Recently a few good friends have been laid off and I’ve been left thinking what to do after that happens. First up I don’t have any jobs in my back pocket. I don’t know anyone hiring right this second. My thoughts are more general than that.

First even if you haven’t been laid off I would start preparing now, my advice is around building your profile and being prepared for whatever happens. This is also the pretty much exactly what I did in the past few years as I started thinking about moving from day to day software development to a full time Agile Coaching role.

My focus build your personal profile so that people will know you and think of you when they have a problem to solve. My approach to achieving that – provide service and value to others – good things will flow from there. So although the goal is create your personal brand I think the best way to do it is thinking what other people will find valuable.

My Strategies

1. Get an email address with your own domain name. Having hotmail/yahoo/gmail address just looks unprofessional. Domain names are cheap and you can alias your domain to a google apps or any other acct. It just looks better.
2. Start a blog. Don’t use blogger – it looks cheap, pick something where you control the look and feel – typepad and wordpress are both great choices. Focus on quality and value, not frequency. BTW Use feedburner from the start if you ever migrate it will save a ton of hassles.
3. Find your local Agile group (Scrum Community PBwiki has some). Start attending meetings. Ask relevant questions, become known, become a speaker.
4. Find an Agile mailing list (or two) that is of interest to you (Scrum Development, Agile Testing, TDD, …) start answering questions (when you have something of value to add).
5. Start twittering, I’m: http://twitter.com/mlevison – if you look through the list of people I’m following you will find many of the interesting people in the agile community. Also search on “agile” and you will see interesting conversations float by. I use tweetdeck as my tool.
6. Try LinkedIn – yes I’ve dissed it before but you might get something from it I haven’t. My LinkedIn profile.

Remember your focus is helping other people. Do that and they will pay you back in spades. It may take a while but eventually it will. In my case it took about two years but in the end it helped me land my ideal job: Coaching Agile teams.

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