The Job Journal

Ok, so we can finally, officially announce the newest feature – The Job Journal. I introduced it last week, screen shots and all. Liz Handlin was so excited about it she blogged about it again and plugged it in the weekly Thom Singer podcast! We released this on Saturday (ahem, a couple of days early thank-you-very-much :))… so here is the final announcement on this blog. Only premium members will be able to see the Job Journal (aka, Job Diary).

Mouse over the Tools menu option and find “Job Journal” … click on that.

Click on the link to add a new journal record.

Fill out the form – this is all the general, quantifiable information about your achievement.

You can fill out the description box and call it good, or you can click on the “Problem/Action/Results” checkbox and split the description up.

Like I said, you can just use the description box, but to be “in the zone” you might want to consider this as a problem/action/results presentation (thanks to Kent Blumberg for that suggestion). Here’s mine (in case you can’t read it above):

Problem: Career coaches tell us we need to track important things in our jobs, which will help us understand our brand, prepare a resume, and have stuff for interviews. It’s really hard to track all of this, though, and really, who has a physical folder they keep for this… and who really keeps this in a word document?

Action: I gathered information from various coach/resume partners who had input on the job journal, and how it should work, and spec’d it for Rene/Liz. Worked with them to get the project done, looking nice, and functioning. Blogged about it.

Results Achieved: Increased the scope of JibberJobber more into the career management space with a new feature that is totally outside of the “job search” “job seeker” mode.

When you are done you can see the results of your entries in this format:

This is cool for various reasons. The most important, in my mind, is that it integrates with all of your other career management stuff. There is ONE place to manage your elevator pitches, your journal entries, your target companies, your network contacts, your career documents (resumes, cover letters, reference letters, etc.)… the list goes on and on!

Here’s some miscellanous reading on job journal thoughts:

• Addled & Accentuated by ADD in Academia talks about a different kind of job journal… that is, chronicling a job search. I’ve already blogged about my thoughts on that approach, but it looks like a good thing since it’s anonymous. Just note that Addled is doing something completely different than what I’m talking about here.
• The Painting Master has a “job diary”… again, something completely different than what we developed for you at JibberJobber.
• The Police Job Diary is a “My story of applications, forms and interviews for trying to get a job in the British Police.” … again, not the same thing.
• Here’s another job journal by someone from the Mathematical Association of America. Thoughts on a job search that was published in 93/94. It’s like a blog before there were blogs. Again, not the same thing.
• This Job diary is a project management ticket system for software… not the same thing!

And here are the things I found that actually support the JibberJobber job journal:

• Ramon Padilla writes Keeping your journal up to date? on the popular Tech Republic blog from CNET. This is a great article, even though it went up over a year ago.
• Liz Handlin, CEO of Ultimate Resumes, has thought about this before… here’s an article she wrote for JobsInStockton.com.
• Carol Anne Carroll writes about a job journal and says to not only log your accomplishments, but also promises made by your boss (!) I didn’t think about that. This is a really good, short article.
• The New Zealand Ministry of Social Development suggests you keep a job diary and even links to their cute little pdf that you can download.

Interesting, I didn’t find anything on the job journal from Monster or CareerBuilder.

So there you go, perhaps the most comprehensive post on a new feature release we’ve ever done 🙂 Now, time to get back to work!