One of the big ideas for me in a personal approach to knowledge management is that I get to consider what's important for me and how I want to manage and use it. I get to look at my skills and preferences and consider how this fits with where I am in life, so why not apply this to the job search process.
Jordan Corn of Meredith Point Communications did a presentation on Personal KM During a Job Transition at the February 2006 meeting of the Philadelphia KM Group. Given that I live in Chicago, I could not attend this meeting. But I have an "inside source" who forwarded the slides to me. I'm posting the concepts with Jordan's permission.
Jordan looked at six areas where personal knowledge management comes to bear on the job hunt:
- Your leads: How do you organize the strength, status, next steps for each lead?
- Your options: What do you want to do, and what are you good at? How do you go about pursuing your options to turn them into leads?
- Your network: Who do you know? What is your strategy for reaching into your network for help, information, resources? What can you offer back into the network?
- Search resources: Do you know how to use the various job search and corporate database? Do you use them?
- Your artifacts: Keep track of emails, resumes, etc that you've sent with respect to jobs. How do they tie back to your network, leads and options.
- Your IP: What do you know, what can you do, what have you written and published? Do you know where former non-disclosure agreements limit you
From one viewpoint, this sounds a lot like standard recommendations for job hunting. But from the KM perspective, I see more inter-relationships between all these ideas. Whether it is truly knowledge, the important suggestion Jordan makes is that showing this kind of diligence in the job hunt will demonstrate to future employers (and clients) that you are organized and ready to go. His slides even close with the reminder to continue practicing PKM in that new job.
Note: If you want to contact Jordan about this, please let me know.