Organizational Clarity: LinkedIn connect with your Alma Mater part 1

Connecting with professionals and academic mentors is a key part of networking, LinkedIn is a great tool for this if you are comfortable with having a LinkedIn account. The LinkedIn account does expose you to everyone your places of employment, academic status and those within your professional circle. If you are okay with that then one suggestion I have is to link up with Professors from your Alma mater, this way now only can you give the appearance of that student who excelled in their classes so much that their professors actually like them! Ha! But also, you can reach out to them for questions regarding your degree field, mentor ship, or even possibly letters of recommendation.

This is an example of one of the messages I sent to a Professor on LinkedIn was:
“Good afternoon Professor

I was wondering if I could ask you for some advice. After graduation as I work on my job search, are there any keywords or areas I should be applying my focus in regards to organizational development?
Have a good day”

It is very basic however by sending a short message I was able to reach out, connect, and add a Professor from my Alma mater to my connections for my LinkedIn account. I was actually successful 5 times with his approach and it adds some variety to my body of connections. This is very important to have a connection list from various bodies of affiliation especially to potential employers who will then see that you an outgoing professional not just at one job or school but multiple.

And potential employers do search the internet for your LinkedIn account so building up your connection list is key. Keeping thinking variety, variety, variety and having a Professor or two from your Alma mater only adds that necessary “sparkle” to your profile, where nothing else can.

Linked In... nah.

There is a real good reason that while in school I am not on Linked in, it seems that everyone I worked with thinks its Facebook light. And posts pictures to their personal profile that belong on Instagram, not in a professional profile or environment. Then my special friends want to connect with me, but unfortunately linked in now works you are in a bind to use all the free services without a specific number of connections meaning that to use LinkedIn  I am forced to link up with these individuals.

Yes, they are friends but they do not understand the need for a professional image nor know that organizations frown upon such profiles, when associating with specific candidates I have tried to discuss these issues with a friend who was guilty of the professional futa poa their response was that they did not care what Organizations thought! But they also did not care how that decision impacted others as well. If employers frowned upon their profile then they will definitely assume (falsely) that I was unprofessional as well.

The proof was in the pudding during a job search last year I shut down the linked in account when searching for opportunities and that being the only change I made, I was not surprised when I received more emails and calls from prospective employers. Now, this not a scientific study but the evidence to us was plain to see. Without the linked in account, I was more professional and more of a mystery to organizations that did not want to chance to associate with someone who was in turn with people who were unprofessional themselves.

Although you do not want to hurt your coworkers or friend’s feelings nor do you really want to deal with an organization that looks past your resume and accomplishments but this is the real world and these Things actually occur reaffirming the old saying not to judge a book by its cover, but in reality organizations and people who hire still do that being the case that is why I shut off linked in so I do not give any organization a reason to judge me until that first live interaction and maybe you should too.

Organizational Clarity: Explanation of the OCAI Assessment presentation

To explain the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument even further there is a slide share presentation by Yeliena Prokhorova from Enterprise’s Strategy Department, called “Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI): Practical Training” each slide is chockfull of information. The slides go from “What is Organizational Culture?” to a short analysis of Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture this helps explains what Organizational Culture is, what the assessment is about and basically why you should take the assessment.

Even though the slide share usually requires a LinkedIn account to download you can still view the slideshow by clicking on the link below. I really like how in-depth and brief the presentation was detailed the sequence of tasks of the OCAI assessment, knowing what the OCAI assessment is about may change your answers a bit, knowing about it, the assessment or with anything actually beforehand changes the outcome of what a person may decide.  

In this case, it may change how the person answers the questions naturally to with some type of skepticism or more analysis of a question, than if there was no or was a lack of knowledge when taking the assessment.

Click upon the presentation here:

http://www.slideshare.net/annaskiteva/encolloquium