How to advance your web career

To earn more money and get more respect, you need to become a manager of tasks, not a manager of technology, and certainly not a manager of content.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years is that content gets no respect from senior management. Associating yourself with content is a guaranteed way to ensure your career goes nowhere.

The phrase “content management” is an oxymoron in most organizations. At best, it relates to the process of buying fancy technology that will hopefully ‘manage’ the content automatically.

Look what happened to knowledge management; a cousin of content management. Knowledge management became data management. It was about finding the cheapest way possible to store lots and lots of stuff that just might be of some use at some point in the future.

I heard a great definition of a knowledge manager once:

My mother doesn’t understand what I do.
My boss doesn’t understand what I do.
I don’t understand what I do.

The library might have lots of books on leaders, but leaders rarely start out as librarians. The people who become CEOs are sales people, accountants, and technicians. And what do they all have in common? What they do has a quantifiable, measurable impact on the success of the organization.

If taking a content approach is the wrong way to manage your website, then taking an IT approach is even worse. IT is essential but it is a tool, not a management approach. Managing from an IT perspective encourages lots and lots of projects with lots and lots of features and lots and lots of complexity.

We need a new type of manager. Someone who understands the value of content and IT, but who is relentlessly focused on helping customers quickly complete tasks.

What the task manager does can have a quantifiable impact on the success of the organization. A government task manager can show that they are delivering better services to citizens. An intranet task manager can show that they are making other staff more productive. A university task manager can show that they are bringing more and better qualified students to the university.

I know lots of talented people working away at web content trying to do the best job they can. The problem is that it doesn’t really matter to the organization whether they are doing a good job or not. 500 words of content is not measurable in any quantifiable way that means anything to a senior manager.

However, quality content is crucial to task completion. Without content, there would be no Google. Without content, there would be no Amazon. Without content, there would be no eBay, no Twitter, no Facebook.

So, why don’t ‘they’ (senior management) get it, you ask? How come your intranet is run on a shoestring? How come your public website is still dependent on the hand-me-downs from print? How come there’s not enough resources to remove out-of-date content?

Because talking about content is talking about costs. Talking about customer tasks is talking about value. Identify your customers’ top tasks. Then measure your success based on your customers’ ability to quickly complete these tasks. Becoming a task manager is how you will advance your career.