Seriously. When Nicole was offering to cover SL in class, I was underwhelmed, thinking SL is so three years ago and very uninteresting. But I went along with it, in part because I knew I'd enjoy the other modification on offer, the Twitter section.
The readings in preparation for class have completely turned me around. The most impactful articles were both career related - I am so fixated! The other readings and interviews were very interesting and made me more interested in checking out SL, but the news that IBM and the UK government are using SL to recruit and process recruits intrigues me. It's another way to market myself to potential employers, and I'll take anything I can get!
Looking forward to class, and trying to keep myself from signing up before then. Would that be really bad if I did?
Showing posts with label job search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job search. Show all posts
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Homework is Hard!
That is, it's hard to complete efficiently. If I just read the articles, thought about them, took some notes, did the assignments, wrote about them, it would be easy. But this evening I've spent three hours bouncing back and forth between the readings, my resume and LinkedIn profile. Oh and Facebook and Twitter, but that's more just my own little attention deficit problem more than anything.The readings are too relevant and helpful to me right now, about to set off of my next job search! I never thought I'd write that either. It's just distracting - I'm so forgetful now that if I don't do something right away, I'm worried that I won't ever do it. So I read Guy Kawasaki talking about how to use LinkedIn, and I feel I have to run off and implement what I like of his ideas (a lot!) in my profile right away, like making more information public and searchable.
One of Guy's tips reminded me that I have had LinkedIn used on me while interviewing a prospective employee. He'd looked up my profile and realized we were from the same part of the world. I knew that from his resume, but I was a little surprised that he knew it too! Since then, I've started doing a bit more online reading about prospective hires, but when I find unprofessional info, like a goofy public Facebook profile, I try not to let it affect my judgement of the person too much.
The Fast Company Brand Called You article is a great reminder that I need to work on defining and capturing my brand - I recently signed off an email to an old friend (who works in public sector IT in the region where I want to work, so it's important to get a bug in his ear) saying to "keep me in mind if you run into anyone looking for a generalist geek/communicator extrodinaire." I don't think that's quite it, but it's a start at a label for myself.
I was happy to re-read Penelope Trunk's piece on networking, as it hearkened back to a classroom discussion we'd had about the need for humor. Trunk writes it's not necessary to be witty, but to be nice and a good listener, to do some good networking. We were talking about humor in the context of blogging, but I think this translates well to blogging, as a way to network: if your blog posts are respectful and well written, and they show that you're paying attention to your blog topic/subject, they are going to be more interesting and valuable to the reader. (Trunk isn't blogging at Yahoo anymore, but you can catch up with her on her own site. She reminded me as well that I need to be commenting on non-school related blog posts as a way to increase my brand visibility. It's just a bit tough right now, because I'm supposed to be doing homework!
This is a bit off topic, but reading the Get More Out of Conferences piece left me looking around for the heavy use of Twitter at conferences these days...and then I realized it was written in 2007. Guess they hadn't heard of Twitter yet! (Ok, it's mentioned, but only as a post event tool)
So, the readings this week, all of them, have been really useful and inspiring. I'm frantically bookmarking the really good stuff in case we lose access to the readings after the course ends. And of course, I'm hoping that I'll remember why I bookmarked them!
What do you think your personal brand is? How are you promoting it? What do you think mine should be saying?
Photo credit Alessandro Pucci
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Post full o' Love
My classmates and I are learning about blog post tags and giving each other link love. I'm delighted to discover the wonders that exist in Google Insight, where you can learn about popular search terms people are using.
My wondrous classmates include:
I'm going to have some fun with some labels for this post now... See below...
My wondrous classmates include:
I'm going to have some fun with some labels for this post now... See below...
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Social Capital
These readings got me thinking about so many things! The Gladwell article on Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg inspired me to update my LinkedIn profile, where I am connected with many of my weak links, and start emailing them to make sure everyone knows that I’m relocating in a year and will be looking for work. I’m thinking of sending a link to the article along with these messages, as a gift and food for thought for those who may not have read it yet.
In Six Myths About Informal Networks, Cross, Nohria and Parker write that “engineers and scientists were roughly five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues for information as to impersonal sources.” This immediately rang true in my mind (though of course I'm not an engineer nor scientist, just a geek) – in my workplace, the people I rely on for assistance are the ones I consider friends.
However, it also occurred to me that the people I like and consider friends in my workplace are largely people who I feel are my equals in terms of dedication to our mission and work. Those co coworkers I don't consider friends or at least friendly, I go to with problems as a last resort, and they have become coworkers of last resort in my mind because of their general unwillingness to be helpful and sometimes, unfortunately, due to their lack of knowledge. I am often, as predicted in the article, closer with people similar to me in age, though oddly not in gender – I think that’s just a function of there not being many women working in IT from which to pick.
I run a service desk in a medium sized IT department: we are the customer facing side of the organization, and when there are problems with systems, infrastructure or applications; our customers call my staff and me to let us know they are having problems. My staff and I have the responsibility to identify and then notify the person in charge of the problematic system. Because of the complexity of our systems, the initial diagnosis is often tricky. With some programmers and administrators quick to say it’s not my problem, we sometimes have to provide proof of the cause, or cajole them into reviewing logs on their systems before they investigate possible problems.
In The People Who Make Organizations Go – or Stop, Cross and Prusak discuss how informal networks can help a company function, and a few roles (central connector, information broker and boundary spanner). They present these networks as a new way of operating – I’m not sure they’re right about them being new, as the cliché “It’s not what you know but who you know” probably wouldn’t be the chestnut it is, if it were just us Gen Xers and Millennials that started forming and using informal networks in the workplace.
In my workplace, we have some substantial internal boundaries, due to various past events, leadership differences and restructuring. Across those boundaries, wariness and mistrust is more common than collaboration. Some of my colleagues who have worked for the organization twice as long as I have don’t know the names, let alone roles and skills, of people on the other side of those boundaries.
I’m not sure if I’m a central connector or an information broker – I lean towards the former, but arguments could be made either way – but it’s a part of my work that I really enjoy. I think I’m effective at it partly because of my nature as an extrovert and partly because management largely supports me in what I do. A year ago, a newly hired executive started telling anyone in our IT group “we all work for the service desk,” predictably winning my support!
However, regardless of how you label how I do my job, when I approach programmers and administrators, more than a few will good naturedly say “Uh oh, here comes the service desk,” essentially inviting me to interrupt whatever they are doing to let them know about a problem with one of their systems. More often than not, I’m just stopping by to gather information or say hello, but for those who get what I do and respect my connection with our customers, it makes my work easier and more pleasant.
These days, coworkers come to me with a wide range of requests, knowing that while I don’t really run any particular system nor am I a programmer, I do usually have a good idea of who can answer their question or fix their problem. I’ve noticed that lately, my coworkers have even started coming to me with questions about things outside our IT department, such as HR and other organizational policy. Because I have built good relations outside of our group, I can usually direct them to the right place.
I will be sorry to leave! In a short time, I’ve built a great network of people here I know and trust, and I’m dreading not only abandoning them, but rebuilding my network at a new organization, and making all the gaffes and faux pas that I need to make to learn my way around. I hope I will feel so connected and trusted so quickly in my next position.
In Six Myths About Informal Networks, Cross, Nohria and Parker write that “engineers and scientists were roughly five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues for information as to impersonal sources.” This immediately rang true in my mind (though of course I'm not an engineer nor scientist, just a geek) – in my workplace, the people I rely on for assistance are the ones I consider friends.
However, it also occurred to me that the people I like and consider friends in my workplace are largely people who I feel are my equals in terms of dedication to our mission and work. Those co coworkers I don't consider friends or at least friendly, I go to with problems as a last resort, and they have become coworkers of last resort in my mind because of their general unwillingness to be helpful and sometimes, unfortunately, due to their lack of knowledge. I am often, as predicted in the article, closer with people similar to me in age, though oddly not in gender – I think that’s just a function of there not being many women working in IT from which to pick.
I run a service desk in a medium sized IT department: we are the customer facing side of the organization, and when there are problems with systems, infrastructure or applications; our customers call my staff and me to let us know they are having problems. My staff and I have the responsibility to identify and then notify the person in charge of the problematic system. Because of the complexity of our systems, the initial diagnosis is often tricky. With some programmers and administrators quick to say it’s not my problem, we sometimes have to provide proof of the cause, or cajole them into reviewing logs on their systems before they investigate possible problems.
In The People Who Make Organizations Go – or Stop, Cross and Prusak discuss how informal networks can help a company function, and a few roles (central connector, information broker and boundary spanner). They present these networks as a new way of operating – I’m not sure they’re right about them being new, as the cliché “It’s not what you know but who you know” probably wouldn’t be the chestnut it is, if it were just us Gen Xers and Millennials that started forming and using informal networks in the workplace.
In my workplace, we have some substantial internal boundaries, due to various past events, leadership differences and restructuring. Across those boundaries, wariness and mistrust is more common than collaboration. Some of my colleagues who have worked for the organization twice as long as I have don’t know the names, let alone roles and skills, of people on the other side of those boundaries.
I’m not sure if I’m a central connector or an information broker – I lean towards the former, but arguments could be made either way – but it’s a part of my work that I really enjoy. I think I’m effective at it partly because of my nature as an extrovert and partly because management largely supports me in what I do. A year ago, a newly hired executive started telling anyone in our IT group “we all work for the service desk,” predictably winning my support!
However, regardless of how you label how I do my job, when I approach programmers and administrators, more than a few will good naturedly say “Uh oh, here comes the service desk,” essentially inviting me to interrupt whatever they are doing to let them know about a problem with one of their systems. More often than not, I’m just stopping by to gather information or say hello, but for those who get what I do and respect my connection with our customers, it makes my work easier and more pleasant.
These days, coworkers come to me with a wide range of requests, knowing that while I don’t really run any particular system nor am I a programmer, I do usually have a good idea of who can answer their question or fix their problem. I’ve noticed that lately, my coworkers have even started coming to me with questions about things outside our IT department, such as HR and other organizational policy. Because I have built good relations outside of our group, I can usually direct them to the right place.
I will be sorry to leave! In a short time, I’ve built a great network of people here I know and trust, and I’m dreading not only abandoning them, but rebuilding my network at a new organization, and making all the gaffes and faux pas that I need to make to learn my way around. I hope I will feel so connected and trusted so quickly in my next position.
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