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FROM: JUL-AUG 2008 ISSUE | BY MINDY ABRAMOWITZ
A commitment to ongoing professional development demands a proactive and focused approach. Designing a program that incorporates the elements necessary to meet your goals is critical. And professional development resources are plenty – the trick is to harness the resources at your disposal to address the needs you face at each stage of your career. You no doubt use the Internet to receive PD updates and invitations, to register for courses, and to report your CPD hours. Supplement your PD by taking advantage of online tools.
Customize Your Curriculum
PD Net serves as a wide and varied repository of articles, seminars, courses, and other learning products that you can organize and bookmark to create your own library of material. It allows you to build a personalized curriculum and maintain records of your progress.
Once you have the blueprint to guide you, extend the scope of your learning by following up with some ancillary reading. For example, you might read a particularly useful or informative article that you discovered in PD Net’s Recommended Resources section and wish to keep abreast of related articles and news. You can by reading the originating website’s updates in a RSS feed reader.
A RSS feed reader (or news reader) makes it simple to collect, read, and store all sorts of online articles. It aggregates, sorts, and stores syndicated web content until you read it. It allows you to subscribe to news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs.
Popular free web-based feed readers include Google Reader and Bloglines that are accessible anywhere. Once you have set up an account in the feed reader of your choice, you can start subscribing to online content. New reading material from a variety of sources will begin to accumulate in one location, the feed reader, where it will be stored until you have a chance to read it, at which point you can either save or discard the item. Some feed readers can even make suggestions based on your existing subscriptions and those of users with comparable interests.
Although not all web content can be aggregated by a feed reader, it is easy to identify the content that is available for retrieval by a feed reader. Look for an orange RSS icon in your browser’s address bar or in the body of the website, beside the links to its feeds. Its position depends on your browser.
Collect and Review New Opportunities
You can also use a feed reeder to help you look for employment and volunteer opportunities by subscribing to websites that feature relevant job listings. While this method of searching for employment is neither exhaustive nor reliable enough to entirely replace customary job search techniques, it can leverage results from other efforts like browsing your regional association’s employment referral service, working with an employment recruiter, or good old-fashioned networking.
You can tailor an RSS job feed to collect job listings to meet a number of criteria such as industry, function, and location. Job postings meeting your criteria will appear in your feed reader to be read at your convenience and in anonymity until you submit an application or contact a prospective employer directly.
Some employment websites provide unique content, others compile listings from a range of external sources. Determining whether the website can provide search results as a feed involves a bit of research. In some cases the job search results will prompt you to save the search in a number of possible formats, one of which is a RSS feed. In other cases the orange RSS feed icon will appear somewhere on the page. A search on Craigslist, for instance, displays the feed icon in either the address bar or menu bar, depending on your browser. Click it to subscribe to search results corresponding to your parameters.
Start by subscribing to similar searches on different websites – you will quickly form an impression of the employment market and the types of jobs that are available in it.
RSS feeds offer an organized and robust means of managing a vast collection of information and of extracting what is relevant in an efficient manner. They furnish you with an indispensable amenity in your pursuit of professional development.
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