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The real objective of a technology tool is to have something that helps manage everything about a career — contacts, relationships, job searches, interviews, building great answers to tough questions(!) and enabling a place to build tasks for your “personal brand.” In short, we need a tool for career management. Fortunately, there is one: JibberJobber.com.

Born just over a year ago, the tool was built from the ground up with one objective in mind: give all of us the tools necessary to manage our careers. Think of it as a hub, giving you the tools to manage all aspects of your career (except delivery…which is up to you, of course). JibberJobber even has an interface to import your contacts from LinkedIn because LinkedIn is just one small aspect of your total career management. I also use JibberJobber, but have found it to be much more comprehensive than simpler contact linking programs.

<strong>A tool such as JibberJobber.com overcomes the career management limitations of a contact linking tool:</strong>

<blockquote>1. You can build action items for today relating to your job search, your personal brand, or follow-up to contact people in your network.
2. You can target companies where you want to work.
3. You can use tools to prepare yourself for interviews — getting that elevator speech with your value proposition down cold. Preparing great answers to tough questions.
4. You can track jobs you have applied for and have follow-up items for each.
5. You can, of course, enter in your contacts and personal information about them.
6. You can even enter in who contacts were referred from so that you can have reports that show you “degrees of separation” of the contacts in your world.
7. And the information is private and no one else has to join JibberJobber just to be part of your network.</blockquote>

Regardless of your tool choices for career management — and a case can be made for any different tool — the importance of managing our network is more critical than ever. Corporations relentlessly downsize, outsource and reorganize. The people that we work with are constantly moving to other positions in other companies, states and countries.

Managing these relationships to stay connected is critical for our career management.