Career Change for Academics

More of my colleagues are noticing the new feature on LinkedIn, called Endorsements, which began appearing as an option in September of this year.  By now, a good amount of air (and electronic words) have been used in discussing it.  Most of us either love it or hate it, and apparently LinkedIn plans to keep it.  Here’s a fairly balanced article on it from Forbes, that includes a number of useful tips on actually using it.

I suggest that you read the article and consider your options, especially that of selecting your skills and listing at least ten?

Can I further suggest that you list what we might call your “motivated skills”?  They’re  the ones you prefer using, not the ones you have to struggle to make yourself get started on doing.

That way, you’ll be suggesting to readers of your profile (including recruiters), that they keep you in mind when they are looking for someone to help with the particular skills that you most enjoy and will probably continue improving.

You do not want to list skills that you struggled to learn in grad school, that you did to pass the course or write the thesis, and would have to re-learn before you could use that skill at an employer’s level of expectation.

Just thought I’d throw in a note about the Kindle mania that is at least temporarily causing some authors to lower their book prices – and you don’t even have to have a Kindle to save money.

For example, all of Martin Yate’s Knock ‘Em Dead series of career books (on job search, resumes, cover letters, etc.) have now been made available on Kindle, and they’re on sale at Amazon for $1.99 each – but only until December 15 (five more days from now).  That’s not a bad price for the books that are normally priced around $10 each for paperbacks.

You can find the Kindle versions of Yate’s books here, and you can find all the versions here.

If you want to download Kindle’s software to read on your PC, try this link. (I actually prefer to read nonfiction on my larger PC screen.)