I was asked recently by someone how do I generate ideas for the articles I write for TechRepublic and other sites. Since my layoff in September 2012, I’ve been a full time freelance writer generating story ideas that interest my editors is of utmost importance. read more
Now that my day job went POOF on Friday due to budgets cuts, I am hitting it early this morning because I am back to freelancing at least for the interim. While the market is still in bad shape and the threat of Sequestration looms over the local federal government contracting community, I have plans and feeling hopeful about what’s next for me professionally.
Here is my plan for the week:
I finally updated my Presentations page with slide decks from my previous Messiah United Methodist Church Job Seekers Ministry presentations.
I had been getting a little bit bored (and frustrated) with my professional technical writer site, willkelly.com over the past few years. The continued rocky period on my employer’s federal government contract and an endless cycle of halfhearted Dreamweaver templates got me on the road to migrate willkelly.com to the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). It has been a rather mixed experience. I tore it all down the other weekend and started over, not as much out of disappointment, but to knock the kinks out of my first deployment.
Here are some lessons I learned:
Despite being a technology early adopter and writer, I’ve only kept a slow and steady clip with my social media presence. My social media presence is focused on LinkedIn and Twitter with a little Facebook and Google+ thrown in for good measure. Somehow along the way, Klout seemed to think I should have an account with them and just signed me up. Not cool. Here are the 10 reasons why Klout has no clout with me:
Having your resume online is the nice bond paper of twenty years ago now that so many companies have an online first approach to recruiting employees. However, the state of network security in some organizations might be directly at odds with the tools job hunters use to post their resumes online.
I’ve gained a new appreciation for giving presentations since I’ve been volunteering with my church’s Jobs Ministry especially since I now have presentations with no proprietary or otherwise confidential information not for public eyes. So I wanted to look into some options for publishing and sharing the slides from my presentations.
Social publishing sites like SlideShare and Scribd are great for publishing presentations because they offer up another vector for Internet users to find out about you and your message. These options also offer such a clean delivery when compared to just posting your PowerPoint slides online and expecting people to download them via a link.
Here are my impressions about some of the leading online publishing and sharing options:
I had the opportunity to give my talk about social media and job hunting again at last week’s meeting of the Messiah United Methodist Church Jobs Ministry. As a volunteer, I am happy to be there to help people, and find myself learning something new whenever I talk to folks on the subject. Getting up and talking in front of a group about LinkedIn and the use of social media as a job-hunting tool also challenges me to refine my own online brand and job hunting approach.
Here are some lessons I’ve learned from two presentations and a lot of reading and research about the subject in between and try to stress during my talks:
One of the technologies I’ve been waiting to advance more into the mainstream is electronic signatures. While I have a smooth process down to print out contracts and other documents that need my signature and then scan them into PDFs with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, I would still like to whittle down the signatory process even further. Now that EchoSign, an electronic signature solution is an Adobe acquisition, I decided to reopen my research into electronic signature options.
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