Technology for Career Management

I am so excited to introduce you to Scot Herrick my guest here at Tough Questions? Great Answers! today. Scot is my first guest writer here and I am excited to share his excellent writing and even more his tremendous breadth of knowledge. He writes multiple blogs, Cube Rules, Ten Keyboards and K9JY Ham Radio. Take a minute and read his submission on our topic of Technology this month. Whether you are a cubicle warrior or you are in the market looking for a job, Scot’s recommendations will assist you in managing your career.

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Technology for Career Management
By Scot Herrick

When you left your last company, how many people stayed in touch with you?
If you are like me, not many. After leaving an employer after eighteen years — an employer where one of my managers asked if I knew everyone at a 1,000 person multi-state meeting — only one person has kept in touch with me. Only one.

That’s tragic, especially since I should have figured out a way to keep in touch with many of my former co-workers and networked my way to another job after my next gig resulted in a layoff.

Unfortunately, and unlike today, there were no tools to help stay connected. There was no technology to help figure out all those contacts, manage their comings and goings, and having a consistent way of reminding myself to keep in contact with people. But today, there are quite a few tools out there to help with your networking.

LinkedIn made quite a splash with working professionals. The service is free to sign up and allows one the ability to “link” to others that have also signed up for LinkedIn. For a good overview of what you can do with a LinkedIn profile, check out Guy Kawasaki’s article on Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn.

While I have a profile on LinkedIn and have contacts, I personally haven’t found the service to be that useful. There are some reasons:

1. You can only connect with people already signed up on LinkedIn. That limits me to 10-million people when there are 40-million knowledge workers in “Corporate Earth.” This also excludes people who could be significant contacts for you today, but are not part of the service.

2. You can’t “manage” contacts. You can’t put in the strength of a relationship, reminders to contact the person, or keep things to have in a database about the person private.

3. Consequently, what you can control is your own profile and searching LinkedIn for others to connect to. The ability to leverage the network is tough, though LinkedIn is constantly adding new things to the site.

The real objective of a technology tool is to have something that helps manage everything about a career — contacts, relationships, job searches, interviews, building great answers to tough questions(!) and enabling a place to build tasks for your “personal brand.” In short, we need a tool for career management. Fortunately, there is one: JibberJobber.com.

Born just over a year ago, the tool was built from the ground up with one objective in mind: give all of us the tools necessary to manage our careers. Think of it as a hub, giving you the tools to manage all aspects of your career (except delivery…which is up to you, of course). JibberJobber even has an interface to import your contacts from LinkedIn because LinkedIn is just one small aspect of your total career management. I also use JibberJobber, but have found it to be much more comprehensive than simpler contact linking programs.

A tool such as JibberJobber.com overcomes the career management limitations of a contact linking tool:

1. You can build action items for today relating to your job search, your personal brand, or follow-up to contact people in your network.
2. You can target companies where you want to work.
3. You can use tools to prepare yourself for interviews — getting that elevator speech with your value proposition down cold. Preparing great answers to tough questions.
4. You can track jobs you have applied for and have follow-up items for each.
5. You can, of course, enter in your contacts and personal information about them.
6. You can even enter in who contacts were referred from so that you can have reports that show you “degrees of separation” of the contacts in your world.
7. And the information is private and no one else has to join JibberJobber just to be part of your network.

Regardless of your tool choices for career management — and a case can be made for any different tool — the importance of managing our network is more critical than ever. Corporations relentlessly downsize, outsource and reorganize. The people that we work with are constantly moving to other positions in other companies, states and countries.

Managing these relationships to stay connected is critical for our career management.