are not working for your boss. Legally, you are working for some corporation or organization. Your boss may give you assignments, but in the end we’re all really working for ourselves. You are selling your labor for money; and so, every day, improving the product — you. Professionals should not be concentrating on a boss’s praise; they should focus on building a reputation among their colleagues and in the job market.

Support your colleagues — but how? Beer and office treats will only go so far. You need to give a gift that is valuable.

I suggest you say “thank you.” Done right, it will boost your colleague’s market value and people will appreciate you for it, too.

Has a co-worker ever bailed you out with amazing, over-the-top work? Maybe by helping you restore a corrupted database, catching a tricky error in a spreadsheet, or contributing key data for your slides the day before a critical presentation? When colleagues show that they’re among the few who Get Things Done, they deserve a thank-you.

You’re already saying “thank you” when it’s needed. And an email thank-you, with a CC to the colleague’s boss, is also nice. That helps put your colleague on the boss’s good side.

But a one-time note of appreciation is unlikely to result in a raise — especially if the boss realizes that no one outside the office knows about it. It’s ironic, but even in this new era of openness, professional reputations can still remain a corporate secret, locked inside the office walls.

So the answer is to say a public thank-you. Something like a blog post. The world needs to know how good your colleague is.

For a public thank-you to mean anything, you’ll need to prove your identity and show that you stand behind your word. A rich online social profile is fairly hard to fake. So a public tweet or Facebook post will get the word out, believably.

An even bigger step is offering to serve as a reference, to speak up for the colleague when they next look for a job. There is no clearer sign of support than publicly committing to pitch your colleague to potential employers. And today’s phone reference process is incredibly broken. I mean, if you have a good  relationship with your boss, you have to hope he or she quits – under most circumstances, a boss is not going to want to help you leave if things are working well. So, if you want to really support your colleague, offer to serve as a reference.

Thank-yous and phone references are a great gift at any time, and particularly whenever you finish a project with a co-worker. They cost you nothing, and they mean money to your colleague — even a small effect in salary negotiations is worth a lot.

Just pay it forward, don’t be mercenary about it. Before you know it, your colleagues will realize what they’re missing: an environment where professionals, not bosses, rank and evaluate each other.

There are lots of ways to show support, but the bottom line is: We are not oppressed proles, living in fear of the boss’ sneer. We are strong professionals. The world is ours; let’s take it.

Josh Fox has long been obsessed about the fact that excellent workers produce five times the value, but don’t get five times the salary. He decided to do something about it: The result was Laudits.com, which helps you capture professional reputation with thank-yous and offers to serve as a reference.

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The post How to Get Ahead Professionally (and Help Your Co-Workers) if You’re Not a Fan of Self-Promotion appeared first on Brazen Life.