Whatever your circumstances, there will be something here to help you.<\/p>\n
In this series, I’m going to guide you through a process of identifying your own career goals and provide information, tips and advice to help you formulate your own career plan and follow it through. Along the way you may find you change your plans or switch things around a bit \u2013 in such a fast-moving industry, being flexible is essential!<\/p>\n
Missed a tutorial in our WordPress Careers Masterclass series? You can catch up on all six posts here:<\/strong><\/p>\n By the time you’ve reached the end of this series you’ll have four\u00a0essentials:<\/p>\n As you work through this series I encourage you to ask questions of yourself, make notes, do external research and think hard about what it is you want and why, as well as working out how you’re going to get it.<\/p>\n Think this is for you? Read on!<\/p>\n My experience of attending WordCamps and WordPress meetups has shown that people are doing all sorts of things with WordPress. From the causal blogger through to the full-time WordPress developer, there are lots of things you can use WordPress for, and plenty of those will make money.<\/p>\n They come under four broad headings:<\/p>\n This list isn’t\u00a0exhaustive. I’m sure there will be even more opportunities that arise time, and some of you probably\u00a0do something that’s not in my list. But this gives you a good idea of the options available to you.<\/p>\n You don’t have to be a developer\u00a0to forge a successful WordPress career. For example:<\/p>\n But,\u00a0of course, there are plenty of opportunities for people who do like to write code!<\/p>\n In this series I’m going to look at the four headings above in detail and pass on\u00a0advice from people with relevant careers, so you’ll be getting it straight from the horse’s mouth.<\/p>\n The final part of\u00a0the series will\u00a0help you put it all together, identifying what your priorities\u00a0are and how you’re going to meet your goals. We’ll also look at continuous learning, and identify how\u00a0successful WordPress professionals keep developing their skills.<\/p>\n Before you start, it’s a good idea to take some time to identify what your own goals are and what sort of career might fit with those. Doing this might surprise you: you might have always wanted to launch an online store but find when you’ve done this that you’re better suited to being a freelance developer, for example.<\/p>\n I’m going to ask you to grab a piece of paper and a pen (old-fashioned I know, but then I’m a writer!) and make some notes around four key areas:<\/p>\n This is just for you to complete and will be private, so be honest with yourself!<\/p>\n But first I’m going to let you identify your dream lifestyle.<\/p>\n Let’s start by doing some dreaming. Imagine it’s five years from now. You’re living the dream, doing the things you’ve always wanted to do. Money is no object, nor are skills or any other obstacles.<\/p>\n Think about what you’re doing. It needn’t be job related: it could be lounging on a Caribbean island. And you may be thinking, “how can this be relevant to career planning?” But bear with me.<\/p>\n Now write down whatever you’ve identified as your dream.<\/p>\n Take a look at what you’ve written, and identify\u00a0what that means in terms of your day-to-day life. In your dream world, do you have a job? If so, what hours are you working? Are you doing something that stimulates\u00a0your brain? Just being lazy??(!)<\/p>\n Identifying your dream lifestyle can help you identify your priorities. For example:<\/p>\n Take some time to identify what you think your dream says about you, your priorities, and how these might translate to your career goals.<\/p>\n Now let’s come down to earth and look at the practicalities.<\/p>\n\n It’s easy to assume\u00a0you should look for a job doing something you can already do.<\/p>\n WordPress, and web development in general, is such a fast moving field that very few people have got years’ and years’ experience doing what they\u00a0do\u00a0right now. When I launched my own WordPress agency in 2010 I had no experience developing websites for clients, so I decided to specialize in responsive design, something that was new to everyone. I had no disadvantage and was quickly able to learn and establish a reputation.<\/p>\n Think about the experience you\u00a0have\u00a0that might be relevant to a WordPress career. Don’t confine this to job\u00a0experience. Think about:<\/p>\n Think broadly: if you’ve got experience coding\u00a0in one\u00a0language,\u00a0you could learn another one. And if you’re great at social media marketing you might be able to translate this to conversion optimization.<\/p>\n Now make a list of your\u00a0experience. Once you’ve done that, we’ll move on to identify your skills.<\/p>\n All jobs and careers require some skills. But it’s tempting to focus on technical skills, which are easily learned, instead of interpersonal, management and marketing skills, which are much harder to learn.<\/p>\n Looking at your list of experience, identify the skills these experiences have given you. Don’t limit yourself to skills you’ve used at\u00a0work. For example, if you’ve done volunteer work you may have learned useful skills you can use in\u00a0your career.<\/p>\n Think about three categories:<\/p>\n Now add a list of your skills to your notes. You may find that what you’ve written down so far reinforces the priorities you identified when thinking\u00a0about your dream lifestyle, or you might be getting a few surprises. Try to keep an open mind at this stage. And add the skills you think you could learn.<\/p>\n When you were identifying your dream lifestyle earlier, I asked you to imagine that circumstances were no object: you had plenty of money, could live wherever you want and your family and\/or partner\u00a0came along with you without the slightest grumble.<\/p>\n In the real world, your circumstances will be a factor you need to consider when planning your career. Think about:<\/p>\n Again, make some notes. And don’t assume you know the answers. The people around you might be more flexible than you expect, and you may find ways of making or saving the cash you need to make a career change.<\/p>\n Finally, we come to you. It’s important to think about what suits your personality and fulfills you.<\/p>\n Think about what makes you happiest at work. Is it working in a team? Inventing new things? Creating a product? Making a sale? Or maybe finding time to work alone and get things done?<\/p>\n Identify the situations in which you’ve felt most comfortable and been most productive. Chances are you’ll have a mix: very few people need to be either alone or with other people all of the time, for example. I’m like a lot of writers and developers:\u00a0I work well alone. But I’d go crazy if I worked in a vacuum so I’ve found opportunities to work with other people too, including running my local WordPress group and being part of a writers’ group.<\/p>\n Make more notes. Now look over everything you’ve written and review what it says about your goals, priorities and what career options might suit you and be available to you.<\/p>\n What do you need to learn? Where do you need to live? Do you need to talk to\u00a0the people around you? Do you need to save some money? Identify the changes you need to make\u00a0in order to\u00a0succeed.<\/p>\n Now you’ve spent some time looking at yourself and identifying what motivates you and what you’re good at, it’s time to translate that into a career plan.<\/p>\n But stop.<\/p>\n Before you can put together a useful plan, you need to know more about the options available to you. This will help you check if you really want to follow the career you’ve got in mind. It will also help you to understand what you need to do to make a success of that career, or at least to get started with it.<\/p>\n That’s where the next four parts of this series come in. In the next four weeks you’ll learn all about four different career options with WordPress, and all the variants of them:<\/p>\n It’s likely that these will overlap. For example, you might want to specialize in SEO but need to think about whether you’ll do that as a freelancer, by setting up an agency or for an employer. So reading all the parts of this series will help you.<\/p>\n Once we’ve looked at those four career areas, we’ll come back to your career plan. You’ll take some time putting together the work you’ve done today with\u00a0what you learn about specific careers, and use that to build a plan you can follow. One which will adapt as time moves on and things inevitably change.<\/p>\n We’ll also look at continuous development, and identify ways you can keep developing your skills as you pursue your new career.<\/p>\n I’ve written plenty of posts about careers in\u00a0the past \u2013 many of them are listed in the resources below. But this series will help you go into\u00a0detail and identify what you need from your career, inform yourself about the options, and plan for success.<\/p>\n If you take the time to identify your goals and priorities, as well as\u00a0the arsenal of skills and experience you’ve got at your disposal, you’re much more likely to succeed.<\/p>\n I look forward to working through your career plan with you \u2013 good luck!<\/p>\n Welcome to this new series on WordPress careers! In this six-week\u00a0series, you’ll learn about the wide range of options available to you if you want to forge a career\u00a0with WordPress. This series will be useful for you if you can answer “yes” to any of the questions below: Are you starting out with WordPress and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":347011,"featured_media":160095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10469],"tags":[10686,9770,9824,10555],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-159586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-marketing","tag-agency","tag-development-2","tag-jobs","tag-wordpress-career"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/347011"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159586"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162128,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159586\/revisions\/162128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159586"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=159586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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WordPress Career Options<\/h3>\n
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Identifying Your Own Career Goals<\/h3>\n
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Your Dream\u00a0Lifestyle<\/h4>\n
![\"wordcamp](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/wordcamp.png\")
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Your Experience<\/h4>\n
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Your Skills<\/h4>\n
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Your Circumstances<\/h4>\n
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Your Personality<\/h4>\n
Formulating Your Career Plan<\/h3>\n
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Never Stop Learning<\/h3>\n
A Great WordPress Career Starts With a Plan<\/h3>\n
Resources for Further Reading<\/h3>\n
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