A few weeks back, my office was going through a search process for hiring interns. One resume item caught my eye: under special skills, one applicant had listed his familiarity with various blogging and social media platforms.
Three years ago, the last time I had a job search, I could not have boasted in an interview – let alone in writing on my resume – about my expertise at looking up old high school friends, joining online groups, and staring at videos of portly adolescents staging lightsaber duels. In 2009, that’s an asset.
Via TechRepublican, I stumbled across a Path101 post that discusses this very phenomenon – and draws what I think is an apt parallel. While there are workers who refuse to learn these tools but recognize their importance, there’s a generation of college graduates who use social networks every day the way other people use telephones – meaning, according to Path, that in five or ten years knowledge of certain online environments could become as standard among job seekers as knowledge of standard word processing software is today.
That also puts a short life span on the “social media expert” occupation that many in the consulting world are looking to carve out as their own.
Jim Eltringham 