But, there is gold in status reports, for those who are willing to think their purpose through and deliver.

Status reports are communication tools

Yet, the lowly status report is a practical way — sometimes the only way — to communicate your accomplishments for the week. Passing communications with your manager don’t cut it. Because no one can remember the update for anything past one or two items and then only for what is happening that day. Doing one or two significant accomplishments each day doesn’t seem like much until put into a weekly context. Having five to ten significant accomplishments for the week places you in a different light.

Status reports are a record of your accomplishments

One of the most difficult lists to keep is your list of accomplishments. It is not as though you will always remember to go out to that resume performance review file and list yet another completion. We forget. We delay. We procrastinate.

Yet, the weekly status report can be the perfect vehicle for storing our accomplishments for both reviews and resumes. By placing our accomplishments in electronic writing, we document what we have done with our work.

Take a new look at your status report. Look at it as the communications tool and accomplishment repository of your work. I’ll help you do that over this week as we move the lowly status report up the career management tool set chain.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Self-reviews use kicked up status reports
2. 4 reasons to do a status report for your boss-even when you don’t have to

One of the great questions asked during the presentation was “how many social sites like MySpace or Facebook should I sign up for and participate in for my work?”

We face the same question as Cubicle Warriors, don’t we? Should I have a blog, join LinkedIn, go nuts on Facebook — or forget the whole thing?

I don’t think you can forget the whole thing; that would hurt your career management networking. But, there are some criteria you can use to decide how you spend your time. Here’s mine:

1. The audience is everything. You should spend time on the social sites that drive sales to your target market. If tween-something is your thing, then MySpace is your place. For Cubicle Warriors, it more often is career management blogs and places like LinkedIn and (my personal favorite, because it is a career management tool) Jibber Jobber.
2. Your time is everything. You can only spend so much time focusing on your network. Make sure you are spending your time where it is easiest and gives you the most bang for your buck. What’s the easiest way to stay in contact with your work associates, past work associates and friends? That’s where you go.
3. Know your criteria for accepting social connections with “friends.” And feel comfortable with the criteria.

My criteria for accepting connections are simple: I know you, have interacted with you, and believe that you “get it” in my definition of competence. If you do, you’re in. If you don’t, you won’t. Simple.

You might not agree with that definition, but that’s OK. I have to feel comfortable with the definition; you don’t. As I don’t need to feel comfortable with your definition of what makes a valued connection.

Electronic social networking will continue to increase in importance as the business of commerce becomes global and your best networking contacts are on the other side of the planet.

Knowing why you will connect with someone will make the difference in having a valued connection or merely someone on a list.

Scot

Related posts:

1. What are your favorite Career Management sites?

September, to me, has always signified the start of fall here in the Northern Hemisphere. It was back-to-school time, new notebooks, and some new clothes to go show off with my classmates. September, compared to the frolic of summer, is simply more Serious; a time to start to focus on the work at hand.

Here’s the first career management tip: Formalize your networking.

In a global economy, with companies being bought and sold, employees being laid off, and organizational change in your own company creating terrific amounts of turnover, it is more important than ever to have a good network of coworkers, friends, and perhaps family to provide a support structure for your career.

Yet, it’s getting harder and harder to maintain a support network — for the same reasons it is needed now more than ever!

Here’s five ways to formalize your networking:

1. Networking is helping other people. Recognizing this simple fact allows you to do what you do best and be remembered for it — help others.
2. Keep in contact with people who leave your company. You’ve already established a good working relationship with this person — and it is very easy to lose touch with someone who can actually help you find a job in a different company. There are many ways to keep in touch, but few do.
3. Purposely schedule time to talk with other people. Whether it is going out to lunch, having a cup of coffee, or simply walking around, talking with people will give you opportunities to help people that you would not have had if you just sat in your cube.
4. Do informational interviews inside your company. You’re not looking for a job, but you want to know more about what people do. One way to do this is to spend 15-20 minutes interviewing someone in a different department about their work. Over coffee is great, but there are the two benefits of learning more about the company and making a new contact at the same time.
5. Use a career management tool set. I use Jibber Jobber because it is a suite of tools that will help your career. Jason also has a great blog on career management supporting Jibber Jobber. From contacts, to a place to prepare your elevator speech, to importing contacts from LinkedIn, to tracking resumes and interviews, Jibber Jobber is the most comprehensive career management tool I’ve seen.

Networking, while important in the past, is critical for cubicle warriors now.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Business Networking – Formalize Your Contacts
2. 30 Career Management Tips — Separate career management from a company
3. The career management key to networking
4. 30 Career Management Tips — Have a work management system
5. 30 Career Management Tips — Provide Personal Communication

Darlene asked me to guest post about a couple of tools that I use for Career Management: Jibber Jobber and LinkedIn.

I’m not going to talk about the specific tools here; check that out over at Technology for Career Management.

But, what I didn’t cover in the article is why we should be using a tool for career management in the first place. It’s an important subject.

The world has changed from twenty — or five — years ago. How people make and keep relationships has changed. Where twenty years ago a person was expected to stay with the same company for a very long time, if not life, today we are constantly moving between companies to perform our work. Or countries.

This dramatic change in the workplace has meant that relationships have become much more transactional than in the past. We interact with our neighbors — until me move. We interact with parents at our children’s school — until we change schools. We interact with our co-workers — until we change companies through voluntarily moving or being laid off.

We have become relationship transients at the very time we need to build and maintain strong networks in our life — because corporations are no longer responsible for our career management.

Here are five reasons to use technology for our career management:

1. Develop our personal brand. There is a lot of chatter about personal brands and how to build them being published right now, but the critical thing is to know your core strengths and be able to express those strengths to others. Career management tools can help you do this.
2. Target companies to work. Companies come and go and the work goes along with them. One day a Microsoft is the cool place to work and the next day it is Google. As you understand your work and what you like to do, certain companies will stand out as a place to work. A career management tool should help us focus on particular companies to work.
3. People are geographically disbursed. This means you won’t run into your old mentor at that other company at the grocery store and have a few minutes to catch up. It means your mentor at the other company is now working in a different country. So how do you remember to keep in contact? Through technology.
4. Job campaigns are harder. While it used to be you could find out about jobs at other places through your personal, physical social network, you now have job web sites, recruiters, company job sites — and nothing to keep track of what you have done or not done with a particular company relating to a job search. Technology should help with this tracking.
5. Unfocused tasks don’t get done. By having a technology tool to help you manage your career, you will have to maintain the information (and be reminded of things to do based upon tasks you enter). While this is work, the deal is that this is work that now needs to be done by you to help your career. No one else will do this for you. Consequently, managing through a tool is an effective method for career management.

You still need to do the work, of course. You still need to perform. But no one is watching out for you except you. So build — and manage — your network for all the right reasons. Your network will have great rewards far beyond those associated with finding a job.

Scot

Related posts:

1. 3 reasons job skills require technology tool skills
2. Technology is Great; Technology Sucks

What your management actually means when they talk is a great career management tool. And, since I do humor using Corporate Speak, I always appreciate someone else’s great turn of phrase when it comes to making a point about business.

I saw this from David Zinger on Employee Engagement and read the priceless reality:

don’t make your point pointless with an overabundance of PowerPoint slides as you blur into a darkened room dimly lit by glowing BlackBerry screens as participants drift off to bulging email in-boxes.

Wow!

Related posts:

1. Employee Engagement and Enthusiasm
2. Interview on Employee Engagement Zingers
3. Cost wise and employee engagement foolish
4. Vacation Policy affects Employee Engagement
5. Employee Engagement Trumped by Management

You want to do networking, right? You think LinkedIn is the way to network. You want to manage your career, right? You think the development goals you create at work is how you manage your career.

Not really. The REAL way to manage your network and career is through JibberJobber.com.

I’ve interacted with Jason for about nine months of the not-many-more months he’s been blogging about networking. And, he’s built a web site that has the tools to manage your work search, contacts, and have a tool where you can truly manage your career through one tool set (including the ability to interface with LinkedIn).

He built it because when he was laid off, the tools he found to manage his job search were poor, at best. So he built a web site that fulfills the needs of people to not just find a job, but manage their career and networking contacts in a way that will serve them for life.

This morning, Jason published this on his blog:

JibberJobber is offering a one-week special! From April 2-9, you can upgrade to JibberJobber Premium for life for only $99! This offer is 80% off the standard lifetime premium membership of $495.

JibberJobber is a powerful relationship and career management tool designed with your career needs in mind.

If you are already employed, this may be the most important career tool you use to collect contact information and data on target companies – two of the most critical areas to track for career growth
and future job searches.

Here are some of the powerful features you’ll enjoy when you upgrade:

• unlimited network and company contacts
• unlimited target companies
• unlimited log entries
• action items e-mailed to your inbox
• printable phone lists and contact reports
• interactive network and job search reports
• import and export your information
• rank companies and jobs
• categorize your interview prep answers and be ultra-prepared
• manage your possible tax deductions with the expense tracker
• site-wide search with one search box
• SOON TO COME: synchronization with Microsoft Outlook contacts!

This is the only tool out there that I’ve seen that actually helps you manage your career, your networking relationships, and your personal work goals. I saw this announcement and went to PayPal at DSL speed with credit card in hand.

You can sign up for free at JibberJobber.com and enjoy the upgraded privileges for fourteen days to really tour the site. But, the special only lasts this week. Take a serious look at this; we all need to manage our own career through our own network. This tool does that better than any I’ve seen.

Scot

Related posts:

1. JibberJobber Blog Birthday
2. Status Reports — Communications Tool