经济学人下载:自助,我的远大前程

Whom you know has always played an important part in the search for work, but social media are changing it from an art into a science. Last May LinkedIn became one of this year’s hottest initial public offerings, with its share price doubling on the first day of trading, because the social-networking site for professionals started in 2002 has become an integral part of the job market, useful for jobseekers and recruiters alike. It has around 120m members, more than half of them outside America and many of them professionals earning $100,000 a year and above. The website enables them to identify mutual contacts who can introduce would-be employees and employers to each other. Such personal recommendations are thought to have a better chance of success than applications or job offers to total strangers. BranchOut, a start-up launched last year which mostly deals with less exalted jobs, is trying to do something similar, using people’s networks of friends on Facebook to fill the jobs it lists.

人脉关系在找工作中一直都扮演着重要的角色，但是社会媒介已经把人脉资源从艺术变为了科学。去年五月，LinkedIn网站成了当年最火的股票首次公开发行，上市首日股价就翻了倍，这是由于这家成立于2002年的专业人士社交网站已经成了求职中不可或缺的部分。LinkedIn有1.2亿会员，一半以上的会员在美国之外，其中很多会员年薪超过10万美元，LinkeIn使得专业人士们能够辨别可以介绍雇主或雇员的联系人，一般认为这样的私人推荐成功率更高。BranchOut是去年新成立的网站，主要处理中低端的工作，但和LinkeIn一样也是使用Facebook上的朋友网络来推荐工作。

Using these social-media tools to find a job is just the first step. According to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, the site is increasingly becoming a peer-to-peer career-development network. In future, he predicts, members of LinkedIn doing similar sorts of work will “trade intelligence” about professional best practice with each other. “

用上述这些社会网络来找到工作仅仅的第一步。根据LinkedIn的创始人里德.霍夫曼所言，LinkedIn开始越来越像一个对等的网络。他预测，未来LinkedIn上同行业的人会彼此交换职业智慧。霍夫曼说，交换智慧也是一种不断提升自我的方法，比如说，可以（交流）如何能成为一个更好的产品经理。

The growing need for workers to keep upgrading and adapting their skills is one of the themes of a new book, “The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here”, by Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. She argues that the pace of change will be so rapid that people may have to acquire a new expertise every few years if they want to be part of the lucrative market for scarce talent. She calls this process “serial mastery” and notes that the current educational system in most countries, from kindergarten through university, does a poor job of equipping people for continuous learning. There is likely to be a wave of innovation in further education, particularly online, that will cater to this need in a more flexible, personalised way than the traditional degree or postgraduate course. For some people, this evolution will take place within a single firm offering long-term employment. But for a growing number of workers the trick will be to jump from one company to another to take advantage of changing skill shortages.

伦敦商学院的琳达.格拉顿写了一本书叫《转变：未来的工作已在此处》，不断增加的对工人持续提升自我和改进技能的需求是该书的主题之一。在书中她认为，变化是如此之快，以至于要维持稀有人才的位置人们每几年就必须拥有一项新技能。她把这一过程称为“序列掌握”，并且指出现行的教育制度，从幼儿园到大学，在教会人们持续学习方面做得很差。在继续教育方面可能会涌现一波创新的浪潮，尤其是网络教育方面，因为网络教学比传统的学位教育更灵活和自主。部分人可能会在一个公司待很久，这项变革（网络教育）就其间发生；但对越来越多的人来说，这项变革可能意味着利用变化的技能短缺、从一个公司跳到另一个公司。

According to Ms Gratton, people will also have to invest more in their personal “social capital”, which will involve three elements. First, they need to build themselves a “posse”, a small group of up to 15 people they can turn to when the going gets rough, says Ms Gratton. They should have some expertise in common, have built up trust in each other and be able to work effectively together.

根据格拉顿女士所说，人们同时也会在个人的“社会资本”方面投资更多，这主要涉及三个因素。第一，他们需要建立一个大概15人的小“团队”，在困境时可向这些人群寻求帮助；这些人应该有共通的技能，同时彼此之间建立了信任并且能够有效地一起工作。