If you can look at your career not as something that is part of you but rather a separate entity, it will make it easier to understand the care that has to go into managing it. Our careers are like our own children. If you have a child, you sometimes have to make sacrifices. Also, when a child is involved, you are always looking at its long term prospects. Career is all about long term prospects. If you have short term plans with respect to your career, it is headed to a dead end. In this post we take a look at how technology can help shape your career.
How To Manage Your Career With Technology
The best way to start with career management is to assess where you are, as of now. A career is sort of like a trail of activities that is drawn during the duration of our work life. At present time, you have decided to take control of it, or improve this trail. Similar to a game or a movie, we need to know where we are right now, to decide where we want to go next. So, where are you right now in that career line?
Even though it is your career that we are talking about here, you will find it very hard to track your own movements so far. That’s because this is all new to you. In our opinion, start this management thing is with your resume. Go ahead and sort all the resumes that you have designed and used so far in your career. How many resumes have you made so far? The answer is simple. The number of jobs you have changed is equal to the number of resumes you have crafted.
Finding Past Data
How do you search your old for your old resumes now? Well, that is where online services come into play.
You may have never realized this but email is still the most useful technology. With today’s technology, you can share high definition video with friends and family from across the globe, access your entire music collection from the cloud on your mobile and even play high intensity games while on the move. Yet, email remains the most used and also the oldest tech that is still as relevant since its inception was two decades ago.
Obviously, you would have emailed your resume to prospective employers, every time you were looking for a job. That implies that, chances are, all your old job resumes are still present in your email. Most people never delete their emails, and that rule applies to you as well. So, simply log on to your email account, do a quick search and voila! All your old resumes are yours to keep.
Analyzing Your Resume
Now that you have access to your earlier copies of resumes, sit and understand how your professional life has evolved over time. If today is the first time you are thinking of career management, then, you will probably be less than satisfied with the way your professional has planned out. Still, you should be a firm believer in the phrase which says you can always find the bright spots in the darkest of caves.
Usually it helps if you use a spreadsheet software, which is available on your computer. If you do not have spreadsheet utility on your machine, you can any use one of the free and web based spreadsheet tools that are available online to chart out your life. You can build a table and graph out of your earnings over the years, the way you have progressed in terms of job titles and position held in each company.
Discuss With Your Friends
If you went with our suggestion of using the online spreadsheets available, then you get one more bonus benefit. That is the ability to share what you have gathered with your best of friends. The great thing about best friends is that they can give you unbiased, straight to the face opinions. This is something which you will never get with a work colleague or a golf buddy.
Online productivity suites allow you to share information easily with your friends who are probably spread across the country, or even the world. You can get feedback from them and see what best you can do next with respect to your career. You have done your research about your past. That information will allow you to avoid past mistakes and hopefully only make new mistakes. Don’t worry too much about future mistakes because it is only a reminder that we are all, still human.
This author will never claim to be an expert on career management, but his own career was shaped for the better when he consulted the fantastic folks at TCMO.
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