The Rise Of Announcement Culture Has Helped My Work Hustle
You’ve seen the posts; you know the preface. They are the humble brag you love to hate and hate to love. They’re annoying, they’re joyous, and you can’t scroll through social media for a whole day without seeing one. I have announced two job moves across my social-media platforms in the space of a year (don’t hate the player, hate the game) alongside my professional awards. One tweet has garnered over 709 likes, while an Instagram post has reached over 2,000 likes and counting. At one point, after leaving a job in 2020, I went so far as to write a ‘press release’ about my departure in Apple Notes – because 280 characters just wasn’t enough – before sharing it on Twitter and Instagram.
After each announcement, every notification I received was like a dopamine hit straight into my veins. It didn’t matter whether I knew the person or not; I felt smug, proud and at the top of my game. But it wasn’t long before the euphoria wore off, panic struck, and I frantically looked around for other things in my arsenal to announce: a new job with an insane relocation package? A book deal? A baby? Welcome to the era of announcement culture.
When I switched careers in 2017 from law (where you’d rather die than brag about a promotion) to journalism (where you’d die if you didn’t), I felt the pressure to share my professional news in order to build my personal brand and to get my name out there in the industry. Dan, 27, who also recently made the switch from law to journalism, felt this too. ‘When I was working in law, nobody announced their job move on social media, especially not Twitter,’ he says. ‘At a stretch, you’d update your LinkedIn profile and your network would get notified, but that’s about it.’
But, since then, things have changed, with everybody and their dog announcing something, somewhere, at any given time. An engagement. The birth of a child. A relocation to somewhere hot. Buying a property. A new job. Getting fired or made redundant from said job. And, more often than not, you’ll know it’s coming before you’ve let yourself scroll any further because someone is ‘So pleased…’, ‘Can’t believe I’m writing this…’ or ‘So happy to share…’
Between 2020 and 2021, Twitter saw a 59% rise in mentions of ‘personal news’, with the greatest daily average of celebratory tweets during the months of April and May. And announcement culture now spans a spectrum of industries. Everyone from teachers, architects, politicians and receptionists to artists, musicians and, yes, even lawyers have been using social media to publicise their work and announce job moves. This endemic look-at-me behaviour isn’t unique to Twitter and Instagram, where you might expect it most. It has percolated through to the internet’s least-sexy social-media platform: LinkedIn.
As the media hive was busy declaring the Great Resignation during the pandemic, LinkedIn reached a new height of popularity. When it launched in 2003, the social-media platform was designed to ‘connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful’. People proudly showcased their CVs as a way of advertising their knowledge, skills and expertise to sell themselves to lurking job recruiters, or to simply connect with like-minded professionals. These days, the platform has become somewhat more personal – and a lot more popular. In the past year, there’s been a 22% increase in the number of feed updates viewed and a 28% growth in public conversations happening on the platform. Only last week, I received a message from a man I’d never met before, calling me beautiful. And another week, I got headhunted for a six-figure job in Dubai (I declined).
Charlotte Davies, a career expert at LinkedIn, has seen a significant shift in the way people use the platform in the last few years. ‘While announcement culture is often perceived as people only posting about success, the reality that we’re noticing on LinkedIn is that people are turning to their communities more than ever before. Not only to share their achievements, but to also share their struggles and challenges, reach out to their network for advice, provide a helping hand to others and connect with each other.’
And the lines between professional and personal on LinkedIn have been blurred even more during the pandemic. ‘We’ve started to see more personal and vulnerable stories emerge on the platform, but very much through a professional lens,’ Davies says. One such example is Aisha, a 23-year-old from London who is a technical recruiter at Monzo. She opened up to her community about the struggles she faced growing up and how she overcame them. Her post received over 12,000 likes and hundreds of well wishes for her new role. The hashtag #newjob on LinkedIn has thousands of posts, with many users sharing their new job roles, promotions and even professional and personal anecdotes of their time at various companies.
For 31-year-old entrepreneur Angelica Malin, this more open and, dare I say it, authentic side of LinkedIn is a refreshing change. ‘For me, the platform is viable because there are so many high-profile people that I would never get to meet in real life, plus in terms of validation and proof of worth, you can get people to recommend you. It’s a live CV if you use it correctly. But if you’re only joining it to announce wins, then your content isn’t of value to other people.’
The pandemic also triggered a third of UK workers to consider a career change, or quit altogether. I left two jobs in the space of a year, which, outside of a pandemic, would have been considered crazy. But during those two years, I realised what I truly wanted: flexibility, a pay rise, a new title, and to be somewhere where I felt valued. LinkedIn, which I previously hadn’t given a second thought to, let alone curated, as much as my other networks, became a powerful resource to discover what else was out there, such as the ability to work abroad with more freedom to actually live your life, as well as consider other people’s career trajectories through a much more personal lens. It makes you realise that the Great Resignation isn’t really about giving up on work, but about reassessing it. Perhaps talking about our work in our networks is even more important now, not less.
Still, the phenomenon has its downsides. It was British influencer Grace Beverley who coined the term ‘announcement culture’ in her 2021 book Working Hard, Hardly Working. She describes it as ‘our ever-growing need to announce everything we’re doing, therefore perpetuating our anxiety of having “things” to announce in the first place’. It’s also a form of gratification and validation, something that Beverley has struggled with.
‘When I first realised that I was altering the way I operated based on this work-sharing culture, I started to see “announcement culture” everywhere I looked,’ she explains. ‘We need to sack this view of productivity to build real foundations for our career and gain genuine traction towards our goals.’ She adds that our, ‘quest for announcement “productivity” that we can show off – for self-worth and sometimes social-media kudos – means we hold ourselves back from going beyond surface-level work and actually making profound progress.’
Abby Rawlinson, a London-based therapist and a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, agrees. ‘It could be argued that announcement culture fuels our need for validation and puts pressure on people to always be doing something worth announcing,’ she says. ‘When we receive likes or comments on a social-media post, our brain’s reward centres are activated and dopamine, our “happy” hormone, is released. Once the initial thrill of announcing our achievement is over, our instinct is often to look for the next piece of validation, which can push us into a cycle of regularly posting to receive recognition.’
This is something I can relate to in terms of my own need to post personal announcements. But Rawlinson warns of the risks involved in getting too caught up in this cycle: ‘It can lead to stress, burnout and “productivity anxiety”, which is where our self-worth is tied to our output and we feel anxious or self-critical when we’re not achieving “enough”.’
While we might be sold the idea of the Great Resignation as one of the pandemic’s legacies, I would argue that, in reality, this phenomenon of continuously announcing new projects indicates that we haven’t slowed down, or quit work for good. In fact, we’re working harder than ever before. Faced with the rising costs of living, lack of opportunities and Brexit thwarting plans of living and working abroad, many have been forced to take on more work, whether that’s setting up their own businesses, turning side hustles into second or third jobs, or simply putting more hours into their day job to ensure security.
Even though some may roll their eyes at the multitude of ‘personal news’ posts on social media, I can’t help but smile at them. ‘We shouldn’t feel ashamed for wanting to tell people about our hard-earned achievements,’ says Rawlinson. ‘Humans are wired for connection, after all – it’s normal to want praise and validation from others. Announcement culture might be a particularly important tool for increasing the visibility of under-represented groups. It shows us what is possible. This kind of representation can also help reduce negative stereotypes about other groups.’
When I announced the day I became a deputy editor of a magazine, I did so with pride because I knew how much hard work went into it. I hustled and grafted for four years and got that promotion despite former bosses telling me I wasn’t ready. I now share my own successes so that one day, a young Black woman hailing from an inner-city borough can see that she, too, can succeed and break glass ceilings for other women. The 35-year-old business liaison manager Aimèe Jones agrees: ‘I get that some women may shout less about their successes, but it’s not stopped me. I think women should be able to celebrate their successes loudly, as, let’s face it, they’ve probably had to work a lot harder for that recognition.’ Malin concurs: ‘It’s great that women are stepping up and doing that more.’
Whether we choose to partake in announcement culture or not, the flood of personal news posts isn’t slowing down. Next, we’ll be seeing new-job photoshoots across our feeds,
something that’s taken off in a competitive way in the US. But, if announcement culture allows people to connect with each other globally on a much deeper level, then who says it’s necessarily a bad thing? For now, I only have one thing to do, like I wrote on Twitter back in 2019: ‘Some personal news: I have finished my feature and can now go back to watching Netflix in peace’. Some things never change.
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