I originally published the following post on this blog in July, 2007.  It contains 5 links to helpful LinkedIn resources.

Judging by the traffic in my personal inbox, it seeems a number of my colleagues have just discovered LinkedIn.

Although I`ve had account for a few years, it wasn`t until I listened this podcast interview with Reid Hoffman that I recognized the some value of it.

If you’re new to the service, the folks at Web Worker Daily offer 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively

Guy Kawasaki has written a number of articles about using LinkedIn:

• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
• LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover
• LinkedIn and the Art of Avoiding an A**hole Boss

If you`re curious, you can find my profile here.

Here are 5 tips for job seekers:

1. Make it easy for recruiters to find you - If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, create one immediately.  Every recruiter uses LinkedIn.  If you already have a profile, make sure it is complete and up-to-date.  It is now easier to highlight specialities, publications, patents, etc.

2. Prepare your resume to land the interview – If a recruiter contacts you with an intriguing opportunity, they will want to see a resume.  Make sure you have one ready.  I know some people that haven’t touched their resume in years.  The last thing you want to do is to create one at the last minute.  Schedule some quiet time to update your resume.  Get in the habit of updating your resume a couple of times a year.  I often do it over the holidays.

3. Discover opportunities – If you’re actively looking for a new role, there are plenty of job boards on the web.  Here’s a few that I’ve found to be useful – especially if you’re looking for tech jobs in the Toronto area:

• Simply Hired
• Red Canary
• Eluta
• Quantum Technology Recruiters
• JF Talent

4. Research – If you find an opening that looks interesting do your research.  Both LinkedIn and Glassdoor are free resources that you can use to research an organization.  Using LinkedIn, you may be able to discover someone in your network that works for the organization.  With Glassdoor, you can get “insider information” about salaries and interview questions.

5.  Sharpen the saw – If you haven’t worked with a recruiter or been interviewed in year, you may want to sharpen your skills.  Check out the Career Tools podcast published by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne, the co-founders of Manager Tools. There are a bunch of tips on interview preparation, resume writing, and working with recruiters.  Be sure to go back in the archives.

Do you have a tip you’d like to share?  Leave a comment below.

Here are 4 resources for product management newbies:

1. Pragmatic Marketing – As far as I can tell, Pragmatic Marketing’s framework the industry standard for high-tech product management.  They claim to have trained over 60,000 product marketers and managers.  Even if you can’t afford the training, there are a lot of free resources on their website.  Be sure to sign-up for the free newsletter and magazine.

2. The Product Manager’s Desk Reference by Steven Haines – The most comprehensive book I’ve found on product management.

3. Toronto Product Management Association – If you’re fortunate enough to be located in the GTA, you should attend TPMA events.  They are inexpensive.  It’s a great way to meet product managers and learn about various companies.

4. The Cranky PM – Cranky offers cynical but hilarious insight into the “ugly side of software product development”.  Check out her book recommendations in the product review section.

Do you have any favourites?  What would you recommend to anyone interested in learning more about product management?  Post a comment below.

Here’s the abstract:

In this IBM® Redbooks® publication we describe and demonstrate Version 9.7 of IBM InfoSphere™ Warehouse. InfoSphere Warehouse is a comprehensive platform with all the functionality required for developing robust infrastructure for business intelligence solutions. It enables companies to access and analyze operational and historical information, whether structured or unstructured, to gain business insight for improved decision making. InfoSphere Warehouse solutions simplify the processes of developing and maintaining a data warehousing infrastructure and can significantly enhance the time to value for business analytics.

The InfoSphere Warehouse platform provides a fully integrated environment built around IBM DB2® 9.7 server technology on Linux®, UNIX® and Microsoft® Windows® platforms, as well as System z®. Common user interfaces support application development, data modeling and mapping, SQL transformation, online application processing (OLAP) and data mining functionality from virtually all types of information.

Composed of a component-based architecture, it extends the DB2 data warehouse with design-side tooling and runtime infrastructure for OLAP, data mining, inLine analytics and intra-warehouse data movement and transformation, on a common platform.

Thanks to the authors: Chuck Ballard, Nicole Harris, Andrew Lawrence, Meridee Lowry, Andy Perkins, and Sundari Voruganti.

Here are two links that provide the information you’re looking for:

IBM InfoSphere Warehouse features and benefits

IBM InfoSphere Warehouse edition comparison

And, if you’re not a fan of reading, then watch the Value Matrix videos.  These are short videos that highlight the various features of IBM InfoSphere Warehouse.

Like most knowledge workers, my friends and co-workers struggle with tremendous email volumes and balancing heavy workloads.  In my spare time, I developed a presentation that provides describes how I use Lotus Notes and GTD to become my productive.

Since 2006 I have delivered this presentation many times to very diverse audiences within IBM.  I’ve spoken to new employees as well as managers and executives.  I’ve explained my approach to software engineers, market intelligence researchers, consultants, and human resources specialists – just to mention a few.

Sometimes I’m able to speak in person.  However, most of the time, I deliver the presentation via webcast and audio conference because the audience is spread across North America.

I don’t have much time to actively seek out speaking engagements.  (Remember, this isn’t my real job.)  Instead, I usually receive a request to speak from an IBMer that I have never met.  They usually have heard of my presentation (or received a copy of the slides) via the internal “grape vine”.  I have received many of these “out of the (big) blue” requests – some from IBMers as far away as Moscow.

Last week, I delivered the presentation to my largest audience yet.   925 people registered for the webcast and 441 attended the live call.  In the post-event survey, 25% of the respondents rated my presentation as “Inspiring” (5 out of 5).  60% give me 4 out of 5.

I have always enjoyed public speaking – especially when I get to help people.  However, the biggest highlight is reading the personal “thank you” emails that land in my inbox after the presentation.

Are you going?

You can register here.

8 Reasons to Run a Customer Advisory Council

How to Run a Better Customer Advisory Council

I left a comment on her blog suggesting one more way to improve your customer advisory council:

Ask a few customers to describe how they use your product/services, what features they use (or don’t use), what they are planning next, etc. We’ve been doing this for years in our customer advisory council. It’s a great way to kick start discussion. Also, it builds a sense of community. Other customers are always interested in knowing how their peers use the product/service.