A few months ago, I met some of the principles of Sideskills.com at a local networking event here in Los Angeles. We randomly started talking, but I was immediately taken with their service and their message. They were seeking to make it easier for people to connect and communicate about their work and their careers. Like myself, they saw a disconnect between job search methods of the past and the those required for the world we live in today. Most of us are still using job search and career development methods first created in the 1940’s and 50’s. The world has changed greatly since then, but our methods seem stuck in the past.
This is true whether you are looking for work or looking to hire someone at your company. The old-fashioned paper resume should be an artifact on display in some some career museum, not the main method of selling your skills to a company, and yet, it is still the most common method used. Sure, these paper resumes get slurped into high-tech database systems which are supposed to allow companies to tease out the best candidates, but in reality, if the data going into the system is flawed, the data returned by these systems will be next to useless.
Enter Sideskills. This free service allows everyone to create a “Presume” (profile resume) that best suits THEIR needs, THEIR wishes and THEIR methods of building their career. The “Presume” is quite flexible and allows users to input not just their job history, but their job skills. Instead of simply listing that they were an Senior IT Tech, they can talk about their database development skills or their hardware troubleshooting skills or their programming skills. They can offer extensive examples of their work and link to recommendations from others.
Here at Career Opportunities, I often recommend that any resume first “tell a story. A resume shouldn’t just be a dry listing of job titles, dates and companies. Rather it should be a living document that tells a story about your career and, more importantly, tells a story about “what you do and how well you do it.” Sideskills can help greatly with developing just such a story.
Sideskills can be used to find full time positions, part-time, but also facilitates developing freelance work based around your skills. The system provides methods for people to “hire” you directly through the site. You can accept or reject a request and even use Sideskills to manage payment for this freelance work. I often consul people to try freelancing, even in the smallest way, as part of their career strategy. In many cases, they find that not only do they prefer freelancing, but freelancing also better fits their career wants, needs and desires.
Freelancing can also be very useful in earning income between your full time positions. As you know, it can often take weeks or months to find the next job when the current one ends. Freelancing can help bridge that gap so that we feel comfortable looking for the BEST job instead of desperately searching simply for the NEXT job.
Sideskills can be a great facilitator for one of my dreams for the world of work. I dream of a day when your work, your jobs, your opportunities come to you instead of you having to go begging for your next job. I want to turn the job search world on its head and help companies find great workers, not wait for the random resume to show up on their desk. The world has changed and our job search methods must change with it. By constantly showing people “what we do and how well we do it” we can help them to discover us and our talents the next time they need someone for their company and Sideskills can be a great way of making that happen.
I hope you will take a moment to check out Sideskills.com and start building your own “Presume”. You can find mine here — Douglas E. Welch. I believe that if enough of us make the effort, we can change the way we all find work — or that way the work finds us!
