LinkedIn is sponsoring Brazen Careerist

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I am excited to announce two things. The first is that traffic to Brazen Careerist increased by forty percent last month. The second thing is that LinkedIn agreed to sponsor this blog.

The two are related. Of course, LinkedIn wouldn’t be sponsoring the blog if there was not a lot of traffic. But to be honest, they did not approach me for my traffic. In fact, they didn’t approach me at all. I asked them.

I have known the director of corporate communications, Kay Luo, for a while because she was on the phone when I interviewed Konstantin Guericke one of the LinkedIn founders. She was very fun on the phone, chiming in a few times. I ended up writing about how her network-challenged boyfriend should be using her network for his job hunt. And she was a good sport about that, so I liked her.

We kept in touch for a while, and after one email exchange when we were talking about my book, she sent me back a link that showed me how to find all the journalists in my network who could cover my book. That was really cool of her to think of. It didn’t occur to me that I could do that with LinkedIn.

So a few days later I broached the idea of her sponsoring my blog and my book tour. I couldn’t believe how quickly she got the idea approved.

This is a dream sponsorship for me because I am a huge fan of LinkedIn and I was writing about them all the time. Way before I thought of asking them to sponsor me.

Sponsorship is a difficult nut to crack in the blogosphere because there aren’t any official rules for blogger ethics except: Have them. I get approached often by people who want to do some sort of advertising/sponsorship/whatever deal. I always say no. The blog is a huge part of my life, and matching it to someone else’s brand is a big step. I have to love that brand. It has to be integral to my message. I think I’ve found that in LinkedIn.

So I will still write about LinkedIn on the blog, but every time I mention them, I’ll remind everyone that LinkedIn sponsors me. And hooray for that.

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Subscriber Number

65,289

About Me

Penelope Trunk is the founder of four startups and she writes. A lot.  

Each company Penelope built was focused on a community. Her own career path has had twists and turns and in a world where straight, safe career paths are nowhere to be had, Penelope appreciates the power of managing oneself through community.

Penelope’s career began in Los Angeles, where she played professional beach volleyball. She then went to graduate school for English. During that time she learned HTML which allowed her to get a job in the marketing department at Ingram Micro.

After a stint in the Fortune 500, she went to a few smaller software companies and then started her own company, Math.com, a math-tools resource for the teaching community funded by Encore Software. She sold that company for a small sum, and founded eCitydeals, an online auction service for city governments, which was funded by Shelter Ventures, and was shut down in the dot-com bust.

During this time, Penelope wrote a column for Business 2.0 magazine about her experiences as a startup founder. She relocated to New York City and after only a few months at her next startup, she found herself a block from the World Trade Center when it fell.

She decided to be a full-time writer so she did not have to leave her apartment. And she focused on giving career advice instead of writing about herself. At that point, generation Y was entering the workforce and they were looking for advice to tell them how to steer a career that accommodates their lives: old career advice was irrelevant to them.

Penelope started writing career advice for a new generation of workers. Today Penelope is the author of a bestselling career advice book for generation y and the number one career blog.

Penelope spent three years publishing research about how to figure out where to live. After delving into reams of research on economic development and positive psychology, Penelope moved to Madison, WI, where she did not fit in well, but she fell in love with a farmer.

After her relationship with the farmer ended, she moved to Swarthmore, PA, so that her son could continue his cello studies. She homeschools both of her sons.

Now she lives in Boston.

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This is a replacement post for the post that used to be here

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I took down a blog post today. I made a pretty big mistake in taking a critique of a book and making a personal attack. I am sure sorry that I did that. I sure don’t want to be that kind of writer. I probably made a bunch of other mistakes in that post too, but the blogosphere goes fast, and I can’t process them all fast enough to tell you about them now.

Here’s what I can tell you, though. Media Bistro linked here today – and it’s a blog and community that I really respect. And CareerJournal.com is featuring this blog on Monday. And I really don’t want any of those people to think the blog is about personal attacks and controversy.

This is what I think my blog is about: Community.

People have always asked me why I write every day about career advice. I mean, there are more glamorous topics in the world, for sure. I tell those people, first of all, that my career saved me at lots of very bad moments in my life, and I’m grateful that I have it to fall back on, and I want other people to have that, too.

But the other reason I write is because I want to be happy in my life, and I know that somehow, my career is involved in that, and I am not totally sure the best way to do it, and I want a community of people around me who are also trying to figure this out. I want us to do it together.

So, you can see that the post I deleted (well, if you saw it at all) is not turning out to be in line with my vision for my writing life. I wish I had never even thought of writing a personal attack. I can only tell you that I’ve learned a lesson. Maybe ten lessons.

To be honest, I am used to having an editor reining me in, which I don’t have on the blog. And it makes me nervous all the time. At Business 2.0 my editor told me never to write about sex, ever. At Warner Books, my editor took out two fat references and told me that no one wants to hear me writing about fat.

I sure wish I had listened to her.

At Yahoo, the readers write in scathing comments every week, (Example: “Terrible advice but I’d take her for something else.” Yes. I’m not kidding.) But it never bothers me. The comments are so absurd that I know the people are not part of my community.

The comments I got today were thoughtful, heartfelt, and definitely were from people I consider part of my community. So, in an effort to keep us all on the right track – looking for how to do work and life in a way that makes us happy – I deleted this post. And you should know that I’m not above taking some advice, either.

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New feature on Brazen Careerist: Twentysomething

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Ryan Healy will write a new feature on Brazen Careerist called Twentysomething. Presently, he is working at his first job out of college, at a Fortune 500 company, and thinking of starting his own company (of course).

I met Ryan through Brazen Careerist. He told me he was starting a blog with his friend and he asked for some guidance. I read the first post on his blog — Employee Evolution — before he had even set up a way to subscribe, and I liked it so much that I asked him to email me when he posted again.

When I read Ryan’s posts, I found myself thinking, “I should write about that topic.” And then I thought to myself, “Wait. I can’t write that. That’s a topic for a twenty-two-year-old.” So I asked Ryan to write on Brazen Careerist so someone is addressing all those fun topics that Ryan dreams up that I couldn’t really steal, even if I tried.

I have already learned a lot from him. In today’s post Ryan writes about a “blended career.” You can see in one of my comments that I appropriated his phrase before his post was even published. I’m looking forward to picking up a lot more from him as we go along.

Friday smorgasbord: Estimate your real age and ability to contribute at work

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It turns out that young people are poised to significantly increase workplace productivity. But, before we get to that link, here are links to help us redefine age and rethink what engagement looks like at work.

1. Recompute your age
Here’s a new way to think about which generation you are part of: How many social media tools you use. Really.

Margaret Weigel, who manages research about media at MIT, introduced me to this idea, by way of commenting on this blog, and now I’m hooked. Weigel writes: “I mark generational differences by media use, not by age. There are gamers, there are bloggers, and then there are those who post every waking moment of their lives on FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr.”

This is a way to explain why people who are twenty years old and leaving voice mails all day are older than their age. It’s also a way to explain why I think of Obama as a gen-Xer. He has 48,000 friends on MySpace – double any of the other candidates for President.

2. Commitment is personal investment, not time investment
Sylvia Hewlett’s broad sweeping study showed that baby boomers are much more willing than younger people to put in excessively long hours at work. However Personnel Development International finds that hours spent working have no direct correlation to commitment to work: Generation X is actually more committed to their work than baby boomers.

(Maybe this is because Gen X job hopped more and job hopping leads to more passion and more passion leads to more engagement at work.)

3. Collaboration is the next frontier of productivity
Ironically, the baby boomers are the ones who have done all the research about how important and effective teams are, but the baby boomers generally don’t like working in teams. My favorite link of this week is from Mike Griffiths at Leading Answers about the wide-reaching data about how incredibly collaborative young people are at work.

It looks like the real productivity is not going to come from hours spent working, which is how the older people in Hewlett’s study think of productivity. But from the collaborating tools and the people who use them intuitively.

What to do with all this? Companies should make sure that people who don’t understand collaboration get out of the way in the workplace.

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Redesigning a blog is about communicating with the designer

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When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked.

So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.

1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order.
This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices – to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience.

Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself – are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage.

2. Don’t ask your designer to train your dog.
Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designer’s job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer.

Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer can’t fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Don’t bother with being inventive. It’s not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content.

People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. I’ll learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. There’s a lot of return on my time investment. I’m not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I don’t even know if I’ll like. And don’t tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. It’s not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs

4. Keep your design opinions to yourself.
There’s a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then don’t hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you don’t trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then don’t hire her. If you think the designer doesn’t get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs.

In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who can’t design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, here’s an article on how to hire a better one.

5. Talk about your expertise, not the designer’s.
Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples:

Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue.
Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment.

Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top.
Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I don’t think they’ll see the email me button where it is.

6. Know your own limitations.
With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff you’re best at, but there’s always room to learn. My learning area is the photos. For now, I opt for high quality, but free stock photos from sites like Burst.

One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather.

I’m annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but it’s been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.

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New design for Brazen Careerist

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New Blog DesignTa-da! It’s my new blog design. This is a big moment for me because when I started blogging, I never dreamed that it would matter so much to me that I would actually pay to have a custom blog design.

There is an important lesson here about starting something new. Many people who have successful businesses say that if they had known how much work it was going to be they never would have started. I found this was true with the companies I’ve started. And at Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that has grown astronomically in the last year, JD has a nice description of this process of growing in unexpected but exciting ways.

Meeting our goals might depend on being ignorant of how much work it will really take. If I had thought I was going to post six days a week I would have procrastinated every day forever because the amount of work would have seemed unbearable. But in fact, once you fall in love with what you’re doing, like any small business, the long hours don’t feel so long.

In some cases, though, you cannot help but know that you are about to start something that will be a lot of work. That’s how I feel about adding photos to the blog. I never expected to have photos, but my designer, (Rob Brown, who I really liked working with), showed me that the photos add a lot.

The only way I could get myself to agree to make the photo leap is to live in denial — a tactic I used for starting many clearly difficult projects. This means that we are launching a new design, but I have still not learned the ins and outs of photos. So this photo of workers at a desk is what Rob picked as a demo. But it looks good, doesn’t it?

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Business Week features my blog, sparks contact from my secret mentor

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This week’s Business Week just hit the stands, and what do you know? My blog is featured.

Lindsey Gerdes wrote a great summary of my blog, proving to me that other people can write a better summary of our work than we can write ourselves. (Yes, this is why you should hire someone to write your resume.)

Anyway, for you Business Week readers who are stopping by to check things out, Gerdes highlighted these posts:

Navigating the quarterlife crisis

How to turn down a job offer

How to manage your image

The first person to congratulate me about the piece in Business Week was Joyce Lain Kennedy.

This was no small moment for me. She was my silent mentor for years. I say mentor in the loosest sense of the word because (violating one of my own pieces of advice) I never contacted her. I thought she was too big to pay attention to someone like me. (Note: Don’t ever do this. Try contacting everyone. Most people will give you advice if you ask a specific question.)

Joyce Lain Kennedy is the most widely syndicated career advice columnist in the country. Probably in the world. Newspaper syndication is very complicated. Not that you shouldn’t try it. You should. But beware, because people like Kennedy have been there forever and sit on small empires. I studied her patterns, trying to figure out syndication. And, to be honest, I studied her column topics trying to figure out what the heck a career advice columnist writes about.

The problem was that I started out writing about my own career. Sort of like a well written diary. But then my company went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Business 2.0, the magazine that was running my column, told me I was no longer that impressive — unemployed and pregnant did not look good. So I took my editor’s advice and stopped writing about myself. (Well, I tried to. You can imagine how hard that must have been.) Instead, I started writing straight-up career advice, like how to write a resume.

But my ideas ran dry after two or three, so I started stealing Kennedy’s topics: How to interview, how to write a cover letter… They are all classics, all good. She is a pro. I would write them the way a non-pro would write them — adding, for example, references to sex at the office that my editor would delete.

So then, five years pass, blah blah, and here I am, receiving an email from Joyce Lain Kennedy herself. And she sent her book to me. Autographed. It’s Resumes for Dummies. And it’s on a special, sentimental spot in my bookshelf, next to this week’s edition of Business Week.

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Benefit from blogging without spending tons of time

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A few months ago, I was interviewing this guy, Ben Casnocha.

The first thing you need to know about Ben is that he started a company when he was fourteen. And it’s still around today, four years later. Ben doesn’t run it, but my point is that it’s a real company.

But no, wait, that’s not my point. This next paragraph isn’t my point either, but I’m going to tell you anyway: Ben’s company, Comcate, helps governments do stuff online. Nothing particularly notable about that except that it’s exactly what my second startup did. So while my own governments-go-online startup was going bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Ben was in his sixth grade classroom making a success of that very business.

Ben does not know this. I nearly fell on the floor when I was on the phone with him, and it was all I could do to keep the interview going. But now, whenever you see me grandstanding about my three companies that I started, you can recall that I’m also the one who was outmaneuvered in my business by a kid in junior high school.

But anyway, I digress. Ben is a very humble and interesting guy, and he’s hard to not like. So during the interview, I asked him how he meets people to mentor him. This is what he said, “Mostly face to face. Not through the more traditional ways like blogging.”

TRADITIONAL? I had to pick myself up off the floor again.

But you know what? That was eight months ago. And I’ve been blogging for a while now, and Ben has a point. It is very, very easy to meet people through blogging. And it’s very efficient — you never have to leave your computer.

Some of you are thinking you have no idea where to start. So look, here are the easiest instructions for starting a blog. Some are you are thinking it’s too time intensive. But you can grow a useful network efficiently from a blog that you post to only once or twice a week.

I think the networking benefits should be enough reason for you to be posting twice a week. After all, if you can’t afford two hours a week for networking, your career is in trouble. But here are three more benefits to blogging — these are goals you should have for your career anyway, and they’re goals you can reach by blogging only a handful of times a month:

1. You will force yourself to specialize.
You can’t really write a blog about everything. Well, you can, but it will suck. So you’ll need to pick a topic and stick with it. And just the act of doing that is good for you because specializing is good for your career. After all, you can’t be known for something if you are not specializing in something. And once you are known for something you have a lot more leverage to get the kind of work you want to be doing.

People who want flexible work schedule often think that being a generalist will give them a lot of wiggle room. In fact, it’s the opposite. A generalist is easy to find, so no one needs to bother giving you a flexible work schedule to keep you. But if you specialize you are not so easily replaced, so you can ask for more flexibility at work.

2. You will let people know you have good ideas.
One of the biggest complaints people have about their work is that no one listens to their ideas. Everyone wants to be a creative thinker, but not everyone feels like that sort of work is open to them.

With a blog, though, you show people your creativity. Got a lot of ideas? Good, because there are a lot of days in the week for you to fill on that blog. And instead of you running around the office complaining to people about your stifled potential, you can show people your potential by broadcasting your ideas. The best way to get hired to spew ideas is to spew them and get people interested.

3. You will show passion and commitment.
There is a lot of evidence to show that, all things being mostly equal, we have a proclivity toward hiring people we want to have sex with. But we also have a proclivity toward hiring people we like. And after all the Ford Models are out of the interview cue, the most appealing people are those who have passion and commitment.

Of course, if you have read any how-to-interview advice, you know you should always say you have passion and commitment. But people who have it exude it. And if you are a blogger, and post at regular intervals, you don’t need to tell people about your passion and commitment – it’s right there on the page.

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