Almostgotit.com

Some have called it “Resume 2.0.”   For others, it works as a universally accessible business card.  Whether you are looking for a job or running your own business, or simply want to control what people will see when they “Google” your name on the internet, you need LinkedIn.com. 

The whole premise works a little like the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” game — LinkedIn helps you build a growing group of “connections” — people you know and can personally vouch for — who form the “first degree” of an enormous “network” of people consisting of the friends and colleagues of your friends and colleagues. 

Sort of like the way networking works in real life, hey?

If you don’t have a LinkedIn.com profile yet, you need to build one, and here’s why: 

1. All of LinkedIn.com’s basic features are free, and LinkedIn will even search your email address books for you to find those first contacts.  You don’t need to build your profile all at once, either, but can gradually add and learn as you go.  There are plenty of online resources about LinkedIn.com to inspire you, too.
2. The more data you have online about yourself, the more easily search engines will find you.  It is more important than ever for anyone and everyone in the working world to have an online presence, and LinkedIn is a great way to help manage yours.
3. In addition to your employment history and links to your other business or personal websites, you can add ”recommendations” to your LinkedIn profile, which you solicit from your own contacts.  This is a fantastic opportunity to create a public list of quick, mini-reference letters, and one that is entirely controlled by you: nothing goes “live” on your profile until you’ve approved it.  
4. Sharing your LinkedIn.com profile is easy, and much less obtrusive than handing out resumes or business brochures.  You can even put your LinkedIn URL on a business card… a tactful way to assure that all the professional information you may want to share is easily accessible by anyone who wants it.  LinkedIn also provides a cute little badge you can add to your other business websites, linking folk back to your profile.
5. Managing your contacts is easy, too.   Once people are on your contact list, you will receive regular updates or “pings” whenever they make their own LinkedIn updates, which is helpful information and often fun, too.
6. LinkedIn is a great way to find former classmates and long-lost friends. People will inevitably find you, too: one quickly learns to gracefully ignore “link beggers.”  The strength of your network, after all, is based on the understanding that everyone’s ”1st degree” contacts are people she can honestly recommend.  It is perfectly appropriate, and tactful, to simply ignore any invitations from the high school boyfriend you never want to see again. Yes, really! 

Whaddya waiting for?  It won’t take long before you’ll be a true Insider, and then you’ll be ready for the latest in LinkedIn humor, too…

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These are from actual resumes:

(from multiple sources: if you know original source, please comment!!)

“Personal: I’m married with 9 children. I don’t require prescription drugs.

“I am extremely loyal to my present firm, so please don’t let them know of my immediate availability.”

“Qualifications: I am a man filled with passion and integrity, and I can act on short notice. I’m a class act and do not come cheap.”

“I intentionally omitted my salary history. I’ve made money and lost money. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. I prefer being rich.”

“Note: Please don’t misconstrue my 14 jobs as ‘job-hopping’. I have never quit a job.”

“Number of dependents: 40.”

“Marital Status: Often. Children: Various.”

“Here are my qualifications for you to overlook.”

“Responsibility makes me nervous.”

“They insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 every morning. Couldn’t work under those conditions.”

“[left my last job because I] was met with a string of broken promises and lies, as well as cockroaches.”

“I was working for my mom until she decided to move.”

“The company made me a scapegoat – just like my three previous employers.”

“While I am open to the initial nature of an assignment, I am decidedly disposed that it be so oriented as to at least partially incorporate the experience enjoyed heretofore and that it be configured so as to ultimately lead to the application of more rarefied facets of financial management as the major sphere of responsibility.”

“I was proud to win the Gregg Typting Award.”

“Please call me after 5:30 because I am self-employed and my employer does not know I am looking for another job.”

“My goal is to be a meteorologist. But since I have no training in meteorology, I suppose I should try stock brokerage.”

“I procrastinate – especially when the task is unpleasant.”

“Minor allergies to house cats and Mongolian sheep.”

“Personal Interests:  Donating blood. 14 gallons so far.”

“Education: College, August 1880-May 1984.”

“Work Experience: Dealing with customers’ conflicts that arouse.”

“Develop and recommend an annual operating expense fudget.”

“I’m a rabid typist.”

“Instrumental in ruining entire operation for a Midwest chain operation.”

 ((When one might consider hiring a service..))

From Time Magazine Commentary: “MIT Dean Marilee Jones Flunks Out” (May 4, 2007):

M.I.T. has lost an apparently great dean at a time when you don’t read a lot about successful university administrators. And, it turns out, she is one who had a personal as well as professional understanding of the stresses of our résumé culture. It would be a useful lesson for M.I.T.’s students if the gatekeeper who gets to award the golden credential of a degree from the world’s most prestigious technical institution is someone who lacks that kind of credential. It would say, “Don’t let it go to your head. An M.I.T. diploma isn’t necessary. In fact, it isn’t sufficient either. There are qualities that M.I.T.’s admissions office can’t sort for and its distinguished professors can’t teach. And as you go off to face the world with your M.I.T. degree, you may or may not have them.”

Instead of dumping her, M.I.T. might want to consider giving Jones an honorary degree. We’re coming up on the season when universities hand out these things with abandon, often to people who never saw the inside of a classroom at this, or sometimes at any, university. These folks get honorary degrees because they gave the university a million or two from piles so large you can’t even see the dent. Then she could go to the university health services and get another piece of paper stating that the résumé fib was the result of stress. She’s the expert on résumé stress, after all. And then let her go back to the work she apparently does so well.

Click here to read the whole Time article  (it’s short!)

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Turns out Marilee Jones does have a college degree: a BA in biology from the College of Saint Rose, a small Catholic College in Albany.  Along with Saint Rose and MIT, Jones was awarded the degree in 1973, six years before she first applied to MIT.

However, MIT now also claims that while Jones inexplicably omitted the Saint Rose degree, she not only claimed two other (unearned) degrees when she first applied, but later added the third (unearned) degree from Albany Medical College AFTER she began working for MIT.  This contradicts Jones’ own statement made last week, which still suggested she had no degree whatsoever, and only lied the once.

I’m going to need therapy over this.

My thesis has been than Marilee Jones lied, but that she is not a LIAR.  It makes all the difference.  Too many people have wanted to essentialize Jones, repainting her entire character and accomplishment with a single flaw: a tragic error which, nonetheless, I think I’ve argued is both understandable and forgivable. 

MIT’s chancellor believes he’s being charitable by describing Jones as “short on credentials but long on potential.”

An angry letter  published in the Boston Globe sputters:

In the eyes of this alumnus (1950 and ‘53), Jones has disgraced herself, dishonored a prestigious educational institution, and tarnished the reputations of the tens of thousands of MIT graduates for whose admission she was responsible. There is no substitute for honesty, most especially at a research institute whose main contribution to society consists of graduates imbued with the zeal to become productive citizens seeking the truth in whatever they do. How do we alumni now know what criteria have been applied for decades in selecting the pool of MIT freshmen each year? Jones’s “positive legacy” now needs to be carefully reviewed and amended appropriately.

Okay, look.  I have never said that it was okay for Marilee Jones to lie on her resume.  While it’s true that I carry big ugly cigars around in my purse now, it’s because they remind me that it’s okay to be bad every now and then.  But I don’t actually smoke them, because life feels a lot better when one is not throwing up. 

I do actually have a point here, and I want to say it one last time, very emphatically, before I’m quite ready to drop this whole thing, okay?

Memo to snotty Dr. MIT Chancellor and all the rest of the world:  Marilee Jones was FULLY credentialed.  Her legacy stands.  If this were a surgeon who lied about going to medical school (it’s happened!) that would be different.  A skilled mimic might actually become quite good at performing routine appendectomies, but if a complication arose,  his or her medical training would be called into play.  

But there is no “Dean of Admissions” school.  Jones’ 28 years of experience in MIT’s office of admissions *are* her “credentials,” just as surely as they would have been if she had not lied on her resume.

Nor is it at all helpful to suggest, as some (with degrees!) have done, that “had she gone to college, perhaps she would have taken a course in ethics.”    Since when did a course in ethics make one ethical?   Are we really now going to start making THOSE kinds of arguments?  If anything, I would hope that college-educated people, particularly those who have taken any philosophy, let alone any history, would have learned better than THAT.

I’m going to go lie down, now.  Tomorrow: new subject.

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