Career Insights: finding your tribe
We’ve all been there - lost, disconnected, not knowing whom to approach for advice and guidance, in short - keeping the head down for a lot longer than needed but just enough to lose the precious long-term perspective on what is happening in your professional niche. Finding your community can help you keep connected with other professionals in your field, ask for advice, and share feedback on new tools and processes.
Here are the top 3 communities in your niche you should consider joining:
Product
The product stack: a coalition of like-minded organizations offering practical solutions for modern software teams. Members get plenty of valuable benefits, including access to webinars, advice, and interesting product management conversations through our Slack channel.
The product coalition: a Medium.com organization, is the largest free community for product managers and publishes Medium’s leading product management online publication, ProductCoalition.com
Women in product: Women in Product is a community founded to provide women with equal access and representation in product management careers. The organization features both geographic chapters — the Austin community, the Toronto community, etc. — with a broader online community where women at all levels of product management can network, and offer advice.
Data Science
Data Science Central: based around a forum system, but also includes an editorial platform for experts to share their knowledge via personal blogs. There is also a pretty extensive suite of social interaction tools to make connecting with peers easy.
Driven Data: focused on using data science to create a better world. This community focuses on putting a number of key stakeholders in touch, and not just data scientists and coders, but also activists and lawyers, all of whom are working toward socially progressive goals.
Data Science Society: an initiative of graduate students at Berkeley and is one of the most exciting data science communities around at the moment. This community has taken the lead in encouraging minorities and women to train in data science. This is the place to go if you are looking to find people who share your values and politics, while also sharing the technical and scientific skills needed to make a difference.
Engineering
Digital Ocean: a platform where Developers are supporting developers. If you have questions, a big idea, or something to share, their community is designed to help you. They want the open-source community to thrive. There are a lot of tutorials and questions you can browse. Also, You can explore the tools their developer community has built using the DigitalOcean API.
Code Project: one of the biggest developer communities with 14+ million Software Developers joined together with specific common goals: to learn, to teach, and to have fun. Members from all over the world come together to share code, tutorials, and knowledge for free to help their fellow Software Developers.
Hashnode: a place to connect with the best developers from across the world. It helps devs solve real-life issues. You can publish stories and share them with the developer community or showcase your recent projects. You can ask a question and get help from the community members. And even you can start your own blog and promote your brand.
2 main shout outs for the 🦸♀️ female-driven communities:
Chief: private membership network focused on connecting and supporting women executive leaders.
Elpha: members-only group to connect with peers and mentors and learn from experts.
