If you’re not a part of a social network, you probably don’t spend much time on the Internet. The phrase "social networking" has been around so long, it can’t even be considered a buzzword anymore. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn… they all take up a large portion of many people’s lives. LinkedIn is an example of a site that attempts to link social networking with business networking. A new site called Workology takes a similar approach.
I decided to give Workology a try. The site seemed easy enough to use, and they let me get started quickly, only asking for a name and e-mail address. Here are a few features that I found useful:
1. You get a personal "mini site" with your own URL. Here you can outline qualifications, experience, education and recommend other "experts" among other things. Mine is pretty bare right now, but you can check it out here.
2. The "Knowledge Market". It is a big discussion group where you can post jobs or ask advice.
3. Job matches (if you want them) based on keywords that you choose. This is very similar to the service that sites like JobScore and Vitruva provide.
There are some problems with the site. Workology is in the beta stage right now so understandably there are a few bugs (like when trying to recommend "experts," the button to add someone does not show up). As far as I can tell the site is not very active right now as well. I posted a discussion question in the early afternoon and received no responses into the late evening. However it may have been the content of my question, which raises another important fault. I asked if there were any Americans around the site, as I quickly realized the site is based in England and most of the members seem to be from there. While it is open to anyone, it is most likely that the site will grow from its England base. It may take a while before the site is really relevant to American workers.
Overall the site looks very good and is easy and fun to use. It may become a useful tool to connect and find jobs in the future, but I would wait until it is more heavily used.
This is a guest post by Steve Krager.
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