Social Media and self promotion - doing my job well is no longer good enough

[Aggielera]

I can’t be the only one who feels like this!

I have been in my current role (middle
management in professional services in Higher Education) for 12 years. I’m really good at my job and get lots of positive feedback from clients/staff/students. I’m also obviously very experienced so I spend a lot of time mentoring/supporting new members of staff.

This isn’t an age thing as many of the people I support are my age or older, late thirties.

I don’t enjoy bragging (although this post is a bit Bragg so far 😃) If it get positive feedback it makes me happy & I’m happy to share in my appraisal but I don’t feel comfortable telling everyone how wonderful I am. I also don’t use Social Media personally. I have a work account on Twitter as we are encouraged to do this. I don’t post much apart from service based retweets. Everyone else seems more than happy to share every single bloody thing they do. If someone emails them saying thanks, they screenshot and tell everyone about it. They present at a meeting/conference they tell everyone how great it was. These get a lot of engagement from management and I’m starting to feel invisible! Even though I’m still plugging away, doing my job. Much better (&more efficiently) than many of these people.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do what they do, it just isn’t me. But it seems that everyone else is doing it now and I’m worried I’ll get left behind!

I don't think self promotion as a requirement of many jobs is a new thing. It was called networking and involved going to loads of "proefessionals" events when I was younger. Being able to do it on SM is way easier !

Just plugging away and doing your job well has never been enough to get recognition, promotion etc.

It's always been about visibility and relationships, it's just the tools that have changed.

Similar sounding job to me, and I don't share the thanks either,I appreciate them, and tell my partner, but I don't forward a string of emails or post on sm , that seems odd to me. So if a student brings me a gift, which does happen occasionally, am I supposed to post it online rather than just thanking them and taking it home? If it's on my desk and a staff member asks, I say, but otherwise not.

Fundamentally the emails saying 'brill, thanks for sorting it out' etc, are nice, but just an acknowledgement of you doing your job.

I find these people really cringey and often think it would be better if they spent the time doing the job rather than bragging on social media. If they are on LinkedIn all the time then to me is suggests they don’t plan to stay in the company. They are looking to go elsewhere so aren’t loyal. Keep plugging away, make sure you make your boss’s life easy, and you will still get noticed.

I don't think it's about sharing thank yous or compliments, more what you've been doing.

"Great trip to xyz achyological site with abc students today" and photos

"Brilliant to have finished xyz project, thank you for all your support"

"Successful conclusion to....today"

Very easy to just get a few things out and have a presence.

Although better of you check your spelling 😆

@Comety I can see those kind of things being useful as an academic, for promoting their course.

I am support staff though, my colleague’s SM is pretty much entirely self promotion with a sprinkle of useful service information. It’s photos of boxes of chocolates on their desks, it’s gushing emails, it’s screenshots from conference presentations, it’s post about another successful collaboration with a tagged colleague (even if the project was shite and they freely bitch about said colleague). A lot of it is rose tinted. “Successful workshop with stakeholders” Just call them students FFS! With no mention of the fact that only 2 people turned up. It seems to be done entirely to make them look good.

The time taken to post can’t be insignificant either.