We’ve still got one week left in 2010 but with the holidays coming up and people’s focus probably going elsewhere for a few days or more, here are some things to think about that you can do for the upcoming year that can help to benefit your job searches, your career and by extension your life:

Turn over a new leaf in the new year

1. Stop tweaking: I’m a tweaker so I know this is an area I need to improve upon. By tweaking, I mean tweaking your resume, tweaking your cover letter, tweaking anything over and over again when you could be otherwise spending your time doing something more productive like meeting people who could positively influence your career. I constantly tweak my websites and posts but I’ve been trying to focus more on adding posts and good content and worrying about the really important things and less on making little changes here and there. Sure, making improvements is great and often necessary but so is looking at the bigger picture and actually getting stuff accomplished that will lead to a bigger payoff than simply tweaking what you’ve already done.

2. Get out and meet new people: Using the online social networks is great and it can pay off especially if you’re in a profession that values this sort of networking but actually meeting new people face-to-face is a tried and true method that works too. Social media is evolving and over the past few days, we’ve learned that Yahoo is shutting down Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, and AltaVista with several other services potentially getting shut down too. It seems that the social networks are consolidating as consumers have generally decided that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn tend to be the ones that they use for work purposes. These also tend to among the higher profile networks for those of us who really couldn’t be bothered signing up for every new one that pops up. While spending time on some of the more popular career-oriented networks can help your career, the last thing you want to do is focus the majority of your job search using these services. And at the end of the day, job interviews tend to be held face-to-face, not through an Internet connection.

3. Ask for help: Another area I have personal experience with…I tend to be someone who tries to do things myself because I like not to have to rely on other people plus I like the feeling of accomplishing things on my own. Having said that, no one wants to be a jack of all trades and master of none and the fact is that we will never know everything. There is always someone else who knows more about a topic than we do and we shouldn’t feel like we shouldn’t ask for help when the time comes. By asking for help, it could be asking someone specific – like a peer, colleague, manager, friend or mentor – or it could be consulting the web. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been trying to figure something out and simply typed what I’m looking for into Google (my favorite search engine truth be told) and find that I can quickly find the answer rather than having to search for it myself. Just yesterday I was trying to figure out how to do some programming work on another website and not being a programmer by trade but someone who likes to dabble, I spent some time trying to figure it out and then simply typed my problem into Google…and had the answer about 1 minute later. You won’t always get your problems solved through a search engine but if you’re unsure about something related to your career, don’t be afraid to ask for assistance from someone who can help.

Employers (and recruiters) have an increasingly number of good Internet resources at their disposal to scope out and learn more about potential employees using publicly available information that these job searchers are either putting out there themselves or that are available due to their connections and friends on various social networks.

In the old days before the Internet, if you lost track of someone you might look them up in the white pages of the phone book and maybe ask a few friends or colleagues “whatever happened to insert-person’s-name-here.”

These days, you – and other people who might be thinking of hiring you – can use your LinkedIn profile and other networks like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace to locate people who have worked with you in the past or who might be able to speak about you, your skills and experience.

People are increasingly turning to secret references or unauthorized ones where they contact someone who is not on your list of authorized references and get them to do a reference on you.

Personally, I’ve never done this. I find it sneaky and back-handed.

I’d be afraid that in addition to how sneaky it is, I’d end up calling an unauthorized reference who would then tell someone with your current employer that you’re interviewing elsewhere for a new job that would result in you getting a lot of grief.

I suspect if this sort of thing happened and the job searcher finds out about it, there would be a lawsuit filed by the job searcher against the person who started calling unauthorized references. I read an article where a lawyer had suggested that contacting people who are not on your reference list is not illegal, but if it results in your current employer finding out about your job search and making your life difficult, isn’t this going to cause you to look for someone to pay for causing you this trouble?

Plus, it probably won’t look too good on the company doing the secret references once word gets out in the job search community that they’re doing this sort of thing.

Having said that, if you’re going to link up with various people with online social networks that essentially offer public domain information where you understand that other people will be allowed to view it, perhaps nothing wrong is being done?

Still, I don’t like the idea of skulking around looking for people to contact behind a job searcher’s back to do a reference on them. If someone called me unannounced and unexpectedly to do a reference on a former co-worker, the first thing when I’d do when I hang up is call my former co-worker and ask them why this person just called me for a reference without my former co-worker knowing about it.

When linking up with various people through online social networks, I’d be careful to ensure the information and people I’m linking up with won’t come back to haunt me in the future.