Goal, aim, score

"The best search engines are other people." - Eric Schmidt, Sun Microsystems

Okay, you're connected to 50+ people. Now what?

How can they help you, and how can you help them?

The first level of career collaboration happens at the information-sharing stage. Fair enough, but WHAT kind of information do you share with your connections?

It depends on their career goal. If you know what they are trying to achieve in their career, then you will know fairly easily what kind of information they need (unless they work in a field so arcane or exotic that you have no idea what useful information they need, or where to find it!).

Similarly, perhaps your connections want to help you by sending you information, but then you have to make sure they know what YOUR career goal is. If your career goal is not stated on your LinkedIn profile, one of two things may happen:

1. Your connections will send you information, but it will not be relevant to you or it will not help your career
2. Your connections will not send you any information, since they don't know what your career goal is (people usually don't send unsolicited material, they know that working people already receive way too much emails in a day)

In a future posting, we'll examine how goal setting is the very first step in properly managing information for career advancement purposes.

But for now, perhaps it is enough to remember the critical sequence of Goal, Aim, Score: without a goal, one cannot aim. Without aiming, one cannot score.