Impact of community to career growth in tech and communities to join
This post examines the power of community to career growth, important communities to join in the tech space and how to be useful in a community.
I have found community useful to a lot of people and to me especially. I also make it very important that when I am exploring a new path or learning something new that I check and join communities that will make my journey accelerated or less stressful.
“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” — Ratan Tata
It is definitely a lonely journey to the top but community can make it a lot smoother. I would be sharing about the following in this piece:
What is a community & What a community is not
Why you should join a community
How to be useful in a community
Physical vs Online/Virtual Community
Communities to join (marketing, software development, product, customer support, startup)
What is a community
A community refers to a group of individuals with common interest, shared goal & common characteristics.
For example, a startup community would have people that are founders, operators working in a startup or own a startup.
This is also the same for a software developer community. You would find people that write codes or are learning how to write codes. Same as we have religious communities and so on.
One other thing to note is that the community could be physical or online and it could be both. You don’t have to be physically present to be part of a community. This has been made possible by the digital evolution today. I belong to a community of over 19k people and I have not met up to 1% and the people in the community have been useful still.
You also need to know that a community must have value to the members. Even though it is a collective effort from members, the community is dead if it does not serve as a place for people to learn, ask questions and get connected on their career journey.
Please also note that you don’t have to have 100 thousand members to be a community. We can have a community of 10 people or 20 people. The value is what matters, not the number count.
Why you should join a community
Human nature gets tired of staying or being at one point for a long time. This means humans want to move, grow and get to the next phase.
This also applies to our career. We want to get to the top of whatever field we find ourselves in and many times the ability to achieve that is the power of people or community.
We also need to see the community as more than the people in it alone but what it can be to you.
This is why it is important to know why you should consider joining or being part of a community.
It could serve as a learning guide/place: The best way to be grounded and make less mistakes is by learning from others. Communities offer that. You learn how certain concepts or processes are in your field of work.
For example, you are starting out with Paid campaigns as a marketing executive and you are looking for ways to effectively maximize your budget and get more results, asking questions in the community could provide answers that could guide you.
Support group / Motivation: The best communities are communities where people are open about sharing their successes. This could be a motivation to someone putting in the work but is not currently seeing huge results yet.
It is also an opportunity for people to ask how they went about achieving that milestone. However, it is also important that you don’t pressurize yourself because efforts compound.
Opportunities: Your next role could be from someone posting in the community. I have gotten many jobs from the community as a developer and I have also hired people from communities I belong to. A community can be a hub of opportunities that accelerate your career.
To Share (your work/experience): Apart from learning, getting opportunities, being motivated in a community, it can also serve as a tool to market your work, share your learnings and experience through content which in turn gives you visibility. If you want people to start seeing you as an authority in what you do, start sharing in the community before making it big.
Influence: Being part of a community could open doors for you. What do I mean? It is possible that people take you more seriously because you are part of a particular community. You could also get opportunities as a result of the type of communities you belong to.
More connections, More chances of success (Networking, Net worth): Your chances of meeting important people or people that have done well for themselves is higher, if they belong to the community you are in. You are able to share from their wealth of knowledge and learnings.
This definitely is a first step then you can build up by exchanging value with the connection you just created. That is when they become part of your network. I think what I am saying in essence is you are able to build meaningful connections with people you would normally not meet, if you are also able to give them value too.
How you can be useful in a community
The effectiveness of a community is a collective effort of people in the community and there are several ways of doing this:
Respond to questions: The first step or easiest way to contribute to a community is to respond to pain points of other people. Respond to their messages and join important conversations. The more people are involved in conversations, the more active the community grows.
Create or Join programs: Whether physical or virtual programs, creating programs like workshops or webinars or a shorter session is a way to contribute to the community members and be part of their growth and that of the community. You could organize Twitter spaces bringing a subject expert or volunteer to be part of the conference logistics and planning.
Attend community events: There is no event without people. Attending a community event is useful to the community. Many times the program itinerary of the event might not be addressing your pain point at that point but you can make the event useful to your use case assuming it is a physical event. For example, I can go to a startup event not for the talks or the sessions but to network with founders/investors that would be in the event.
Share learnings through contents: As you grow, you keep learning. So why not share it? You sharing your journey could help people avoid pitfalls along the way and they will be forever grateful.
Volunteer to help: This is just a way to be useful regardless. Many times community work is not paid so volunteering could be helpful to the organizers and people doing the hard work of bringing people together. Volunteer no matter how little the task could be.
There are also advantages to being useful to a community
Impact (Give value back): Impact is value you give to people. You cannot quantify impact. If impact is top of the chain for you, then this is a good avenue to do that. I have had situations when I was a developer and actively writing and some people will walk up to me and say I saw your article on technical writing and it was very helpful. Some started a career in technical writing through that article.
Build an audience: Building an audience can be the aftermath of being useful in the community. You could find people sharing your content on socials or analyzing your views. You can then see growth in terms of interaction with your ideas or content.
Advance in your career (get connections that get you a better job): When you keep showing up in the community, people tend to know your strong point and recommend you for new opportunities. It is one of the sweetest gifts of the community and the funny thing is that you don’t have to be close to the person that recommends you. I met one of my first investors in my Startup (Sendchamp) through community.
Physical Community vs Online/Virtual Community
In recent times, and with the growth in usage of digital social platforms like WhatsApp, Slack , Telegram and Discord online communities have become rampant and instrumental to the growth of the career of people in the community.
However, physical communities are very important and the most effective way to build a connection in my own opinion. This type of community is at a fast rate dying and causing a loneliness pandemic in regards to career. The Covid pandemic was also instrumental to the gradual death of Physical communities.
The advantage of Virtual community is that we live in an age of instant global connectivity and we can connect people from all corners of the world at the click of a button.
Every virtual community should make it important to have a physical touch to it. Whether it is a conference, workshops or meet & greet. This is because that is when more value is being gotten by community members. It definitely sends a message to people that you are not lonely physically and even after we depart from each other, you can still access the community.
Communities To Join
The list below is not extensive but the beginning to curating a list of communities that you can join as a startup founder, developer, product manager, marketing exec, customer success exec, or just getting started in tech or seeking tech jobs. Please also feel free to share communities to add to the list.
You can access the excel sheet to view or add other communities here.
As we come to the end of this article, I want you to know that you should maximize the power of the community to accelerate your growth. I would also love you to share your experience or the impact the community has had on you in the comment section.