Prompted by a NZ Herald article about the shortage of jobs for graduates we advertised a graduate role on Seek recently.  What a disappointment!!!!

• Only 30 or so responses
• 80% from outside NZ
• 85% didn’t bother with a cover letter, despite us requesting one
• With the remainder the cover letter was generic and/or clearly aimed at a job that wasn’t the one we offered
• It appeared that no-one actually visited our website to find out what it is that we actually do.

Where are NZ’s best and brightest?

Grant has challenged me to describe my personal deliberate knowledge structures.

I have become much more ruthless about tools lately - I simply don’t have the time or inclination for anything too complicated… As you’ll see from the below I am a hi-tec and a lo-tec girl.

The game changer for me has been my iPhone.  Where I’m perhaps a little different from most is that I have never been much of a photographer .  I have gone years without taking photos.  Even with previous phones the effort involved in downloading the photos to a PC and then uploading them somewhere else or sending them to other people was too much for me.  Now I do one click to take the photo and then a second click to send it.  My parents get daily photos of their granddaughter and we are collecting a great record of her first year of life.

I use Evernote frequently.  In fact, I have all of my useful “stuff” sitting in Evernote.  It has completely replaced Delicious for me. I record my families birthdays, gift ideas, useful websites and music I want to download.  Most helpful is that I have Evernote wherever I go.  Again, I don’t have to do anything, it is automatically available to me online, offline or on the road through my iPod.

I eat breakfast going through the blogs that I subscribe to.  I flick through most of them looking for useful references and points of view.  In particular, I find that most of my non-fiction reading (about a book every fortnight…) comes from blog recommendations.  We’re also starting to get value from our internal team blog - particularly the insights that people are recording from conferences. 

Now onto the lo-tech.  I use a hardback, unlined, moleskin for ideas/thoughts and general writing.

For thinking, I work in colour on a large A3 artists pads…I’ve used this recently to map the model from The Opposable Mind onto my life and onto my thinking about the business.  The key to this is to not to aim for pretty or for perfection.  That can always be done later. It’s really to focus on getting the ideas out and I enjoy the paper and pen effect.

How about you? What are your deliberate knowledge structures?