Careers are made every day. And as everybody knows, careers are often not made through good marks – they are made in lavatories, they are made by having the right connections at the right time. There are possibilities to increase your chances to get a good job, and Philipp will share them with you in this article.
Careers are made every day. And as everybody knows, careers are often not made through good marks – they are made in lavatories, they are made by having the right connections at the right time. I say, there are possibilities to increase your chances to get a good job, and I will share them with you in this article.
Real Life and Digital Life
Today, in a time of individualism, with the web – the opportunity to live a second life – you can pretend to be whatever you want to be. You could present yourself as a rock star, you can post and tweet like one and yes, you might be the next rock star of the web, just in your second life, not really you. Your career is only digital, deletable, fictive. But stop!
This is not true.
As we all know, social media has a big influence. We live in a time where real life and digital life are merging more and more into one structure. We organize our life with smartphones and synchronize all our data, our life, with our computer or even with the web. So why shouldn’t we try to push our career by making use of the web? The web is a big chance for companies to do marketing. So why not use it to market ourselves?
Of course we can’t expect to become a rock star when we are only tweeting or posting as one. To make things clear to you, I divide this small guide into three steps.
1. Situation Analysis
What are you doing at the moment? What have you done in the past? What skills do you have?
It is essential to clarify what you are able to do and what is missing to reach your goals. Showing transparently what you are able to do is important as well.
You should also do „ego-googling“. Search yourself on Google and take a look what kind of standing you have online. Are there bad entries or anything else that doesn’t emphasize your skills and doesn’t improve your reputation? Remove it.
2. Define your aim
What would you like to be? Are your current activities working towards achieving your goal?
It is very important to define your aim. The earlier you know which job you want to have, the better you can work on it. If you are not sure, you do not have to specialize yet. Try to keep it more general for the time being.
3. Begin to build your second life in a business way
- Create accounts on important platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and XING.
- Follow people of your business and hide people who are posting information you do not need. Add them as friends/contacts/followers.
- Complete your profiles with the required information and try to connect all your networks with each other. You can do that via their APIs.
- Get connected! Connect with the people you know and pick the people which could be a good connection for your future goals.
- Build up a blog about the skills you have! In step 2, you chose your aim and your field. Why write about it? You’ll become closer to your chosen field of expertise, in the long term you will become an expert in it, you improve your writing skills and you get a larger network, too.
- Tweet and post your blog entries to your connected networks and let everybody know how good you are! There are thousands of other people who might be even better than you, but only the ones who show their skills are going to achieve their goals.
- Maintain your profiles, your blog and your connections!
Summary
With these few tips you will be able to push your career in an undefined way. It depends on you and your goal whether it will be a big push, a small push or nothing. The more specific you are and the more you do, the better are chances of success.
Philipp Zentner builds websites and specializes in Social Media and Online Marketing. He currently studies Business Computing in Germany.
Want to learn more?
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