Learning about the US experience of careers and web 2.0

I know I’ve been very quiet on the blog recently. Trying to do too much as usual and dropping some of the balls! But I’m also re-thinking things a little in terms of what I write about, so watch this space…

I’m writing this post from a slightly chilly Minnesota. I’m actually on holiday visiting my brother, but also squeezing in a day at the University of Minnesota next week to swap notes with some careers people there. 

So how did that come about…? Well it’s a typical web 2.0 story. 

I had the idea of seeing whether I could arrange a visit to a local university while I was in the US, and the University of Minnesota was the obvious choice. After that, I played online detective, looking for someone at the university who I could contact to set the ball rolling. A careers practitioner interested in the web and new technology with a strong online presence seemed like too much to ask for… until I came across Vic Massaglia’s profile [cont...]

“To do” lists and techie tools for getting organised

Thanks for all your comments and feedback on my previous posts, and particular thanks to AGCAS for promoting it! My last post on video interviewing via Skype or other technology really seems to have caught people’s attention, so I’ll write an update on that later in the week. Apologies for the virtual silence in the last week by the way – my ISP is playing up at home, and since this is an out-of-hours blog, it has been a little tricky!

Time Management and Organisational Skills. Hmmm…

I’ve run student workshops on these, but it’s still something that I have to work hard at myself, in spite of many years as a project manager… In the past, I’ve had ‘to do’ lists that look something like this, probably written on the back of something I can’t find again:

[Image from Flickr courtesy of Eamon Brett, www.ebbybrett.co.uk]

But I do love tools and gadgets, so I’ve tried PDAs, the ‘tasks’ function in Outlook and numerous other “technology-enhanced” techniques. My latest discovery is a little tool at www.rememberthemilk.com. (Thanks to Matt Lingard at LSE for that one.) It’s another example of what has traditionally been a desktop application going web-based. If, [cont...]

Stumbling uncertainly into a brave new world

This first post is dedicated to my “very web 2.0” colleague Elizabeth Wilkinson, a fellow careers consultant, who has (in the short two months I’ve been in post at the University of Manchester as Careers Consultant with a specific remit for “the web and new technologies”) encouraged and nudged me and given me lots of food for thought about all these kinds of things. Check out her postgrad careers blog.

When I was fretting about the “pace of change” the other day, a friend observed that he’d surprised himself by getting hooked on the Nintendo Wii (I have to confess that what I had in my head was “We” before an article on the BBC website about the impressive sales of the console put me straight!). I reflected that I’m perhaps just a bit too old to keep in touch with the increasingly rapid advances in technology without really trying hard, and just a bit too young to have teenage children to do it for me!

I suppose in some ways I do see myself as a bit of a web 2.0 neophyte stumbling uncertainly into this brave new world, but at least knowing I want to be there is a start, and I will try not to hide behind the [cont...]