How often do you review your personal information management strategy? Do you have such a strategy? What information do you have available about your education, training, skills, knowledge, work experience, and interests? Do you have it readily at hand? How do you organize it? How secure is it?
In today's environment, where social networking trends are evolving quickly and the flow of information continues to increase, how does your information compare with that of others? Can you differentiate and distinguish yourself?
Some interesting things to think about.
Hall (Careers In and Out of Organizations) promotes the idea that the emerging career involves pursuing one's own "path with a heart," it is driven by the person, and it can be subject to frequent changes in shape and direction. He views this as different from the traditional model, where career choice was a single event or a terminal process started by making a decision about career in one's late teens or early twenties.
Early in the creation of EverFile I thought a lot about the idea that people experienced "inflection points" where something (external event or internal epiphany) caused them to react, take stock, re-package and re-present themselves. My view was that EverFile, the personal tool, would be there to help them not only deal with the inflection point but prosper from the resulting new database and outputs they would develop.
It seems that the experience of a 22-year-old who is about to graduate from college is quite different from a 5- or 10-year work veteran who needs to react to a lay-off, leave a horrible boss, deal with job boredom, or address the need for a lifestyle change.
This leads to a question about where knowledge nomads actually come from. Recent articles suggest that burned out high performers, those dealing with life-changing family events, or those who lose jobs have reached personal inflection points and may see the possibility to become knowledge nomads.
Is there a fundamental assumption arising at his point in the history of work (at least in developed nations) that most graduating students about to enter the workforce are essentially knowledge nomads -- whether they know it or not, because that's the way society is going to expect or force them to act?
EverFile solves a problem for knowledge nomads: fragmentation of career, school, and personal records across separate, non-compatible information management tools.
With EverFile everything is in one place, in one comprehensive, easy-to-use system, available by subscription. No more searching for papers or trying to remember names or dates. Information is easily entered or uploaded into structured file areas.
The heart of EverFile is its docking utility. A subscriber docks her/his system to exchange information and build a joint record with organizations such as employers, clients, partners, schools, or associations. When it is time to move on the subscriber undocks and takes a copy of the joint record within her/his portable, personal EverFile record. At the next port of call the EverFile System is docked again. Over time a cumulative record is built.
The EverFile portable, personal record enables the subscriber to manage information over her/his lifetime in order to present skills, experience, achievements, and contribution value.
Todd L. Pittinsky, Harvard University, and Margaret J. Shih, University of Michigan, use the metaphor "Knowledge Nomads" to present the idea that mobile workers are capable of building meaningful commitments to and relationships with organizations. This is different from the view that sees mobile workers as itinerant wanderers, moving frequently with no commitment to the organizations where they work or conduct other activities. Pittinsky and Shih re-conceptualize the relationship between worker commitment and worker mobility and put it in a positive light.
Reference
Knowledge Nomads: Organizational Commitment and Worker Mobility in Positive Perspective. In American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 47, No. 6, 791-807 (2004).
In the DVD "The Secret" the authors, physicists, metaphysicians, visionaries, and psychologists who are interviewed talk about positive intention and visualizing things in order to materialize them, to attract them into one's life.
EverFile is a tool designed to help knowledge workers visualize their career development and materialize opportunities. How does EverFile help? A subscriber can develop a detailed and cumulative personal record over time, making it far easier to see her or his overall experience level, skill set, and domains of interest and competence. When it is possible to see a greater view of the landscape, it is possible to be clearer about the goal and the course to follow. This is useful for visualizing and attracting positive, life enhancing events and situations.
Will the portfolio career (a number of part-time jobs that combine to be the equivalent of a full-time position) become the norm? Will all workers need to formulate and maintain portfolio careers in order to make a living as companies continue to shed traditional roles and responsibilities? It's possible.
In this scenario having a few resumes won’t fully help an individual take advantage of various interests and talents and exploit opportunities that come along. Personal presentations must be more and more ad hoc, easily generated and crafted to respond quickly to a change or new opportunity. What is needed is an expandable, structured database of personal information that can serve up a relevant resume or portfolio almost instantly. Then the individual is prepared and agile.
Randall Hansen, Ph.D., founder of Quintessential Careers, talks about the portfolio career, which involves working in a number of part-time jobs (including temporary, freelance, contract, or self-employed) with different employers or clients that combine to be the equivalent of a full-time position. Portfolio careers offer greater flexibility, variety, and freedom, but they generally require a tolerance for risk and a high degree of personal and professional organization.
Hansen writes, "Portfolio careers are usually built around a collection of skills and interests, though the only consistent theme is one of career self-management."
Another sign that the population of independent knowledge workers is growing comes from recent statistics published about microbusinesses, firms that are individually owned and do not have employees.
Steve Strauss is an expert on entrepreneurship and small business. He writes in a December AllBusiness online newsletter, "This new generation of technologically savvy, Internet-connected entrepreneurs has the advantage of creating businesses with a worldwide reach, and they can offer countless goods and services without having to hire staff and incur the expense of employees."
Jim Hopkins writes in USA TODAY that in 2006 the number of microbusinesses reached almost 20 million, up 27 percent from 1997. The number of companies with employees rose only 7.3 percent during the same period, to 5.9 million. Microbusiness receipts rose to $887 billion in 2004, and 7 percent annual growth puts the total at $1 trillion in 2006.