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| Photograph by Ron Henggeler (http://www.ronhenggeler.com/) |
Career oriented professionals understand how to set and achieve business accomplishment via strategy and long-term commitment to achieving that goal. The same tenacity and flexibility used to achieve a business solution should be applied to developing and achieving your desired career goals and ambitions. Conquering interim steps and staying focused on a career path helps to build self-esteem, affirms your ability to achieve short-term goals, and strengths your resolve to achieve the long-term goals you expect of yourself. Being focused and knowing what you want to achieve help you to deal with rejection as well as help you to decide if an employment offer is really ideal for you.
An organization creates a business strategy in order to leverage company capabilities, talent and resources in ways that result in leverage over competitors and creative ways of doing business. This competitive advantage depends on the company’s management being able to attract and retain the talent necessary to achieve the goals of the business strategy. How the company is perceived in the marketplace can determine if your company attract, acquire and retain the necessary talent or whether that talent goes to a competitor (Phillips & Gully, 2009)
Career focused individuals should have career ambitions that are more than just an objective written at the top of a resume. A resume documents your past career history. The evolution of the resume is your social network profile URL. Your social network profile should be much more than just a copy-and-paste of your resume along with a few nicely worded recommendations from past employers, peers, and coworkers. Many organizations are limiting employees in their abilities to provide recommendations or a reference (whether written or verbal) for current or past employees or consultants, so now is the time to get as many relevant recommendations and reference postings you can. We might find employees working for some major corporations chasing after senior level consultants and freelance professionals, in order to get recommendation postings on their LinkedIn profile.
Posting a history of attendance of local MeetUP or LinkedIn networking events demonstrates your commitment to a particular technology, industry standard, or particular skill or talent. Posting a list of books you’ve read or are currently reading in your LinkedIn profile shows prospective employers you’re intelligent and an active reader of relevant and topical reference material. You can post writing examples, portfolio, PowerPoint presentations, technical documentation, and whitepapers via Box.net. Social network profiles can be connected to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Wordpress – providing prospective employers a venue to view your social profile, contribution to online communities, blogging, social branding, and how you choose to portray yourself to the world via social networks and social media.
Employment websites like DICE and JobFox are building website-based social networks providing tools to provide a good overview of candidates experience and capabilities. JobFox’s “Interactive View” provides candidates with a marketing URL used to give prospective employers a more complete picture of who the candidate is and what that person has to offer an employer. JobFox feels suggests candidates:
• Let employers know who you know by sharing a subset of your social network connections, highlighting your industry connections and showing how you are linked to customers, vendors and business partners
• Impress employers with real-world examples of what you've done by including samples of your work (files or other websites) and linking them to the other information in your Interactive View
• Give employers a more complete picture of who you really are by adding answers to the Q&A section of your About Me page
View and an example of a JobFox “About Me” page at: http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahSmith
Social networks should be more than just an online resume. A social media profile demonstrates (over time) your commitment to your career goals and ambitions as well as your success with past career achievements. Do not let your profile seem like your career was something that just happened. Make sure your profile demonstrates your ability to establish career goals in 2011 – so that it can later on document your ability to achieve those career goals and ambitions three-to-five (3-5) years down the road.
Reference:
Harris, P., JobFox Customer Service Email Broadcast. View and an example of a JobFox “About Me” page at: http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahSmith
Phillips, J.M. and Gully, S.M., Staffing to Support Business Strategy (2009), Summary viewed via Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Publications Website: http://www.shrm.org/Publications/Books/Pages/StaffingBusinessStrategy.aspx
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