Is LinkedIn on your Job Description?

You own your LinkedIn page, it is not owned by your employer,  even though you might use it whilst at work. 

However your employer must encourage you to use your LinkedIn every single day.

Why?

Because you are helping your employer to get noticed. And if you are helping your employer to get noticed, they may benefit from social exposure and word of mouth recommendation, which in turn means more sales and job security for you and your colleagues.

Most LinkedIn profiles are left to gather dust, showing poor profile photos, badly written headlines and summaries and a sparse experience section. As well as an incongruent list of skills and insignificant educational achievements. 

That’s why employers MUST add LinkedIn to your job description and train you to create a great profile and to use it each and every single day.

My mantra is ’LinkedIn 20-minutes per day’. Even before you open your email.

But what do you do there every single day? Well here are 7 things you can be doing in your 20-minutes per day.

1. Grow your connections. The more connections you have the easier it will be to connect with potential buyers of your employer’s products and services. Connecting to colleagues is a must, so is past fellow students, teachers, professors and yes even family, including your Mum (Mom) and Dad.
2. Send personal invitations, not the standard ‘LinkedIn’ boiler plate invitation. It really sucks when you do that. You are basically saying, I don’t really care about you, but I want to connect with you.
3. Send personalised thank you emails for those who have taken the time to click the accept button. It’s just polite to do so.
4. Share an update, which could be an interesting article you’ve read on Pulse (LinkedIn’s news channel) or a simple status update about your efforts at your employer. Be mindful and careful about posting unauthorised company news though.
5. Read your home newsfeed and like, comment or share interesting posts by your connections.
6. Make sure you join industry and client groups on LinkedIn. Be actively discussing, commenting and liking. Avoid posting your company blog or news, boring!
7. Write recommendations for your colleagues, suppliers and clients. Also endorse their listed skills.

A lot of people commute to work by train. You can do these 20-minute activities on your mobile. LinkedIn’s mobile app has been getting better and is still improving and soon most of us will be more active on the LinkedIn app compared to the desktop.

And remember you don’t have to do all these activities every single day. You can just do a few each day, the important thing is consistency and making sure you form a habit. After all you have a habit of reading your emails each day and often first thing each day, maybe even before you get out of bed. You might as well make it a LinkedIn habit each and every day. 

Just 20-minutes per day!

And in case you are totally maxed out during the day, I am sure you have 20-minutes in the evening, when the kids have gone to bed and you are watching mindless TV.

So here’s the 20-day challenge for you. 

Let’s see if you can spend just 20-minutes per day on your LinkedIn for the next 20-days, so that you can start to form a habit.

And whilst you’re at it, share this article with your colleagues and the HR department. Let’s get them all thinking about this and consider including LinkedIn on everyone’s job description.

As an interim step you can ask your boss to add it to your objectives for the next 6 months, so you can both evaluate your performance for this. You know what they say; ’What gets measured, gets done’.

Let’s see which employers have the courage to add LinkedIn to job descriptions. And I’m not just talking about Sales and Marketing Professionals, I mean every single person in the company including the cleaner.

Wishing you massive success with your 20-day challenge and do let me know how you’ve got on.

@stayingaliveuk

Have You Ever Studied Ants?

I was recently in Greece and with temperatures in the 30’s, it's best to take it easy lie by the pool and observe the world around you, OK maybe people watch sometimes!

However even people watching gets boring, so whilst resting on my sun bed in the shade, I started studying the floor beneath me and to my amazement saw this fast moving highway of very small ants. Now usually in hot countries ants are very big, but these weren't and that made them all the more interesting.

As I studied them, I noticed that although their movements appeared random, many were carrying food crumbs back to their colony, which had entrances along a short section of a raised plant border wall. One by one several of these very efficient creatures were collecting these crumbs from all around the pool and taking this very important food stuff back to their colony.

By the way none of them actually ate the food on their journey back, which if you saw how far they were travelling, you would not have blamed them if they had. Now if this was a human doing this, ’collecting free food’, the chances are that it would have been eaten by the time they had completed the journey back.

I also noticed to my amazement that with larger crumbs 2 or even 3 ants would work together to carry it, as it was too big for just one.

This gave me an idea, next time someone in my party came back with cake at tea-time, I would use one of the crumbs and give those hard working ants a challenge. A super large crumb to see how they would manage this.

Have a look and see what happened, I recorded it on video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChZGj9BEQRk

What did I learn?

Ants are ’Team Players’, one ant who passes the crumb and checks it out, decides to start moving it and immediately another ant starts assisting, and then another and another until I counted 12 ants moving a massive crumb. Nobody said, ’that’s not my job’ or ’I’m busy doing something else, or ’its not in my job spec’. They just did it because they know that one ant will never manage it on their own and therefore they just started helping out. The ants who joined in just happened to be passing by, they weren't called from the colony, didn't get an email and nobody checked their calendar to see if they were available.

For me it was just the best possible demonstration of excellent team-work. Wow if business could learn just one lesson from ants and if employees and HR teams could stop their compartment thinking, what a different world we would have around us.

Each morning a few scouts would be up early looking for anything that they might have missed and as the day moved on and more holiday makers sat around the pool, eating and drinking, more ants came out scouting the neighbourhood. Obviously they had developed their knowledge that more crumbs would be available later in the day.

Accordingly more troops were scouting in the afternoon.

So here are 3 takeaways from this story:

1. Be open to helping out anyone in your wider community or organisation, without being asked for help, ’Just Do It’.
2. If there is a big task or project happening, go and ask if you can help out. They probably will say ’no thanks’ but make sure you insist, even if it is to make the coffee!
3. Teach your kids or colleagues the power of team work and share the story of ants. I found this great film on YouTube, which will explain and share the story of ants and their incredible behaviour. Watch it together with your kids or colleagues. Teach them how they can adopt the same approach in life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-gIx7LXcQM

Success!

Have you Embraced 'Social Learning'?

The term 'Social Learning' in current days, doesn't mean the same as it did when Bandura did his experiments in the 60's. It encompasses a theory that individuals enjoy learning in a social context, when our learning is discussed and debated.

After all 'everyone has an opinion', and this means that we actually learn more about a topic, news story, event, training intervention, when we can reflect on it and interact with it.

Learning & Development (or training) at school and at work has and will continue to be the holy grail for all education professionals. We're always looking for better ways to engage students and drive a change in human behaviour.

Trouble is millions of $'s & £'s are spent every year to achieve these objectives. And it's so painful to see when the results don't match the spend.

Think about it. The world is at War somewhere in the world and always has been. Consider the economic conditions in most countries currently. If education, training and development works, we would not be in this state of flux. But really think about it. We as humans haven't evolved as much as we like to think. Our nature is closer to animal instinct then we give ourselves credit for.

If we are truly sophisticated and used more of our frontal lobe, which is the part that separates us from animals, then surely we wouldn't be carrying out wars, we wouldn't have an issue with CO2 emissions and global warming, the economies would be running smoothly.

Surely it would? Am I mad? I don't think so, I believe I am quite a rational kind of person, who can usually see both sides of the argument and yes I do see the best in most humans, because after all they should be educated, rational, intelligent and loving beings. And you also know that this isn't always true, but we have to start somewhere and I start with everyone's good until proven otherwise.

Anyway where is this leading us towards?

Oh yes, 'Social Learning'.

Consider the success of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and the latest kid on the block Pinterest.

What do they all have in common? Any idea?

Humans connecting with humans, that's the common thread through all of it. So why is this so important at this time in the world? It has allowed millions of us to have a voice, to discuss, comment and debate on news stories on major world events and on individual stories and their life events.

My theory and its only my theory and it makes perfect sense to me is as follows.

Remember the war? Which one you will say, because there have been so many.

Well let's just talk about World War II.

The War brought people closer, they looked out for each other and they knew more about each other's lives compared to any time in history. Well it's nearly 70 years since the ending of that major war and ever since then we as humans have drifted apart and have become more unconnected.

Social Networking is not an accident or a happy coincidence, it isn't either the creation of a Harvard University graduate or silicon valley's entrepreneurs. Their invention would never have worked if there wasn't the appetite for it.

The old saying ’people buy people first’ applies in social networks too, not just in business. We like to connect to like minded individuals or people that interest us and maybe we can learn something from them!

And yes we do like to learn, we are always learning, the brain collects millions of impressions every day, without us even realising it. If we don't learn we will die. As humans we have an inherent need to grow. But when we think about learning we think about, classrooms, teachers, exams, pressure, stress and recall many unpleasant memories.

We don't perceive consciously that reading tweets, Facebook posts, articles, blogs, watching YouTube videos as learning and of course it is, you are learning all the time.

The learning methodology of 70-20-10, is showing us that actually we learn 70% on the job or in our daily lives, 20% from our colleagues or family members or friends and 10% formally, so that's when we sit in a classroom, either at school or in the workplace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtdHZQ2VXhE

The development of social networks, will and is changing the world of learning forever. Millions of teachers and trainers are having to adopt these new technologies as part of their delivery methods.

This requires the teacher / trainer to become proficient in these new tools and get their own knowledge of these networks up to scratch. After all their students are using these to learn, so now we better embrace these too and make use of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H4RkudFzlc#!

Those that do, will succeed in helping to change the landscape of learning for themselves and students alike. A more engaged student will mean a more connected world and a more connected world will mean a world with more compassion and understanding for our fellow human.

Success!

Human Capital Checklist for UK plc

From the Ninth Annual People Management and Development Barometer Report Highlights of recent CIPD surveys

Resourcing strategies and objectives Fifty-six per cent of survey participants reported having a formal resourcing strategy. The top three resourcing objectives were attracting and recruiting key staff (79%), enabling the achievement of the organisation’s strategic plan (59%) and meeting the future skills requirements of the organisation (47%). However over half of the organisations surveyed said the recession was having a negative impact on their resourcing budget for 2010/11. More organisations said that they would be focusing on developing talent in-house and retaining rather than recruiting talent this year compared with last year. There are some indications that efforts to reduce recruitment costs will be made as more report they are reducing reliance on recruitment agencies.

The good news is fewer organisations said they would be implementing a recruitment freeze in (22%). More (65%) expected to continue to recruit key talent/niche areas (53%). Nevertheless the outlook appeared much bleaker for the public sector, where particularly large proportions are anticipating recruitment freezes (51%) and reducing the number of recruits they hire (68%).

The volume of applicants for vacancies has increased. Seventy-six per cent of employers have noticed an increase in the number of unsuitable applicants and 32% reported that there were too many suitable candidates to choose from. At the same time, 41% reported that competition for talent was greater as the pool of available talent to hire had fallen sharply. As in previous years, the majority of turnover is attributed to employees leaving voluntarily. The voluntary turnover rate reduced substantially in the manufacturing and production sector (2010 survey: 2.7%; 2009 survey: 7.7%).

Employee attitudes and the recession In all, 19% of respondents say it is likely or very likely they could lose their job as a result of the recession, a slight increase from the previous quarters figure of 18%. There is no change in employees’ attitudes towards the labour market, with just 10% believing it would be easy or very easy to get a new job if they lost their current job. The proportion of employees saying their employer has made redundancies as a result of the economic downturn has fallen very slightly to 30%. There has also been a continuing trend by employers to cut back on training. Pay freezes also continue to be more widely reported, with 43% of respondents saying their organisation has introduced a pay freeze, up from 40% last quarter. Only 21% of respondents are currently looking for a new job with a different employer. However, over a third (37%) would ideally like to change jobs within the next year.

Key findings Senior HR people identify the top three organisational priorities to be managing costs (73%), growing the current business (65%) and focusing on customer need (54%). The proportion of employers that expected staff levels to increase against those that expected them to decrease improved to +12 in the three months to December 2010 from –3 in the three months to December 2009. However, employers are less optimistic about the medium-term outlook. The proportion of staff that expected staff levels to increase against those that expected them to decrease is +1 in the 12 months to September 2011.

A year ago the CIPD forecast that 2010 would be a better year for jobs than either 2008 or 2009 as the UK economy gradually began to emerge from the deepest and longest recession since the Second World War. By this they meant a relative improvement, with employment falling by less and unemployment rising by less than during the recession. In the event, however, 2010 turned out to be a much better year for jobs with the number of people in work increasing and unemployment starting to fall. Despite this they expect 2011 to see a return to falling employment and rising unemployment though we do not envisage the deterioration in labour market conditions being anything like as severe as during the recession. At the same time they expect that, as in 2010, average earnings will increase by less than price inflation resulting in a squeeze in workers’ real incomes. Our longer-term forecast in turn indicates that labour market conditions will remain weak in 2012 before starting to recover more robustly in 2013.

The most frequently cited causes of recruitment difficulties were lack of specialist skills (67%). Between 2009 and 2010, the proportion of organisations reporting retention difficulties decreased from 69% to 55%. Labour turnover for all UK employees averaged 14%, down from 16% in 2009.

Types of jobs and pay prospects for 2011 They feel that even if 2011 turns out to be a ‘jobs-light’ rather than a ‘jobs-loss’ or ‘jobs standstill’ year, the chances are that the bulk of any new private sector jobs will continue to reflect the experience of 2010, with part-time and temporary jobs in the majority. Moreover, the bulk of workers will feel a squeeze in their living standards, with pay rises still relatively modest against a backdrop of higher prices for many essential products and services, higher taxes, the availability of credit still tight and the likelihood of falling house prices.

Even on the relatively more optimistic OBR jobs forecast, unemployment will act as a tough constraint on pay rises which are unlikely to outstrip price inflation. 2011 will, like 2010, be a year of real pay squeeze for most workers, especially those in the public sector. A ‘jobs-light/pay-tight’ year is probably the best we can hope for, which will make for another challenging

Key human capital benchmarks (UK averages) Recruitment and staffing Labour turnover 16% Organisations making 10 or more staff redundant 33% Organisations experiencing recruitment difficulties 68% Organisations experiencing retention problems 55%