A year or two ago, I nervously huffed and puffed into an interview video call. The interviewer starts asking me a battering of Wi-Fi protocol questions. Post-gauntlet the engineer mentions “By the way, I love your posts. They explain topics so simply”.
I almost laughed out loud. Partly because it diffused my simmering anxiety. My energy flipped from tense and tepid to conversing with this person like a friend.
I’d spent the prior year writing posts half-convinced I wasted time I didn't have. Yet this individual that I never met and wasn’t even following me somehow came across my content?
That's when I stopped treating posting online like a hobby and started treating it seriously.
The problem
Most network engineers I know want nothing to do with personal branding.
“That’s for salespeople and marketers.”
And social butterflies who figured out that being likable on camera pays better than being technically correct. I deploy switches and read packet captures. Why does building an audience on the internet have anything to do with me?
Most answers floating around online are unhelpful enough that they actually make a good case against posting online.
Why the normal branding advice doesn’t work for engineers
"Put yourself out there." "Build your personal brand." "Share your expertise."
Every one of those is technically true and yet unhelpful on its own because it skips the part that matters to engineers: why.
We don't open Wireshark because our filters display pretty colors. We run it because something broke and we need to know why.
Personal branding advice aimed at us comes from the sales and marketing world, where the output is leads and the goal is often reach in of itself. Engineers often don't care about reach for its own sake. There has to be a “why” whether it’s educational or hobby-driven. So the advice rolls off and we go back to work plugging along, assuming wasn’t meant for us in the first place.
What about the job market itself?
Well, when everyone has ATS optimized resumes and the candidate pool skyrockets for every job, one must pursue creative ways to stand out. Posting online or publishing content in other venues is one of those ways.
Here’s what actually changes
A year of posting about Wi-Fi taught me something no career coach will tell you: the skills you build explaining this stuff online are the same ones tested on the job each day.
Think about the last time you had to justify a config change to a stakeholder who thinks Wi-Fi is just "the box in the closet.", or document a post-mortem that the NOC and team lead understand clearly.
That's harder than most think, because we were trained to be technical, and being technical and conveying clarity come from two different skillsets.
When you write a post or blog explaining EAP-TLS to someone who doesn't know what 802.1X is, you're training the conveying clarity muscle. For instance, a person in the comments may push back on your technical opinion or reasoning and you have to justify your hypothesis. This feedback loop runs faster and remains lower stakes than a troubleshooting bridge for a hard down site. You hit post and either way you learn something new.
Three things actually worth doing
Start with one thing you had to explain on the job this week. Not a tutorial, just a few paragraph: what you saw, what it meant, why it mattered. To try write this scenario clearly for someone you never met.
Then, branch out. Try applying to speak at conferences, or perhaps putting videos out on tutorials. Any time you think “Gee I wish I had a manual for that” try documenting and figuring out the process along the way. Before you know it, you’ll have a living portfolio that curtails nicely with your resume.
Speaking of resume, once you have a few articles, recorded lectures, or tutorials under your belt, actually promote them to people. If someone needs help with a topic you wrote about, say “Hey by the way, I wrote on this topic here. It may help”. No one will know about what you don’t tell them.
Personal branding skills have made me a better engineer
I knew contributing to events and websites = good personal branding.
Here’s what I didn’t expect specifically related to content creation:
The skills I developed to create content made me a better employee at my 9-5.
For example, I’ve learned some basic photo editing, graphic design, and branding while posting on LinkedIn to keep my post “feel” consistent.
Just this past week while updating a slide deck with new branding guideline, plugging in those branding hex codes and understanding how to give documents an aesthetically pleasing, consistent look came naturally.
All week, I practice writing in structured narratives outside of work. Now when it’s time to create a new presentation for an internal process, I intuitively think in easily-digestible structures: a hook, an agenda or outline, the 3-4 main points, a summary of pragmatic takeaways, and a list of resources.
That doesn’t even scratch the skills to use tools like Powerpoint, Canva or AI to complete these tasks faster and more polished than usual. I highly recommend getting proficient at one type of content: videos, infographics, or articles. You’ll likely come away with skills you can use immediately even if they’re more soft skills than hard skills.
Before you close this
The engineers who get hired or promoted aren't always the best engineers technically. They're the best at making technical concepts clear to people who aren't technical.
Being online didn't only make me a better engineer. It made me faster at explaining the work and creating the visuals aids for that process. And in the network engineering field, being understood is half the job.
If you've been on the fence about putting yourself out there, send me a line at [email protected] and tell me what's stopped you. I read every one, and the reasons are usually more addressable than it seems.
Stay connected,
Eva
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