I discovered an interesting startup called upmo. They are selling a set of tools to help you systematically improve the quality of your networking. Right now it’s in a free public beta; later on their model is to sell it to university alumni organizations, companies, etc., who would like to offer it as a service to their members. It’s an interesting model. They have four main tools, quoting here from their website:
- The Network Readiness Evaluator – A free online tool based on research and science that assesses the state of your network today and your networking style, identifies strengths and weaknesses, and provides best networking and career practices to help you serve and strengthen your network to stay and get ahead. Individualized recommendations are provided in a comprehensive, actionable “State of Your Network” report.
- The UpModel Chooser – Use the UpModel Chooser to browse UpModels and select one to emulate. UpModels are high-earning professionals who’ve shared the details of their career development: books they’ve read, classes they’ve taken, mistakes they’ve made and the networking habits they’ve used to drive success. The Chooser lets you tap your UpModel’s habits and path, dialing up and down key attributes to arrive at a networking style uniquely you.
- The Career Mapper – With the Mapper, overlay your specific desires, goals and career path with those of your UpModel, giving you a way to evaluate the impact of real-life decisions on your career—decisions around education, time off to care for kids or aging parents, time spent networking, etc. The Mapper takes the guesswork out of career decisions and helps you avoid getting get stuck or lost.
- The Career Action Plan – Use your regularly updated Career Action Plan to identify landmarks and to receive mile-by-mile instructions for how to navigate your career path. Access your Plan online, through Microsoft Outlook, on your desktop and, in the future, through your mobile device. Your Career Action Plan helps you develop a regular networking habit by providing defined daily, weekly and monthly tasks like phone calls, meet-ups, events, e-mails, etc., all based on your network readiness, networking style and career destination.
The Network Readiness Evaluator seems like the best part here. The advice given seems pretty sound. The question is how specific the advice really is, i.e. how directly applicable it really is to one’s own circumstances, versus being primarily generic in character. Obviously, if their business model is mostly to sell it as a tool for to some other provider, this may well be sufficient. But it’s intriguing to see if such a tool can really at some level understand one’s situation well enough to deliver genuinely personalized advice. In some way it’s like automating a coach, a simple bit of artificial intelligence if you will. I’ve always been interested in this kind of machine modeling of human behavior so I’m actually curious as to how well this thing works. Ever since the Eliza experiments in the sixties, it’s well known that a very simplistic model can appear to be intelligent by just, as it were, saying and asking the right things. (For those of you who don’t know about Eliza, you need to try it. It’s a wonderful waste of time. The funny part is that it’s surprisingly realistic, until you realize that it just parrots back at you what you input.) So I’m hoping UpMo is more than that, because it’s suggests interesting possibilities for helping people in an automated yet personalized fashion.
The remainder of the site is much more questionable, being a rather half-baked set of career and future planning tools. A much better approach I can recommend is “The Personal Compass” which you can get from Grove consulting. This is a really useful set of materials for planning your vision for your future. I was introduced to this in a wonderful class I took from Stanford Continuing Studies, which is itself an excellent resource if you’re on the peninsula.
