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Take this Personally

March 25, 2009 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: Moving Up, UpMo News

Dear Friends,

Happy Birthday! Last week UpMo celebrated its first. In just 12 months—and after tens of thousands of hours in development, research and talking with hundreds of professionals like you—we’ve built a solution that we take personal.

Public BETA launched February 16th. Since then, UpMo has been gaining hundreds of new users daily, was featured in the NY Times, and is in April’s Fast Company magazine. See us on Fast Company’s home page today! I celebrate this incredible vote of confidence not because I like seeing myself sitting on a red chair or screen shots of our service, but because it demonstrates that others see today what we saw a year ago—an emerging tide, a shift in how successful careers happen.

Since we started, the market has changed—as has that thing we call career.  Today, longer careers swell the candidate pool. Constant career shift and job jumps are commonplace. Skills erode rapidly. A heavier reliance on relationships and reputation has completely transformed how we get ahead… and stay afloat.

What does this mean to you, to anyone concerned with where they’ll be in six months, in a year, in five years? What does it mean when the economy is off balance; when sharp rises in unemployment become scary? What does it mean when there are fewer jobs and incredibly steep competition for each of them?

It means bad career moves cost more—and that you can’t always rely uploading your resume, posting your bio on LinkedIn and hoping for the best. It means that “career,” like life, is something you can manage despite, and even because of, change. It also means you can take advantage of the new tide by defining your outcomes, tuning the dials and allowing your path to emerge.

Which is where UpMo comes in. We simplify how you define and manage your plan. We show you the risks and rewards of every career move—before not after, you make it. We help you build support systems around your unique assets, relationships, education and skills to maximize every inflection point on your path.

You… we take you personal. We want you to succeed! And, as part of the UpMo community, you’re well on your way. You’re an early mover, part of a wave that’s changing how people succeed at this thing called career.

Stay tuned. Over the next three months, the UpMo team will release several new features that will take even more risk out of your next job move and simplify how you manage your career. We’ll be announcing important partnerships and launching new ways for you to find your next job or opportunity. We’ll also be giving you new ways to get support and insight from your peers and your UpModel.

To those of you who helped define and shape UpMo, I say, “Thank you.” To our backers and funders, I say, “Thank you for betting on my vision and enabling us to grow in what may be the world’s worst downturn.” And to the thousands of people using our service I say, “Use it up! We’ll make more!”

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/promisephelon

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 and is filed under Moving Up, UpMo News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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5 people have left comments

Go, UpMo, go! I jumped on the beta after reading about you in FastCompany, and I love your product. I’m working with it every day, actually. Really looking forward to the new features.

Greg Howard wrote on March 25, 2009 - 9:38 pm | Visit Link

I appreciate the time you took to develop this site. I only wish I was younger. Should this site help me now at my mature age, I will gladly shout from the rooftops the splendor in using your site. For now I am just telling you FYI that from what I can see this is a great site for those who are interested in developing a career.

Sarah wrote on March 26, 2009 - 9:06 am | Visit Link

I’ve always been very interested in tools combining personal motivation and career growth like yours. A few years after becoming a manager, I came across a book by Helen Harkness entitled _The Career Chase_. Its main premise is that we actually have 2 career models today. The first is the traditional, the straight climb. The more modern one is where a career consists of several turns, lateral and downward moves to then get you back up again.

The major problem, however, is that while many agree that the world of careers is changing, not everybody has made the mental switch between the new and the old models. This includes some of the very employers one wants to connect with. They still judge applicants by old linear career standards. This is also why candidates needlessly overworry about anything that looks like a casualty on their resumes, from gaps to taking “lesser” positions.

I’m hoping that tools like yours with its career profiles demonstrate that many valid paths to construct successful careers exist. Several real-life events can cause anybody’s career to derail, e.g., manual labor being done by machines. Or as career discovery takes more importance, people find a new field that excites them more than what they majored in at age 22. What can be very exciting is to see just how did a high achiever handle career setbacks and how did future employers benefit.

Since some candidates are actually employers themselves, I hope they see these profiles and are therefore more welcoming of people who’ve blazed their own non-standard paths. Your suite of tools can accelerate the growth of careers, especially when you get hiring managers to use them.

Glenn Mandelkern wrote on March 29, 2009 - 8:03 pm | Visit Link

Thanks for the feedback Glenn, Sarah and Greg. We are on the edge of a transformation. Old ways of finding jobs are outdated, and the idea that careers are LINEAR is very 1980. @Glen, you’re right. We’re going to see more people with longer and more diverse life and career paths. The exception will be the norm. We want to fuel it.

Appreciate your support of UpMo and our approach to taking the risk out of job moves and simplifying the career management process.

Promise Phelon wrote on March 31, 2009 - 12:47 am | Visit Link

Glad to help, Promise! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Greg Howard wrote on March 31, 2009 - 11:09 pm | Visit Link

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