Time for action—editing your resumé goals and skills
- Click the My Resumé tab on the Profile submenu.
- The first two text-entry boxes ask you to type in a cover letter and also some information about your interests. Type in some information here to get you started. Don't forget to click the Save button immediately after you have entered your information.
- Now scroll down to see the contact information that has been carried across from the Contact Information page you edited earlier.
- As you work your way down the page, you will be prompted to fill in your personal information, employment history, education history, and so on. Fill in the sections that are relevant to you.
- Click into the My Goals tab and write your three different types of goals.
- Click into the My Skills tab and write your three different types of skills.
What just happened?
You just edited your resumé, your goals and your skills. This information is now stored in Mahara. The beauty of this of course is that you need to go through this process only once, then in the future you will only need to make updates depending on changes in career or skill sets. This is much better than having to update a word processed document!
You should regularly pop back and update your profile information. Also, you should think about using different e-mail accounts within Mahara for different purposes and audiences. Mahara encourages you to do this so that you can receive similar sorts of messages from similar groups of people in separate places.
Mahara asks you to set up a Blog Address as part of your contact information. Perhaps you could use Mahara itself to create a web page that collates your public-facing blogs. You could then enter this page as your blog in your contact information.
Most of all, we encourage you to use Mahara to become a reflective learner. It is not only a useful self-developmental process to use blogs to articulate, capture, and refine your everyday thinking processes, it can also be a useful self-developmental process to:
- Set yourself concrete academic, educational, and career-related goals that you then strive to achieve:
It is all too easy to just roll on from one year to the next. Mahara is encouraging us to be a bit more proactive with our lives than this. Why not push yourself? Set yourself some forward-looking targets and then strive to achieve them.
- Honestly, openly, and critically self-evaluate your skills:
It is as important that you are able to identify what you can do as it is for you to be able to identify what you want to be able to do or achieve. Use the Mahara Skills section to see if you can be honest and open with yourself about where your own skills and strengths actually lie. Are you intellectually and emotionally mature enough to actually be able to identify what you are good at? Many people aren't. Using Mahara can help you to get better at doing this.
Pop quiz— understanding your profile information
- How many profile icons can you upload to your profile?
- In which section of your portfolio should you be adding career related targets?
- Goals
- Skills
- Contact Information
- My Resumé
Have a go hero—doing more with your profile information
You saw in the last section that you can add links to your messaging addresses in your profile information. Mahara is encouraging you to play with some live messenger and audio/video conferencing clients such as Skype and Jabber. If you are not using these already, visit www.skype.com or www.jabber.org and sign up. You can also add your MSN, AIM, or YAHOO! accounts. You can now share this information with other users on your profile page as we'll see in the next section, so people have a different way of getting in touch with you.