This topic has been interesting. I have learnt people have very different ideas on how we should be building an authentic professional online profile. Whereas I believe we should be mainly focusing on our professional accounts like LinkedIn and monitoring our social networks for potential employers, Georgina focuses on building a professional network primarily through blogging. I really enjoyed this post, I had never thought about how your passions and creativity could help influence employment – which I now realise was very naïve of me.
It’s important to get the right balance between professionality and creativity. As I concluded in my first post in this topic you need to think what are people going to see when they Google me? If you know what industry you are going to be employed in you need to tailor your image to them. But if you don’t, then you need to show your open minded and willing to try your hand at multiple things, this is were having a combination of professional profiles, social media accounts (that are appropriate) and blogs can be the advantage that sets you aside from everyone else.
However, managing all of these accounts is very time consuming and if not kept up to date can actually damage your professional image. To some extent, as Todd points out, our professional profiles should stay in cyberspace. We should not let them take over us having fun online. But at the same time is this realistic? We are constantly connecting our personal lives with our professional ones by the means of social media. But this is such a bad thing? It means that we can build them without making a conscious effort, but we have to be careful not to damage our image at the same time. In conclusion, with employers increasingly turning to the internet to research potential candidates, professional image portrayal online has never been so important. The authenticity of your online professional profile depends on it.
Here's to the Wonderful World of blogging... 