Hi #work-career-advice I am a very experienced writer who has done all forms of B2B in the healthcare business space: old school journalism, PR, B2B demand gen emails, landing pages, web copy, messaging platforms, and social. What I have NOT done is positioned myself as a "Director of Content." What skills/capabilities do you think I need to master in order to win a career move in that direction? Happy to talk offline if you are kind enough to lend your thoughts...all the best.

Oh! I just moved from freelance into in-house! I found it hard for some hiring managers to recognize my skillset -- and I even had a lot of experience creating content strategy via agencies for very large Fortune 500 companies and 8 years experience freelancing for very large companies. I did not get any traction on Director of Content roles. I did, however, get traction on senior level content marketing manager roles at startups that can sometimes pay equivalent to some Director of Content roles. My goal is to get into a company and make a huge impact and then... either transition via promotion or by getting a job outside as a Director of Content in the next 2-4 years. I have done the first part twice this year (and got laid off once! Starting round 2 on Monday!). I would say that you also need experience creating content strategy, analytics, management, and with SEO on top of your existing skills in order to get Director of Content roles eventually. But I don't think anyone will hire someone who has never done an in-house role with content strategy attached into a Director of Content role. It's too critical. In-house roles aren't just about producing content but creating measurable business results and folks hiring a Director rather than a Manager will want that track record. That said, I recommend you target content marketing manager, Content Lead, and Senior Content Marketing Manager roles at well-funded startups.

Below is generically what I’d expect a director of content to do, baseline. • Come up with strategy that can deliver meaningful business results (which you can measure quantitatively and qualitatively, as appropriate) and figure out how to execute. 1. Explain strategy to noncontent people and make a solid business case, so you can get buy-in, support and resources as needed. (Need to consistently do this to add significant business value and to derisk for people joining your team.) 2. Connect dots for your team and guide them on how to execute. (They’ll need to understand the why, and how things fit, to produce optimal results.) • Recruit and hire people in ways that align with business needs and company culture. (This doesn’t mean hire people you know; it means hire agnostic of your network and instead focus on what best fits the company’s needs.) Identify who’s best in class for your business goals and how you’ll get them to work with you and stick. • Manage people and help bring out the best in them, including those unlike you. • Develop people so they grow more valuable at your company and in the job market. Otherwise, you won’t be able to retain, which will cost your company business momentum and actual dollars in hiring, onboarding, training, developing domain expertise and institutional knowledge. • Coach up underperformers at business speed, as well as fire and manage out if their gaps remain too large beyond a reasonable time box. • Manage initiatives and projects that deliver significant business value that you can quantify and otherwise document. • Build processes from scratch and change or scrap them to begin anew as the business evolves. • Influence those whom you have no authority over, including cross-functional partners. • Collaborate with stakeholders with competing priorities and POV. If needed, get them to compromise and collaborate. • Prioritize and reprioritize as needed, understanding trade-offs and communicating clearly with your team and stakeholders. • Know when to say “no” and push back in ways that keep things collaborative and professional. This includes dealing with execs and other key stakeholders, and being able to explain why “no.” They don’t need to agree; they just need to be able to follow your rationale. • Earn the respect of your peer cohort and higher-level execs. • Know how to help interview cross-functional partner candidates, including helping to close ones who are in demand. • Exercise solid judgment, including solving various one-off problems, such as personnel issues, business conflicts and trade-offs, ethical questions, standards and practices, stakeholder management. • Make decisions at business speed, often with incomplete info, because that’s a reality of many business and competitive circumstances. You don’t need to be perfect (not humanly possible); you just need to get most decisions right and to correct what’s wrong, as possible. Over time, your batting average should get stronger and stronger. • Some director titles are inflated. Actual director-level roles mean you’ll also manage managers. Knowing how to develop them and to coach them to coach others are necessary in those cases. • Serve as a role model, someone whom team members aspire to be like. Not clones — because individual styles can vary — but learn similar abilities to lead, think strategically, connect dots, grok business, collaborate, etc. • Help build bench and avoid or eliminate key points of potential failure that could disrupt business continuity or momentum. • Depending on the employer, you also might need additional skills. Like if your work is in health care, personal finance or security, you might need know-how in laws, regulations, compliance, privacy and such. You don’t need to be an expert, but at director level, you should be able to grok that line of thinking and anticipate various scenarios or problems, and ask the right Qs when you work with cross-functional folks such as lawyers and security experts. • Some jobs will involve SEO or such, but you can hire for that and learn as you go if needed. Directors and above do not typically get into the weeds unless their titles are inflated. For instance, at NerdWallet, we became among the world’s best at SEO in a highly competitive space, but I never required that know-how when hiring, because we could always teach that. The stuff above, not so much at business speed. Personally, I knew next to nothing about SEO when I was hired as a director, but I learned. I ended up being promoted to senior director and later VP as I strengthened my business know-how and my team grew and our business results got stronger and stronger. As we scaled, I ended up with three deputies, who were directors of content. We led a team of nearly 100. Unlike most content teams, ours wasn’t a cost center, so we kept expanding to help grow our business.

This is such a helpful breakdown @white-potato-56800 Thank you for sharing! I really appreciated reading that.

Something worth noting: Content jobs are increasingly remote. That means rising expectations for managers to lead distributed folks well. And the bigger the team, the more challenging it becomes, especially developing people and building bench. Anyone with strong skills along these lines will be increasingly differentiated and valuable as their team grows and thrives. It will be a competitive differentiator for the company, because it affects throughput / business results, engagement / morale, retention, for example. Like NerdWallet’s content team is now at 130+ across three countries and is going strong. We built the team to work remote first from the start, in 2013. And we regularly measured engagement / morale, business results, retention and trust in leadership via anonymous surveys.

Hi - I wanted to say thanks for your advice and perspective. Lots to chew on. 🙂