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

and a Powerpoint presentation he did for students on both the potential and perils of social networking.

Vic is an experienced career advisor at the Career and Professional Development Center (CPDC) in the University’s School of Law with his fingers in many pies! For example, he contributes to the CPDC’s blog and also delivers presentations to students on managing their online profile and the career implications of web 2.0. I sent him an e-mail explaining what I was hoping to do and drawing his attention to our shared interest in careers and the web/new technologies. To cut a long story short, Vic responded very warmly to my initial e-mail and set about arranging my visit, planning assiduously to make the most of the opportunity for many of his colleagues and I to exchange information and share our experience, and to make me feel welcome! In fact, Vic has cunningly promoted this as a professional development opportunity for his colleagues. His internal e-mail reads:

“Please join us for a career development round table hosted by Vic Massaglia and Melody Jennings Kruzic on May 8, 2008 from 2:00 to 4:00 at the University of Minnesota Law School.
This session will feature Career Consultant Helen Pownall from Manchester, England, who is visiting the states in part to have a dialog regarding best practices on the following areas:

• An overview of her career development experiences in the UK
• Career information on the web
• Career related blogs, forums etc.
• E-guidance
• Career or recruitment focused social networking groups
• Career podcasts and videos
• How recruiters use the web and new technologies in the US

More information about Ms. Pownall can be viewed at
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/b43/339 and her blog
http://careerswebushka.wordpress.com/

We are confident that not only will you contribute significantly, but learn much regarding international career development.”

I hope Vic is right. I rather suspect that we have much more to learn from them (especially about their use of technologies) than they do from us (!), but I’m very much looking forward to it.

My visit is on Thursday 8 May, so if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to find out about the US/Minnesota experience while I’m there, just let me know. And watch out for a post-visit report here…

Firstly, it can be painfully slow. A student writes “I’m a history student graduating in June and I need to get a job, but not really sure what I want to do. Can you help?” The usual ‘exploration’ phase of the interview is highly problematic by e-mail. It is always a delicate balance between giving information (risking being irrelevant) and asking lots of questions to probe and clarify (risking opening up so many cans of worms that even a flock of hungry seagulls over two generations couldn’t deal with all of them!).

Secondly, misunderstandings seem to happen much more often. Of course, we are very aware that with e-mail there are no visual cues – no body language, no facial expressions or tone of voice. There’s little in the way of substance to help you get to know a person. But I think the lack of immediacy is also an exacerbating factor here. If you write “What do I need to do to get a job at the BBC?”, are you asking for information about the BBC’s recruitment methods or do you mean “Darn it, I’m so frustrated! I’ve tried everything to get a job in that bloomin’ organisation and nothing’s working. The whole world’s against me!” [cont...]

[...cont] If we were having a ‘real’ conversation, I could just ask you to clarify. Or I could inquire tentatively whether you were perhaps feeling a little frustrated. Either way, I’d probably get to the crux of the matter pretty quickly. And even if I was having an off day and jumped to the wrong conclusion initially, you would have a chance to set me straight within seconds. Not so with e-guidance.

OK so it’s a bit clunky.

But it is still great to be able to offer something for students (or graduates) who can’t make it onto campus. And we’ve talked about the video interviewing option via Skype or other technology (and by the way I want to pick up on your very interesting comments on this rather belatedly in a blog post soon)… But what if there was a ‘cheap dirty option’ which wouldn’t require any fancy technology but was quicker than e-mail?

Well… what about instant messaging? In the US, some careers services already use software which has instant messaging functionality for guidance purposes. At the University of Florida, for example, careers counsellors use a piece of software by the name of ‘Live Chat‘, developed by a company called ‘LivePerson‘, which specialises in customer service solutions for businesses.

In a careers context, students can click on a button on the careers service website which says something like “Chat live to a careers counselor” and then do just that.

The University of Florida has one of its careers advisers ‘on duty’ from home each evening providing ‘instant’ careers information, advice and guidance online in between watching their favourite sitcom or putting the kids to bed. When the adviser gets a ‘chat request’ their computer will ring like a phone, and they’ll drag themselves away from whatever they’re doing and check to see where their caller is coming from and start chatting.

Oh and it also has a customisable database of FAQs and stock (but modifiable) ‘answers’ or text that the adviser can send through to avoid trigger finger (or client boredom!), called ‘Knowledgebase‘.

Progress or brave new world? What do you think?

In general, it’s a fairly simple exercise, and students (assuming they aren’t scared off completely!) usually find the experience pretty useful, if only slightly less painful than a trip to the dentist! Some of you might have also ventured into the realms of video interviewing, as we have here at Manchester…

But at peak times of year the demand for mock interviews might be so great you just can’t meet it.
Or students (or more likely, graduates) might be off campus and not able to come for a face-to-face interview.
Or a client might need to arrange a mock interview at very short notice and you just can’t fit them in.
Or they might want to have more than one shot at practising their answers to those “killer questions”.

That’s really where virtual interviews come into their own. [cont...]

[...cont] A number of university careers services in the US have licensed mock interview software, which students can then access via their website (usually only with a valid uni login). One US-based software company describes how their virtual interview software, Perfect Interview, works:

“A professional interviewer appears on your computer screen and asks questions based upon your profile. [You are asked to complete a profile when you register.] You must answer each question on the spot, with the optional Quick Cam Pro® camera automatically recording everything you say and do. You can play your recorded answers back for immediate feedback, or save them for later review.”

You can even e-mail your interview file to your friendly careers adviser. I’m currently having a play with trial versions of two US software packages, “Perfect Interview” and “InterviewStream“, and so far, I’m impressed!

OK, so that’s what they do in the US, but how long before something like this is available in the UK? Well, I’ve heard on the grapevine that one institution here already uses some software along these lines, and may have even developed it in-house, so I think I’m going to put my detective cap on and see if I can learn more!

But until then, I’d like to leave you with a link to what might be the next best thing – the BeMyInterviewer website, which features videoed interview questions from such well-known figures as Duncan Bannatyne (Dragons’ Den) and Ruth Badger (The Apprentice), among others. After each question, the interviewer tells us what kind of answer they are looking for, rather than giving us a ‘model answer’. The website claims to be ‘interactive’, but it seems to be conflating interactivity with multimedia. It is essentially an interesting and well put-together video-based resource, developed by Jobsite, but it lacks some of the important functionality of the US mock interview software.

Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and one of the directors at the Web Science Research Initiative, said:

“The web is the elephant in the room – it has transformed our lives, but we never see it. We feel the time has come to study it – to see its benefits and understand its possible dis-benefits.”

“Dis-benefits…?”

On the one hand, I feel slightly uneasy about the word ‘science’ being used to describe the study of what the WSRI describe as “the largest human information construct in history” – the internet. However, as someone who sometimes feels like she’s on an accelerating treadmill with no ‘off’ or ‘pause’ buttons, desperately trying to keep up with new technology, I do welcome any attempt to make it appear less scary and more manageable. I’ll be watching these developments with interest…!

So what is the purpose of a careers website in 2008? What do we want it to do? What do students and graduates want it to do? What are the possible pitfalls? A few thoughts and questions…

• How many of our websites are still mainly about providing information or ‘content’?

• How far should we ‘go web2.0′ with our careers websites and start creating online communities with user-generated content like student blogs or enter into the murky world of social networking?
• Do we want to move towards delivering our products and services via the web, developing online applications such as live web chats for e-guidance, CV builders, e-portfolios and mock interview simulators? [Watch this space for more on some of those features.]
• How much should we be creating multimedia like audio, video, media-rich presentations etc? Is this just a distracting gimmick or is it a way of making the site more lively and interesting and addressing different learning styles?
• With all the content ‘out there’, to what extent does it still make sense to continue to try to develop our own content, and how much are we just reinventing the wheel? Should we rather move more towards being ‘knowledge workers’, sourcing relevant, high quality third party content where it already exists and focussing our attention on producing our own resources where we have identified gaps (e.g. local job markets?).
• How far do we try to allow for students to personalise their own content, for example, using feeds or portals?
• And with all of that, how do we still manage to keep tabs on issues like quality control and accessibility?

As usual, I’d love your thoughts on all of the above, those of you who are involved in managing or developing your careers service website. How many of you have a purpose statement for the website to clarify its aims and define its key audience(s)? What criteria have you used to decide what content you want to include?

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...]

[...cont] like me, you use a computer at work, another one at home, and sometimes a laptop or two, you’ll really see the advantages of web-based applications like this. No more copying files onto memory stick, e-mailing yourself important documents, or (heaven forbid!) printing things out… You might even be able to access them via your mobile if you’re so inclined.

I like the way that Remember The Milk incorporates tagging, so you can group your tasks easily and flexibly, and the no-fuss approach to setting priorities and deadlines is nice too. You can also synchronise it with your Google mail or iPhone if you happen to use those, although these features are reserved for ‘pro’ users (i.e. they’re not free). Tasks can be categorised into different types – personal, work, customisable etc – so that “Clean out the freezer” doesn’t have to sit next to “Write funding bid for web 2.0 project”!

I’d be interested to hear what tools you use to organise your work. Anybody out there have a Blackberry, provided by their employer (go on, surprise me!) or otherwise?

Right, all I need now is a robot to actually clean out the freezer for me…

To conduct a careers guidance interview remotely, however, all that is really needed is some form of video or teleconferencing technology (such as Skype) installed on your PC, a webcam, and some speakers or headphones, and hey presto, our students (assuming they have the same technology) can interact with us from the comfort of their [cont...]

[...cont] bedrooms. A friend of mine from the US describes how he talks to his parents on Skype using a webcam, sometimes while folding his laundry or catching up on other odd chores (!), so I can see the potential… (Not that I would like to encourage students to multitask in this way while contemplating their career options, I hasten to add!!)

Anyway, I’d be really interested to know if anyone out there’s doing this already or thinking about dipping their toes in the water. Perhaps institutions with a number of small campuses or lots of part-timers and distance learners?

For the rest of us who aren’t doing this, what are your thoughts? Do you think there might be a demand for this? Would you be worried something would be lost if we were not being physically present with a client? Or is this just the next logical step after the telephone and e-guidance services that many of us already offer?

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Wow! Does he mean that any reading we do on a screen as opposed to on the printed page somehow does not count? The point is, [cont...]

[...cont] Johnson says, that what, where and how we read is changing, and the study simply fails to take into account all the reading that people do online.

OK, so I’ve occasionally come across people in the careers world who think like the NEA too, but they do tend to be pretty rare these days. Most people do now seem to see electronic ‘content’ as having a valid role to play in the student learning experience. It’s just that we don’t always know how to do it well. There are still cases where we just put something up on the web which was originally developed as a 10-page booklet. This is invariably followed by the complaint that “those damn students just can’t be bothered to read anymore”. But if we’re completely honest with ourselves, exactly how often would we be prepared to download a 10-page article and read it from beginning to end?

Seriously, I believe we do need to think differently about how we write for the web. This means taking into account the fact that the internet has probably changed the way we find research and get information (and thus to an extent the way we read) for good. A recent piece of research conducted by University College London on behalf of the British Library and JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future‘, debunked the myth of a so-called ‘Google generation’ that behaves differently from the rest of us. The study, published in January 2008, found that:

“Research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.”

So it really isn’t just “those damned students” with their 20-second attention spans apparently. We’re all like this! And if we’re all like this, we should be able to figure out what makes for good web reading matter, shouldn’t we? Hmmm…

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot recently, as I’m looking at the whole issue of how we produce quality content (and not just what we call ‘quality content’ but stuff that people actually want to read!) for the careers website here at Manchester at the moment. In fact, I’ve signed up for the AGCAS training event ‘Developing Electronic Content‘ in March. The last one they ran was so popular I didn’t get my name down quickly enough! Usually an indication that we’re all thinking and needing the same thing…

Anyone else out there pondering these issues? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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...]

[...cont] sofa! Actually, I confess to finding myself both curiously fascinated by the power of web and the so-called “new” or “emerging” technologies, and excited by their very real potential to change the way we live and work for good. The last few weeks has seen me jettisoning Internet Explorer in favour of the new social networking browser Flock, setting up feeds to help me keep in touch with what’s new in the world of careers and technology (as well as just how rainy it’s likely to be in Manchester in the next few days…). I’ve been excited by the wonders that are screencasts, and had a go at setting up a wiki, among other things. And of course it’s already been ages since – like so many of us – I was first seduced by the likes of Facebook, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and Flickr.

So I decided to set up this blog to share with you my journey into the world of web 2.0 (and perhaps 2.1, 2.11, 3.0, 4.0?), and in particular its applications (both existing and potential) for our work as careers practitioners. I hope to bring you snippets, titbits and links to news, websites and other technologies, as well as what’s “new and hot” in the careers world. I also want to develop some “quickstart” pages on some of the new technologies like feeds, social bookmarking, podcasts, video and screencasts, social networking, wikis and blogs, with examples of how they’re already being used by careers services and third party content providers. But for all of this to be useful and interesting, and in the true spirit of web 2.0, I hope you will share your own thoughts, ideas and resources with me here too, as well as put me straight when I mess it up and get my facts wrong! Ultimately, I’d like to consider us setting up a social network for careers practitioners, perhaps in Ning… OK, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself a bit there.

Anyway, more soon, but in the meantime, for more about the purpose of this blog or who I am, check out the About this blog and the About me pages.