Welcome back to another edition of Careers&Things!

It’s part 4 of the No-Code Tech Careers mini-series. Just 1 more to go for this mini-series before we reflect on learnings from these first few no-code careers.

Today we highlight Community Management roles that focus more on hybrid community management- both online communities and offline (real-life activations and events)!

Name: Mpumelelo Sefalane

Role: Community Manager

Company: Airbnb. Airbnb takes a unique approach toward lodging. Part of the “sharing economy,” Airbnb offers you someone’s home as a place to stay instead of a hotel.

Tech jobs Category: Community Manager

What is a Community Manager/What does a Community Manager do?

A Community Manager is the bridge between the company and its community. As Community Managers, we help nurture and enrich the company both online and offline.

As the Community Manager for the Middle East and Africa region, I work alongside hosts to manage regional and market-level host communities. Host communities are host-led social groups built for our thriving host community. My main responsibility is to connect and bring hosts and the business closer together through these communities, drive learning and sharing, and disseminate tools and best practices to help hosts improve their hosting on the platform.

What does a typical day in your role look like?

Community leaders check-ins: Regular check in’s with host leaders to understand, strategise and discuss new and innovative ways to support the hosting community. With the host leaders, we also build out a roadmap on various things we can do in the year to support our community.

Community meetings: Community meetups where we invite the entire host community to catch up on informative topics that can enhance their hosting on our platform. Here, hosts can learn from each other through sharing insights and connecting with each other to grow and strengthen our community.

Special Projects: We build and run special projects that support host communities outside of our regular meetups, information packs, and check-ins. These are projects that may require support and collaboration from other teams within the business and go to support hosts at a more business level (such as working to build new platform tools for them) or within their market in other ways.

What is a project you've worked on that you're most proud of/that you enjoyed the most?

Shop Local, a project where we showcased the power of the platform and its host community. This was a good example of how we support small business growth.

More on the project here: https://www.airbnb.co.za/d/supportjozi

What skills, qualifications, or experiences are required to get into this role?

A community manager role does not require a specific qualification, however, I believe it’s more important to possess certain qualities/experiences and skills such as:

• Working well with people,
• Experience with mobilising communities at the most local level;
• Understanding how to build and manage communities (both online and offline).
• Planning and managing events;
• Possessing emotional intelligence; and
• Being a team player.

What advice would you give to people trying to get started in this role?

I would say that it’s most important to showcase your past experiences where you’ve worked with communities on solving community-level issues so don’t be afraid to work on community projects in your local area (organise a community clean up in your neighbourhood) or to develop your own community-level projects making use of some communities you are already a part of (Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, etc.).

In my case, I have a Diploma in Journalism and Digital media, however, I ran a few social impact businesses (one of which had a tourism component), which I believe is what helped showcase my skills and that I would be the best fit for this role.

End.