Do-it-yourself (DIY) culture has invaded the corporate world. Some companies can’t tell the difference between a true professional and someone who has hacked their way through learning a skill set online.
Many professional resumes now include freelance jobs so it’s not out of the ordinary to see more self-employed professionals. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, some industry professionals work exclusively as freelancers. This makes it hard for corporations to verify where someone learned their skills and gained experience.
Sometimes educational profiles help, but not always. Many professionals take courses from legitimate sources, including experts, that aren’t administered by accredited universities.
If you’re looking to hire a professional, you want someone with experience and not just knowledge. Here are the top 3 tech professions that require experience to generate results.
Table of Contents
1. IT services
Unless you hire a professional IT service team, you won’t get the proactive tech support required to keep your company’s network secure around the clock. Organizations need managed IT services, but some have yet to recognize the need is dire. Those companies wait until there’s a problem and then try to patch it up or ask someone from another team to troubleshoot the issue.
Unfortunately, organizations that skip professional security services can end up being responsible for catastrophic damage. For instance, a hacker gained access to a Florida water treatment system and through the control panel increased the amount of lye to 100 times the normal level. Sodium hydroxide (lye) is used to control the pH of the water but is deadly in large quantities.
Thankfully, an employee saw the change happening in real time and changed it back immediately, preventing contamination. However, some organizations aren’t that lucky.
Make sure you hire a qualified IT service professional for all of your IT security needs. Don’t make the mistake of trusting DIY hobbyists with the security of your company.
2. Copywriting
Another popular DIY profession is copywriting. Although many people have become decent copywriters without formal training, they lack the level of expertise required to get significant results.
For example, copywriting often requires speaking to the reader in a casual, conversational tone that requires using improper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. That may sound strange, but it’s true. It’s also the reason A-list copywriters get frustrated with their clients. Clients want perfect grammar and punctuation, but that’s not what people respond to.
Part of the reason companies ends up with mediocre copywriters is because they don’t know the difference between copywriters and content writers. They think any skilled writer can do the job. That’s understandable, but if you want big results, you need a professional copywriter to write your sales and ad copy and limit your content writers to blog posts and external articles.
Content writers are best tasked with writing well-researched, informative, educational, or entertaining content. Hire a content writer for:
· Blog posts
· Article marketing/content marketing to be published on other websites
· General web copy (about pages, services pages, etc.)
· Content describing a video
· Educational content
· Content designed to prove points or provide evidence for a claim
Copywriters craft copy that gets readers to take a specific action like signing up for your email list or buying your product.
Hire a copywriter for:
· PPC ad copy
· PPC ad landing page copy
· Squeeze page copy
· Contact page copy
· Direct marketing copy
· Webinar copy
· Email marketing emails
Ideally, you’d have your copywriters and content writers work together to make all of your copy as powerful as possible.
3. Website developers
Looking at websites online makes it seem like website development is an easy job. After all, everyone seems to be a developer these days and most sites look great. Well, that’s because everyone’s using templates. Most developers aren’t developers at all. In fact, the internet caters to a generation of developers who want to get a high-paying job without experience.
Where most organizations get tripped up is not giving candidates a test first to see if they really qualify for the position. Perhaps you wouldn’t even know how to test a developer. That’s why it’s critical to hire a professional development team over random freelancers from random job listing sites.
Not hiring a truly experienced professional developer could cost your organization more than 100 times the price of the original project. DIY developers might know how to make a WordPress site look good, but expert developers aren’t experts because of their aesthetics; they’re experts because they make the right architectural choices that support a website from the ground up.
Hire a professional to explain how to verify a candidate’s experience
When you’re not an industry expert, it’s hard to spot a true expert. Instead of guessing, hire an expert in each industry to create a system to verify experience and qualifications for each of your required tech positions.
