Blog - Page 2 of 6 - The Winding Road

Are You Seeking a Career or a Job?

by Travis L. ScottJuly 8, 2020July 10, 2020

Seeking a Job vs. Seeking a Career A few days ago I posted the following on LinkedIn and Twitter: If you’re "spraying and praying" and applying to jobs without any curiosity or interest in the company that posted it, you’re looking for a job, not the next step in your career.And that’s fine. #careers #CareerDevelopment— Travis L. Scott (@509marketer) July 7, 2020 Some people confuse a job as being part of their career, but I disagree. After watching Elizabeth Gilbert break down the difference between a career, job, hobby, and vocation, it all became more clear for me. Here’s the …

Everything You Do is Branding

by Travis L. ScottJuly 2, 2020July 6, 2020

This title isn’t just meant to get your attention or pique your curiosity. It’s an assertion I stand behind. Over the past several months, I’ve been exploring the concept of branding and brand marketing since most of my professional experience has been in direct marketing. Last week I wrote about something similar in my post Brands Make Promises, So Should You. Direct marketing is what you do when you send an email campaign or create Google Ads (aka paid search) and send them out into the world. Both of those things can be measured by saying we spent $X and …

Brands Make Promises, So Should You

by Travis L. ScottJune 24, 2020June 24, 20201

Marketing is a Promise I’m in the beginning phase of writing a book about marketing and, more specifically, recruitment marketing. In the beginning, I’m providing background and building a foundation based on what marketing is (and what it isn’t). This morning I wrote (in my book) about the promises that marketing makes, and it made me think about how we extend that to our careers. Every day, every bit of communication we have with people – email, phone calls, Zoom meetings, conversations at a conference – is part of building others’ perception of who you are and what you’re …

Reframing a Learning Mindset to Being More Curious

by Travis L. ScottJune 17, 2020June 17, 2020

Reframing a Learning Mindset I read, watch, and listen to a lot of things. Sometimes I write things down, usually in a notepad that I eventually misplace, but most of the time I don’t. It just stays in my head. Recently, I heard someone talking about the difference between how we learn and retain things when we’re truly curious about them. I can’t remember where I heard this or who was talking about it, but I’ve been thinking about it over the past week or so. My marketing career has mostly focused on direct marketing and digital marketing. Very little …

Career Capital – The Best Investment in Yourself You Can Make

by Travis L. ScottJune 9, 2020June 9, 2020

In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, author Cal Newport talks a lot about something he calls “career capital.” [1] Simply put, career capital is nothing more than building and acquiring rare and valuable skills over time. The term rare can be subjective. Rare skills don’t necessarily have to be a single rare skill. You could take several skills that a lot of people have and combine them into a portfolio or combination that is rare. Take my experience, for example. I have sales experience, technical recruiting experience, project management experience, marketing experience (and education), and leadership and management …

Should We “Brand” Ourselves Professionally?

by Travis L. ScottJune 2, 2020June 3, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about brand marketing, brands, and the concept of personal (or professional) brands. In the past, I’ve ignored branding and brand marketing because I didn’t think I was creative enough to be involved with it. Now I’m starting to realize that branding isn’t about being witty and creative in that way. It’s about crafting a story in a way to shape people’s perception of your products or services. It’s like a guiding hand in helping them form their own stories about your brand. It’s why storytelling is such a valuable skill to have and to practice. …

What does it mean to ‘make the most of each day’?

by Travis L. ScottMay 26, 2020May 19, 2020

Making the Most of Each Day? Are we really making the most of each day? When you hear someone say that, what does it even mean? Does it mean we’re effectively utilizing every minute of each day? Or, does it mean have we properly prioritized the things in our life and then focusing our energy on getting the highest priority things done? Or, does it mean if we had a chance to take a break that we didn’t take because that would mean we’re ‘lazy’ or unfocused? Does it mean we sat at our desk for 8 straight hours today …

The irrationality of fear

by Travis L. ScottMay 19, 2020May 20, 2020

It’s been nearly a year since I spun up my site The Winding Road to talk about careers. I didn’t quite know exactly what I was going to talk about but I knew it would have something to do with our careers and the non-linear trajectory that’s the reality for so many of us. One of the first things I wrote about was fear. Little did I know that fear would be such a prevalent feeling or so many of us a year later and not only as it relates to our careers and willingness to try new things, but …

Who’s it for?

by Travis L. ScottMay 13, 2020May 13, 2020

Who’s it for? That’s what was on my mind as I was running this morning. This is an important element of any marketing strategy or campaign. I’ve always thought of it as complementary to the question of “what’s it for?” Usually putting more emphasis on the latter question, probably because it’s usually easier to figure out. That’s what I’ve done with the writing and content creation I’ve been focused on over the past year. This is on my mind because I don’t think it just applies to my content or marketing projects. It applies to nearly everything we do. It’s …

Changing the Game – Without a Resume

by Travis L. ScottApril 29, 2020April 29, 2020

How can you get noticed without a resume or a LinkedIn profile? If you’re a software engineer and have a LinkedIn profile it’s like throwing bread out to hungry pigeons. It doesn’t take long before the flock of recruiters sending you messages grows and grows and grows. LinkedIn has all kinds of fancy filters that recruiters can use that make discriminating against people pretty easy. Things like filtering results by graduation date making it nearly impossible for older employees to even show up in some search results. That’s why you won’t find my graduation dates anywhere on my LinkedIn profile. …