Why Now Self Promotion is More Critical and Valued More Than Skills

March 5, 2023 • 100% Human Written

For my first article on this site, I chose a rather specific and provocative topic, but since there are no restrictions, I will express everything as it is, without choosing the right expressions. I want to talk about advertising itself, and to be more precise, why now, in 2023, it is much more important and more useful for yourself to concentrate on promoting your personal brand, in other words, yourself, and not what you can do, what you have learned or will learn in the future.

The idea of the article came to my mind for a long time, but I could not formulate my thoughts. Quite a complex and controversial topic. Someone will obviously disagree with me and I don’t blame them, everyone has the right to their opinion, however, someone will still agree with me. For them, my article.

Self Promotion

What do I mean by self-advertising? Everything is simple. By self-promotion, I understand a simple principle - "To seem, not to be." You can be a genius, a new Leonardo da Vinci, but if you can’t sell yourself, you can’t show yourself, you don’t know how, or you’re just shy, then no one will even know about it. This also works in the opposite direction. If you are stupid as a log (no offense to the log), but you can sell yourself, tell people that you can do so many things that at least at the interview you can build a time machine, but in fact you have never held a screwdriver in your hands, then such a log more chances of success in the modern world.

Self Advertisement Meme

I don’t want to be boring now about the fact that we all have become two-faced and, in order to achieve our goal, we will all lie shamelessly. This is wrong. It's just that the values have changed a lot. Now it is much more important to show yourself, to show what you can do, but whether you really know how is not important at all.

When applying for a job, if you say that you know 6 programming languages, although you only know their name, your chances of getting a job are many times greater than someone who has written code in this programming language all his life. As you understand, this is a very personal article and I did not invent all the examples, but encountered them in my life and career.

Why is That

To be honest, it's hard for me to say why this is happening - why lies and hypocrisy are now more respected than diligence, work and diligence, but I think that the reason is competition. Competition is now insane everywhere, not only in IT. Many candidates can apply for the same position, and in such conditions it is much easier to tell a lie, lie about work experience or a skill that you do not have, and you only know the name, than to actually acquire this new skill. Learning mathematical statistics is much more difficult than just saying that you are fluent in higher mathematics.

In addition to competition, I think it's about publicity. Now everyone has the right to speak out anywhere and anytime, for this it is enough to get a smartphone, and then you yourself know what to do. Because of this publicity, it’s not enough just to be able to write in JS, it’s much more important to tell the world that you started to learn it, and whether you finished your studies and whether you started at all, this is no longer interesting to anyone.

Job Interview Lie Old Meme

How often have you yourself encountered a situation where you shared your first, insignificant, but still successes, and then did not finish the work. For example, they started taking a new course, on Skillshare, told everyone around about it, but in the end they didn’t even finish it. How often have you signed up for a fitness room, been there three times in a month, but the whole family already knows how athletic and motivated you are.

I myself am like that. It only happens to me with books. I will start reading the book, tell everyone how I like it, recommend it to all my friends and acquaintances, and in the end I will never finish it myself.

Facts

Someone will say - ok, but after all, those who devote more time to self-promotion than to real learning will sooner or later be figured out anyway, and is it really difficult to check and expose those who lie about knowing 6 programming languages, because a couple of questions will be enough for this ? Yes, it’s simple, however, when it comes to the conditional recruiter and team lead that this is just a smart guy who talks more than he knows, you will no longer be on the list of candidates, you will be eliminated at the first stage, because you only have Python in your resume, and it has JS, PHP, CSS, HTML, React and Go.

I don't blame recruiters, because it's impossible to understand from one PDF file that a person talks more than he knows, but agree that it's unpleasant to get into such a situation. And you might not have guessed about it. Perhaps this has already happened to you more than once, but you simply did not find out about it, because at the first stage of the resume contest, the reasons for refusal, as a rule, are not disclosed. If you think about it, you can go into a deep depression, so I don’t advise you to think about it.

Avoid

How to avoid this and how to compete with those who are more engaged in self-advertising than real knowledge and skills? This will sound sad, but no way. There is no way to fight this. The only way out is to engage in advertising yourself, but justified and not fake.

If you are doing data analysis, show it in practice, on a real project, with a real dataset from Kaggle. If you're learning python, don't post it on Instagram, but share a piece of code you wrote today (even something as simple as declaring variables). If you have started to disassemble the Power BI functionality, then share the graphs that you have learned to do.

How and with whom to share it? For me, this portfolio is perfect. I am a huge anti-resume. I hate them and I think they should be banned by UN decree. For as long as they exist, an important feature of your resume can be the presence of a link to a portfolio. I will not now dwell on how to do it and where it is better to do it. Any format will do, the main thing is to record what you are doing. I remember in my very first portfolio, there are pieces of code where I just shared the CSS styles of the buttons. Why not?

It is not necessary to put everything on public display, on social networks. It is enough not to delete folders with your work, but save them on GitHub, just save them in the Google Drive folder and be sure to attach a link to your resume.

Conclusion

What did I want to say with this article? In short, record everything you do, everything you learn, know, read and watch. Each of your projects must be saved, each line of code is fixed, each certificate is stored in PDF in the cloud (well, or on a flash drive if you are over 60). In our time, it is important not only to know a lot and be able to, but to present yourself and sell yourself correctly. I myself struggle with my introvert nature and do not want to share everything in the world, but because of this I lose my job or do not get the position that I rightfully deserve. Don't repeat my mistakes!