How to Leverage Your Passion Project to Achieve Your Career Goals

Auditorium • November 21 • 10:45 - 11:05

Passion projects are awesome opportunities for career growth and professional development. Whether your project includes contributing to open source, organizing events, helping others learn to code, or a creative endeavor, it provides an opportunity to develop skills, hone your focus, grow your network, build your reputation and collaborate outside of your day job. However, when you are juggling work, family, and social commitments, it can be challenging to find enough time and energy to follow through on a passion project. Sometimes a project can start to feel just like more work and the passion can drain out of it and it can contribute to burnout instead of inspiration. This talk will outline how to choose, plan, set realistic goals for, and leverage the impact of “passion projects” or “side hustles” so that they can add value to your career and keep you interested, and sustainably engaged, in the things that you inspire you most.

This talk will be geared towards those who have a great idea for a side project or are passionate about a cause, but are not sure where to start, as well as those who have commenced on one (or several) passion projects, but have hit a roadblock due to lack of direction, focus, or burnout. This talk will cover planning and goal setting for passion projects, as well strategies to integrate what you have learned and gained from them into your career vision and planning. It will not cover starting a full-blown business from a side hustle.

◀ Agenda