80% of the Job Description Doesn't Matter... But This Is the 20% That Does
Newsletter from Week of Nov. 20th, 2021
Interpreting IBM Job Descriptions
I was recently asked to speak to the Code the Dream Bootcamp, located in Durham, NC. One of the areas that they said their students consistently struggle with is understanding how they should look at job descriptions. This is harder than it seems because of 1) how large the description is and 2) how unreasonable some of the requirements are.
In this talk, I break down for this bootcamp how to understand job descriptions, including:
How 80% of the job description doesn’t matter
What parts of the resume are flexible and which ones are hard requirements
Why looking for a culture fit in a resume is a waste of time
I then go through several real job descriptions from IBM and tell you how to be reading them. I hope you enjoy this talk!
Quotes To Inspire Your Path
Recently one of my most favorite books. Highly recommend you give it a read.
I could have started a Nassim Nicholas Taleb fan account after reading Anti-Fragile. Once you see your education as taking bets with your time, life starts to look better.
How Schusterian Does Digital Marketing
Recently, one of the people I work with at my job asked about how I did my digital marketing. I asked to record it and she agreed. So I spent an hour talking about how Schusterian Careers works, and diving into:
How I still get 10,000 views/week on Quora despite not posting anything
How I write for particular platforms
How I generate ideas to write (and execute on that writing)
My personal Trello board and how I track my work creation
If this interests you, I have an unlisted youtube video you can access here:
Course on How To Improve Your Reach On LinkedIn
I’ve become a big fan of small courses that teach you one thing well. I’m a big proponent of digital marketing as a way to grow your network on LinkedIn and have been meaning to improve. Fortunately Aaron Hayslip let me know about a course he just joined called Brand30.
Brand30 is a really simple program for getting 30 posts on LinkedIn in the 30 days. So far the course has been pretty easy to follow. Nothing in the course is that grounding breaking, but what’s unique about it is that there’s a big focus on community and collective growth. I was assigned a partner to work with over the next few weeks which I thought was good.
I think anyone who’s interested in growing as a developer needs to learn how to do digital marketing well and this is as good of a way to improve as any. Their next cohort is starting in January, 2022, and you can checkout their website here.
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