How to increase your visibility as a Business Intelligence professional

Firstly before I start sharing my views, I would like to emphasize on one point that I am not a career guidance guru / expert. I share my views and thoughts based on my experience, and you should always use your wisdom to steer you career in the right direction.

Today almost every other IT professional who does not work as a free lancer / trainer, works in one or another, small or big, core IT or IT services of a core organization. Any organization has employees in hundreds to thousands, and when performance of an individual is measured, it's always in terms of percentile and not percentage. So this means you have to compete against all your peers, and you would be rated against the same. Today the industry has become so competitive that employees are not recognized as professionals but just technology resources and many a times it happens that people are treated as commodities. When you approach operations and/or resource management, at one or other stage of your career, you would come across a stage where you would hear that "you do not have a good visibility in the service line / business vertical to which you belong".

Another challenge is that when you change you job / business unit / project, you head on to a new world where almost anyone won't recognize you / your technical capability / your career achievements. The only thing that you would have as a record of everything is a piece of paper, called "Resume". The reason is again, you do not have enough visibility as a professional outside your project / business unit / IT industry. So how to deal with this issue ?

1) Go public: Do not waste your efforts in making your immediate supervisor happy. In my viewpoint, this is a very short term vision. He / She is not going to be your supervisor for life. Invest into efforts that would survive over the period of time. For example instead of creating an copy-pasted document from MSDN to contribute a tutorial in your CoE, invest time in creating an original and useful project on Codeplex.

2) Build your network: Attend tech-eds, user group meetings, webinars etc where you can connect with professionals across the industry. Do not waste time entertaining influential personnel in your organization. This is again short term vision, unless and until you are going to work with the same set of people for your life.

3) Establish your reputation globally: There are open discussion forums like MSDN Forums, Community websites like SQL Server Central and others, development platforms like Codeplex. Make the best use of these platforms to establish your reputation as an expert professional. When you raise your reputation, you raise all the means to raise the height of your visibility.

4) Open a communication channel: Blog is one of the best ways to open a communication channel to the external world. Whether you change your technical area of practice / your job / your base location, people can always reach you through your blog / website and the same acts as a log book of your evolution as a thought leader in your area of expertise.

Even if you follow the above points just in your local city, there is a very high probability that you would stand out from the rest of the queue. The summary of this long theory is that, don't think like a frog in a well, and Go Global to raise the height of your visibility to the best of your capabilities. Believe me, once your reputation reaches a certain level, people would come to you and you won't have to run after people to keep on advertising yourself. Keep in view that reputation gets built over time, it's not an overnight delivery. So start the long term plan for your career right now. Feel free to share your opinions on my viewpoint.