Website Review: Google Profiles

Are you ready for this?  Google, of all companies, is now jumping into the on-line networking game and has launched a new feature called Google Profiles where people can create a free page that talks all about themselves, their interests, where they grew up, etc.

I’m not sure whether this will turn out to be another great Google innovation we’ll all wonder how we lived without, or whether it’s a sign of the pending apocolypse, instead, but if this thing catches on it could be BIG.  It not only will go directly up against sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that allow people to create an easy link to a bunch of information about themselves, for job hunting and other purposes, but it will also ensure that all participating professionals have their personal data captured in digital form for all eternity.  Sure, creating a profile is totally optional and there are a number of privacy settings one can deploy, but the bottom line is that almost nobody is going to be able to “hide” anymore if the world starts revolving around these types of tools and technologies.

Don’t get me wrong, however.  Google did a nice job in executing this new application and overall it’s very approachable and user-friendly.  Admittedly, I don’t quite get the point of asking people to describe their “superpower” or list “the one thing they can’t find via Google” on their profile, but I guess they’re trying to add some fun and whimsy into the site, which isn’t a terribly bad thing.

As for whether this new tool will take off?  Bet on it.  As much as Facebook and its social networking brethen have captured the imagination of millions of people around the globe, this number is dwarfed by the billions of people who use Google — and I also think the Google brand has become incredibly strong, to the point where many people will start using this new Profile site simply because it comes with the G-word attached.

So if you’re paranoid about identity theft or worried about being tracked down by somebody you jilted or borrowed money from, years ago, creating a Google Profile may not be the right move for you.  But for the rest of us, jumping on the bandwagon right away might not be a bad idea.  Not only will doing so generate a little extra “PR” for ourselves, but you’ll also get the chance to grab a customized profile address with your name in it, while one is still available!

Website Review: TradeVibes.com

Interested in working for an Internet startup?  Want to know as much as you can about it before taking the plunge?  If so, TradeVibes is the latest in the wave of “full transparency” websites that seek to pull together a rich mix of both objective and subjective data to help job seekers (and others) research various organizations.

For example, on the objective data front, you can use TradeVibes’ advanced search screen to pull up detailed information on over 285 startup companies in Washington State.  The data available includes standard stuff like web address, location, phone numbers, and such, but also some pretty impressive info in terms of each company’s executive team, board of directors, funding status (e.g. Series A, Series B, Series C…) and the like.  I’ve never before seen this information compiled all in one place on so many companies, so the site gets a huge thumbs-up from me for this reason alone!

TradeVibes doesn’t stop there, however.  As you click on each company listing, you can discover whether the majority of site visitors are “bullish” or “bearish” regarding the organization’s future.  While such rating systems are far from an exact science, this information is still extremely useful if one is considering rolling the dice with a startup firm, especially since you can read many further details in the ongoing discussion threads that are tracked regarding each company.

So long story short, if you’re a job hunter or career professional interested in working within the Internet/Web sector, this site is definitely one to watch!  They’ve already gathered an impressive array of data on a staggering amount of start-up firms, so as soon as this site really catches on, the “subjective” aspect is likely going to get more and more valuable, over time.  Check it out…

Website Review: Jobvent.com

Call me crazy, but when I first came across this site and started browsing through it, I swear I heard a deep announcer’s voice in the background saying: “In the world of cyberspace, noone can hide…”

Jobvent.com is one of the growing number of websites (another popular one is Glassdoor.com) designed to “level the playing field” and give job candidates the chance to read about companies, and their cultures, before deciding to work for them.  It allows people to anonymously post comments regarding their experience working for any given company, in addition to rating their current or past employers in various areas such as pay, respect, work/life balance, career growth potential, and co-worker competence.  Are these ratings scientifically valid?  Obviously not.  Are they likely to be more negative than positive?  No question about it, given that most people visit these types of sites to complain, not to throw compliments around and pat companies on the back.  And yet, Jobvent’s data shouldn’t be taken lightly, since they appear to do a good job at removing any company reviews that appear blindly hateful or where the person submitting the review does not justify their ratings in any way.

At present, Jobvent appears to have at least several hundred reviews related to employers in the Puget Sound area, and one of the things I like about this site, compared to others, is that you can easily sort the reviews by the city and state where each company is located.  Additionally, it’s nice that all of the content of the site is easy to access and free of charge.  You don’t have to submit any reviews yourself in order to read what others have to say, unlike Glassdoor.com, where you can only access a limited amount of content as a casual visitor. This makes it easy to use the tool as a routine part of your pre-interview or pre-negotiation research, where it can be extremely valuable in avoiding hidden land mines and making sure that you ask all the right due diligence questions before accepting an offer.

As for the overall role of these types of sites in today’s marketplace?  Barring some cataclysmic change, they’re here to stay, and job seekers should embrace them as one more way to investigate an employer before deciding to sign on the bottom line.  Used properly, and taken with a grain of salt, they can help people avoid organizations that might not be doing business on the up-and-up or where a particular corporate culture might not be an appropriate fit.  It also seems only fair that candidates should have access to these kinds of tools, too, given how much information companies are able to demand about the background of a potential employee before hiring them.

To Twitter or Not To Twitter?

Now HERE’S a post that might stir up some lively debate…

When it comes to social networking websites and their role in job hunting, I’ll confess, I’ve pretty much “only got eyes” for LinkedIn at this point — but have been seeing increased chatter out there about the importance of using other networking sites to generate connections, especially Twitter.  For those who may not know much about Twitter, it basically involves exchanging brief text messages throughout the day with a number of fellow users on the system who you decide to “follow” on a regular basis.  For those unfamiliar with the tool, click here and you can watch a short little video that explains how the site works and some of its unique capabilities.

But back to the key question I want to ask: “Does it make sense for the average job hunter to invest the time to join, learn, and start using Twitter, in addition to all of the other critical job hunting activities and resources people need to be concentrating on?”

Now before you rush to respond, let me issue a big disclaimer.  Clearly, anybody whose professional career is directly related to the new media field (e.g. marketing executives, web programmers, recruiters, etc.) will need to pay careful attention to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the other similar technologies out there.  These sites have become a major part of the Internet landscape and will only be growing in importance in the coming years as a way for companies to communicate with their customers, recruit new employees, and so forth.  My specific question, however, is whether Twitter has now reached the point that it should be viewed as a mainstream job hunting tool, able to generate good networking and job hunting results for a broad range of professionals in transition.  Should a Manufacturing CFO sign up for Twitter, in other words?  How about a copier salesperson?  Or a property manager?  Or an admin assistant?  Is this a technology that’s still on the bleeding edge or something that has become truly meaningful to the masses?

Based on my own outside observations, I don’t think we’re quite there yet.  While the site is definitely attracting a huge following (over 1 million users, reportedly) and is the current “darling” of the social networking scene, I’m still not hearing any stories of consistent, concrete breakthroughs that the site’s users are enjoying in their job search efforts.  This is in stark contrast to LinkedIn.com, where I could cite hundreds of examples of people using the tool to lasso a job, generate useful referrals, identify appropriate target companies, and the like.  And while Twitter strikes me as a technology people are flocking to because it’s fun, addictive, and inarguably “cool” in many respects, I’m still not convinced of its raw productivity in a job hunting context.  Have you had a different experience?  If so, please let me know, since I’m completely open to being convinced to the contrary!

As for the basic premise of Twitter and the notion that anybody in their right mind would be interested in keeping track of what other people are doing at all hours of the day, I’ll confess that this concept first struck me as utterly, absolutely ridiculous.  Slowly but surely, however, I’m starting to be won over.  For example, I’ve caught myself many times scanning through the “status reports” section on the Home page of LinkedIn, where people in your network are able to publish short notes related to what they’re working on.  In a sense, these notes are something of a “Twitter lite” and I’ve certainly been intrigued to see what kinds of jobs people are doing, what books they’re reading, what events they’re attending, and the the like.  So who knows?  If I’m seeing value in this basic simulation of the Twitter experience, perhaps I’d be blown away by the real thing, if I gave it a fighting chance.

Twitter veterans out there, your thoughts?

Website Review: UpMo.com

Remember that old Monty Python line, “…and now for something completely different”?

When it comes to the world of career-related websites, the new UpMo website fits this description like a glove, as it heads well off the beaten path to chart some dimensions of career management that I personally have never seen a company or on-line service attempt to tackle before.  The underlying concept (UpMo is short for “upward mobility”) is based on the study of hundreds of successful real-life executives and a mapping of the specific habits, steps, and techniques that these individuals have followed over the years to get where they are today.  Aspiring professionals can then visit the UpMo site and study these action plans — as well as set up an account (subscription required) that will help them follow along in these peoples’ footsteps, in the years to come, and have a better chance of making “all the right moves” in their own career progression.

It’s quite an ambitious concept and the site is still in beta form, so not every feature is fully fleshed out yet, but if nothing else, I’d encourage all of my clients and readers to invest 5-10 minutes and go through the “Network Readiness Evaluator” test you’ll find on UpMo’s main page.  This assessment asks a series of questions about your networking habits and interpersonal connection style to find out whether you’re managing your social capital in the most effective, optimized way.  It then provides you with a detailed report that identifies the specific type of networker you are (compared to the profiling research they’ve conducted) out of what appear to be four main possibilities — followed by some excellent suggestions on how you might be able to improve your networking success, going forward.

As for me, personally, my Evaluation indicates that I am a “Plan Strategically” networker (which makes sense) and reveals that I have a 65.1 “Networking Readiness” score out of 100 possible points.  Now as somebody who thinks he does a pretty good job at staying connected with folks, on average, I suppose I could quibble a bit with the methodology they use to compute this score — but honestly, I’m so highly impressed by the depth of what UpMo is attempting to accomplish, and the usefulness and practicality of the information they’ve pulled together, that I’m not about to argue!

So if you’ve got a few moments to spare on your next coffee break, give UpMo a look, and take their networking assessment to see what it reveals about your own relationship management style.  I think you’ll get a kick out of it.  And while there are thousands of career websites out there that flame out or don’t ever amount to anything, I have a hunch that UpMo is going to be around a while, and I look forward to bringing you further updates on them as their site evolves in the months to come.

Last but not least, I salute their management team (are you guys reading this?) for allowing individuals to visit the site and use some of their tools without forcing the visitor to jump through a bunch of hoops, provide their e-mail address, or sign up for some gimmicky free account that is guaranteed to make them a spam magnet for the company’s advertisements down the road.  Too many sites practice this kind of entrapment — and I’m glad that UpMo, unlike other services, chose to take the high road…

LinkedIn Usage: The Top 10 Mistakes!

Having just taught my latest Lassoing LinkedIn webinar last night, to help people learn the ropes of the powerful LinkedIn.com networking website, it struck me that it might be useful to compile a list of the “top 10 mistakes” that I’ve witnessed being made by novice users of the system.  Granted, the observations below are highly subjective, but my hope is that they’ll help some of you out there get even more mileage out of your LinkedIn.com experience!

1.  Not using it — or lumping it in with other social networking sites

Sorry, we’re going to start with the basics — including my passionate belief that the people out there who still haven’t “joined the revolution” in terms of using social networking sites, like LinkedIn, are at great risk of falling behind the technology curve and damaging their ongoing employment marketability.  These technologies may have snuck up on us in recent years, but they’re soon going to become as familiar a part of the business landscape as e-mail and cell phones.  And while this trend applies much more to white-collar professions that other types of fields, at the moment, this could quickly change down the road.  Also, for those who think all social networking websites (e.g. Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plaxo.com, etc.) are created equal, or of equal value in a business or job hunting context, I’d beg to differ.  Sites like Facebook might have attracted over 100 million people of all ages who are interested in sharing photos, chatting with their friends, and the like, but LinkedIn is populated by over 30 million users — most of whom are in management, executive, and professional roles and looking to use the tool to forge meaningful, profitable business relationships.  There’s a WORLD of difference.

2. Paying for a membership when it’s not necessary

Unless you’re a bonafide “power user” who is going to be using LinkedIn every day, and sending out dozens of introductions each week, it’s unlikely you’ll need to sign up for a paid LinkedIn membership.  Don’t get me wrong — LinkedIn puts out a great product and I don’t begrudge them a single dollar they choose to charge people, but in reality, most users (job seekers included) won’t ever need to purchase more “bandwidth” on the system than they’re eligible to receive as a free user.  The main categories of people who would gain value from a paid subscription include sales professionals, recruiters, people in the human resources field, and other people whose jobs typically involve extensive daily networking.

3.  Failure to use the “Get Introduced” feature

One of the amazing things I’ve discovered, in teaching my Lassoing LinkedIn classes over the past few years, is that while millions of people have joined the LinkedIn system, a relatively small percentage of folks have actually used its single most important feature — which is to search for people relevant to their business/career goals, then reach out to these folks using the “Get Introduced” functionality of the system.  Hands down, this is the killer application of LinkedIn and the feature that trumps every other aspect of the tool, combined.  So if you haven’t been using the People page of the site to make these kinds of connections, you’re really missing the boat!

4.  Lack of creativity in People searching

As a follow-up to item #3, above, I’d mention that even those people who ARE regularly using the People page of the site to search for contacts may not be using it to full effect.  While the mechanics of the search process are fairly straightforward, many people would benefit from thinking more outside-the-box in terms of how best to pull up a list of useful individuals — or how to separate these individuals from the thousands of other profiles that might turn up in a simple, kneejerk search effort.  For example, if a job hunter was looking for a position as a paralegal, they could certainly just search using the words “legal” or “law firm” in the Keywords field of LinkedIn’s People page.  Such a search would be almost worthless, however, since there are way too many different contexts in which those words could come up in a member’s profile.  A much more targeted and effective search would be to search the Title field (set to Current only) for the phrase Counsel OR Attorney OR Lawyer.  Or to search the same field using Paralegal, simply to identify the companies in town that had a proven track record of hiring paralegals.  Or to search for the Title: Partner OR Director OR Attorney OR Counsel combined with checking the “Law Practice” box in the Industry field.  In most cases, there are several different searches you could run that would produce great results, but you have to first familiarize yourself with all the search field options — and then apply a strong dose of creative thinking!

5.  Lack of Profile optimization

Upon joining LinkedIn for the first time, most people are in such a rush to whip through the sign-up screens that they fail to flesh out their Profile to a sufficient degree.  Having an incomplete Profile, however, can result in many missed opportunities, since tons of employers and recruiters use LinkedIn these days to find talent for hire — and if you’ve got a wimpy Profile, you’re not going to show up!  So at the very least, you’ll want to put your full work history and education into your Profile, and I’d also recommend you create a powerful Summary statement and then pack your Specialties section with at least 10-15 of the most relevant buzzwords in your field.  For example, if you’re a Sales Manager and don’t have phrases like sales pipeline, sales funnel, prospecting, negotiation, sales presentations, and lead qualification in your Profile, you could easily get missed by a recruiter searching for those specific skill sets.

6.  Usage of the default LinkedIn scripts & templates

Okay, while this may not technically be the biggest mistake one can make on LinkedIn, it’s definitely my biggest personal pet peeve!  Whenever you initiate contact with somebody on LinkedIn, such as inviting them to connect with you, requesting an introduction, sending an InMail, and the like, the system pops up an automatic, generic note that you can send along by default.  The problem with using these built-in scripts is that 1) they’re vague, boring, and painfully overused; and 2) they defeat the fundamental purpose of the system, which is to build trust with your key relationships.  In other words, if you come across an old friend on the site and decide to reestablish contact with them, after many years, I think they deserve something more heartfelt than “I’d like to invite you to join my personal network on LinkedIn.”  So take the extra 30 seconds, delete the default note, and write a more customized message that says something meaningful.  It’s basically the equivalent of how you feel when you receive a birthday card with just the cheesy Hallmark slogan inside, versus a card that includes a handwritten personal note…

7. Inviting people you don’t know to connect

No matter how many times LinkedIn warns against this, or I emphasize it to the folks I encounter, there is still the perception among many people that the goal of LinkedIn, and similar sites, is to build as many connections as possible with other people on the system.  Nothing could be further than the truth.  Remember, the only thing that separates these sites from simply picking up the phone book, and connecting with other people at random, is that they’re built (at least ideally) on a web of friendships and the deep chains of trust between individuals.  So if the “arms race” continues and people continue to connect with tons of other people, willy-nilly, my prediction is that people will start to abandon LinkedIn in favor of other sites where the networking pool is less diluted.  We’re not there yet, thankfully, but I’d urge people to do their part by only connecting with those people they’ve personally met — and with whom they have a personal relationship and a healthy level of conditional trust.

8. Requesting endorsements from the wrong people

Endorsements are great.  Endorsements feel good.  Endorsements add those cute little “thumbs up!” icons next to your LinkedIn profile.  When requesting endorsements from other folks in the system, however, make sure the person you’re asking is truly in a position to say something meaningful about your skill sets, experience, or character.  It’s considered bad form to ask for an endorsement from someone, say, that you met just last week at a networking event or who is a friend that hasn’t really had the chance to work with you professionally.  So be somewhat judicious when making these requests — and make sure to give back and write them for other people, too, whenever appropriate!

9.  Confusing 2nd Degree contacts with 3rd Degree ones

While this is an innocent mistake, to be sure, I’ve noticed that many novice users of LinkedIn don’t pay close enough attention to the “degree” of the contact they’re targeting when they request an introduction to somebody — or perhaps they don’t fully understand the “degrees of separation” concept that underlies the system in the first place.  This problem materializes most often when somebody decides to try to make contact with another LinkedIn member who shows up as a 3rd Degree contact (i.e. the friend of a friend of a friend) in their network.  So let’s say they know me, and I know Bob, and Bob knows Judy — and Judy’s the person they’re hoping to reach.  When they send their introduction request out to me, however, they’ll often say something like “Matt, would you introduce me to your friend Judy?” without realizing that I don’t actually KNOW Judy, myself.  She’s the friend of my friend.  Not a big deal, to be sure, but as their note gets routed along the chain it makes them look a little silly — or exposes them as a total LinkedIn greenhorn, at the very least!

10.  Setting up more than one Profile

Unfortunately, many LinkedIn members have become “born again” users of the system without even realizing it.  It’s not uncommon for people to create an account on the system, connect with a bunch of friends, and later discover that they actually had already created another profile on the site years ago — and forgotten about it!  As a result, they end up having two sets of books on the system, so to speak, with some of their contacts attached to one profile and a bunch of other contacts connected to the other.  Their network not only becomes highly confused by this duplication, but a ton of inefficiency ends up being created as valuable Profile updates, new connections, and other changes would need to be made twice.  Trust me, you don’t want to be in this situation, and there’s no easy way (no way at all, actually) for a person to merge two or more profiles together.  So if you’ve discovered that you’ve got more than one profile on the system, immediately address the problem by searching the LinkedIn help menu for “merging accounts” and follow the instructions provided.  The sooner you nip this problem in the bud, the better!

So there you have it.  You’ve now got my “top 10″ list in terms of the most common mistakes I’ve seen people make on LinkedIn — and since I’m on a roll, here’s one bonus (and hopefully self-explanatory) mistake I’ll throw in for good measure…

11.  Adorning your profile with that fuzzy/embarrasing/unflattering photo your brother/friend/self-timer took of you lounging on the sofa/hugging your pet/partying down in Cabo…

Why, oh why, do people keep doing this?

Scuttlebutt on TheLadders.com

Of the 40,000+ employment websites that now exist, few of them attract as much attention or generate as much controversy as TheLadders.com.  For a subscription fee of $30 per month, this site claims to provide job hunters with a steady stream of job openings at the $100,000K level and above.  Here’s a direct quote from their website, in fact, summing up their unique value proposition:

“TheLadders.com brings $100k+ job seekers real, open executive-level jobs across the US and around the world. Our targeted sites list more than 35,000 new $100k+ jobs each month across every industry, in companies of all types and sizes. We only list jobs that pay more than $100,000/year, including many C-level, VP, Director and Manager jobs. If you’re in the market for a $100k+ job, you won’t find a better resource anywhere.”

Is this service worth the price tag?  That’s where the controversy kicks in.  Having asked my clients repeatedly over the years whether they felt they were getting value out of the service, for those who had subscribed to it, the answer heavily leans to the “no” end of the spectrum — although there were definitely a few folks who DID feel it was worth the money.  In addition, I personally don’t care for the company’s advertising strategy and the fact that they claim to have a “free” membership tier, but this tier does not allow people to actually APPLY to any jobs or see the application details.  It smells a little bait-and-switch from my perspective.  They also imply (or at least have in the past) that a subscription will provide people to access to many exclusive jobs not advertised anywhere else, which is a highly questionable claim, at best, although I noted that the lingo they now have on their website carefully tiptoes around saying this overtly — and positions them, instead, as a site that simply aggregates listings from other places to make things more convenient for the six-figure job hunter.  This is a very important distinction, since the average person may well be willing to pay $30 each month for a set of top-drawer job leads not available anywhere else, but I doubt many people would pay this same fee for the “convenience” of just having these leads collected in one place, when they could get similiar results from a free search on sites such as www.indeed.com and www.simplyhired.com.

At ANY rate, my intention here isn’t necessarily to bash TheLadders into oblivion, but simply to educate the novice job hunter about what they’re really buying when they sign up for this kind of service — since it’s easy to get sucked into the marketing hype.  And if you want a second opinion, I’d strongly encourage you to click here and read a recent article written by my favorite career author of all time, Nick Corcodilos of Ask the Headhunter.  He’s not nearly as shy as I am about sharing his opinions of TheLadders.com.  It’s well worth a few minutes of your time…

Website Review: CardBrowser.com

The business world is a moving target.  Companies come, companies go, and the #1 mission of savvy job hunters should be to scan the horizon for emerging organizations and relevant individuals — then contact these entities, proactively, to introduce themselves and try to uncover some hidden hiring needs.  Only focusing on the large well-known companies around town is typically a losing strategy, as is waiting for a published job advertisement to appear before initiating dialogue with a given employer.

This being said, while I’ve featured many outstanding company research tools over the years in my blog/newsletter, every now and then a new resource pops up that may not quite match the caliber of the other sites I most frequently recommend, but offers an intriguing new twist that might be a useful addition to one’s overall arsenal of research sources.  Cardbrowser.com is one such resource.  This enterprising little site intertwines the worlds of old-fashioned “networking by business cards” and modern web search technology by serving as an on-line repository for thousands of business cards that have been collected at professional, industry, and trade conferences around the globe.

The concept is simple.  The creators of the website have identified hundreds of business events and trade shows that tend to attract the “movers and shakers” in various niche industries, then they’ve amalgamated the business cards of all of the attendees at these functions into a single database that web users can search in various ways.  Currently, they’ve got over 150,000 cards in their system, representing conferences ranging from the ABA TechShow (focusing on Legal Software & Technology) to the Homeland Security Conference to the Wireless Dealers Expo.  Upon clicking on any given conference, the site user is shown a list of all the job titles and companies that CardBrowser has stored for that particular event, then can decide whether to pay for the full set of data (i.e. contact name, e-mail, phone number, website, etc.) or attempt to turn up some information on the company for free, on their own, through a Google or LinkedIn search.

My recommendation to any job hunters visiting the site is to first click on the “Guest Login” button, then scroll through the list of recent trade shows to see if any of them match your particular industry focus or target niche.  If you find one, I’d suggest you then click on the “State” column header to organize the companies alphabetically, by location, which will make it easy to see which companies are headquartered in your local area.  Alternatively, sales representatives and similar “mobile” professionals might instead ignore the location criteria and aggressively contact organizations located anywhere around the country to see if they need a Pacific Northwest territory representative.

At the end of the day, it’s definitely a neat concept, and I suspect the data (if one pays for it) is of a very high-quality, given that it is sourced directly from business cards.  And while I was initially on the fence about the site, a quick search of my own on the 2008 ASTD Conference (American Society of Training & Development) turned me on to a number of very interesting training and development organizations in Washington State I’ve never heard of — which sealed the deal and made me an instant convert!

Website Review: PayScale “GigZig” Application

Current career path getting you down? Feel like you’re stuck in a rut? If so, the popular salary-survey website Payscale.com has built a nifty little tool called “GigZig” that can help you ferret out the career shifts that similar professionals to yourself have made in recent years. As to whether this is a new tool the site offers, or something that’s been around a while, we suspect the latter scenario is more likely — and that many people (including ourselves) had simply not noticed this feature previously, since it’s not mentioned on the site’s home page and is more or less buried off to the side of PayScale’s remaining pages.

Regardless of the navigational difficulties in finding it, however, the GigZig tool provides a fascinating slice of data about the modern job search marketplace. Simply type in your current job title, or any title you wish to research, and the system will tell you the most common positions that people held five years ago — before landing the job title in question — as well as the titles that the people who USED to hold the target job title now hold, five years into the future. All of this data is based on the thousands of people who visit Payscale.com each year to research salary information, and as a result, the data strikes us as being much more “real world” in nature than the commonly-available info which is bandied about on academic and government websites.

So again, if you’re thinking about making some sort of career change, pay GigZig a visit and try searching on a variety of occupations relevant to your interests. If you’re a marketing specialist, you’ll see options come up such as graphic artist and event coordinator. And if you’re a technical writer, you might follow in the footsteps of your peers who have become instructional designers or business analysts. Are the career alternatives that come up breathtakingly surprising, in most cases? Not really, but then again, this is consistent with the fact that most people tend to stay roughly within the same occupational “cluster” for most of their career — for obvious reasons — and this information is still useful for validating your most viable options and for researching the salary increases/decreases that would be associated with each move. Give it a try — it’s addicting!

Website Review: Professional & Technical Diversity Network

Since 1997, the PTDN (Professional & Technical Diversity Network) has been a major force in promoting the hiring of experienced minority candidates throughout Washington State.  As a result of this commitment, the organization has attracted over 100 corporate members and developed a website offering a treasure-trove of useful resources for diversity candidates, especially experienced workers seeking to advance within the professional and technical fields.  Additionally, the PTDN group hosts an ongoing series of diversity-themed career events and job fairs throughout the Puget Sound area.

Beyond these obvious benefits, however, the PTDN website has one other useful feature that could potentially come in quite handy for both diversity and non-diversity candidates alike.  If you navigate to the “Employer Partners” and “Other PTDN Supporters” areas of the site, you’ll find an exhaustive list of local recruiters and human resource professionals affiliated with the PTDN group — including over 150 specific contact names and e-mail addresses you can use to connect with various public and private sector organizations around town.  Given the difficulty of acquiring these types of individual e-mail addresses through any other source, this list can be a goldmine for resourceful job hunters who take the time to cross-reference the company list against their desired career goals and target industries!