Gary, Jason knows the rest of us as career professionals and though Jason always says he isn’t a resume writer / strategist, career coach etc, he knows the products, the field, and the resources very well. And thus, we all tend to forget how much we do know. Steve said it very well when he talked about Job Acquisition Boot Camp.

You will find a wealth of information if you follow the career industry around blogs, Twitter, and even Facebook. And you can’t go wrong by stopping by any of Jason’s blogs.

The blogger sounds like one of those resistant to change types that will find it not only difficult to land a job but might also find it difficult to keep one. Personal change management has become so important as what we know today becomes obsolete tomorrow in almost all aspects of our lives. Change must not only be embraced but met head on in order to survive in almost any career or personal endeavor. This, as you stated, will require multiple tools for handling the vast amounts of information that we not only create but assimilate and disseminate as well. JJ really seems to be a perfect place to start the organizational process.

If you look at the effort to launch a job acquisition strategy… self analysis (personality, skills etc), resume development, branding, marketing, interviewing, negotiating etc why it is almost like getting an MBA within a month, I equate it to Job Acquisition Boot Camp in about 2-3 weeks or less. I spent twelve weeks in boot camp and another four weeks learning combat techniques while in the Marine Corps.

To me or you and Barb … Job Acquisition is not complicated as we do it every day of our lives and deal with the finest professionals in our tradecraft and have them available to us for references. We’ve been building these networks for years as we learn from one another. The newly unemployed jobseekers are dealing with the psycho/social aspects and are not often ready to leap into the the search. Cripes you know all this stuff… but we have to continue to remind everyone they deal with about the resources and tools available… when they find out a tool like JJ exists I hear “dag on, how would I have found out about these cool toolsthat will allow me to concentrate my efforts on the things that get me where I want to go… like back to work.” It is a marketing problem and it is the nature of using the product we are marketing… you don’t know/care about the existance of this particular product/service if you have no foreseeable need for the item or service. To create this awareness one must continue introducing it to our customers on a regular basis by reaching out to those through the non-traditional markets and piggyback on to products/services that are in demand and valued. don’t look at me I don’t have the answer. But it is a fun exercise

The trick, though, will be be (and has been) sifting through the muck to find the tools that really are value-add, or critical. There are hundreds of tools out there, all claiming to be the best thing since _____, but really, many are just newer versions of the old (or, powered by other technologies).

As a job seeker, I want to find a few of the most important tools and use them… not become an expert on all the stuff out there.