Tag Archives: professional

Mar 16 2012

ResumUP Your Resume

More on the visual front. I am a big fan of the new wave of visually-inspired resume builders. ResumUP is a new player in this field with a very easy, detailed resume creation tool built on Facebook and LinkedIn. The tool is in beta, but from my view point, works just fine. The resume piece offers great depth in editing professional and educational experience, achievements and career focus, as well as boxes for pycho-social elements to fill out your character profile. The result is quite gorgeous, full of charts, detail and color.

 

But ResumUP doesn’t stop at your background. You can also make your job searching intentions known on the site, and employers can search and post “visual vacancies.”  The job postings mirror the visual style of the resumes, with corresponding charts and graphics for job description, experience levels, necessary skills, benefits and compensation. Check out some of the sample postings here.

 

Of course, there is a social piece. You can take advantage of a dashboard when you connect with friends on the site. Plus there are plenty of sharing tools for spreading your resume, with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. There is a message center within the app. And, you can download your resume in PDF form via the export feature.

 

I think the idea is quite brilliant – the Web is an experiential place. Offering a visually-appealing means to promote yourself and peruse jobs seems a natural fit for how we interact with information. If you would like a peek at how ResumUP works and looks, check out the video below. And take a few minutes to create your own graphic resume at their site.

 

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Jan 10 2011

The iPad: A Use Case

Remembering back now, almost a year ago, to a post I wrote about the iPhone as Swiss Army Knife. The post followed my use of the Phone over the course of a ski weekend, including connecting with a new client, drafting and collaborating on a project bid, finding local restaurants and tracking my husband and kids on the slopes.

Flash forward to last week, and I found myself in a similar situation, armed with my trusty iPad.

For those of you who are still on the fence about whether an iPad can further your business interests, read on. While it does not touch on the same range of applications as my prior iPhone post, it shows how a simple iPad can replace a laptop and help you get the job done with a much smaller footprint.

Last week, my mother underwent surgery. I took a personal day off to be with her at the hospital, follow her progress, and report back to interested friends and family members. These days, I can’t really afford to take an entire day – my workload suffers too much from the added weight. So, I packed my little bag with nothing but my iPad and Alu Pen stylus.

I got an email from one of my task force team members asking for research on a particular issue of New York Workers’ Compensation law and Medicare. I read the email on the secure webmail server that I accessed via Safari on my iPad. I quickly hopped onto Google for some quick searching and a general overview. I then opened a new page for westlaw.com, entered my OnePass and got to work.  Navigating Westlaw on the mobile interface is a little tricky but I somehow managed to access all the necessary functions through some creative tapping and swiping.

A couple of hours later, I had emailed all the pertinent information to myself. I then set to work drafting the research memo to the team, using the Word-compatible DocsToGo. I was able to incorporate all the necessary formatting using DocsToGo’s tools. And it did not take me much longer to deposit my writings on the virtual page than it would have with a keyboard.

And I do actually have a bluetooth keyboard for it. But I find that I really don’t use it as much as I anticipated and don’t really miss it when it is in a location different from my iPad and me.

Once finished, I sent off the memo to the team, again using the secure Web interface. I then read all the important news from my social streams and RSS using Flipboard and Feedly, sharing some key bits with my friends. While I still needed my phone to make and receive my work related and personal calls, I was able to do EVERYTHING else on the iPad.

The size difference between a small laptop and the iPad is not great. But, in my opinion, the difference in capability is not great either. I have yet to encounter an insurmountable problem while using the device for a particular task, and either leverage an app or come up with a clever work around to get the job done. It’s small, lightweight (to me anyway), and connected via Wi-Fi and 3G. It is instant on and solid as a rock. It has awesome battery life – much better than my three laptops. And it is fully customizable with a click of a button in the App Store. I have even gone so far as to control my remote laptop with my iPad, thus solving some of the issues surrounding the difference in capabilities.

In a word (or two), it rocks. The competition definitely has its benchmark.

Dec 13 2010

Morph Your LinkedIn Profile Into A Resume

Why reinvent the wheel? If you don’t feel like tweaking your LinkedIn profile and then tweaking your resume, why not just turn your LinkedIn profile INTO a resume? Now you can – LinkedIn Labs has just released a new tool called Resume Builder (link here), which allows you to turn your profile into a resume.

Log in with your LinkedIn account and give the app access. The result is a nicely-laid out version of your profile, resume-style, in PDF, printable format. Choose from more then ten different templates and download the result or host it on LinkedIn’s site.
Easy-peezy. Takes all the fun (angst) out of resume-building.
Dec 7 2010

Give Yourself An Interview

Not content with the “exposure” you can get for your professional skills in the usual online haunts? Tired of simply pasting your name, email address and social site URLs in yet another directory? Need something that sets you apart from the maddening crowd?

How about giving yourself an interview and posting the results for all to see? New site Whohub allows you to do just that. On the surface, Whohub is a social network, geared to professional interests. But Whohub does this one better: it guides you through a series of interview questions designed to help you promote who you are, what you do, and what you can bring to the table, professionally. Whohub also optimizes your interview answers for search engines, helping you convey your information to the virtual world. Or, use Whohub’s script to embed your interview in your website or blog site of choice. Use your Whohub personal URL as another social link and use the Whohub site itself to discover other professionals and connect with them.

When you start on Whohub, you designate your field of work. Whohub then presents you with questions that relate to that field. There is a “law” category in the list.  There are at least a dozen unique questions to choose from – you can pick one or all or any number in between to answer to create your interview transcript. Choosing your questions and answers carefully will result in a tight “give and take”-type description of who you are and what you can do.

You can expand your profile with your current projects and, as noted, search for other professionals and connect on the site. Or check out the site’s job board – searches are free, postings are paid. Visit the forums and answer some questions to highlight your expertise, LinkedIn-style.

It never hurts to leverage a professional social network’s reach. And, at Whohub, get a little souvenir in return – your own, personal interview!

Jul 20 2010

BranchOut Yields Facebook Fruit

Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for professional networking, right? WRONG! New service BranchOut (link here) offers means to leverage your Facebook friends on a professional level.

BranchOut is an application built on Facebook that makes it easy to locate professional information about your friends and, if they have installed the app, their friends too.

Install the app and search a company name. The results show which of your Facebook friends do work there or have worked there.

BranchOut currently is offering free job listings directly to your network for 30 days, but intends to open up job listings to everyone for $30 per month in the near future. With both professional networking connection information and job listings, this app is sounding a lot like LinkedIn, Facebook-style.

I haven’t yet tried the app, so I can’t really provide more detail than available in the Techcrunch article that broke news of the service (link here). But, if it works half as good as suggested, this sounds like a great new way to get those Facebook friend connections to bear a little fruit of the green variety.

Jul 14 2010

Hot Damn! My Own iPhone App!

By George, I think I have finally done it! After splitting time between my Windows and Mac machines and iPhone, I finally got an Ad Hoc version of my very own, personal, AdvantageAdvocates iPhone app working like a charm! The app, created with the web tool AppMakr (link here) and aptly called Advocate, brings together all of my content streams in one nicely-designed package. If you enjoy Studio tech posts, Advocate tech article shares, my tech tweets and mobile app reviews, then this App’s for you! And it’s going to cost my favorite number: free.

I went through this process in order to complete the exercise of completing an app design, rather than to make a developer name for myself. When I ran into snags (and there were a few), I used AppMakr’s support forums and kept them apprised of glitches. To their credit, they responded beautifully, fixing issues and clearing the way for Luddites such as myself to finish the product.

Wanna see some screen shots? Here is the icon on the page:

Here is the splash screen:

Here is The Studio blog feed:

If you click on a link in that view, this is what you will see:

The little arrow above the image is the actual audio link to the NPR broadcast, preserved from my blog post! Click and the audio plays! (can you tell I am all excited?)

This is my Studio Tweets screen:

There are sharing links from each individual entry in all screens. This is the sharing link from a Tweet:

Studio Web includes my shares from Google Reader. I have a huge Reader library and like to share the great stuff I find in there. It is always articles with a legal, tech and/or professional bent. It’s like having your own personal tech / pro research assistant reading and pulling the cool stuff so you don’t have to.

An individual share entry looks like this:

The Studio apps button has all of my mobile app reviews from MobileAppOfTheDay. Here is the individual app entry for today (you would scroll down on the app screen to get all of the images and review):

It works flawlessly and really looks pretty darn great. I used my own artwork for the header image, icon image and splash screen, but AppMakr allows you to browse the Web or your own hard drive for images to use, with helpful tips on how to size them properly.

No one can say that creating an app for a mobile device is a quick and simple process. But I have to say that it can’t be that bad – if I can do it, anyone can do it with a little tenacity. AppMakr certainly makes the job a whole lot easier.

Stay tuned to the Studio for information on when the App goes live in the App Store. Next stop: Android App Creator!

Oct 15 2009

More Business For Your iPhone

It’s iPhone week this week. When isn’t it iPhone week? With new apps popping up hourly, there is always something new to try out.

Today’s offering is from McGraw-Hill Professional. MHP is offering access to its collection of business-focused ebooks through a dedicated ebook reader developed in partnership with ScrollMotion. Topics include career development, management, innovation, entrepreneurship, communication, finance, investing, and more. The first group of available titles includes two recent best-sellers, How to Make Money in Stocks by William J. O’Neil and Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty by Ram Charan. 

MHP plans to make more than 600 titles available before the end of 2009 and to expand into other professional areas.

Phillip Rupel, president of MHP, hits the nail on the head in summing up why this product is so exciting for them (and for anyone looking to market in the 21st Century):

“The audience for business books on the iPhone is an enormous untapped market, representing hundreds of thousands of commuters and other voracious readers who always have a smart phone in their pockets,” said Calvin Baker, ScrollMotion Chief Content Officer. “We’re thrilled to be working with McGraw-Hill to put their fantastic library of best-selling business books into the pockets of globe-trotting executives worldwide.”

That’s right, Phil. Hit ’em where the live (and work).

MGP’s ebook site is here. App press release can be found here.

Hat tip to ResourceShelf.