The Path to Community is Diverse: See How our Roomies Got There

Linda Lian
CEO & Co-founder, Common Room

Community is more relevant than ever, and we’re seeing rapid growth in community manager roles. While building Common Room and Uncommon, I’ve had the opportunity to meet many inspiring community leaders. While they share many things in common - like authenticity and a passion for creating meaningful engagement amongst people with common interests and goals, their paths to arriving in community are surprisingly diverse and unique.

It’s not a secret that tech suffers from a diversity problem. It’s a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Some attribute this to a “pipeline” problem where to be in tech, you need to have experience in tech, creating a sisyphean loop of inequality. However, community teams buck this trend! Community functions are incredibly diverse. This is in part because the demand for community managers far outweighs the supply, and in part because the skills community managers need to succeed are both learned and transferable from a diverse set of experiences and backgrounds - community leaders are coming into this discipline from backgrounds in other roles, functions, and excitingly, other industries! This results in diversity in representation, diversity in experience, and diversity in perspective.

We’re so excited about enabling and encouraging economic opportunities for the future generation of community-obsessed managers, marketers, and product leads. That’s why we’re working on training and certification to help more community managers enter the field and why we started a job board for our customers and community. We’re also starting with telling their stories.

In our upcoming blog series, “The Rise of the Community Manager” we’ll be celebrating community managers and discussing how they found their way into community. For some, it was an intentional choice, and for others, the path found them.

I’m excited about building alongside others who see that value and power of community. Here at Common Room, our Roomies have over 25 years of experience in community combined, at organizations like AWS, Google, and Facebook. So I asked some of them to share as well. And we’d love to hear how you arrived in a community role too - or if you’re not there yet, but interested in making the transition. Record your own video, post it to LinkedIn or Twitter (@CommonRoomHQ), and tag us!