What’s your Employability Score?
Hey okay, I want to talk to you a little bit about this thing I'm calling an employability score. It will help you to understand this if you visualize in your mind a dashboard of all the different things that you've done throughout your career. All your experiences, where you went to school, all the different things that you've done, all listed out one after another on a dashboard. Now before we go further, I want to take a step back. You and I, every day, leave behind a digital footprint. What I mean by that is anything we do online, says something about ourselves. If you go to Amazon and you buy something, that says something about you. If you go to Facebook and you make a post, you like a comment that says something about you.
Your Social Influence – Klout
Now as you have the vision of the dashboard in your mind, I also want you to think about something that's called Klout. I don't know if you've ever heard of Klout but it's a measurement of your social activities.
Klout assigns you a score between 0 and 100. That score is a measure of your social influence level. So the higher your score, the more value is assigned to you. The Klout system is basically saying hey, this person is a big-time social influencer.
What Klout looks at (to generate your score) are your activities online. It looks at what you like, what you don't like, what you posted, how many retweets do you get.These are all signals the Klout algorithm uses to compute your score.
Your Social Influence – Crystal
Another company called CrystalKnows that's Crystal K-N-O-W-S, sends it's bots out into the internet and finds of your digital footprint. It brings back everything it finds about you and puts it into its proprietary algorithm. From there, it creates a personality profile for you loosely based on the DISC assessment.
Between Klout, who's already calculating your level of social Influence, and CrystalKnows, who's able to put together a personality profile, it only seems natural to me that at some point someone is going to develop an algorithm that will begin to tie all these currently disparate algorithms together into one algorithm (that rules them all! – I wish I would have thought of that during filming).
This new algorithm will assign you an employability score. There was a famous quote by someone and honestly, I can't remember who it was, so maybe it's not really all that famous, but the quote goes something like this; Everything around you is mathematics and everything around you is numbers.
If you look at your career like that, like math and numbers, what is it aspects of your career could be converted into a potential number?
For starters, think about where you went to college or if you even went to college at all. Based on your answer, a numerical value could be assigned. For example, did you go to college? Yes. One hundred points for you. But let's say you went to Harvard. Well, that's worth 500 points. Didn't go to college? Zero points.
Hopefully, you see that the point here is, you can assign a score to an experience or anything that you can think of along your career progression. Other examples, the average time you stayed in a position or the average time you stayed with a company can be assigned values.
Achievement Points for Your Career
Careers very much parallel an Xbox game or any video game for that matter. As you start any video game, you start with the most basic player that there is. Everything you do from that point on either gives you skill points or experience points. Your career is really no different.
If you think about it, you go to college, you get out, and you take your first job. You have nothing at this point because you started at the beginning. Everything you do from this point forward, every role you take, every experience you have, every skillset you gain, you are earning experience (credibility) points if you will.
Those “points” are what help you move from one job, one role, or one company to the next. So you can see just from that logic, it doesn't take a big huge leap, especially with the amount of data that's available on each and every one of us out there, to come up with something down the road that's going to resemble an employability score.
Creating the Employability Score
Now let's think about job descriptions. Five to ten years down the road from now, I think, not only will they say “here's the title” but they could also specify the minimum employability score required. Think about that. Why am I bringing this up? Well just this past week in the United States, our Congress voted against a resolution that would have helped us maintain our internet privacy.
Because of this vote, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will soon be allowed to sell your personal search results to companies. Your personal search results. To companies who could potentially hire you. Of course, initially, companies that will purchase your search results are only going to purchase them because they're going to want to sell you something. Obviously, the more information they have about your online activities, the more specific they can be with targeting ads, coupons, commercials, or whatever, at you. Can you say Minority Report?
Trying to entice you to buy something sounds like it might be okay, right? But what if your internet search history was actually used as a part of an employability score? How would you like to have your personal search results out there for everybody to see? That's why it's extremely important for us to pay attention to our digital footprint because within five years, someone will develop an algorithm that will pull together all of our digital footprints and they will create an employability score. Or something very similar to it. With that, we'll call today's blog done.
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