Have an interview but no experience?

I had an interesting conversation with a Knowledge Management Professor the other day. It was about how students who graduate without work experience nor any technical skills will do in an interview and how sharing their knowledge.

First of all, they don't have much technical skills to brag about, and even less knowledge to share. Now what? I believe what one can do is show their behavior and instead of attracting employees by selecting skills, an interviewer may decide to change his decision criteria to go look for bringing a culture change in the organization.

Secondly, what one can do, as she said, was to show your analytical skills. How do you answer questions is often more important than your answer itself... Example taken from another teacher: how would you answer this question?

How many tennis balls can you put in a school bus?

Regular answers: "a lot", " 10 millions ", "I don't know", "who cares"

Best answer: "assuming the bus is 10 meters long by meters wide an by 4 meters high, and that a tennis ball measures 5 cm x 5 cm, and that you remove all the furniture, the approximate answer would be..."

Thus, even though those tips are very limited, it does give you a good start. However, I was not able to extract more out of my Teacher for that day due to the bell ringing, but guess what ? there is the INTERNET!

LinkedIn threatens corporate workforce?

While presenting LinkedIn to a group, I've been asked during the Q&A session, what we would do to encounter the fact that managers are scared that LinkedIn might help their own employees find other ( presumable better ) jobs. However, I understood the question differently and answered something else, and now I would like to have a second shot.

Is LinkedIn really going to threaten your company's workforce?

1. Either you implement it at work or not, your employees can still have an account at home or elsewhere. How can you forbid your employees to use it?

2. LinkedIn is a social network. More precisely, it is business social network used to create and find new business connections for business purposes. Let's say your employees have an account, they probably have at least (hopefully) 20 other professionals, either they work in the same field or not. Those 20 professionals will be aware of your company through his use of LinkedIn. Of course, in the short-term, you might see a short increase in departures, but in the long-term, you will be able to attract a lot more professionals, often more talented than the ones you currently have. Professionals on LinkedIn and use it regularly are more prone to be more active and proactive, more technology savvy and more technology illiterate. So, imagine that for each employee who uses it, you can make your company glow to at least 20 other professionals...Do the count!

Sharing Or Keeping Knowledge?

I know we've discussed this in class but I just can't admit that I am convinced that sharing knowledge is always the best thing to do for an individual who works in a company.

I do agree that one must share if he/she works on similar tasks with other coworkers and that none of their know-how is really unique. However, consider the case of an application programmer that developed solo a program used by a credit company. He is the only person who knows how it has been coded even if the language used is known by many people. I still believe that because he knows how it has been developed, and is the only person who knows about the loopholes, or the "traps" he set in the code, he would be best to keep it for himself and become "important".

This thought occurred to me many months ago when my coworker told me his friend was in this situation. He had a huge salary because he designed it, and that the company was totally dependant on him. I know it may sound selfish, but I'd probably do the same to earn a higher salary too!