How to Transition to a Career in Community
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I’ve had a few people ask me about how to transition into the community industry recently, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.
Transitioning to any field is a difficult feat. Community is no different.
A company isn’t going to feel confident paying you the same salary to do something you have little experience with.
So what are you to do?
There’s the common advice of reading books and taking training programs. That’s certainly useful, and I’ve written a full guide loaded with resources for people getting started in the community industry. But training isn’t usually going to be enough to get you hired.
Your goal is simple (but not easy): You have to make a hiring manager really fucking confident that you have what it takes to lead their community to success.
In today’s article we’re going to discuss:
✔️ How to break down community management into its parts
✔️ How to target communities where you’re already a member
✔️ Why you should focus on business goals you have experience with
✔️ 4 ways to build your community muscle without asking for permission
Let’s dive in…
Break down community into its parts
You might not have experience managing a Slack community, and you probably haven’t organized a local chapter program, but if we break these programs down you’ll realize you know more than you think.
Here’s how a community professional’s role typically breaks down:
Business strategy: Community professionals, especially at senior levels, will have to define their business goals and success metrics. Most use a system like OKRs. Measuring the business value of community is hard, so any experience you have with defining goals and connecting your work directly back to revenue will help.
Operations: Community professionals optimize the backend systems that make the community tick: member onboarding and surveying, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, analytics dashboards, content templates, etc. If you’ve worked on operations in your other roles, the fundamentals are the same: you’re making processes more efficient and repeatable. Flex those ops muscles.
Cross-functional collaboration: Community touches every other department in the organization. It works closely with sales, marketing, support, success, HR, and product and customer. Getting others in the business to care about and contribute to the community is never easy. Highlight any experience you have getting other people in the company to give a damn about what you’re doing.
Writing: When you’re running a community you’re writing constantly: posts in the community, copy for events and landing pages, emails to members, blog posts, onboarding flows, internal emails, social media posts, internal reports… show off your writing skills in any way you can. If you can create engaging content in other channels, that’s a signal that you can also engage a community.
Project and people management: Communities, as they scale, become increasingly complex, and community professionals start looking more and more like project managers. Community members will take on roles like moderators, event organizers, and ambassadors, and it will be your job to manage these people. Any experience you have coordinating complex projects and groups of people will serve you well.
Focus on communities where you’re already a member
While you might not have experience managing a community, you definitely have experience being a part of a community.
This could be a product that you use. For example, Ben Lang who leads the Notion community team, was already a power user of Notion before taking on the role.
This could be your job. For example, if you were previously an educator, you might consider applying for jobs managing an education community. If you were in sales, find a community for sales professionals.
This could also be an interest, hobby, or some other part of your identity. I got my first community management job working for a platform that focused on bloggers, because I was a blogger.
If you’re a parent, you could look for a community job focused on serving parents. If you’re a gamer, get your foot in the door as a gaming community manager. Artist? Athlete? Gardener? You get the point…
Focus on business goals you have experience with
Community can drive many different goals for a business as our team at CMX covered in The SPACES Model:
It’s likely, if you were working for a business, your job touched at least one of these areas.
All community roles are essentially hybrid roles. Your experience driving a specific business goal will make you more appealing to companies hiring for a community that’s driving that same goal.
So if you were in sales or marketing before, you might want to find a role where the goal of community is Acquisition. Your knowledge of marketing and sales operations, goals, and language will be a big benefit in your community role.
If you were in a product role before, working on a community program focused on Product, where the goal is to gather feedback and insights from community members, could be a great fit.
If you were in customer education or support, a community Success or Support focused program could be a good fit.
This might even give you a competitive edge over other candidates who have community experience but still struggle to connect it to business outcomes (which is a lot of them).
Build your community muscle without asking for permission
1. Conduct community audits
Find communities you really respect, and audit their community for them. Use a tool like Loom to record yourself going through their website, community, emails, etc., and provide feedback. Or put together a one-pager with recommendations and send it to them.
This will give you experience in breaking down community experiences, help you form a thesis for how you like to design communities, and make you more knowledgeable and articulate in interviews. That’s the worst-case scenario.
Best case scenario, this gets your foot in the door with that company and opens up an opportunity to work for them.
Or, as a bonus, you can publish your audits publicly. Check out Chenell Basilio’s breakdowns of the growth strategies of top creators as a great example. Who wouldn’t hire her to lead content strategy after reading her newsletter? FOOLS. That’s who.
2. Interview community professionals
Start a content series where you interview different community teams. It could be a podcast, a newsletter, Twitter threads, or whatever format floats your content boat.
This will give you deeper insight into the inner workings of community teams. Ask super specific and tactical questions. Again, this will help you become more knowledgeable and confident in interviews. You’ll be able to come with a strong point of view about how communities should be run.
It will also build your personal brand and network. A company will be much more likely to hire you if they found you through your content, instead of you finding them.
Or, as a bonus, the people you interview might be hiring, and interviewing them is an incredible way to get your foot in the door and learn about the program you’d be working on if you get the role.
3. Use an existing community as your testing ground
There are countless free communities out there that you can join and participate in.
Find one that you’re passionate about and use it to run experiments.
Make a commitment to post once a week, and reply to at least three posts every day.
Test out different engagement techniques. Experiment with different conversation starters. Try to develop relationships. Improve your writing skills.
If there are opportunities to volunteer to organize events, raise your hand.
If you can fuel engagement in a community as a member, you’ll be able to do it in a role as a community manager. You can even use some of the successful threads you start in those communities in your portfolio.
4. Start a small community
It’s never been easier to start a community. That’s one thing that’s beautiful about this space. The barrier to entry to getting a community job might be high, but the barrier to starting a community is zero. You can start one today.
You don’t need to launch a massive forum. Keep it simple. Start with a small group of people that you’d like to surround yourself with. I recently invited a couple creator friends into a WhatsApp group so we can support each other and it’s going great. If you prefer offline experiences, then organize a dinner.
The real boss move: Start a group for community professionals in the space you want to work in.
For example, if you want to get a job leading a sales community, then find 10 community professionals who are working on a sales community and invite them to do a group call together or join a small chat group.
They’ll love it because it’s so niche that it’s unlikely anyone else is doing it. It’s highly curated which makes them more likely to want to participate.
Being the person that brings them together also puts you in a position of perceived power. It earns you a favor or two.
If you’ve proven you can bring them together in a meaningful way, why wouldn’t they want you to do the same for their communities?
At worst, you’ll have built up a really great foundation for your personal network in the space and you’ll learn a ton from others in the field at the discussion.
At best, one of them will be hiring and you’ll be pick #1.
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I’m confident that if you do these things, you’ll be able to break into the community industry without sacrificing too much seniority or salary.
In summary, here’s how to transition to a career in community:
Break down community into its parts
Target communities where you’re already a member
Focus on business goals you have experience with
Build your community muscle without asking for permission
Conduct community audits
Interview community professionals
Use an existing community as your testing ground
Start a small community
If it works out for you, send me a selfie from your first day at work. I also accept gratitude in the form of obscure earl grey tea and Amazon book reviews.
Further reading: Learn what hiring managers are looking for in my post “How to Hire your Next Community Lead”.
🔥 Featured Community Jobs
Community Manager, Hampton (Remote)
Head of Community & Learning, Apple (Cupertino)
Creative Professional Community Director, Adobe (San Francisco, $142,800-$284,900)
👉 View 71 more community jobs here
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🍭 Brain Candy for Community Nerds
I’ve talked a lot about “empathetic exclusion” and how important it is to exclude thoughtfully in your community. Everyone’s favorite gathering artist Priya Parker shares her own take on what she called “generous exclusion”.
Hank Green, a popular YouTuber who I first discovered on TikTok announced that he has cancer. His fans, myself included, find ourselves in a weird place where we feel like we know Hank but he has no idea who we are. Such is the nature of parasocial relationships, which I touched on in the Brain Candy section last week. This read by Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci paints a vivid picture of what it’s been like to be in a parasocial relationship with Hank.
My friend Casper (who was the first person I interviewed on my podcast) has been working on a fascinating community project that aims to fill the gap left by religion. He calls it “The Nearness”. He’s gathering 100 New Yorkers this summer for an 8-week journey which you can learn more about in an info session here.
Nadia Asparouhova’s ode to the recently shuttered GitHub office is a delightful glimpse into the unique community culture that characterized tech over the last decade, and touches on the importance of communities holding strong on their beliefs, even when not popular.
I spent a two-hour flight reading through the Surgeon General’s 2023 report on loneliness. Most of the data in there is only as recent as 2020, so there isn’t much new to report, but it’s clear that we’re still headed in the wrong direction. A question I’ve been pondering: Do large online communities actually help solve loneliness or could it be hurting us by making us feel connected, while still lacking the few deep relationships we actually need to no longer feel lonely?
🫡 That’s all for this week!
After several weeks of travel, we’re finally back in NY and don’t have any long trips planned. Our cat welcomed me home with lots of cuddles followed by scratching the shit out of my leg. We have a complicated relationship.
My goal this week is to get caught up on writing and fill my backlog of articles. I’ve been feeling very behind. I hate that feeling.
I’d also like to launch a new course this year and would like to start taking action to move that idea forward. More soon.
Until next week!
Thanks for building community.
-David