When: Fri, Jun 11, 2021 10:00 AM – Sat, Jun 12, 2021 4:00 PM EDT | RSVP HERE
I am writing to you today to encourage you to sign up for and attend a technology conference. *record screech* Did that just say TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE? Yes, it did. And here’s why, nannies, you want to sign up for and attend certain sessions of the technology conference:
Because if you can mentally manage to ignore the tech-bro corporate jargon, there’s actually really solid advice in there to help manage and advance our nannying careers. While we raise children and the folks this conference is marked to raise apps, the soft skills involved are the same. Also, it is both free and online which means you don’t have to pay anything for these usually hundreds-of-dollars-worth of career advice sessions and also can attend them from your phone while working your nanny job if you usually work on Fridays or Saturdays. Convinced yet?
I have attended ProductCamp RTP in person for close to a decade and found the career advice very, very useful. Also, in person, if you attend, sometimes you get really cool giveaways or trivia facts. Just something to keep in mind for next year when this goes offline.
Jennifer Levenbook, NC PAN Treasurer
Here are the sessions we’ve specifically identified as being of use to nannies:
Looking to transition out of nannying? Need a hand better identifying what your ideal placement will be? The session at 10:35 am on Friday called Empathy Mapping: Getting Started with the Next Tool You’ll Love doesn’t have to be about apps, it can be about careers. The skill (tool) of empathy mapping can help guide these sorts of big career decisions in a way that is serene and contained and encourages brainstorming.
Do you wish your charges were more independent? The session at 11:15 am on Friday called Good PMs confidently manage products. Great PMs manage people’s confidence. doesn’t have to be about teaching tech middle management how to build confidence and independence in their underlings, it can be about how to nanny with an eye on building confidence, and thus independence, in our small charges.
Want to interview better? The session at 11:15 am on Friday called Interview Questions Best Practices gives even us the inside scoop into what it is like to be in the interviewer seat so that we can give answers to the questions our future employers want answered, even if they didn’t phrase the question ideally. The examples will all be from tech, but the theory applies even to childcare.
Do you have nanny wisdom? Do you need nanny wisdom? Consider attending the session at 11:15 am on Friday called Advancing your Career: Coaching/Mentorship Matters to both Mentors and Mentees for the solid scoop on why becoming a mentor or engaging a mentor is a quick way to advance in nanny pay and prestige without having to put in the years of work experience. Let this session sell you to make the career leap you’ve been hesitant to take without even having to leave your Unicorn Family.
Ever get the feeling that you are not quite meeting your employers’ expectations but when you ask they tell you everything is fine? Then the session at 11:55 am on Friday is for you! It is called How Exceptional Product Managers discover unmet customer needs and while it is supposed to be about tech, we know that the sense of disappointment lingering in the air comes from undiscovered and unmet needs from our employers; we don’t have to be product managers to discover these so we can meet ’em!
Ramble too much when a potential employer asks you to tell them about yourself in the early interview phase? That’s the employer asking for an elevator speech about your value as an employee, and they can be hard to craft to be full but not long. The session at 11:55 am on Friday called Six-World Leadership Stories: Curating and Crafting Your Elevator Speeches will demystify the art of the elevator speech and leave it as a simple recipe to follow. Career bonus!
We all have moments we aren’t on the same page as our employers, but do you want a tool to navigate those moments for win-win success? The session at 1:15 pm on Friday called Affinity Mapping Your Way to Better Team and Stakeholder Alignment will give you that tool (affinity map) and teach you how to use it. After all, as nannies we know that “stakeholders” just mean our employers and ourselves and that “alignment” just means that we all agree even if we didn’t start out agreeing; not compromising, actual agreement. THAT IS A WIN! And that is how jobs are kept.
The problem with difficult conversations is that there is a chance that they won’t go the way you want. Or will they? The 1:55 pm session on Friday called How to Get What You Want in Difficult Conversations will arm us with tools about how to get what we want in difficult conversations, whether that is a raise or to finally be allowed to venture further afield with our charges than the immediate neighborhood. Ignore the tech-jargon and embrace the skills so you can finally get car seats, a stroller, or enough money to not live paycheck-to-paycheck!
Do you shotgun your resume to every family that is looking and then always feel dissatisfied with the jobs you are offered and ultimately accept? That’s because you haven’t identified your target market. The session at 1:55 pm on Friday called We can’t be everything to everyone – how to build a playbook for your target market will teach us the skills to identify who would be our best employers and how to seek them out while simultaneously rejecting the bad fits before we even have to waste time interviewing with them. Sure, the presenter thinks she’s teaching us how to sell some computer program to some business or whatever, but we know how to use her knowledge for our own ends!
Do you have an answer for the inevitable question of where you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years? I mean a real answer. Sure, we all can say words at this point, but the session at 10:40 am on Saturday will help us actually have a real answer. It’s called Developing a Career Roadmap: Stats, Paths and Plans and can equip us with a career roadmap that works for us and won’t leave us scrambling at major transition points. Why let all the business-people have all the career advantages?
A lot of these speakers cost mondo-bucks as their speaking fee, and because ProductCamp is aimed at the tech industry, so many big corporations have shelled out to cover those speaker fees. And because ProductCamp isn’t limited to – just marketed to – tech folks, we can scooch right on in and learn expensively, but for free.
We’ll be there and hope to see you there, as well!