The challenge of technology in your career

Is technology in your career essential? It is in my career and most likely is in yours.

Yes, as a blogger who normally writes about job search strategies and an entrepreneur who pretty much lives online, I enjoy technology. As a professional resume writer, I need all my tools to work and work consistently.

I expect many different technologies to work at the same time so that puts the bar pretty high. Let me tell you how today started and you will get the picture.

When technology breaks

I woke up this morning and the button plug-in that I use in several locations on my website was broken.

All the buttons were literally missing, yup, MIA. I discovered that when speaking with a new client yesterday as we determined which package would fit him best but I was busy and didn’t have time to investigate why all my red buttons were gone.

I almost started recreating them but decided to check the support tab for the plugin and someone had explained that if you deactivate the plugin and reactivate it, it should come back. It did. That saved me at least an hour of redesigning the buttons. I still changed them and added more information to the table, but less time than a total breakdown would have needed to reconstruct.

After that experience, I was working with my first client and I needed to use the thesaurus. Up until this morning, clicking on a word and holding the ALT key opened the thesaurus in Word. It didn’t today. I ending up closing the document and reopening it. It worked again.

Technology in your career isn’t going away

Whether you are a job seeker, employee, or entrepreneur, technology in your career is now the norm. You use technology on a daily basis and if you are not, you are left out of the loop. I trust multiple programs, tools, and services to work on a daily basis to allow me to do my job. You are going to find glitches in things working and it is frustrating. But if you slow down and ask questions, most technology crisis moments pass and you can continue on with your day.

How technology fits in a job search

Many of my clients are frustrated with the automated nature of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), those pesky online sites that make you enter all of your data for a second time even when you uploaded your resume previously. I can’t give you an option to avoid the ATS systems but I can tell you that you need to accept them as a part of the process.

At the same time, you need to be innovative and incorporate other job search strategies into your search. Use LinkedIn (more technology) to find people who work for the company and contact them to see if they would be willing to tell you more about their company. As long as you are polite, many people are more than willing to share a few minutes of their time telling you about their company. When you research this way, speaking to people about the company culture and understanding the values of the company, you will interview better and be more likely to land the role.

Face it, technology isn’t going away!

Embrace it and let it help you reach your goals. You will find that you may need to delve a little deeper, think a little harder to get things to work right but ultimately, you will do better. Last week, I added a new app called Calendly to my site. You can follow the link to Open the Calendly app or find a new widget on the bottom of each page on the website. Calendly allows both prospects and clients book appointments with me and find times that fit their schedule.

It was becoming increasing hard to get my clients to schedule their appointments. The back and forth of emails is difficult and often by the time a client replied, the time they selected was gone. Now if you are a prospect, you can select the 20-minute prospect call that fits your schedule or as a client, you can choose between 60 and 90 minutes. You don’t see my calendar, but you do see all of the available times that could be your next appointment.

What lesson did I learn from installing this new technology?

I learned that I need to block lunch and dinner and office time. Last week was the test run and I didn’t do that at first. I ended up with a total of 25 client appointments with 13 different people. Not everyone was booked through the app but the people who used it, scheduled advance and multiple appointments so the schedule filled up quickly. Now I learned to block time so that I can provide the client with someone who is alert and ready to write. I can also fit in time to walk the dog and do the hundreds of other things I do outside of client appointments.

Technology isn’t going away. Just learn to figure it out, call for help if you need to, and keep learning!

Image courtesy of SOMMAI at FreeDigitalPhotos.net