Thoughts on Digital Life

My career has been a strange path so far, but it has certainly been quite a nice ride. Yet again, I'm changing the scenery and I decided to explain a little bit on the why. The snippet-resumé My resumé, or CV if you will, has become quite ridiculous. I've got loads of short-term employments on it over the past 6 years, ranging from two years to 9 months. And that sucks. Big time. When I started my career I worked at a place where I could have worked forever - until they went bankrupt... I've been in that same situation once again since. Both of these employers could have been my employers for my entire career if the finances didn't go bad. I've often changed jobs. Sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Once there was a mutual agreement that things didn't work out - that company was mostly copying great work by others and that didn't compute with me. And once have I been fired because I was too critical of the company ...

A few weeks ago me and my employer decided it was best to split. Because I am the sole income for my family (mortgage, car, 2 kids...) I need to find a new job and prefer to find one soon. I decided I'd like to find out how and if social media could help me out on this one. I needed to get noticed and wondered if social media could help me do just that. LinkedIn. I've taken LinkedIn as the basis for my experiment. LinkedIn is the business network where you place your résumé online. Just like you "Google" your possible new employer, that employer Googles you. Most often your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account will be found. LinkedIn keeps a ranking. It gives you feedback on how you rank amongst the people you know. On LinkedIn I've got about 475 connections. At the beginning of this experiment I ranked at 128. That's not bad, but it isn't brilliant. It meant that my profile was viewed an average 1,5 times a week. And there was my challenge....