That selfie may just make or break your next job application.
Whether it’s LinkedIn or employers checking Facebook instead of references, we all know that social media and work have been crossing over for years. Our Working Team took it one step further with one of their recent scan hits.
The piece is: Personal Branding in the Future Workplace: A Crucial Skill for Employees and Recruiters…
It suggests that “as we move from a knowledge economy to a social economy, companies have begun to weigh applicants’ “personal branding” skills just as heavily as they weigh core job capabilities and traditional qualifications.” We are already seeing some companies experiment with this idea. For instance, “Salesforce.com, for instance, recently advertised a position that listed ‘a Klout score of 35 or over’ as one of the key ‘desired skills’ for a community manager position.”
Is this just the tip of the iceberg? It suggests that students will need to develop skills in personal branding, defining their “value proposition,” develop their personal network , and curating their online reputation as key jobs requirements of the future. Will universities of the future be ready – or capable – of meeting these needs?
The University of Houston Foresight program is exploring the future of Student Needs 2025 and Beyond for the Lumina Foundation, a leading higher education foundation with a goal of raising higher educational attainment levels from 40% today to 60% in 2025. We are tasked with providing Lumina a view of how student needs are evolving over the next dozen or so years. Put simply, could changes in student needs alter the equation of what higher education will need to providing by 2025 and beyond?
To map the student needs landscape of the future, the Houston Foresight program has assembled a team of two dozen faculty, alums, and students organized around six teams exploring evolving student needs related to living, learning, working, playing, connecting, and participating. We are using Houston’s Framework Foresight process to produce forecasts of student needs and identify the implications and issues they suggest for higher education.