The Future of Your Personal and Professional Online Identities
With the recent Microsoft-LinkedIn acquisition, I began thinking a lot about online identities and resumes. Where do I think this information is heading in the future? Do I believe that a product such as LinkedIn with a mediocre UI and spamming notifications/emails will continue to grow its identity network?
The more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that we are destined to have more and more fragmented online identities in the future. From a social perspective, most users have the majority of their personal info stored on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. What’s interesting about this personal info is that it is distributed amongst a number of social platforms and mediums. On Facebook, most people have stored some written and photo info. On Snapchat and Instagram, your personal info is expressed solely through photos and videos. Your friends and family get a much more complete view of your personal identity by interacting with you through all these different mediums.
What about your professional identity? Sure your personal info is stored in many different social networks, but your professional info is pretty much only on LinkedIn right? This has certainly been true for awhile and has led to the subscription recruiting business that LinkedIn has rapidly grown. However, an interesting shift has been occurring. Coders are increasingly posting their professional code and experiences on sites such as Github, AngelList, and personal websites. UX designers now need to have a personal website with examples of previous work, LinkedIn provides no value in this context. In the tech and investing worlds, people are focused on developing their professional info through public blogs which has the added benefit of being able to provide real-time feedback from your readers. More and more targeted job boards are being created for potential employees to sculpt their professional identities to match the exact jobs that they want.
In the new world of cloud hosting services and free design websites, it is easier than ever to start a blog or personal website. Furthermore, you can post videos/photos and other types of media to augment your professional info. The flexibility of these mediums allows your content to be shared on all of your social networks as well helping to get your professional info out there in a more personal manner to others in your network who can make “warm intros” for you. All of our professional and personal info is rapidly merging. LinkedIn still has relevance for the time being due to the immense network effect that is has built. However, in the future, it makes more sense to share your info over many different platforms so that your work can get real-time feedback and constantly be reviewed by others in your tangential networks to find the right opportunities for you. We all want to interact with others on a more personal level and have been doing so through social networks for some time. Right now, the shift is just in the early stages of evolving for our professional identities. Soon, we will be getting jobs through referrals of people who enjoy our online work and already know us well from the merging of our personal and professional identities. Who knows, eventually, even the steadfast resume may become obsolete.
