Professional Development Event Reflection -- An evening with Helen Partridge

Late in first semester I attended an evening with my university peers that was hosted by Helen Partridge, our course coordinator, and consisted of three speakers discussing their careers and giving us advice.

The first wasn't at all memorable. I remember the cheese and crackers more than any of the content in that speech. The second speaker discussed their work in a medical reference library. She mentioned it being difficult work, and not many users came through reference desk. I thought working in a medical-type library wouldn't suit me, as medicine had never been of big interest to me.

It was the third and final speaker that I found great disagreement. She pushed that we should join LinkedIn, and while it is required in this course, the idea of networking with this site is one that in hindsight (since writing the post extolling its value on here), LinkedIn is a terrible platform for this. LinkedIn invades privacy and forces people to spam all their email contacts with multiple emails inviting them to use the service (my father has been guilty of this, signing up and absent-mindedly clicking something to be sending out multiple emails to colleagues and family friends) and there have been accusations that LinkedIn sells people's data for recruitment purposes.

I just disagree with some of these web 2.0 concepts being pushed at these talks. Sure, LinkedIn is useful as a space to keep a resume (however that space is limited, and you can't customise the resume as much as you'd like to) but it's not the be-all and end-all of networking. You still need to attend events like this one and speak to people, grab a few wines and make a few pitches. I can tell you I didn't get my job using LinkedIn. As well, LinkedIn displays to the owner who viewed their resume, which while interesting to see which employers care, is also a breach of privacy to those having a look at other profiles. For reference, I accidentally clicked on a resume of someone I'm not friends with anymore. They now know I've viewed their profile, and there will be some tension based around that.

Social networking is excellent online, but it needs to happen in real life too. And I feel at some points in both this speaker's talk, and the course in general, this idea was left to the wayside for the latest Twitter thing, or LinkedIn profile.