Community 👥 Day 6 - Networking Advent Calendar
Career development doesn't have to be lonely and difficult. Communities are one of the easiest ways to network
The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this or missed Day 1, read here; to read Day 7, go here.
Day 6: Join 2 communities and post an intro post
When the pandemic first started, companies froze their hiring and laid off the recruiters before anyone else. As an early career recruiter, I started to question my career choices. I couldn’t see clear ways to keep growing and developing my career.
Fortunately, I stumbled upon Startup Recruiting Bootcamp by Jennifer Kim and landed in the middle of an amazingly supportive recruiter community. The community opened my eyes up to inclusive hiring practices and creative approaches to talent acquisition. Not only did it give me access to knowledge that I wouldn’t have acquired by myself, but also gave me so much more confidence in what I do.
Today’s task is to encourage you to be among the best in your career paths and learn from them. Join any 2 communities of your choice, and post at least one intro post about yourself in either of the communities.
I wrote about 28 professional communities I recommend in 8 areas. If you don’t find ones that match your interests, Google is your best friend.
And remember the bio we (re)wrote yesterday? The intro post is the best time to use it! Here’s an example of my intro post in the Butter community. It landed me a fun virtual coffee chat with someone that commented on my post, and turned out we were both part of another community:
The full list of communities below:
LinkedIn Alternatives
LinkedIn is becoming the new Facebook, thus many newer professional networking communities have popped up aiming to create more meaningful connections.
Polywork: a global professional social network that allows people to share their career highlights like projects or speaking engagements. Website.
Read.cv: similar to Polywork, you can showcase your own projects or view others’ professional projects to collaborate with them. Website.
Blind: a global anonymous professional network where people ask and answer questions about company and career insights. Also has a job board. Website.
For Women
WomenTechMakers: a global community for women in tech by Google. Its Berlin chapter is genuinely one of the most helpful and active communities I’ve been in. Slack and MeetUp groups.
Elpha: a global professional network for women. They embrace the inclusive definition for women and welcome trans women as well as genderqueer and non-binary people who identify as women or femme. Web forum.
PyLadies: a global community for women who code with Python, has local communities in different countries. Slack or MeetUp groups.
WomenWhoGo: a global community for women who code with Golang, has local communities in different countries. Slack or MeetUp groups.
The Mom Project: a global community for women in their working motherhood journey. The employers they work with are pre-vetted companies that are family-friendly. I’ve not signed up so I’m not sure what platform the community is hosted on.
For People of Color
BlackInTech Berlin: a Berlin-based community that supports black people who work in tech. Founded by Kave Bulambo, Director of Talent Acquisition and Diversity & Inclusion EMEA at SmartRecruiters. The community is also open to allies. Slack and MeetUp group.
Unfortunately, I’ve not been in any other active tech community for people of color in Berlin. Luckily, DiversifyTech also compiled a huge list that includes communities for people of color around the world and people with disabilities.
Software Engineering
Most of the engineering communities are organized by programming languages.
DEV: a global community of 660k developers. Web forum.
Gophers: a global community for people who code with Golang. Slack group.
BerlinJS: a Berlin-based community for people who code with Javascript. Slack group.
Android Developer Group: a Berlin-based community for Android developers. Slack group.
Lead Dev: a global community for current and future leaders in software engineering. MeetUp group.
Ruby Developers: a global community for people who code with Ruby. Slack group.
Hackernews: a global community created by Y Combinator. Also has a monthly “Who is hiring” thread where companies post their job openings, and it gets posted around the first day of each month. I highly recommend checking these threads especially if you are looking for remote jobs. A lot of recruiters see this as a source of highly qualified candidates. Web forum.
Product & Design
UIUX Berlin: a Berlin-based community for people interested in UI/UX. Slack group.
Human Robot Creative Community: A global community led by my friend, Austin Keeble, a former Google designer and part of the distinguished faculty of design at General Assembly. He also hosts a 30 Day Creative Career Lab (I had the pleasure to be a part of its version 1 — it was pretty amazing).
Mind the product: a global community of 20k product people. Slack group.
Product People: a Berlin-focused community organized by a team of product managers who offer their service to companies on an interim basis. Their LinkedIn page is constantly posting job openings, so I strong recommend following them. Other than that they seem to organize mostly in a MeetUp group.
ProductHunt Global: a global community by ProductHunt. Slack and MeetUp groups.
Marketing
Product Marketing Alliance: a global community for current and future product marketers. Slack group.
Social Media Managers: a global community for social media managers. Facebook group (of course).
Growth Hackers: a global community for current and future marketing and growth professionals. Web forum.
HR & Recruitment
Secret HR Society: a referral-only community for in-house HR and recruitment professionals. Slack group.
Peoplegeeks: a global community for HR professionals with 15,000 members worldwide, managed by CultureAmp. Slack group.
#Peoplepeople: a global community for HR professionals. Slack group.
Community Management & Workshop Facilitation
Butter Community: a global community run by Butter.us, a fun virtual collaboration tool. Website (Circle).
Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!