Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You by Jeff Gothelf

Author:Jeff Gothelf [Gothelf, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gothelf Corp
Published: 2020-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

Step 3

Follow the (New) Path

As you begin to tell your story, you’ll use your expertise to build a foundation. And as you build your foundation, you’ll start to attract an audience and create a following. You become part of the conversation, which will attract even more people to you and your content. Forever employability is an outcome of your willingness, flexibility, and agility to follow new paths as they reveal themselves. Get an offer to speak? Take it. An offer to write a book? Write it. Don’t know how? Learn how. That’s how I did it.

The content I was publishing solved a problem for software designers in a continuously changing software development world. The more popular my ideas got, however, the less design work I was actually doing, which was an entirely different place for me to be-it was both fascinating and a bit scary all at the same time. I knew that if I didn’t practice my design craft on a daily basis, my skills would start to atrophy. I would become outdated and obsolete, speeding my headlong plummet to the outcome I foresaw the morning of my 35th birthday. I was intentionally going to put myself in a position to be passed up by those younger, cheaper, designers I was so worried about.

Strange times indeed.

I was a pretty good designer and manager of designers, but people weren’t asking me to do that anymore-they were asking me to do other things that I hadn’t done while I was on my old path. I was getting invitations to make presentations at conferences. I was being asked to speak at events and do workshops. “Come to Korea…” “Come to Iceland…” “Come to San Francisco…” “Come to Tel Aviv…” “…and tell us how you did this.” I was more than happy to do it, because it was fun and interesting and it was building the conversation.

I wasn’t doing much actual design work. Instead, I was talking about modern software design-how you build the design process. I was being asked to teach what I was writing and speaking about. I was at a pivot in my life-straddling the fence between doing public speaking, training, teaching, and writing and the career that I absolutely knew I was good at and that would provide me with a reliable paycheck every other week. I still wasn’t getting paid for the new stuff, which made me even more nervous.

Instead of fighting to stay relevant and up to date, I was going to voluntarily become obsolete. This was a big dilemma for me-I knew that if I was going to succeed in the long run, I would need to go all in on my new path. I couldn’t do both, and I couldn’t hesitate. In the short run, I would have to get comfortable with being in an uncomfortable place. The clock continued to tick, and that horde of young, inexpensive designers was on my doorstep-hungry for something good to eat and getting ready to break down my door.

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