Taking Charge of Your Career

CEBU, Philippines – The Internet gives you, for the first time, access to huge amount of information to manage your career. For example, our salary data is useful when you want to know whether you’re underpaid or overpaid. Our assessment feedback is useful in telling you which area you should go into. There are articles at many sites that talk about career issues. There is so much information on the Web that will help you structure yourself and figure out what the trends are and where you need to develop your skills to keep up-to-date.

There’s always been great secrecy about negotiation on salary, but it’s becoming more and more transparent. You know what people are earning out there, you know what you’re worth. You can manage yourself more aggressively. You know what skills you need to develop. You know where you can go and get them. Some of the sites are even linked to training programs, it is a tremendous opportunity to take control and be in charge of your career.

E-mail and the ability to network through the Net is just some of the tools at your disposal. Add in the phenomenon of social media! Of course, you should also continue your in-person networking. But cyberspace gives you a fabulous opportunity to network even more deeply.

For instance, we’ve found that the members of our site wanted to send batch e-mail to other people at our site who were in their graduating class from university. Well, we can make that happen. They’ve lost touch with some of these people, but anonymously we can send this out, and the ones who want to get together can get together in a group. We can even set up a chat room. There are all kinds of possibilities.

In addition, more and more people are using e-mail and the social media to network directly into companies. They might even ask the human resources department to set up an email relationship with someone in the company, so they can go back and forth on what’s good about company, what’s bad about a company. It greatly expands your ability to get out there; that’s the power of e-mail and social media.

— from Fast Forward By Alfred C. Skies with Ellen Pearlman (Morrow)