The Blog That Changed Everything

Blogging as a Way to Show Skill Sets and Create a Portfolio

Staying in touch with your professional skills, learning, and developing. Maintaining a record of work-related activity. Building a work-related local network. Learning the language and cultural norms. Relocating to Norway and looking for work? It’s no walk in the park!

One solution is ‘volunteer somewhere’.

While we agree that volunteering can be a fantastic way to gain experience, speak Norwegian, and start building a network, we also think it’s useful to add alternative strategies to one’s toolkit. Whitney Love Bredland, one of our Stavanger-based mentors, agreed to share her story of building a blog and using it as part of her professional journey with us:

Whitney, an American marketing professional, moved to Norway from Germany for love. The year was 2007, and finding a job at the time was not too challenging: “Getting a job wasn’t too difficult,” she shares, “but finding a great fit in terms of company culture and work responsibilities was.” Whitney was working in Stavanger, but she wasn’t working in an ideal role or even in her desired field. She was doing data analytics - ‘going through data for the sake of gathering data’ - and filing reports. Her job did not focus on her core competencies and skills. She wanted to use data for decision-making, and she wanted to get back into her field of expertise: marketing. She knew she’d have to find a way to pivot professionally.

Finding a way back to relevant roles

One of the strategies she chose was starting an MBA program and gaining a formal education to support her marketing applications. She worked on a master’s thesis discussing the role of social media in food marketing in Norway. Armed with a relevant education as well as relevant experience, she thought pivoting back into marketing would be easy. She was wrong. Because ‘experience and education’ are not the same as ‘experience and education deemed relevant from a (Norwegian) employer’s perspective’. Despite having connected with relevant local companies through her master’s thesis, she had limited luck securing relevant work and found the job-seeking experience utterly exhausting. She decided to use her skill set to show prospective employers what she was capable of, in a way they could relate to and see the use of. Hello, blogging.

The power of blogging

The year is 2009, so if anyone has been mumbling ‘Why not start a blog’ to yourselves already, remember, it wasn’t a thing back then. Whitney had heard about blogs from a friend in the US working in public relations and decided to create her own. She wanted an outlet for creativity and fun, but also to do something meaningful, something to be proud of, and something to be in control of. The blog Thanks for the Food is a journey into Norwegian food. I remember discussing one of the pieces with my mother-in-law (very much a believer in preserving food traditions and making your own food from scratch) well before meeting Whitney. If you’ve never heard of Thanks for the Food, I encourage you to check it out!

“That blog changed everything in my life for the better,” states Whitney. Because one day, a colleague at her then workplace asked how many page visitors her ‘hobby’ was attracting.

“Well, on average, I guess around 25 000 unique page views a month,” Whitney told him. “40 000 in a good month like May or December.”

The colleague was stunned. Because 40 000 unique page views are not a weekend hobby – that was a potential business. It was time to monetize the blog. While creating a blog had meant learning about content production, social media,WordPress/dashboards, and analytics, monetizing the website meant spending time on advertising, analytics, organic growth potentials, and affiliated income streams. It also led to increased exposure. Whitney created a press kit, was interviewed by several media outlets, and linked all external work back to her blog. She realized for the first time how much potential was in her blog.

The blog became a portfolio, a very practical and tangible expression of skill sets. Skill sets that were relevant to the jobs she applied for. Whitney started getting callbacks and interview invitations.

But the blog now also held the potential to be an alternative source of income. Whitney no longer relied solely on securing a job - somewhere along the way, she had created her own.

You are bigger than your role - and good things are out there

Thanks for the food started as a project to demonstrate skills in a relatable way. It ended up being an income, a door opener, and a way back to relevant marketing roles. The website is still live, but it is no longer active. Whitney now works as Presserv’s branding and communication manager and is one of Sammen om en jobb’s mentors.

“I feel like I found the right fit for me once I came to Presserv. My manager trusts me full stop and my colleagues are very supportive. My international experience fits in perfectly with the fact that we have offices in 6 countries and projects on nearly every continent. Also, the company is making an impact in terms of sustainability in the preservation market – and has been since its beginning,” she says. “I am happy here and proud to be ‘just one of the guys’”

Whitney brings knowledge of the application process and of marketing and data analytic roles to the table as a mentor, but she also brings an understanding of what it feels like to be neither here nor there in the application process. If there is one thing she wishes she had been clearer about when she was in the middle of applying for work as an immigrant in Norway, it is the importance of acknowledging one’s mental health needs and how demotivating the job-seeking process can feel.

“I don’t think I understood how important it was for my identity to be a working professional”, she says, referring to her time as a job seeker. “The job seeking process made me doubt and question who I was in many ways. I wish I’d had someone remind me more often that I was bigger than my role”.

“Be mindful of your mental health and emotions while in the job-seeking process,” Whitney advises, as we round off our conversation. “Find things to feel connected to which support your sense of self and your integrity. Also, remember - things are coming, they are out there, just keep trying your best.”

We hope you found this story inspirational and useful! If you have a project of your own that you’d like to share, reach out to us. Sharing is, as we all know, caring.

All images credited to Whitney Love Bredland and Linn Heidi Knutsen