Your blog can make or break your career! Achtung!

The cover article in today’s (5th Sep '07) TOI Accent supplement is about employers reading the blogs of prospective employees to decide if they should hire a particular candidate or not. Reading one’s blog usually gives an insight into individual’s stand on various issues, attitude, writing skills, thinking pattern etc and provides lots of information which may not be noted from a resume or during a conventional interview.

Read article here.

Some tips in this regard:

1. Avoid revealing personal information (You might have happily written somewhere “I hate to get up before 11 AM in the morning”-any manager who reads this will think “My office starts at 8.30 AM what is the probability that he/she will report to work on time?”)

2. Do not use bad words, slangs and such cheap lingo, which create a very bad image of you. Use decent terms to express your emotion/anger whatever.

3. Do not get involved in plagiarism (publishing someone else’s content as your own). It is very easy to detect it and puts a severe dent on your credibility when you don’t acknowledge the source of your content.

4. Search for your full name within “” on Google and see what top 5-10 results are. Analyze what impression these pages may create about you and apply necessary corrective action.

5. If you waste 6 hours a week watching couple of movies no one will ever know. But same time if spent in blogging, it gives a physical evidence that you have spent some time on blogging and few may reach a conclusion that you have no other work…Always ensure that your primary activities/responsibilities are always fulfilled with higher priority than blogging.

6. Ask your close friend or relative to have a fresh look at your blog and ask him/her what image this blog will create about you. Once you get prompt feedback, apply corrective actions as appropriate.

7. Avoid living in dual identity. Some people use blog to explore their fantasies and try to create an image about themselves which they are not, in their real life. If your virtual identity totally contradicts your real personality it may backfire.

8. Check with your company policy on blogging. There may be specific guidelines as to what all information you can release to public domain and what you should not. In most of the cases you’re not supposed to reveal internal information which are critical to your company business such as but not limited to, information related to customers, projects, technologies, patents, processes etc. Comply with such guidelines without fail.

Any more tips/opinion? Please share.

Note:Blogging is all about freedom of expression. I do not say that bloggers should always write under the fear "what some one will think if I write this", but one should be able to take ownership of what he/she writes and the contents of blog should not have a negative effect in one's real life.

P.S. Achtung: German word meaning "Watch Out"