Hello Diigo - Goodbye Delicious!

After reviewing for some while the development of delicious.com since it was sold on by Yahoo, the University of Cumbria Careers Service has decided to use diigo.com as its main website for useful links.  Our links will be stored at the specific url http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers.  Here's a quick screenshot to show roughly what it looked like earlier today:

Hold On - What's All This About?

If you're not familiar with the likes of diigo and delicious, they are both social bookmarking sites.  Anyone can sign up for an account and use it to save web references that interest them - although in the case of diigo, you can do much more, e.g, annotate or highlight text within the referenced webpages.  A bit like Google bookmarks, they have the advantage that, unlike IE favourites or similar, you can view them from any computer.  An extra advantage over Google bookmarks is that anyone else can view them  too, if you have allowed public access to your bookmarks.

Because of the vast explosion of careers and job information on the internet, many University Careers Services make use of them to reference the vast amount of online information likely to be relevant to their clients.  For example, the University of Cumbria currently has 2055 web pages bookmarked on diigo - far too many to even consider putting on a "Useful Links" section of a website. Most services use delicious or diigo but there are others, and the University of London have their own dedicated bookmarking site, Careers Tagged

The key trick is that the use of tags means that it is possible to pick out links according to a key theme or area of interest, rather than browsing all of our links to find if there's anything useful to you.  So you get  exactly those weblinks that are relevant to your needs - more or less.  You can see the precise tags below each web reference in the screenshot.

OK, So How Do I Use This Stuff?

If you visit http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers you can pick out the tags that will interest you and search on them in the box at the top (next to Careers Adviser's Public Library).  Or simply type the first few letters of a word you want to search on and diigo will bring up all the possibilities in a dropdown box.  Alternatively just click on any tag beneath a weblink or in the "Top Tags" list and diigo will bring up all the bookmarks bearing that tag.

Then click on the link to bring it up in your browser, or use the 'preview' facility to get a taste of what's on that page.  If you have too many links using one tag, you can narrow things down by selecting another.

You can also retrieve links by modifying the main link to the uoccareers section of diigo in a url web address.  So http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/cv will bring up all the links tagged 'CV' and  http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/internship will bring up all the stuff on internships, etc.

Useful isn't it?

Sites like diigo offer you a vast amount of information at your fingertips and weed out a lot of the chaff you would get by just googling the themes you want.  It's surprising then that most students report that they have not heard of this sort of site, let alone used them, or set up their own accounts.  All we can say is - give it a try!

University of Cumbria students can find a more detailed guide about using diigo on the Jobs&Careers tab on Blackboard (see 'Plan Your Career' section).  If you should find any dead links on http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers - or if you would like to suggest some new ones - please feel free to contact us on careers@cumbria.ac.uk

FAQ: Where can I get practice with numeracy, aptitude and personality tests?

We recently researched some Frequently Asked Questions for a forthcoming guideline to help our students and graduates.  Unfortunately there were so many, we couldn't include them all! So this is the first in a mini-series to cover at least some of the ones that got missed out.

The trouble with tests is that no employer will be able to show you exactly what test they will use because it would render the test invalid.  Obviously previous knowledge of the exact test will skew candidates' results.


So where can I get practice with numeracy, aptitude and personality tests?

Fortunately, the increase of careers materials on the internet has meant that a large number of sample tests have become freely available.  We have collected some of the links on our section of the Delicious website and in particular you could try http://www.delicious.com/skillzone/psychometric or
http://www.delicious.com/skillzone/tests

For an overview of the types of tests most commonly used in graduate recruitment, plus some further samples, start with  http://www.prospects.ac.uk/psychometric_tests.htm  Also useful for a broader overview of psychometric and personality tests used in a variety of different occupations is http://www.careergym.com/psychometric_glossary/psychometric_test_types

Even if you end up facing a test you've never heard of, don't press the panic button before you start.  There will invariably be one or two trial items at the very beginning of the test to make sure you understand what's required.

Help for Newly Qualified Teachers

The job situation for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) has slowly been worsening over the past few years and even highly skilled leavers are now having to fight hard to find the right opportunity in some parts of the country.

With this in mind we have used our account on delicious.com to gather together a 'stack' of key links that are likely to be helpful to NQTs in their search for work. You can view them at http://delicious.com/stacks/view/INRflp and we hope they help our own and other students to break into the teaching profession.

Incidentally, you can view stacks on an increasing number of key related themes by looking up http://www.delicious.com/stacks/skillzone

Using Social Networks to Advance Your Career

Here you can find some information about using LinkedIn, Delicious and Twitter, the main social networks Careers Advisers at the University of Cumbria have found useful for careers purposes.

We don't currently use Facebook. Although Facebook can be used for careers purposes, we tend to feel that Facebook is more of a leisure facility. There are also reports that employers sometimes reject candidates on the basis of their Facebook profiles.

On the other hand My Space and YouTube have been successfully used by musicians and performers trying to make themselves better known.

LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com is becoming the most important social networking site for students and graduates who want to advance their career opportunities. A recent survey at the London School of Economics showed that, although students were initially more aware of Facebook, many have turned to LinkedIn as the main way of extending their career and professional network.

LinkedIn is a sort of Facebook for professionals but as such there are some major differences:

• Because of the professional context, there is no place for the frivolity that can be found on Facebook, such as drunken photos or dating activities
• You cannot link to any other LinkedIn subscriber unless you do actually know them, or know someone who knows them
• You can however look for jobs, research company details and the career progression of the people that work for them. You can also ask for personal recommendations from people you have worked with.

A helpful introductory video is available at: http://learn.linkedin.com/students as well as a number of pdfs which our students can access on the Blackboard virtual learning environment.

You’ll see that much of the above material is heavily US influenced, but there are already 24 million LinkedIn accounts in Europe and there are plenty of people from the University of Cumbria you may find it useful to link to when you create your account.

Delicious.com

http://delicious.com is the ultimate resource for “useful links”. Following the massive rise in the number of careers websites over the past decade it has become very popular with University Careers Services looking to organise weblinks that are likely to be useful for their students.

The University of Cumbria is no exception and we have collected the links we feel may be useful to you at http://delicious.com/skillzone

http://delicious.com/skillzone/nursing will bring up all the sites that are likely to be relevant to potential nurses, while http://delicious.com/skillzone/cv will bring up all the sites that have been tagged “CV”.

Of course this is just the start of the story. You can also look for more links on Delicious outwith our skillzone area. You can open your own Delicious account and use it to start storing your own favourite “useful links”. There are a number of tutorials on www.youtube.com that will help you do this. Another similar resource is www.careerstagged.co.uk from Careers Group London.

Twitter

Twitter isn't just about celebrity gossip. As well as telling us what Stephen Fry just had for breakfast, Twitter has become a very important source of information about job vacancies and careers information.

Examples of some currently active job feeds are http://twitter.com/EducationJobUK or http://twitter.com/charities_jobs

University of Cumbria LISS-Careers follows a number of useful job and information feeds at http://twitter.com/uoccareers We also subscribe to an automatic daily newspaper, the LISS-Careers Daily at http://paper.li/uoccareers The result is a "mash-up" of stories produced from our tweets and those we follow, including items tweeted from this blog.

You don't have to follow any twitter feeds to be able to view them all on http://twitter.com Twitter can get complicated but it's easy enough to start up your own account so you can follow tweets and tweet yourself. www.youtube.com contains plenty of beginners' and advanced tutorials on using twitter for those who want to get more involved.