Ah, technology...

Basically we’re talking pre-Internet versus post-Internet here.

For those of you too young to remember life before the Internet, let me tell you that things are very different in a career and job searching context.

We’re talking colored resume paper and dot matrix printers and stuff like that.

I can think of quite a few differences just off the top of my head, Here are some of the more noticeable ones:

Pre-Internet: When you printed your resume in hard copy to send to a potential employer, you’d ask your friends and family for a second opinion as to which colour and stock of paper you should use. You didn’t want to pick the wrong colour or pattern nor did you want to pick a cheap looking one.

Post-Internet: They used to print resumes on paper?

Pre-Internet: When applying to jobs you either had to mail individual cover letters and resumes to every single company you wanted to apply to or as that wonderful invention (sarcasm) known as a fax machine became popular, you’d fax them to the employer all at your own expense of course. Stamps and fax fees added up back then!

Post-Internet: With the Internet you can easily fire off dozens or hundreds of resumes to many employers anywhere in the world and it costs you virtually nothing except the time that you waste by applying to jobs that you don’t actually qualify for but figure you might as well apply for “just in case.”

Pre-Internet: When you got a rejected by a company you had applied to, you actually got a written letter in the mail politely telling you they weren’t interested in you. In business school, we affectionately referred to it as a FOAD letter. FOAD stood for F#$% Off and Die since that was basically what the company was telling you. Clever, eh?

Post-Internet: These days you might get an auto response email the moment you hit “send” to deliver an email application or you might get nothing at all. I think I’d prefer a FOAD letter as at least it meant you got some closure.

Pre-Internet: When you were lucky enough to get a job interview, the first thing you thought about doing was going to your public library to see if you could get a copy of a recent annual report for the company you were interviewing with so you could memorize a few key figures about the company just in case they asked what you knew about them. Popular stats to memorize included annual sales and annual profits. Sometimes you’d try to impress the interviewer by pulling a quote out of the annual report and telling them you were aware of their recent acquisition of a company and how it fit into their long terms plans, or something like that.

Post-Internet: With the Internet, you can find out virtually anything about a company without having to leave the comfort of your home. You can learn about probably every senior manager there too since they probably all have a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account too.

Pre-Internet: Before the Internet, it was difficult to imagine that you could realistically do anything in public that would ruin your reputation for life.

Post-Internet: Post Internet it’s difficult to image there was a time where it was virtually impossible to do anything that would ruin your reputation for life. Think drunken Facebook photos and cellphone cameras.

Email makes you strong

Email can also cost you during job searches when you don’t pay enough attention to what you write and make grammatical or spelling mistakes that the reader takes as meaning that you are either aren’t a good speller or are lazy and don’t double check your work.

I’ve seen cases where candidates who I was working with wanted to send a thank you email following an interview and sent a draft of the email to me first so I could check it over. In some cases, the email probably would have hurt them more than it would have helped them because it had spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that didn’t make them look too good. At this point, some hiring managers look for a reason not to hire someone and certainly sending a poorly written email might be a good start to lose out on a job.

I’ve also seen people turned down for resumes because their resume or cover letter was poorly written so this sort of thing can hurt you as well.

While people often use email to hide behind rather than picking up the phone to call someone, email can sometimes help you get in touch with a person who might prefer it as a contact method. I recall contacting people and leaving them several messages and not hearing back from them but when I emailed them, I heard back from them within minutes receiving a response from their Blackberry or iPhone.

It goes to show you that sometimes when contacting someone, a combination of methods – phone and email – often yields the best results.

When possible it doesn’t hurt to ask someone what their preferred method(s) of contact is just so you know in advance.
[ad#Aweber]

It’s being reported that Internet Explorer’s share of the browser usage market has fallen below 50% meaning that all other browsers combined now make up a greater share that IE on its own.

I personally use Mozilla Firefox and love the password memory feature on Firefox alone. You can get free add ons for it too. Last week I added a free plugin that enables me to take full page browser screenshots that you’d normally use with the “function + printscreen” option on your PC but that only captures the part of your browser that’s visible on your screen.

If you go back 10+ years, Netscape was one of the major players in the browser world but where are they now?

Google’s Chrome is making headways and it seems that a new browser war is upon us as technology firms attempt to get users to download and use their browser instead of their competitors.

So what’s the point and how does this tie into your career?

If you go back to the comment a few sentences ago about Netscape, who could have predicted that a browser that was so prevalent a decade ago would have completely disappeared only a few years later? In technology things can change very quickly and sometimes it’s hard for us to predict what’s coming next.

In the career space, I’m always seeing online articles discussing the “top 10 hottest jobs” and “top 6 highest paying jobs” and “hottest career trends” and stuff like this and wondering why these lists keep getting so much attention. Of course, they get attention because we’re told that people tend to like lists and that a quick way to get people to click on your articles is to structure it in the form of a list or top 10 list for example.

The issue when it comes to this kind of list boils down to how useful it is and in most cases, I find these lists are worth nothing. It’s not much different than the old resume blasting services and career counseling firms that over promised and under delivered. They’re not worth the time or money.

Certainly I wouldn’t be basing my career decisions around whatever happens to be hot today since like Netscape it might be cold tomorrow.

While there are certainly many new tools available to help you during your job searches and career in general, watch out for the quick fix options that either sound too good to be true or that simply don’t work.

Networking is what many people tell you to do to help your career and find a new job. Exactly what “networking” means to different people though is another question…

Also, giving versus taking is often a big issue with networking. Specifically, if you’re doing all taking and no giving, it tends not to result in positive results.

Twitter is a popular method of networking that people commonly use these days. Or at least it give people the impression that they’re networking. I get Twitter confirmations to let me know that someone is following me and when I check the person’s profile, I see that they have something like 5,000 followers and they are also in turn following 5,000 people.

So do you think that this person actually has 5,000 active followers who follow their tweets – and that they in return actively follow 5,000 people – or that it’s more a case where people simply follow each other, pad their results and don’t really accomplish much?

In other words, is it simply a quid pro quo of “I’ll follow you if you follow me” or is it something more than that?

People can certainly “”meet” others through Twitter but it’s questionable how many if not most people actually use it positively. I’ve had plenty of cases where someone follows me, I don’t bother following them, and two days later they’re no longer following me.

It does bring up a bigger thought related to networking though. When you’re networking, people expect to get something in return and when you don’t give it to them, they’re likely to avoid you or stop dealing with you.

People decide to follow me on Twitter and when I don’t bother following them back, they decide to unfriend me and delete me. In most cases, I couldn’t care less because I tend not to follow people who don’t at least offer something serious, useful, or related to my topic.

I’ve seen similar actions on Facebook and LinkedIn, too. Cases where I get a request from a person I haven’t seen or heard from in years but get no actual note or email. So they want to be a friend or link up with me…but don’t bother sending any email or note regarding what they are up to or anything like that.

When it comes to real, live, actual networking though, pay attention to what you offer and if you come across as simply someone who is taking and not giving.

People who do this consistently tend to have trouble successfully networking since the person on the other side of the table realizes that the only person benefiting is you.