I’ve never been one for titles. People tell me that I should be an engineer or an architect or a senior this or that. Me? I couldn’t care less about what it says on my business card. I want to be known more for what I do. Even when I was working in a “management” position in college I would mop the floors or clean things left and right. Part of that came from the idea that I would never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself. Plus, it does tend to motivate people when they see their boss scrubbing dishes or wiping things down.

When I started getting deeper into the whole blogging and influencer aspect of my career, it became apparent that some people put stock into titles. Since I am the only employee at The Networking Nerd I can call myself whatever I want. The idea of being the CEO is too pretentious to me. I could just as easily call myself “janitor”. I also wanted to stay away from analyst, Chief Content Creator, or any other monikers that made me sound like I was working the news desk at the Washington Post (now proudly owned by Jeff Bezos).

That was when I hit on a brilliant idea. Something I could do to point out my feelings about how useless titles truly are but at the same time have one of those fancy titles that I could put on a name badge at a conference to garner some attention. That’s when I settled on my new official title here at The Networking Nerd.

I’m Awesome.

No, really. I’ve put it on every conference name tag I’ve signed up for including Dell Enterprise Forum, Cisco Live, and even the upcoming VMworld 2013 conference. I did it partially so that people will scan my badge on the expo floor and say this:

“So, you’re…awesome? At The Networking Nerd?”
“Yes. Yes I am.”

It’s silly when you think about it. But it’s also a very humorous reaction. That’s when they start asking me what I really do. I get to launch into my real speech about empowering influencers and coordinating vendor interactions. Something that might get lost if the badge scanner simply saw engineer or architect and assumed that all I did was work with CLIs or Visio.

Past a certain point in your career you aren’t your title. You are the work you do. It doesn’t matter if you are a desktop technician. What matters is that you can do IT work for thousands of systems using scripts and automation. It doesn’t matter that you are a support engineer. It matters that you can diagnose critical network failures quickly without impacting uptime for any other systems. When you fill out your resume which part is more important? Your title? Or your work experience? Title on a resume is a lot like GPA. People want to see it but it doesn’t matter one bit in the long run. They’d rather know what you can do for them.

Being Awesome is a way for me to buck the trend of meaningless titles. I’ve been involved with people insisted on being called Director of Business Development instead of Sales Manager because the former sounded more important. I’ve seen managers offer a title in lieu of a monetary raise because having a big title made you important. Titles mean nothing. The highest praise in my career came not because I was a senior engineer or a network architect. It came when people knew who I was. I was simply “Tom”. When you are known for what you do it speaks volumes about who you are.

Tom’s Take

Awesome is a state of mind for me. I’m awesome at everything I do at The Networking Nerd because I’m the only person here. I also Suck equally as much for the same reason. When you’re the only employee you can do whatever you want. My next round of Networking Nerd business cards will be fun to make. Stephen and I will decide on a much less pretentious title for my work at Gestalt IT. But for my own personal brand it really is cool to be awesome.