Managing how you are Perceived

Man everyone was looking good last week at school!  Why? We had a career fair and some interviews with local divisions and superintendents.  They spent two days at our University checking out the new teachers.  We, the up in coming teachers, wanted to represent ourselves well to our prospective employers so instead of wearing the usually sweatshirts and loulou's we wore dress pants and a nice shirt.  We also polished up our resumes and readied ourselves to talk about our experiences.  This was all in an effort to get ourselves to be perceived in positive light.

The problem is that it is easy to give these impression on the day of an interview or career fair, but to always be giving these impressions is hard.  The internet demands us to be always on our best behaviour.  Every thing we do is recorded and even though most of that is not easily detected by people some things are.  Everyone (or most people) have a Facebook page with pictures and posts that are either uploaded by themselves or their friends.  These pictures and posts can easily be found by people, including our future employers and students.  This means that when we are out having fun on our own time and someone snaps a picture, we could be incriminated.  Everything we are doing may be legal but it is not necessarily respectable.  We need to be careful of this.

What can we do?

For one we can control the privacy settings on our Facebook pages but more importantly we need to focus on controlling what comes up when someone googles our name.  To do this we need to put things up on the internet under our name.  Having your own eportfolio/website really helps this.  Also when you do something, such as a prezi, glogster or other online project, save it under your name.  When someone googles you, these things will come up, not the negative things.  This will shows you in a positive light.  If you simply change your attitide to how you use the internet you can become your greatest friend when finding a job.

It is like being in an interview whenever you are googled!