Does your job fit you like a glove or is it a straitjacket? When I come across the current crop of job sites, I wish we had Web 2.0 in our career planning days; a search engine, a bit of social networking and a host of sites willing to flash your resume to prospective employers.

With the Web, information isn’t a problem…information overload is. A few clicks and you find yourself navigating away from the information you wanted. What we all want is a single window giving us career occupation descriptions on a list of different career choices.

Mindopia seeks to answer that call by cutting short the path from career research to job hunting. Mindopia calls itself a career discovery website. Positioning itself as a single point source for job seekers to get the ‘inside scoop on careers’.

Old fashioned career planning wasn’t bad, was it?

Not at all, but don’t you feel that it was a bit too toilsome? Starting with a gut feeling about what we wanted to do…getting influenced by our peers or parents…going after subjects of our interest…oops, only to find that the reality of 9 to 5 work life was a bit different from what we had conjured up. A generation back we leapt before we looked. Some of us landed on our feet and some didn’t. Those of us who didn’t, started wishing that we researched a bit more before the leap.

Is the web  a better career hunting ground?

Mindopia (beta) is a new fangled Web 2.0 career discovery site to view career occupation descriptions and other details about a comprehensive list of different careers. So let me roll back my years and see how I would approach a writing career with journalism.

1. The homepage looks clean and uncluttered with a list of featured careers, a career search bar and six tiny video thumbnails which looks like video clips of old pros giving advice on their particular expertise.



2. A little My Page link on the top tells me that it would be better if I register and create a profile of my own. It’s easy because it’s free. Add and edit your profile with details to make it complete.



3. That done, let’s see what I can find for my interest in a journalism career. From My Page, I can click on the Explore careers dropdown which lists all careers currently covered by the site or I can use the top search bar.



4. My selection takes me to the career page with all of its laid out sections. The information covers the following areas –
   • Career Advice from Those in the Field.
   • Salary Potential.
   • Find Schools.
   • Top Job Skills Needed.
   • Top Companies.
   • Jobs in your area.
   • Headline News.
   • Top Websites.
   • Top Books/DVDs.
   • About (which covers the significant details about the field).
5. Three sections are of immediate interest to me as a first timer. Career Advice from Those in the Field is a bunch of video podcasts by veterans who answer the fundamentals a career seeker might ask.



6. The About section also delivers a lot of background info I need on my profession of choice.



7. The third area of immediate interest is of course the Salary Potential section. Clicking on the graph takes me into a page with a few wizards that let me assess the financial attributes of my job.



8. The other sections add to all the inputs I will need to make an informed decision. Each detail is also a link which serves to expand on the info given. For instance, clicking on one of the resources under Top Companies takes me to a more expanded list of companies in this profession. I can click on Add to Favorites to add the resource to my profile or I can click on Find Jobs to see the kind of opportunities available near my area. Clicking on the job listings takes me to the recruitment site page where I can apply for the job.



9. Similarly, I can expand Find Schools to use the search tool for locating a training resource.



10. Each section also has the social networking angle covered through a Contribute link. Members can recommend any career worthy info by clicking the link. The Discussions section is the message board where members can chit chat and add there two bits worth. Though, I couldn’t find any ongoing thread on Editor/Journalism careers.

Trawling through the Editor/Journalism info given on Mindopia, I have got a fair idea of how to approach my choice of vocation. Mindopia succeeds to an extent in bringing me closer to my career.

Is Mindopia a one stop solution?

It can be a stepping stone but being a beta site it still suffers a few drawbacks. The first noticeable one is the still limited selection of careers. New age careers like being a radio jockey or an instructional designer are absent. Topical careers like environmental sciences should have been a default addition.

The profile page also seems a bit threadbare. A more targeted bio would have served a candidate better than generic information. I found uploading a photo particularly hard with its limitation of 104×25 maximum sizes.

The absence of a Help section or a FAQ also sometimes made me feel lost.

But the cons apart, what I really liked about this work in progress site were its comprehensive sections on the careers. Expert-speak videos arranged around questions a beginner usually asks, makes taking the first step a lot easier. Job searching is generally a local activity so it will benefit US residents directly. Of course, international students can find it worthy of a visit too.

A beta site needs all the feedback it can get. Let us know if you like what Mindopia offers in theory and fact.

(By) Saikat is a techno-adventurer in a writer’s garb. When he is not scouring the net for tech news, you can catch him on his personal blog ruminating about the positves in our world.

(By) Saikat is a techno-adventurer in a writer’s garb. When he is not scouring the net for tech news, you can catch him on his personal blog ruminating about the positves in our world.

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