What’s Your Best Career Advice, Using EXACTLY Six Words?

Pete Johnson

Pete used Linkedin Answers to pose the headline question: What’s your best career advice, using EXACTLY 6 words? Here's how Pete framed the question:

In January around the time of the inauguration, the Bush daughters wrote the Obama daughters a letter giving them advice on living in the public eye inside the White House. The most widely quoted part of that letter was pretty touching, “Remember who your dad really is.” 

At about the same time, Newsweek ran a short story about a collection of 6 word memoirs put out by Smith Magazine on the topic of love. 

Given that Jenna and Barbara’s advice happened to be exactly 6 words long, and that I have an interest in mentoring, I thought it would make for an interesting experiment to see what people might come up with on the topic of career advice.  So, what’s the best career advice you have, using EXACTLY 6 words? 

Pete received well over 100 responses to his question, and Scott Allen picked up the story on his About.com Entrepreneurs Blog.

Talking Points:

• How long have you been blogging?
• What is HP's policy toward employees blogging? Is it encouraged?
• What do you do as the Portals and Marketing Solutions IT Chief Architect?
• The key focus of your blog is to promote soft skills to engineers - nerds such as yourself. Tell us what inspired you to focus on soft skills, rather than computing wizadry?
• Using Linkedin Answers, you asked the following: What’s your best career advice, using EXACTLY 6 words? Why six words?
• What kind of response did you receive?
• You decided to create several groups from the responses?
• What were some of your favorite responses?
• What did you learn from this?
• Have you asked other career related questions through Linkedin Answers?
• For those who might be interested in a career with HP, what would you recommed?
  

"Over the course of my experience, I’ve worked with engineers from all over the world, over 400 like-minded nerds in all. What I noticed, and what is the focus of this site, is that the best engineers all have a similar set of skills and that those skills have little to do with the discipline of engineering itself. Instead, what seems to get people ahead in this industry is a mastery of so-called “soft skills”. Things like the ability to accurately estimate the duration of tasks so that reliable schedules can be created, or being capable of communicating technical concepts in terms that can be understood by marketing folks or upper management. Although a baseline of engineering knowledge is a must, it’s these other things we don’t learn in school that mean the most when it comes to raises, stock options, promotions, and other work rewards." - Pete Johnson

Biography:

Pete Johnson created one of the first web applications ever built inside Hewlett Packard during the mid 1990's and has had the good fortune to work with over 400 engineers all over the world, write articles for a variety of publications, and present topics at trade shows. He served as the HP.com Chief Architect for two and a half years before a reorganization brought him his present responsibilities as the Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT, Portals and Applications Chief Architect. He blogs about how improved soft skills can accelerate technical careers at http://blog.nerdguru.net.

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