A few days ago Zoli Erdos asked tongue-in-cheek if there was a Tech Talent Shortage in Silicon Valley. He had run into a job-seeker with a hugely impressive resume who was having trouble finding a job.
Then he answered his own question in the best way one possibly can nowadays: he linked to one of his earlier blog posts.
And his point - note well - was that you don’t use a resume anymore to find a job. Your blog does all the promotion for you, and jobs come to you as a collateral feature of connections occurring. See his post, Proof Positive: The Blog is the New Resume.
Getting ahead has always been about networking, as they say, that old thing of who you know rather than what you know. The Web has built itself on connections, and today’s Web 2.0 world of social networking is simply part of the same continuum: it’s just that the tools got really simple. It used to be scientists making agreements, then it was webmasters, now it’s anybody who wants to open an account in a few places.
The resume, as Zoli Erdos says, is still a factor in employment, but the real story of you - who you dependably are - has probably been told much more authentically in your daily blog posts than in that carefully polished resume. Zoli made this point in an even earlier post where he championed the blog as the perfect mechanism for building the famous Brand Called You, from the work of Tom Peters.
Tom Peters wrote about this ten years ago in 1997. In an article in Fast Company he claimed that in the new Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Peters - himself forever now branded with excellence - called it being the CEO of Me Inc. And he pointed out that the nature of the career was changing.
No more vertical. No more ladder. That’s not the way careers work anymore. Linearity is out. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. It’s full of moves that go sideways, forward, slide on the diagonal, even go backward when that makes sense. (It often does.) A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand. - The Brand Called You
This seems pretty prescient now doesn’t it?
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }