Networking in 7 simple steps

The thought of networking can be scary and you may not know where to start. The good news is that networking does not mean calling an endless list of people you don't know, but it does take effort.  This article breaks it down into 7 steps that you can take right now:

http://workbloom.com/articles/networking/networking-for-college-students-and-recent-graduates.aspx

Manage Your Online Brand

By now we all know that our internet activity is not private; in fact, most of it is just a quick Google search away. Add to that the increased use of the internet for connecting with others on a professional level and there is an obvious need to be more aware of your online brand.

MyWebCareer.com is a free service that helps you to discover, evaluate, and manage online data that may help your career prospects.  They use sophisticated link analysis, visualization, and semantics technologies to enable you to evaluate and explore data that may relate to you making it easy to assess your Professional Online Brand and stay on top of any changes to it.

In addition to these services, they also have an informative blog related to making the most of your online presence.  Check it out today!

Proactive Summer

The summer is such a great time of year! There's festivals, family gathering, vacations, and hopefully, plenty of time for some well deserved R&R (rest and relaxation).  The worse thing about the summer, in my opinion, is that it simply goes by way too fast.  Recently glancing at my calendar, I've realized that the Fall 2012 school year is quickly approaching. Not something you want to necessarily think about right now but being proactive has it's benefits; trust me on this one.

The 2012 academic year brings with it career fairs, employer visits, and of course on-campus and off-campus interviews.  The Fall Career Fair and the Post-Grad Service Fair are both scheduled to take place in September.  There are already approximately 24 employers signed-up for Fall on-campus interviews!  Corporations and agencies are setting their calendars to recruit on Marquette's campus for the best and brightest just weeks after the beginning of the school year.  In preparation for the Fall Career Fair, Post-Grad Service Fair, and internship and full-time position interviews, professional documents need to be in tip-top shape.  The saying is that your résumé gets you the interview and the interview potentially gets you the job.  Don't wait until mere days before the fair to get your documents together, put your best foot forward - and decrease your stress level - by starting now.

There's a few avenues to choose from when working on your professional documents.  One, do it yourself; you may not need additional assistance, you just need to buckle down and get it done.  Two, explore our Online Library for awesome resources available to you 24/7.  Three, and always most recommended, set up an appointment with a career counselor to go over your professional documents.  Even if you've completed options one and two, option three is available to students and alumni five days a week from 8am until 5pm :-)

Your Resume: Be You, Not Someone Else

It seems like such an easy thing to do; just list out what you’ve done in your career thus far on some paper, and abracadabra, you have yourself a resume!  But we all know it is not that simple.  Building your resume can be a time consuming process, and one where every single word matters.  So, logically, you want to make sure that you have the best possible words, right?

Well, not necessarily, because those best possible words might not always describe your actual experience.  Now, I know that you hear to build up your resume and spin things to accentuate what you can bring to the table.  All that is true, but you still have to have actually done what you claim!  Resume fraud is one of the easiest ways to get yourself removed from consideration for a position, or even get fired if you’ve already landed the job.  It’s not just college students that are prone to this either.

Ever heard of Scott Thompson?  No?  You’re probably not alone.  Well, he was the President of PayPal until earlier this year, when he left to become CEO at Yahoo.  Pretty impressive if you ask me.  His main problem though was that his resume had been falsified.  It wasn’t even anything egregious, just adding a degree he didn’t have.  Yet within a week of this being unearthed, he was gone from Yahoo despite all his success in the business world. 

Let’s think about this.  If a company like Yahoo is willing to move along from the person they selected as CEO over a falsified resume, do you think you’re going to stand much of a chance when (because it is when, not if) your employer finds out that you lied?  My money is on NO!  Be yourself, whether on paper, in person, over the phone, or any other media.  That’s the truest way to success.  Let your real skills shine through rather than taking the temptation to make something a little better than it really should be.

How to Showcase Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn: 8 Tips

Our favorite LinkedIn expert, Lindsey Pollak, just posted 8 tips on how to show off your personal brand on LinkedIn. You may be thinking...why should I care? LinkedIn is a great resource for anyone who is looking for an internship or job. If you are looking for a position, you should be using LinkedIn to network (connect with people you know, would like to know and join professoinal groups). Below is an excerpt from Lindsey's blog entry. For more information on how to use LinkedIn for your search, check out our online library

Showcase Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn: 8 Tips

Like professional athletes, we now live in a time of career free agency, where we must regularly prove our unique value in a competitive and frequently changing marketplace. This means that it’s no longer enough to have a good reputation in one’s current position. We need to think about how we’re perceived in the broader marketplace by potential future employers. Even if you intend to stay in your current job forever, clarifying your unique value is something you need to attend to. Clients, conference planners, awards committees and other professionals may be checking you out — primarily online — and you want to make sure that they find the best representation of you. We’re talking about personal branding, a key element of success in the Internet Age. A term first coined by Tom Peters in 1997, personal branding includes your professional reputation, online image and personal characteristics such as your work style, community engagement and worldview. It incorporates the particular skills, talents and areas of expertise you’ve cultivated. When I host workshops on personal branding, I ask participants the following questions to help determine the elements of their personal brands:

• How would your colleagues describe your strengths?

• On what issues are you the go-to person in your organization?

• What do you know more about (web design, compensation plans, marketing to baby boomers) than most people? Once you’ve defined your personal brand, it’s time to showcase it to recruiters, bosses, customers and others who may be assessing you. Here’s how LinkedIn can help:

1. Be authentic. The best personal brands are genuine and honest both in person and online. It can be tricky to showcase your personality on the web (you might love puns, but those don’t go over well on a professional profile), but it’s possible with a bit of effort. For instance, if your personal brand includes a balance between your detailed accounting skills and your friendly personality, your LinkedIn profile can include both your technical credentials and the fact that you belong to several networking groups. You can also ask former and current colleagues to write LinkedIn recommendations highlighting this combination.

Read the rest of this post on the LinkedIn Blog

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