Cube Rules Membership Launches Today

by Scot Herrick

Do you remember your first career job? The first one where it counted? The one you had to explain to someone else what you do since you were no longer in school?

Since then, whether a year out of school or right at retirement, your whole career has changed. If you are like me, many of those career changes were unplanned.

After getting burned over something that happened at work, laid off when you weren’t expecting it, or dealing with a management’s mismanagement, we start looking for career management advice.

Advice? That’s advice?

Most of the advice, honestly, is crap. At best, the advice is theory. At worst, the advice is nothing more than trying to get you to hire someone to help you find a different job. Then they go away. This was the initial reason I started writing Cube Rules: provide solid advice about career management.

Even if you are looking for a different job, there’s little advice out there to help you decide if where you are looking is the right industry, the right company, or the right manager for your skills and ambitions. There is the theory, but no one to tell you what the theory means.

I started where you are: looking for great advice and career management understanding and not finding it. Over time, as I have written about becoming a Cubicle Warrior, I’ve found there needs to be more and better advice about career management for knowledge workers and their managers.

There is great content on Cube Rules and it will stay that way. But there are career management subjects that don’t fit neatly into a business site. Most blog articles, including those on Cube Rules, are typically short and the time spent on the site by a person is fewer than three minutes. Not enough time to learn about the context behind the article.

Yet, people looking for good career management information also want a site that provides the “deep dive” into career management. A site that offers plain talk on industries, companies, and management teams. A site where the knowledge worker toiling away in a cube is the hero and not the expendable resource in a layoff. People just like us.

Enter Cube Rules Membership

Membership will provide you with privileged access to comprehensive coverage of the most important topics on career management for knowledge workers. In addition, reporting on critical industries, companies and management teams that will affect your career management decisions.

If I carefully look at what brings people to Cube Rules over the past years, they break into five categories begging for added content:

Brilliant Basics

This is the “block and tackle” work of a career ignored by most company management and training. Subjects like setting performance goals, SMART goals, and reporting results. Writing performance reviews to status reports so your work is visible to management and distinguished from your co-workers.

Managing Management

There’s a reason you can have an entire section in Business Week about “toxic bosses” — there are too many of them. But there are also excellent managers and managers everywhere in-between. Each new manager represents another opportunity to shine — or die in the job you are in. Knowing which manager you have and how to deal with them are subjects we look at hard in Cube Rules Membership. You don’t think your company will provide this advice, do you?

Cubicle Warrior Networking

Career Networking is all about helping others so we can receive help when we need it ourselves. Yet, company training for networking rarely occurs despite the diverse workforce across the company — and the planet. How do you help your co-worker in a different country and how can they help you? And how can you help your cube-mate in a way that brings success to both of you?

Cubicle Warrior Personal Branding

Personal Brands are the rage, but what do you do to implement them in managing your career? How is Personal Branding any different from simple reputation management? The Membership articles explore building and managing personal brands in a time when your co-workers are as likely to work on the other side of the globe as well as the cube next to you.

Keeping the Castle

We put much of our heart and soul into our work. Or, if not, our time. But companies are heartless and will lay you off in a cold-blooded minute, changing your life. How to keep your life, family, and financial well-being are important and rarely discussed as part of career management. They are discussed here.