Despite being plenty bright and intelligent, she’s long struggled in school. In fact, kindergarten was the last time she had excelled. She had a wonderful kindergarten teacher who encouraged her to explore as a learner, and that was an environment in which she thrived. Once she encountered the more rigid expectations of grade school, her interest faded and a seemingly endless struggle ensued, until she finally graduated from high school (by the skin of her teeth).

After a year away from school in which she realized how much money it actually takes to live the way she’s used to, she started in a community college degree program in Veterinary Technology. And everything changed because she was excited about what she was learning. She studied hard, went to professors for extra help, became part of a study group with experienced students, and found herself getting good grades.

But it’s not the good grades that I’m most proud of, I now realize. It’s all the possibilities that she’s opened up for herself by learning how to learn. People who learn well can do just about anything. They can respond to economic adversity by acquiring new skills. They can pursue their dreams by learning to do what’s needed to achieve them. In short, their lives become an expanding web of possibilities. And that’s the exciting kind of life I’d wish for anyone to have.

So, becoming a good student isn’t about the GPA. It’s about opening the door to amazing opportunities. That’s why I’m such a proud father today!

Over time, I hope this blog will become another good resource for learning about the online community organizer role, as I will be posting about my experience, and my learning curve, going forward.

clipped from fastwonderblog.com Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories.

So, one decision I made was to let this blog include any and all content I felt like blogging about. I know people who have different blogs for different kinds of content. That makes sense, and if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog it’s probably best to be targeted in what you write about, so readers interested in that content will find your blog valuable.

But I’m not doing this for the website traffic and I couldn’t commit to keeping up with more than one blogs, such as one about work topics and one about things of personal interest to me. So I made this blog a blend that reflects all of me — all of my interests, whether professional or personal, the serious and the silly, the carefully considered and the random tidbits. I’ve decided I like it this way.

Now, my career has changed direction and blogging is suddenly part of my official job, internally in my company. So, now I have several internal company blogs I write in, leaving me with less work stuff to write about here (unless I choose to cross-post in both places, which is a possibility I’ve considered). And I really want to blog publicly about what we’re doing in my company with social media. So, do I start a new blog solely for this, or do I mix those posts in here?

Well, I’m still working this out, but the path of least resistance is to just to stick with putting all my external blogging in here. That means that my professional posts in here will shift from call center topics to social media topics. If you’ve been coming here for the call center content, you’ll find less and less that is new of interest for you here. If you come here for the non-call center stuff then you won’t see much change. If you’re interested in social media, then I hope you’ll find this blog to be a rich resource of ideas on that topic.

If you have any thoughts on it the direction I should go with this, please share them with me!

So, apology and excuse offered, I’m shutting down and getting out of the house.

So I went for it, and happily the hiring manager thought I was a good fit for it, too. It’s with the same company, actually: I’m moving from ICMI, which is a part of United Business Media (UBM), to UBM’s corporate entity, specifically in the People and Culture Group (formerly known as Human Resources, formerly known as Personnel).

So what’s the job? UBM Wiki Community Manager. We’re going to be rolling out wiki software and other collaboration tools across the entire enterprise. My job, in a nutshell, will be to make sure we get value out of this investment by encouraging and helping people to use it.

Lots of ideas are already running through my head — I can’t wait to get started. But I have lots of work still to do in transitioning my responsibilities for ICMI so everything carries on smoothly. But I sure am looking ahead with anticipation!

For a recommendation to be useful in a practical way to both the individual recommended and the potential buyer/employer, it needs to answer one main question first: why? Why would you hire him/her instead of someone else? Why would you engage his/her services? It’s because… tell them exactly why.

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My earliest memory of a career ambition was my wish to be a milkman. Yes, we still had milkmen when I was very little, driving around in their trucks before dawn and leaving glass bottles with the foil top in an insulated box outside the door. I wasn’t so fond of school at that age, and I found out that college (more school) was not required for a career as a milkman, so that sounded good to me.

Even when I was in college, I was under the impression that I got to make a choice about my career. I simply had to decide what it was I wanted to do and then go about making it happen. In fact, that is what happened, and I embarked on my first career, as a teacher. And when I wanted to try something else, I went to grad school, thinking I would get to choose once again.

And perhaps I could have chosen, if I had been truly determined to do so. But that’s when things really began to shift. Since that point, what I have done, the jobs that I have held, have been much more determined by circumstances than by my careful planning.

I’ll date myself again: remember the video game, Frogger? A frog attempts to cross a busy highway by jumping from one moving car to another. If you fail to land him on a car he gets flattened, instead. Well, since graduate school my career path feels like a game of Frogger. And I suspect for many other people that is the case, too.

As an adult with a family to support, I did not have the luxury of choosing exactly the job I wanted after graduate school. I leapt on the least worst option and was happy to have a paycheck. In that position, I kept my eye out for other opportunities in the organization, and hopped around a bit to roles that looked interesting or promising, but constrained by the chance of openings and availability.

At one point, my prospects looked bleak due to factors completely beyond my control, so I looked around for a safe place to jump. The call center looked like a possibility, although I didn’t have any experience there and wasn’t sure what I would have to offer in that environment. Certainly not the place I ever planned to land when I was in college or even graduate school, but I hopped in.

Luckily, I landed in an analyst role and fit right in. I ended up with a great boss (Jay Minnucci), who taught me just about everything I know about running call centers. And I had no idea where my career would go after that — I tried to plot it out, but there did not seem to be very many options, so it was looking like I had hit a career dead-end. I liked my role, but I didn’t want to do it forever.

But the Frogger career path came into play, again. My boss left to become a consultant and my career situation deteriorated without his support. When he called to tell me there was an opportunity at ICMI (my current employer), I leapt once again into the unknown. And just in time — within a year my old analyst team was disbanded and half were let go.

I truly enjoy my current role as ICMI’s Membership Director, but just like anyone else, I wonder what the future holds and what I might like to do next, since it’s hard to imagine I’ll have this exact position for the rest of my life. But at this point in my career I’ve realized that I don’t really get to plan everything out. It’s not as simple as deciding to be a milkman and then driving that truck for the rest of my life. For one thing, the job of milkman has long ago disappeared, so all of them had to leap into something else whether they liked it or not.

Wonder where the next car that I land on will be going? Sure hope I don’t miss and get smushed!

There are many reasons why LinkedIn can be ideal for maintaining and possibly developing the loose ties or weak links you have in your network.

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Young urbanites, learning that dirt can also be soil, are using their Carhartts as originally intended.

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Many professional bloggers are essentially piece-workers, getting paid by the post. And speed is the key to success, since the first blogger who breaks a story gets the glory. Miss out on being first, even if it’s the middle of the night, and the rewards are much smaller. It’s a high-pressure profession, and now professional bloggers are asking whether it’s worth the health risk.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

I blog because I like it, and there’s no money involved, and certainly no external pressure. I was rather obsessive about it when I first started, but over time I think I have found a good balance. I think I’ll keep it that way.