Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

Career

Backing up your LinkedIn profile & contacts

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Picture taken on my IPad – 2 of me!
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I updated this post in January 2022  to reflect changes LinkedIn has made.

Every 6 months I back up my profile & contacts. I suggest you do too, you’d really hate to lose all this hard work you’ve put in, wouldn’t you?

Remember, you do not OWN LinkedIn and should protect your investment of time.

1. Go to your Profile Picture at the top of the page and click on the little down arrow

2. Select SETTINGS & PRIVACY

3. In left column, Scroll down to DATA PRIVACY
4. Select GET A COPY OF YOUR DATA

5. Select what you want to save. You should at minimum choose PROFILE and CONTACTS.

They will email you the files.

Save it 🙂

The profile backup is a PDF that you could use to replicate all your text if needed.

Sleep well knowing you’re hard work and connections have been saved.

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Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly email for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

He is the author of A Field Guide for Career Practitioners: Helping Your Clients Create Their Next Move and the recipient of the 2020 Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from National Career Development Association.

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Honoring All Jobs

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Far too often, the message delivered to young people is that “everyone needs to go to college” to be successful. Evidence of this assumption surfaces everywhere. High schools put up signs with seniors who have been accepted into colleges. NPR publishes articles that say the only downside to getting a college degree is not finishing the degree, picking the wrong college, or choosing the wrong major. As a career practitioner this strikes me as odd. Not only is this detrimental to our economy, but it is disrespectful to all those people whose skills and gifts lead them toward trades / crafts occupations. We need all jobs to be honored in this country. It is clear this is not often the case.

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There are 10’s of 1000’s of jobs that do not require a college degree that are wonderful choices for people, and YES, make very good money.  I know many people who have great jobs with no bachelors degree, from a great career in the radio business, to auto mechanics, HVAC, and many others. Businesses in the trades / crafts areas are desperate for bright people who can problem solve and produce quality work.  Why do we shuffle EVERY student who is bright in math / science to college?  If they want to work with their hands and produce goods, why wouldn’t we make it OK for them to choose a trade?  I think of the German model of education that provides two different tracks in high school allowing bright young men and women who want to work in a craft or trades area to get the training they need… and it is OK to do this, not second class like it is here.

If you have not read Shop Class As Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford, you should.  He has a PhD in Philosophy and was working for a professional journal writing abstracts, but was always drawn back to his work on motorcycles and the problem solving skills it took to do that job. Matthew is one of many people who probably was given one choice in high school. “You are bright, you are going to college.”  Matthew argues that our country has failed an entire population of people by continuing to cut shop classes and offering high school technical education for those people that can’t go to college.  (noticed I said “can’t go to college” which is loaded with all kinds of implications.  Because they do not LOOK like they are college material?  They don’t learn best by reading? Because they are poor?… this list goes on and on.)

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Engaged vs Being a Member

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As I prepare for my round table presentation at the National Career Development Association conference in Long Beach in a couple of weeks on “How to create a more vibrant State Career Development Association”, I find myself contemplating on the importance of professional development. Regardless of where I have worked, I have been professionally involved with associations.

I was active in the Association of College Unions-International (ACU-I) while in graduate school and into my career as a Director of Student Activities. I presented at regional conferences and even wrote an article published in ACU-I comparing student governments in New Zealand & Australia to the American model. (This was a great way to rationalize a gap year after grad school backpacking / hitchhiking around New Zealand and Australia).

In my short stint in the Office of Tourism for the State of Maine, I presented to a number of groups in the tourism industry. As a high school guidance counselor, I was involved with the Maine Vocational Association (MVA), Maine Counseling Association (MeCA), and Maine School Counselor Association (MESCA), at Board levels and even as president of MESCA. Now I am a two-time past president of Maine Career Development Association (MCDA). I have learned so much from all of these.

But this is not simply about “being involved” for my own extraverted self. Here is why you might want to consider being more involved with your professional association(s).

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My favorite career bloggers

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LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, conferences, journals, and more continue to come across our desks as ways to do professional development.  (See previous blog on this topic).

So how do we manage all this information?  I found that there are key people out there writing about topics meaningful to me and that if I follow these key people, they will either sift through the volumes of topics and synthesize for me or they write topics I am interested in.   

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I also use feedly.com to organize various blogs & news I want to follow.  This is an aggregator application which compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources. I have three categories, CAREER, NEWS, and SOCIAL MEDIA. I can then add people / organizations that I want to follow under each category.  Currently I follow two news feeds, one social media marketing feed, and six career feeds.  This does NOT have to be overwhelming.  Keep it simple.  Less is best.  Based upon the input I received in a different LinkedIn groups, I’ve actually added a couple to my feed.

By using Feedly I can log into one place and get a quick snapshot of current blogs, articles, and news.  I
can skim the list and if there is something that looks interesting, I read it.  If I like it, I share it on LinkedIn or PeakCareers Facebook, or Twitter.  This allows me to manage my time and if I had all of these coming into my email I would be overwhelmed.  If I had to actually go out to each person/organizations site, I would never go.  

Here is my list of bloggers I follow.

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Creativity, Card Sorts & The Conversation

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Creativity is one of the reasons I enjoy using a variety of “card-sorts” in career coaching with Boomers & with Colby College students.  There are no answers printed out from a software program,  no one way of using the cards, only the conversation it generates.  I LOVE it!

If you have not used card sorts in your practice, I suggest you explore using them.  If you use them now, keep up the good work!

I recently met with a first year college student who was all confused about choosing an occupation.  She was so “hung up” on choosing a specific job that she practically stumbled all over herself, “I thought about being a lawyer because my mom is one, then going into medicine, then being an architect…I even went to a month long architect camp, and I’ve thought about sociology.”  I have a magnetic dart board in my office with various occupations on it and I asked, “Do you want to choose a career by throwing the dart?”  She actually said yes and was literally ready to choose by throwing a dart!  She hit Land Use Planning and immediately wanted to know about that job.  

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Why we all need to “fail forward”.

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Failing forward is an entrepreneurial philosophy embracing and learning from failure.  Thomas Edison, Wayne Gretzky, Albert Einstein, and Jim Peacock have all had many great failures.  The key is to “fail forward”…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again.

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In a recent Inc. magazine, they wrote about a “Failure Church” where one company encouraged its employees to proclaim their failures out loud. Some failures were small, some big, and after the person announced their failure all the attendees applaud wildly! Pretty bizarre but they all said it feels good to get the failure off their chest and feels even BETTER when their fellow employees applaud.

It actually encourages employees to try new things.  Failure Church is a support group with failures that, too often,  we brush under the carpet like the gambler who only tells people when they win.  Other cultures encourage students and people to work hard and to keep trying even when you don’t understand something.  This process is filled with failures. But with hard work, perseverance, and some risk taking, failures often lead to successes.  It is really what you LEARN from the experience that counts.

“The key is to fail forward…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again” 

This fear of failure can pervade our work life by not trying something new and our personal life by living a stodgy boring life because you don’t try anything new.  Happenstance Learning Theory tells us we can discover opportunities by taking action and “creating luck” which I like to call “intentional serendipity”.  A person taking my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) class recently posted how her friends dad was told he’d never work in the animation field and was let go by Disney to open a small startup called Pixar.  He encouraged his daughter and her friends to always “fail forward”, take risks, learn from them, and keep going forward.

Take action and use “intentional serendipity”, take some risks, and be open to what you discover. College students declare majors and then discover they “don’t want to do that”, which can be perceived by family and friends as a “failure”.  We need to encourage students to embrace change and to try new things such as info interviews, involvement in activities, volunteer, internships, etc.. and fail forward.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.... you need to “go for it” when you want to improve your business, better yourself, or help your clients/students learn.  Embrace failure, but “fail forward” learn from it, improve on it, and keep taking action. Wake up and love what you do taking chances and enjoying the serendipity that life brings us.

What risks will you take?
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If you like this topic of discovering opportunities through failure and embracing intentional serendipity, you might want to check out this 5 week, discussion-based, online seminar for career practitioners.
Career Advising Using Happenstance.

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Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly email for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

He is the author of A Field Guide for Career Practitioners: Helping Your Clients Create Their Next Move and The Adventure of Finding Me in New Zealand. In 2020 he received the Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from the National Career Development Association and the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association’s Professional Contribution’s Award.

Sign up to receive my TOP 10 TIPS WHEN WORKING WITH AN UNDECIDED PERSON. You will also receive the career practitioner’s weekly email on a variety of career topics, industry news, interesting events, and more. (Sign up)