How you can make the internet deliver your first job, build your careerPremium

Let’s say you and your friends discuss your favourite brand of dresses on social media. After some time, you watch a video on your phone, and the first thing you see is an ad for the same dress brand.

You speak about something on your smartphone, or you search on Google for something, or you visit a particular place, or you just install a game app. Magically, other apps on your smartphone start showing something related to what you just did. But, such magical coincidences are neither magical nor coincidental – they are exactly how internet and social media are designed to work.

The internet is a useful communication tool and a powerful networking place. But it’s also a massive entertainment complex, that we can easily enter, get lost and never want to leave – it could indeed be a rabbit hole for most of us. Everything we do on the internet lives there forever, even if we think we have deleted it.

The internet knows (or seems to know) each one of us. Like a big brother, it is always watching us, feeding us, keeping us engaged, and serving up content that we want to see, hear, experience and imagine. The internet uses our actions to figure out how to keep us hooked. Yes, you read it right – hooked!

This is how Internet and popular social media apps work for most of us today, but it does not have to be the only way. The internet and social media can be effectively used to achieve our personal or professional goals including the job we are seeking and the career we want, provided we know how to take control and be a very conscious internet user.

Internet and you – as you know it today

Almost all platforms and apps collect a lot of data about us and that data is made available to other apps as well. Let us take Google as an example. You can see what data Google collects about you by visiting the Google My Activity (https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity) website.

Depending on what permissions you have given to Google for collecting data, Google could capture your browsing history, what apps you use in your Android phone, when or how often you use them, which places you visit, what news articles you read, which games you play, what photos you take, what languages you use, what videos you watch or like in YouTube, and so on. Google then uses this data to show you ads that you are mostly going to like – you can see this on Google’s Ad Center (https://myadcenter.google.com/controls).

There, Google shows the ad categories such as relationship status, household income, education, industry and so on that Google uses to show you “relevant” ads. Google has guessed these categories based on your activity data that it collected. Similarly, you can go the other apps and internet-based services that you use, find out the data collected by them, and see how your data is used to keep you more hooked.

Essentially, every app or website tries to build a virtual version of every user including the user’s traits and characteristics, which is referred to as the user’s “digital twin”. The more accurate an app or website builds a digital twin of you, the more accurate it can target advertising that will resonate with you, the more probable you will react to that ad, and the more valuable the app or website’s marketing services will become.

Internet and you – how it can be ideally

Let’s imagine a different world for a moment – say, you are about to start the first year in an undergraduate course, and you own a smartphone with internet data. You wake up with an alert about various free training programs that you can do this week, and you sign up for one program.

You are recommended a news article about various WhatsApp or Telegram groups which are about clearing doubts in your course, finding small part-time jobs while you study, finding meaningful volunteering opportunities in your locality that you can show in your resume later, or connecting with alumni or seniors from your college who could mentor you.

You join some of those groups and start actively participating. While travelling to college, you open your YouTube app on the bus and it shows you videos related to your course or your career aspirations automatically, and you watch a few of them on the way to your college or during your free time. You get connected to some senior leaders in your dream companies on LinkedIn somehow, and they are continuously mentoring you on how to land a job in that company after completing college. You get notified of useful workshops, webinars, trainings, online learning classes, competitions and community events automatically through alerts on your phone, at the right time, at the right location and within your budget.

Any free time you have during college, you attend these events and have fun learning along with your friends. You take a lot of selfies during those events, and share on your social media, and suddenly the HR from your dream company takes notice of this. They invite you and give you your dream job. After a few years in that job, a senior from your college introduces you to your next opportunity, which ends up being the defining moment of your career. Does this seem like a fantasy to you? Can this happen for real?

The Internet is like a Rube Goldberg machine, that uses a chain reaction–type of setup to perform a simple task (in most cases, to sell things) in an indirect and overly complicated way (by giving us many seemingly useful apps and information, and collecting data about ourselves).

For example, in the Kamal Haasan movie in Tamil, Apoorva Sagodharargal, a seemingly powerless and innocuous looking dwarf takes down a nasty villain through a whole series of contraptions that eventually shoots a poisoned arrow into the villain. Here are a few tips that youngsters, especially college students, can follow to ensure that they get their digital twin right so the Goldberg machine, i.e., the internet, starts delivering jobs and careers for them.

The internet is now wired to sell to us goods and services. But it can also serve us. The internet delivers our fantasies to us. If only we tell the internet that our fantasy is our dream job and career, the internet can be made to deliver that too.

Step 0: Get your social media setup right

The foundation of your digital twin is your social media setup. To start with, your email id is your first personal brand. Your email id should reflect the way you want the world to see you, preferably as a young adult and aspiring professional. Your email id could be just your full name, or it could indicate what you want to achieve, or your dream career. Do not use random numbers in the email id which is often suggested by email apps.

Next, do not create an account in every social media app. You should critically think about which social media apps you really need. The ones you do use, ensure you have the right username there and that others can easily find you based on info they already know about you such as your name, your phone number or your email id.

Almost all social media platforms have an “About me” section – use it wisely, and do not ignore it. You should ensure that you use an appropriate profile picture for each social media – for instance, you can have a casual photo on your personal social media, but you could use a more professional-looking photo on job or career-related platforms such as LinkedIn.

TIP: Your username, profile picture and “About me” are the things your future employer might see first about you!

Step 1: Follow the right content

Once you have a good social media setup, you can then focus on your content consumption habit. For instance, which people do you follow on which social media? Are you connecting with people that are outside your peer network, especially people from around the world and in your area of dream career. You can fine tune your social media feeds to show more of some type of content, and show less or block some type of content – use this feature effectively.

Say you want to be a rocket scientist, how many people from ISRO, SpaceX and other space organizations do you follow? How many of them can you get connected to, either by reaching out to them directly or getting introduced to them through mutual connections? How much of your timeline feed is about space travel and related topics?

If your YouTube does not recommend more space-related videos to you automatically, or if your Google News feed on your Chrome browser does not automatically show more space-related news, it means you have not created your digital twin correctly with Google.

Or, your digital footprints indicate a career choice that is different than your stated career aspirations. Remember, if your initial digital footprints on all social media are carefully curated to match your career aspirations, you will soon see that the best content related to your career dreams will start filling your social media feeds.

TIP: The content you follow, or unfollow explicitly, decides where all your free time on social media will be spent and what you end up really learning.

Step 2: Create your rules of engagement

The internet and social media want us to stay engaged no matter what, but they are not designed to care about what is good for each of us. For example, if you aspire to be a biotechnologist but you do not communicate that anywhere on the internet, you will never see any content related to that automatically. So, it is imperative that you create your own rules of how you want to engage with the Internet and social media. Which kind of people will you allow in your network, who will you block? Which type of groups you will join?

Do you need to be alerted for all activities in a group, or do you want no notifications from that group? Which type of posts will you like or comment, and which ones you will ignore or block? Where will you read your news from, and which news sources will you trust less? What type of notifications you want to see from each social media app that you use?

In other words, how much do you want to be disturbed or distracted by each social media app? Whose posts you want to read first, versus whose you never want to read? All of us will spend some time on the internet regularly. Where we spend that time on is entirely dependent on our own rules of engagement. If we do not control our engagement habits, we become a digital sheep in the internet herd, aimlessly wandering and losing precious productive time of our youth.

TIP: Your social media feed is your digital mirror – are you presenting the best version of yourself in front of that mirror?

Step 3: Pay it forward

For a career-starter like a college student, the best way to start building their digital twin is by paying it forward. You can do that in simple ways by active listening, critical thinking, asking the right questions and in the right way, and so on.

For example, if you want to be a robotics engineer, and if you already curated your social media feed to reflect your career aspirations, now you can pay it forward by acting on that feed. You could “Like” and “Comment” on posts or videos that resonate with your understanding of robotics. You could further “Share” such posts with your own commentary on what liked about that content – this is important, because your commentary helps your digital twin get better, and further refines your experience of the Internet. If you find posts on robotics where you could offer your inputs, you must offer that – be vulnerable with your limited knowledge, but be open to learn and get corrected by others.

TIP: Every experienced content creator on the internet wants a follower – what do you need to do, to be the #1 follower of a content creator in the area of your career aspirations?

Step 4: Collect people and experiences

We often use the internet to collect random information such as recipes, ways to dress, home organization ideas, and more. But in most cases, we may not really use that information effectively. The internet rewards us to collect information, but not really to put them to use.

For instance, if you watch a video on how to make a mini-robot or how a factory works, the internet will prompt you to like or comment or share that video. But it will not follow-up and ask you if you really tried to build that robot, or if visited such a factory in-person.

This is where we must take control of what the internet really has to offer – it is not information, it is people and experiences. Who you add in your networks in various social media, which authors or content creators you engage with regularly, which type of experiences you follow through by doing it yourself, and how you enrich yourself beyond what you just consume on the internet – these will be the real benefits of effectively using the internet and social media.

For instance, if you aspire to be a dentist, how many experienced dentists are in your network? How many of them you regularly interact with? How many of them you keep meeting offline? How many companies who manufacture dental products or dentistry equipments are you following and how many do you visit in-person? How many dentistry-related journals do you read, and how many related conferences, webinars do you attend? These are the real benefits of building an effective digital twin.

TIP: Internet is where you start your career journey, but offline is where the real career adventures happen – remember to take yourselves offline too!

Step 5: Tell your story

The final step of building an effective digital twin is to move from being an internet consumer, to an internet creator. Whatever is your chosen area of career aspirations, you can find ways in which you become a content creator.

For instance, if you want to become a software developer, you could create your own tutorial videos and host a YouTube channel for other newcomers, and share your learnings, your tips or your challenges as an aspiring tech developer. Or, you can host a podcast with other budding software developers and ask them to share their journey.

It does not matter how professionally-made your content is. The only thing that matters is whether your stories keep showcasing how you are emerging as a software developer and what technology skills and knowledge you are showcasing for the world to see, and for your dream company to potentially take notice of.

TIP: The dots always connect looking backwards. But you can leave the best dots going forward.

(To learn more about how to take control of and effectively use the Internet and its resources, visit Center for Humane Technology (https://www.humanetech.com/), especially their Youth Toolkit and Take Control Toolkit. Also watch the documentary “The Social Dilemma” which is showing on Netflix.)