| Work on your communication abilities. As I said above, start a blog and start writing about the things you find interesting in tech. Write tutorials, commentary, introductions to new things, etc. within your topics of focus. For public speaking, if you feel you need some training, find a local Toastmasters and join it for a while. If the first one you try isn't good, try another - different clubs operate differently and so suit different people. But Toastmasters is designed to fit around a work schedule, so I find it better than taking a class. If you already feel like you have a handle on public speaking, join a local meetup and offer to speak - I have never met a Meetup that isn't scrambling for speakers and usually fills them in with corporate schills like me cough. Build an audience. Start a newsletter and send them updates every time you publish something new (if you find yourself especially productive, limit your newsletters to once a week or twice a month). Submit your work to places like Hackernoon and here. If you can't do this on your own, do it for your current employer - that's more or less what I did. Talk to your management team about your interests in developer advocacy and ask them what topics you can talk about. Your marketing team in particular will fawn over you if you do this. Developer advocacy is not ALL marketing, but it part of it is an arm of marketing, so working with them will get you far pretty quickly. I;d say it takes about six months to build a following if you stick to it and a full year before you really get something resembling a handle on it all. Be patient, though, and stick with it if you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, don't push it - I love programming and still do a fair amount if it on the side, but it's not at all my full time job and not something I find I have a lot of mental space to afford proper focus to when I need it like I used to be able to. That may also just be aging, though. I still think of it as the most fun job you can have in the industry. |