3 Online Tools to Help Your Career Development

Whether you’re employed right now or actively looking, you’ve probably experienced the toughness of job hunting. An invaluable way to value add to your own credibility, is to invest some time (outside of normal working hours) to fast track your career development and stay ahead in your industry. This not only provides you with increased knowledge but also networking and even possibly new business opportunities. There is a plethora of ways to utilise online websites and tools to help us move forward and here, I have picked out my 3 top tips that I consider invaluable in today’s day and age in staying ahead and proactively growing your career.

1. Go to a meetup, or two.

Meetups are becoming increasingly commonplace! If you haven’t come across this term before, it’s essentially an organised group of people that come together at certain times throughout the year to discuss a topic or industry.

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By far the most popular online tool to organise and participate in meetups is Meetup. Meetups are usually very casual, you pop up when you can and they don’t normally require membership. It’s not only a great way to meet fellow people within your industry or interest, but a chance to learn from others. For instance, there’s a group for Internet Marketing Strategists, Young Entrepreneurs in Sydney, System Administrators plus loads more!

Check out Meetup – they also have an iPhone app!

2. Attend an industry-related event or conference

Apart from casual meetups, larger scale organised events are all the rage and provides another opportunity to help grow your industry’s network and knowledge.

If you’re on the search for a new event/conference or want a more automated way to organise your next one, I recommend Eventbrite to be perfect for this. Eventbrite essentially automates the manual event booking and ticketing system. Bringing it online, you can create or select to attend an event, and choose how your ticketing structure should be – free, paid or a mix of both. Generally, the events on Eventbrite are larger and require an attendance fee, compared to the more bootstrapped, smaller scale events that appear on Meetup.com. Whether you want to attend the Annual Optometrist Conference, Google Analytics Training or the Females in Finance free networking event, Eventbrite is an amazing source to help elevate your network and industry knowledge.

Check out Eventbrite – they also have an iPhone and Android app!

3. Keep a tab on the news

If making time out to attend meetups or events is not something that you can not do too easily, keep in mind that there are still other ways to stay ahead of your industry.

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The power of the Internet means that anyone can now become a publisher and a voice. With this comes the wave of online (and offline turned online) news publishers, industry leaders and amateurs sharing and writing articles online. Stay ahead by keeping a tab on some of these online sources by subscribing to their feeds via a free RSS reader such as Google Reader, or following these publishers on social media. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin more, it doesn’t make a huge difference in this day and age, given that most publishers would most likely have a presence and share their articles across all three platforms.

Here are some great resources for innovation, business and technology that I highly recommend:

Taking some time when you’re on public transport or waiting in a queue to check your feeds is a great and simple step in helping enhance your career.

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