Act as the job you want

At a startup summit I met someone doing work experience who wanted to become a project manager. She did not have the reputation, the track record or the CV for it. Every application asked for exactly the experience she could not get without the job. You will know this loop if you have been anywhere near it: the role wants two years of the thing, and the only place to get two years of the thing is the role.

My advice was simple: start acting in the role you want. These days there are so many startups, so many open-source projects, so many areas where you can just start working as that person. Pick one. Manage something for them: a release, a backlog, an event, a migration. Add value to that company. Tag them on LinkedIn when you write about it. Send them messages and ideas. Connect with the people who work there. The work gives you the CV you did not have.

This is the advice I end up giving most often to people I know who are looking for a job, and it is the part of the first edition I would most like to finish.

If you are looking for a job, you have time

I know a lot of people who are looking for a job right now. Some are between jobs. Some left one to try the next thing. Some have just come out of university, or just arrived in a new country. Some are coming back from maternity leave. Some are still in a job, with a few hours in the evening. And some have no spare time at all, because of caring for someone, or a second job, or illness, which is its own problem and not one this chapter solves. But for most of them the bottom line is the same: if you are looking for a job, you have time.

And if you have time, the best way to get a job is to act as the person in the job you want. Not to prepare for it, not to read about it. To do it.

I wrote this in 2018

This is not new advice from me. The first edition's chapter on getting a job asked how you start working with the companies you want to work for, and answered:

Easy, start collaborating on their Open Source projects. Act like you are part of the company. Understand their values, and behave in ways that will add value to that company, namely the tech stack.

And a few lines later: "What's interesting is that there is nothing stopping you from doing this!" That is more true now. In 2018, acting like part of the company meant pull requests on their open source and conversations with their developers, which is still a good route if you write code. What has changed is that the tools to do real work for a company, before they have hired you, are now in everyone's hands, whatever the job. The product brief, the market analysis, the release plan, the event page, the migration runbook: an agent and an afternoon get you a first version of any of them, and Hired for the workflow said why that is the skill companies are hiring for.

If you came out of a computing degree and work carefully, by hand, you may feel a pull against this. You were taught to get it right before you show it. Keep the care. Change where you spend it: on checking what you publish, not on keeping it private until it is finished. Finished and private is invisible.

It is the same for any job. If you want to be an artist, publish what you make. If you want to be a security engineer, find vulnerabilities in open-source projects and report them properly; the first edition had an outline on bug bounties that only got as far as "big business these days", and that is still the shortest honest description of them. If you want to be a product manager, write the product brief for a product you love and send it to the team. Act on the job you want to get.

Act like a founder, then; be one, now

The first edition had a short chapter next to that one called Be a founder, and it is the then-and-now of this whole part. What it meant by founder was an attitude. "The single thing that you personally control when you go to work, is your attitude to your work and how you approach it", it began, and its idea was that you should "act like one of the founders of the business". Ask yourself, as a founder of the company or department you are in now: how would I behave every day? What needs to be done now that would make a big difference? What would I do differently? What values and principles would I fight for? And then the question that mattered: what is stopping you from doing just that? Who is telling you "Don't do it"? The chapter's answer was "At the moment it is just you!"

That is why the advice above works: managing a release for a startup you do not work for is behaving like one of its founders, and, as the 2018 chapter said, the more you behave like a founder the more valuable you become.

But in 2026 the advice is literal. You can be the founder. The afternoon with an agent that gets you a first version of a product brief for someone else's company gets you a first version of your own. That is why this part is called Getting the job, or making it, and why Be a founder: the expert founders, in Start the company, takes the 2018 title and finishes the sentence. If you are reading this as the parent rather than the graduate, with twenty years inside a field, the job you want may be one nobody is advertising, and acting as it means starting it. The rest of this chapter applies to you too: work in public finds first customers the way it finds first jobs.

Do it in public, and let people help you

Do the work where it can be seen. A pull request on a public repository, a post that tags the company, an article on your own site, a project board anyone can open. Work done in private helps the company; work done in public helps the company and you, because it can be linked.

The link is the whole point, and it is why the rest of this chapter is about links. Many of those companies, if you do a good job, especially in public, will give you a reference. Some will introduce you to people who are hiring. Some will pay you. And some will hire you. Each of those starts with somebody being able to point at the work.

One caution, because unpaid work can be exploited. Choose projects where the work is yours to show, and stop if it is only taken.

People sometimes look at what I publish and assume I have a lot of reach. I do not. Most of what I publish does not get read. On LinkedIn these days most of my posts get a hundred views, sometimes five hundred, and every now and then one reaches a thousand or more. That is fine. If you write for reach you will be disappointed, and you will stop.

Publish anyway, because reach is not the point. The point is that you now have something you can link. And that changes what other people can do for you.

There are people who want to help you: former colleagues, friends, people you met once at an event, people like me. The first edition's outline on mentors said you would be surprised by how approachable they are, and why: if you have the right attitude, the mentors see themselves in you, which is why most have a soft spot for helping. That is still my experience.

But most of them cannot do much with "I am looking for a job in project management". What they can do is forward a link: "Have a look at what this person did for this startup." To do that, they need the link. So give the people who want to help you something they can use behind the scenes: linkable work, a page that explains who you are and what you have done, evidence they can send to someone with one line of introduction. An answer is much more useful when there is something behind it that can be linked, which is the rule Publish, publish, publish: your own newsroom is built on.

Your CV should be online

That is also why, if you are looking for a job, your CV should be online. Not only a PDF sent to whoever asks, but a page, with links to the work, that anyone can forward.

The first edition had a whole part called Your CV. It was a heading and a set of outlines: GitHub, LinkedIn, blogs, Leanpub, Upwork. I never wrote them up, but the notes say what I thought, and most of it holds. GitHub is your CV, the outline said, because it shows how you code and how you interact with others; your commits and pull requests show your voice; your accepted pull requests on other projects are badges of honour and belong on your CV; and the number of people using your tools is a better validation of your skills than any recommendation system. Keep the long tail of projects curated, because it is your research playground. On LinkedIn the notes were shorter: connect to people so that you can reach them, build the network, get recommendations, and expect a low signal-to-noise ratio. All of that is still true. What I would add in 2026 is that the GitHub that shows how you work with others is now also the GitHub your agent works in, so it shows how you work with agents too. That is the part a hiring manager in 2026 wants to see, and it is the one your degree did not give you.

What a page like that looks like in practice: when I drafted the LinkedIn pages for my own companies this October, I did not write them from adjectives. I asked an agent to gather what the platform needed and what we had already published, and to draft every field from the record, with ten first posts for each page, every one an article or page already published. Then I published the drafts, before any page went up, because the drafting is part of the story. Your page can be made the same way: not "a motivated team player", but the three things you did, each with its link.

If you cannot yet open a GitHub account, connect it to an agent and have the agent build and edit a site for you, learn that first. The bar is not that high. It takes an afternoon, and the next chapter describes one way to do it, by voice memo. It is a critical skill, because it is the one that connects the dots: the work you do, the page that shows it, and the people who can pass it on.

The job hunt itself

There is a gap here, and I would rather say so than fill it with guesses. What this part does not yet have is the mechanics of a job hunt in 2026: how interviews run now, what a take-home test is when AI is allowed and when it is not, what an entry-level role actually looks like day to day, and how freelancing fits. The first edition had an outline on Upwork that was mostly about the hiring side; its lines for you were that the on-demand economy is not just a race to the bottom, and that delegating to a freelancer is hard and worth learning. The survey of my articles for this edition listed the job hunt as a gap no article covers, and the plan is an article first, from a memo of mine, and the chapter after.

What I can say without the memo is what every piece of this chapter already says. Whatever shape the interview takes, the person on the other side has one question, why should I hire you, and the best answer to it is a link to the job you have already been doing. If the job you want is a company of your own, the question is the customer's and the answer is the same link.