Ask HN: Do you think there is a need for a community for career advice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think there is a need for a community for career advice?

7 pointsabhinovb23 comments

I guess plenty of students use Reddit/ Quora for career related tips. Please give your thoughts

I answer a lot of question on Quora & Reddit about CS career stuff, I think it's nice to have a community, but reddit questions are more natural and less for show.

Quora career advice stuff have so much artificial taste added to it, such as: recruiter adding very weird advice and getting upvotes. While the answer would still not get a proper answer.

There is actually a startup called Career Dean, that is their whole mission.

http://careerdean.com/

Thanks for the pointing out the limitations in Reddit/ Quora. Seems like CareerDean is specific to CS guys.

There needs to be a community for career changers.

I'm finding it extremely difficult to find a way to change my career and most advice online is not tailored to this.

A recruiting service for matching skilled, quality people who are looking to change careers with open-minded employers who are willing to consider these non-traditional applicants who may not have the standard background of X years experience in Y would be a good idea.

Noted. I understand your concern because I was in a similar situation an year ago.

There's a lot of infrastructure now for those looking to change into tech, web development, startups etc. But beyond that there are many people looking to go from say, Accounting -> Consulting, or Lawyer -> Strategy, etc etc and can't figure out how to pull it off and how to get past the walled garden of corporate HR.

Hmm, interesting problem. I was a telecom engineer but got into a data analyst research position.

Interesting thought, but if I wanted career advice I'd ask Hacker News, since I'm a software engineer and the folks here are a great resource. If I was a chef, I would ask for career advice from a similar online community or subreddit. Point being, an online community about a specific interest is where the experts for that topic would reside and those are the people I want to ask.

The value lies in those communties. Creating my own community platform is something I've been noodling for some time. Reddit is terrific, but it's cookie cutter and not exactly feature rich.

Agreed. This community aims to address the needs of college students in particular, as they are often confused with the available choices during or after college.

Yes. They need the information and they visit very often.

But does it really help? I don't think so.

General advices about what to do make them feel good but they don't really understand what it means and how to really use the advice.

I think compared to giving and finding advice, teaching students how to analyze their own career and come up with a practical plan to carry out is more helpful.

Agreed. Yes, this idea comes from the very issue you mentioned. General advice is not actionable. Thus, we wish to build a community initially for college students and later on build upon it.

I think a good way to do it is actions-measurements.

Let them write down what they have done and the outcome in different periods, help them prioritize what matters to them and what they want to achieve, then match the best consultant or advice for him. It's like how you mentor a real person in a company.

Also, if your target customers are students, I highly suggest you go to universities and talk to the students, get the idea what they think about the advice and what influence it has on them.

I think most people here are better than average. The result may be different from what you really need.

True, will contact my juniors right away.

I don't think there is a need for another one. As you guessed, there's a pretty good reddit sub for that: http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions

Noted.

I think it isn't a bad idea to create a new community of this type. If you are looking for an existing community with an overlapping scope there is http://workplace.stackexchange.com/

Thanks for sharing the link. From what I understood, that community is focused on helping working professionals. I want a similar community for college students.

Yes, working professionals are the core audience. Some of the topics that are discussed there like resumes and interviewing can be useful for students looking to be hired but not so much for those wondering what to major in.

For students there is also http://academia.stackexchange.com/ that deals with the immediate problems they face.

Great! But then it is basically a Q&A forum. May be a mix of HN + SE can be built. Thanks for the suggestion :)

I personally think everyone should have a team to give them help and guidance, and members of that team should have their own teams. I think this is a good idea in theory - will be hard to do in practice though.

Well, there can be voluntary group leaders for important categories such as jobs/internships, higher ed etc

CareerDean is a targeted community just for this purpose.

Thanks for sharing the link.

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