Why blog as a Generation Y Young Professional?
This is the second question I get after people discover Newly Corporate (right after they ask “Why didn’t I have this before my first day of work?”). I usually give a range of answers that center around that fact that I am a serial referrer. When I find a product, idea or technique I like, I want to share it with others so they can realize the benefits as well. This reason works well for short conversations but, I recently sent a site description-type answer to Penelope Trunk, another Wisconsin-based business blogger, who came back at me with this:
I get that that’s the mission of your blog. But personally, why invest time in that and not something else? What do you want to get out of it personally? Why blog and not do something else to achieve that personal goal?
Wow. What a great opportunity to dig deeper into why I put the countless hours I do into blogging when the opportunity cost is so great. After cogitating for a bit, I came up with these reasons for investing considerable amounts of time into blogging as a young professional:
1. It helps me to connect my personal experiences to greater issues within the business world in a way that not only improves my career but the careers of those I am sharing with.
2. It is a great way to practice project management with a team of bloggers. I work with them on everything from training to scheduling and online promotion.
3. It is a great, millennial-friendly, way to develop a network (outside of happy hour) with business people who are self starters and interested in self-improvement. They share their experiences and knowledge on the internet and connect with each other in a way that most people do not, making them a very valuable subset of business people to know and work with.
I can see each of these points in all the best posts on Newly Corporate now that have I have taken the time to dig deeper into my reasons for blogging. How do you achieve these goals? If you blog, do you have other reasons besides these?
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Tags: Career Development, IT, Management, Project Management, Young Professional
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March 5th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] on the internet.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, as I pointed out in my post “Why blog as a Gen Y Young Professional?“. In fact, blogging helps you put together cogent arguments, express yourself more completely, [...]
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April 25th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Blogging is also a great way to develop an organic writing sample. I had a major interview this week and one of the first things the interviewer asked about was my blogging — he liked my “voice”
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May 17th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Hey NC crew - really like the blog. I had to ask myself this sort of question recently when I relaunched my podcast this spring.
I think there’s also a lot of satisfaction from doing something that makes me feel good that sometimes gets overlooked when people decide to blog. Once I’m back from my study abroad, I plan to blog daily which will be an interesting experiment.
Keep up the great work!
-James