career – Jinn

Identifying the right community: the key to a successful career

success is only achievable within a community

When defining what is a successful career, there are different metrics. But those always revolve around the perception of oneself and the community to which one belongs. Let’s explore these in detail.

In any career, there is a recurring moment. It is when you wonder if you did the best career move. Or if you could have done better at some point. Or if you are not about to make a big mistake. Which is good, we should always try to aim for the best. But depending on the environment, the definition of a successful career won’t be the same. For some, a well-paid job, a high social status or some professional awards will define a career as successful. Others will settle for a good work-life balance in a stable and quiet environment. For some others, it will be the feeling of being useful and learn continuously. For many, it will be a combination of all three. There is no unique definition of a successful career. But one notion is common to all examples I mentioned earlier: the community.

A better understanding of the notion of community

A community, from the French word communauté, is a social group having some commonality between its members. There are different types of community;

Location based communities, such as communities based on a neighborhood, a city, a region or a country
Identity based communities, such as communities based on religion, language, ethnic group, age, or political beliefs
Interest based communities, such as sports, entertainment
Organizational based communities, such as schools, universities, companies, political parties, but also families

One community can be of two or more different types. Some sociology professors proposed another taxonomy to map different communities, like Paul James. Therefore, this one is just an example.

In all mentioned definitions of successful career, success relates to how you are perceived in the community in which you want to thrive. This community is the society in which you live in the first definition. In the second one, it is the family. In the third one, it is the work environment. All these social groups are different in terms of size, and modus operandi. A family is usually very small, compared to the other groups listed. It is the basic unit in sociology. Children learn to socialize there before living outside in the society. Whereas the society is vast. To be successful in it, you usually need to have already some prestige in smaller communities. Like a famous company or university, a prestigious job title, or more simply a powerful family.

These elements are not within everyone’s reach. That’s the very definition of prestige. However, although the road to success is harder when you are not in the right community, it does not mean there is no way at all.

How does a community relate to a successful career?

Most successful people have great self-confidence. Which is why they dare doing things beyond the reach of ordinary people. Either they trust their capabilities to succeed. Or they are confident a failure would still be a good lesson for them to become better. Or they can just be patient and resistant enough to withstand difficult times, until fortune smiles upon them. Whereas people who lack confidence generally turn down many opportunities, by fear of failing. Just like a team entering the pitch with the fear of not conceding too many goals. By thinking they are going to fail, they eventually fail.

That is unfortunately a very widespread state of mind. For many people, they are not from the right family, culture, or country. Therefore, there is no point in having big ambitions. The reason is that it is commonly accepted a successful career means a high social status. Something that a significant amount of money can provide. And this money depends on the type of job, which itself depends on the education background. In other words, a bad choice of school hinders the success of a career. Since education is generally the first community we encounter after family, no wonder few people even try.

Use communities to advance in a career

Fortunately, work can improve confidence. There are numerous tutorials available to improve self-confidence, such as here, or here. In general, to build up confidence, it is recommended to start with a small community. This community will support you when you need it, until you reach your objective. It can be just your family or friends first. Of course, the objective shall be commensurate with the size of the community: neither too high, nor too small. Once you are confident enough to go further, you can proceed to a bigger community – the neighborhood, or classmates – and repeat the same steps to be recognized there too. Slowly, by joining bigger communities, you become more self-confident, while getting a prime position in the community. Eventually, you can even be higher than what you expected. Do not forget to accept failure, it is a necessary step to learn more and improve.

There are many reasons why a community feature makes sense for a professional social platform. Which is why we implemented it in Jinn. Communities can organize themselves into groups, private, public or hidden. Ideas can be easily shared via forums. Achievements such as job changes, lesson completed, or certificate earned are instantly spread to community members. Just like any contribution to the career database we are building. This might look small, but by these small steps done continuously make you move forward. And as you move forward, you gain self-confidence, meaning you reach your objectives and can set more ambitious ones. Just because you chose the right community, where you got the required support to grow and integrate bigger communities. Communities can also be very helpful in tapping the famous hidden job market. But this is a topic we will discuss in another post.

When defining what a successful career is, there are different metrics. But those always revolve around the perception of oneself and the community to which one belongs. So let’s explore these in detail.

In any career, there is a recurring moment. It is when you wonder if you made the best career move. Or if you could have done better at some point. Or if you are not about to make a big mistake. Which is good; we should always try to aim for the best. But depending on the environment, the definition of a successful career won’t be the same. For some, a well-paid job, a high social status, or professional awards will define a career as successful. Others will settle for an excellent work-life balance in a stable and quiet environment. For others, it will be the feeling of being helpful and learning continuously. For many, it will be a combination of all three. So there is no unique definition of a successful career. But one notion is common to all examples I mentioned earlier: the community.

A better understanding of the notion of community

A community, from the French word communauté, is a social group having some commonality between its members. There are different types of communities;

Location-based communities, such as communities based on a neighborhood, a city, a region, or a country
Identity-based communities, such as communities based on religion, language, ethnic group, age, or political beliefs
Interest-based communities, such as sports, entertainment
Organizational-based communities, such as schools, universities, companies, political parties, but also families

One community can be of two or more different types. Some sociology professors, like Paul James, proposed another taxonomy to map different communities. Therefore, this one is just an example.

In all mentioned definitions of a successful career, success relates to how you are perceived in the community where you want to thrive. This community can be first your family, then your neighborhood, your university, your sports club, and so forth.

All these social groups are different in size and modus operandi. For instance, a family is usually tiny compared to the other groups listed. Yet, it is the basic unit in sociology: children learn to socialize there before meeting other people. To be successful in other groups, you usually need to master the codes of at least one community. For example, by being in a famous company or university, having a prestigious job title, or coming from an influential family.

These elements are not within everyone’s reach. That’s the very definition of prestige. However, although the road to success is more complicated when you are not in the right community, it does not mean there is no way.

How does a community relate to a successful career?

Most successful people have great self-confidence, which is why they dare do things beyond ordinary people’s reach. Either they trust their capabilities to succeed. Or they are confident that a failure would still be a good lesson for them to improve. Or they can be patient and resistant enough to withstand difficult times until fortune smiles upon them. People who lack confidence generally take down many opportunities for fear of failing, just like a team entering the pitch with the fear of not conceding too many goals. By thinking they are going to fail, they eventually fail.

That is, unfortunately, a prevalent state of mind. Most people are not from the right family, culture, or country. Therefore, there is no point in having big ambitions. The reason is that it is commonly accepted that a successful career means a high social status. Something that a significant amount of money can provide. And this money depends on the job type, which depends on the educational background. In other words, a terrible school choice hinders a career’s success. Since education is generally the first community we encounter after family, no wonder few people even try.

Use communities to advance in a career

Fortunately, work can improve confidence. Numerous tutorials are available to improve self-confidence, such as here or here.

In general, to build up confidence, it is recommended to start with a small community. This community will support you when you need it until you reach your objective. It can be just your family or friends first. Of course, the aim shall be commensurate with the size of the community: neither too high nor too small.

Once you are confident enough, you can proceed to a more extensive community – the neighborhood or classmates – and repeat the same steps to be recognized there too. Slowly, by joining more prominent communities, you become more self-confident while getting a prime position in the community. Eventually, you can even be higher than what you expected. Do not forget to accept failure; it is a necessary step to learning more and improving.

Don't be afraid of asking for support in your community

There are many reasons why a community feature makes sense for a professional social platform, which is why we implemented it in Jinn. Communities can organize themselves into groups, private, public, or hidden. Ideas can be easily shared via forums. Achievements such as job changes, lessons completed, or certificates earned are instantly spread to community members, just like any contribution to the career database we are building. This might look small, but these small steps continuously make you move forward. And as you move forward, you gain self-confidence. That means you reach your objectives and can set more ambitious ones just because you chose the right community, where you got the necessary support to grow and integrate more significant communities. Communities can also be beneficial in tapping the famous hidden job market. But this is a topic we will discuss in another post.

0 Share

What we mean by “career marketplace”

Surprisingly, when I started to look for “career marketplace” on Google, the results were far away from what I had in mind initially. In fact, it seems there are multiple interpretations of the meaning of career marketplace. So I thought it could be useful to explain my interpretation, as well as how I want the Jinn career marketplace to be useful to the Jinn users, depending your profile.

What do people usually mean by “career marketplace”?

To answer this simple question, you can enter “career marketplace” on Google.

Done? Then look at your results.

My results may differ from yours, as Google considers multiple other criteria such as your search history, location, language etc. But it could be that one of the most frequent results you have relates to a company called Career Marketplace.

As for the other results, sure they are related to careers. But none of them is about a real career marketplace, funnily enough. Another interesting aspect is that some results, although quite old – from 2017 – and outdated, still managed to make it to the first page of search results. In other words, there is no real and current career marketplace among these results.

By the way, let’s think of how we could describe a career marketplace. There are only two words to figure out the meaning: career and marketplace..

A marketplace is simply a place where buyers and sellers meet each other to trade goods or service. In the online world, this place is a website, most of the time. eBay, Amazon, CodeCanyon or even Udemy can be considered as marketplaces, even if some of them are more specialized than others.

So theoretically, a career marketplace would be a place where you can purchase different goods or services related to careers in general, right? In that case, isn’t it funny that there is no such thing on Google Search results? Well, this finding lead to the creation of Jinn career marketplace.

What is Jinn career marketplace?

Jinn Career Marketplace is a place where basically, those who want to boost their career come to be in relation with persons who sell services to benefit careers.

Where it gets interesting is that you don’t need to be a career coach, recruitment specialist or consultant in any domain. In fact, everybody is specialist in a specific area.

Concretely, you have 3 main parts:

a vendor dashboard, which allows you to track all the sales you made, but also to configure your own store, add your products, define your pricing strategy…
a store listing, where you can see all the stores available on Jinn
and a page summarizing your orders.

All users can access these pages by default, although you need to request approval to the admin if you want to start selling products. The reason for that is that we first want to be sure the product to be sold is compliant with our policy.

You already know that you can sell your expertise on Jinn, by creating a course with the instructor dashboard. For example, you may have several years of experience in a specific occupation, for which you probably need to master some knowledge and skills. You could therefore teach these skills and knowledge you have, and the more you are skilled and knowledgeable, the more you can be recognized for this, and the more you can earn money with it.

Similarly, if you are in need of a specific skill or knowledge, you can of course find a specialist, and based on his or her experience and mastery of the skill or knowledge, you can purchase the course he or she sells.

But you can do more than just buying or selling online courses, for the sake of your career.

Why a career marketplace?

It is no secret there is a plethora of job search sites, course sites, career sites, etc. So theoretically, access to knowledge should be very easy.

But, as you already know, things are not so simple.

Searching for a job is no easy task. But searching for a job tailored for you, a job in which you thrive, is something probably out of reach of most people. The reason for that? To search for your dream job, you must know what it is. To know that, you must know yourself, your capabilities, your values, and compare all these with the market needs to see if there is a match.

The catch is, even if you fulfill the first three conditions, you may not know exactly what is possible in the market with your knowledge, or how much it is worth, the possibilities of evolution etc.

This is where Jinn Career Marketplace comes in. You can easily contact a coach, to help you define your goal, and the steps you need to do in order to reach it. Furthermore, our career explorer can also give you a hint at potential career objectives in the form of occupations.

But you can do much more than that.

Initially, the idea of a career marketplace came because we were looking for a way to have a job search tool different from all the other existing tools. Most of the generalist ones are easy to use and very convenient (in fact, I benefited from them a lot in my own career). But they are also often targeting a small part of the job market: high-skilled people, low-skilled people, American people, rich people… It is very hard to find a tool made for the whole market.

One of the reasons is that if people do not understand the benefit of a tool, they won’t use it, of course. So the level of knowledge is already a barrier to a wider use of these platforms.

With Jinn Career Marketplace, we bet that the users of Jinn will see the benefit of the tools we are rolling out, use them, and then tell their friends about it. And because they will have benefited from our services, they will want to promote it to them, so they can benefit from it as well. They can also be incentivized by the possibility to sell this kind of service of Jinn, for the price they want. Thus, they will be able to make their friends benefit from Jinn, while being paid.

This will also allow us to potentially reach people who are usually not considered by our competitors: those with no or poor computer skills or literacy skills, people without degree, people with a poor Internet access. And of course, if they benefit from using Jinn too, that means they improve their career perspectives, which is our mission, so it would make our day.

What you can find on Jinn Career Marketplace?

At the moment, our efforts are mainly focused on the Career Explorer and the coaching sessions. Regarding the latter, we even partnered with a coach, in order to propose coaching sessions to our users starting from now. In a near future, we hope to welcome more career specialists who are willing to sell their services on Jinn.

As for the other goods and services we plan to sell, all related to careers:

books and ebooks
webinars
recruitment services
career fair tickets (if covid-19 ends one day, inch’Allah)

We would be ready to look at other suggestions, if you leave them in the comments below.

How much does it cost?

In case you missed it, at Jinn, our objective is to propose affordable tools to allow as many people as possible to boost their careers. Every user of Jinn can sell anything if it is to improve a career. We do plan to charge a commission on all transactions occurring in the marketplace in the future. But at the moment, we charge nothing at all.

That’s right, our marketplace is entirely free to use currently, as part of our launch offer. Although it won’t last too long, so take advantage of it while it is still valid. We will make another announcement to explain our commission strategy.

Conclusion

Jinn Career Marketplace offers something truly unique and original to benefit your career and those of the other members. Everybody has a stake in it: sellers can sell their expertise related to careers, without needing to be career professionals, just professionals in their domain. Buyers have the possibility to purchase information or services they may not have been able to get elsewhere, to boost their careers. And of course, with your feedback, it will get only better.

0 Share

1 career advisor to make the world great again: our approach

Imagine if anyone in the world could access a career advisor, to get tips on the best move to do to accelerate its career? That is the objective of Jinn. Find out how we want to achieve this goal.

The career management experts

I already mentioned in a previous post the tendency for many people to turn to the experts when they want to be reassured on a complex subject. Some experts are fortunately authentic, and can provide highly useful benefits. For example, if I want to eat very good food, I would rather choose to go to a good restaurant than cooking myself. In the same way, for some events in life, there are some experts you do not necessarily think of, who can still be very useful: the coaches.

Career coach vs career counselor

It is important to understand the difference between coaching and counseling. According to the International Coach Federation, coaching is defined as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. However it does not mean the coach is a Jedi master and the coachee the padawan. A coach lets the coachee find his/her own answers while counseling is about providing insights, guidance, it can be more linked to mentoring. In other words, coaching is different from mentoring. Coaches are usually specialized in a defined field, such as arts (ex: vocal coach), sports, business (leadership coach), relationships (ex: dating coach) or health and wellness. And of course the career coaches.

The career advisor

A little more about the career counselor, or career advisor. Many people think a career coach is the one you call when you want to change your job, for example. The line of difference between a career coach and a career counselor is indeed very thin. Both can help people in transitioning to a new objective. For a career counselor, this includes providing industry trends, salary expectations, employment statistics, but also tips to improve a resume, train for a job interview or prepare for salary negotiations. They use personality assessments and other skills inventory tests to determine your competencies and find the career, which is a match for your skill set and aptitude. Similar to what school counselors do for students in education. Career counselors can also help in dealing with emotions, or behaviors that are holding you back.

The career coach

Meanwhile, a career coach will ask you more general questions, such as “What is your dream of doing?” or “What do you expect in your career?” He/she tries to get a bigger picture of yourself and where you are today, and then finds ways to move forward towards your goal, so that not only you get the job you wanted, but you also enjoy your job actually. Meaning the role of a coach does not stop with the signing of a new contract. They will encourage and challenge you to identify the steps you need to take in order to reach your career objective, just like a sports coach would do. Contrary to a career advisor, a coach usually does not spend too much time on elements from the past, but rather focus on the present and the future. In short, the career counselor helps you find your job, while the career coach helps you find your passion.

How to make the world a better place with a career advisor

It is safe to say that many people would definitely benefit from such experts, if they knew they existed. But first of all, they don’t. Like I said, many people mix up career coach and career advisor. Even if they do know, there are other disincentive to using a career coach. Although there are organizations and renowned business schools helping on the recognition of the status of career coach with diplomas and accreditations, anyone can claim to be a coach. Lastly, calling in an expertise, whether it is a career coach or a career advisor, represents a cost that few people can afford. Which is the reason why Jinn intends to make career advice affordable for our users, so that they can hope for better career perspectives.

The Jinn career coach wants to bring all Jinn users toward success

How would a Jinn career advisor look like (at the beginning)

The first requirement to be a credible online career advisor for everybody is obviously a deep knowledge of the job markets, starting with different existing jobs: what are they, what do they consist of, what skills or experience are necessary, what other jobs can they lead to. Such database already exist, but they are most of the time specific to one country, like here for the US, or here for France. To make it more relevant to customers from everywhere, this database should also explain how the same job differs between countries, in terms of title, responsibility, requirements or possible evolution. In a second time, with enough data an algorithm could determine the best career path for a user, by analyzing its current situation, experience, skills and education and suggesting pertinent choices to achieve step by step.

This is what we are trying to make in the career management section of the website. This section contains all the databases we are building today, to help people being better tomorrow. Because of the complexity of making an accurate career advisor, we chose the wiki format, meaning that any user can collaborate by inputting data about careers. So we can make sure our data are as up to date as possible. Moreover, all these data remain in free access to all Jinn users. Of course, it will not be a real career counselor at the beginning, as many services would be still missing to claim to be either of them. Nevertheless, like nearly everything in life, proceeding gradually is the best way to reach your destination: an assistant capable of helping people in the best options to accelerate their careers. This is the first step in our journey to empower the world. Everybody is free to join, so what are you waiting for?

0 Share