How can you test out if a DevRel career is the right fit for you?
Tags: devrel, career
Published: 2024-03-08 15:14:13

---
title: How can you test out if a DevRel career is the right fit for you?
published: true
date: 2023-12-13 13:22:00 UTC
tags: DevRel,career
canonical_url: https://jasonstcyr.com/2023/12/13/how-can-you-test-out-if-a-devrel-career-is-the-right-fit-for-you/
cover_image: https://theagilecoder.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/pexels-photo-6476778.jpeg
---

Sometimes, you just aren't sure if a career is right for you. Do you really want to be a developer advocate or a dev community manager? Is that going to be a fulfilling full-time job for you? There are a few things you can do to try it out before committing your career to the role!

Part-time contracts
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I have never taken the part-time contract approach personally, but it is definitely an approach that you can look into. Some Developer Relations departments get a little budget but can't afford to add a full-time team member. In those cases, a part-time contractor for a specific project might be an option. I would say, however, it's been the exception rather than the rule. Usually, for DevRel where I work, we keep a lot of projects in-house and contract out things like front-end development work or video editing, etc. (non-core skill sets)

Incorporate advocacy into your current role
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What I did for myself, before I got fully into DevRel, was to do developer advocacy as part of my existing job. I was at an agency, so the value of creating helpful content was easily understood. This type of work helped the agency sell our expertise and draw eyes to our website and our services. Many companies probably have a way where you can do a little blogging or video content or presentations, especially if it's a smaller organization where folks wear multiple hats.

Re-use your work for public content
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First off, make sure you aren't sharing sensitive stuff! Most of the time, though, our day-to-day jobs lead us to spending time figuring out how something works or explaining it to somebody else. A very low-intensive piece you can do is to capture emails you have to send (or Slack/Teams messages, etc.). Look for pieces where you explained something to somebody at your job. You can put that on a blog site, and then clean it up to make a nice published article. That's a very low effort way to start testing out personal brand building and social sharing.

Connect with your DevRel team
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If there's a DevRel team at your company already, they often are VERY willing to accept help from other people in the company. There are usually WAY more ideas and things to do then capacity to do them. You can sometimes pitch in on projects or some other area where they need help.

Get involved with your community!
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Getting involved with the community around your company's product is another way to start helping others and seeing how that feels. This might be answering questions, or connecting people to the docs that you know about, or maybe just engaging people in chats to create a connection with them.

Reach out into a professional community
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If you don't currently have a job, or your current company doesn't really have a community or DevRel function, you may need to reach out to a particular community that aligns with your interests or career aspiration. Maybe you are really into Rust, or Astro. Are you coding up Python scripts on the weekend? Is prompt engineering your everything right now? You can find the existing communities around that tech or your interest. Building up visibility in a community also can help you with getting a job on a DevRel team related to that technology. From a strategic perspective it can be good to target a technology where you want to work.

Good luck!
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From the outside, Developer Relations can look very different from what the job really is. It's very smart to explore the different aspects and see what you like and what you don't. Hopefully you'll decide that a DevRel career is right for you, we need more great people helping developers.

Do you have some other tips that might work for you? Let me know!