There are several online portals for career advice. They provide access to a variety of career advices regarding all aspects of a person's professional career. The question is how effective they actually are. Let's take a closer look at the various aspects of the online portals for career advice and how effective are they.
- Amount of Information
The online portal for career advice provides access to a truly staggering amount of information, blogs, advices and tips related to career advice. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
The advantage is that you can find career advice related to most of the situations that you may encounter in your professional life and disadvantage of this is the difficulty of finding the information that is relevant to your particular situation.
- Generalized Advices
Most if not all the tips and advices available on these portals are more or less generalized. That is they are geared towards being a little suited to maximum number of people and not toward being best suited to some people. Even those advices that address specific situations are by necessity somewhat generic.
Although you can find advices for most career situations they would rarely be the optimal ones for your personal situations. Therefore it's best to consider carefully before following them as they may even be harmful for your career prospects.
- Quality
When taking a career advice or any advice or suggestion in general one must consider the content as well as the source of the advice. Although the amount and even content of the online career advice portal articles are acceptable most of the time; same could not say about the source of these articles. These advices are only rarely by experts or professionals first hand, and even when they are the reliability of the said expert is always in question. It is said that when you get some thing for free you get exactly what you paid for. As you get the advice on the online career advice portals for free, you should not expect much from it.
This is not to say that the advices on these portals are useless. If fact you'll rarely if ever, get anything much different, from even paid professional career advisors, than that which you'll find on these portals for free. It is just that the advices or tips that you are receiving can be unreliable and make up your own mind before following them.
- What You Look For and What You Find
As the amount of information on these portals are humongous; it is almost certain that you will find things which, although were not what you were looking for, are still useful and relevant to you. I have often found it worth my while to walk through such portals once in a while. You are almost certain to find things that you'll find of interest. This, in a way, is the real usefulness of such portals. If you are looking for a particular career advice or solution to a certain problem you may or may not find a solution that is appropriate for you; but if you just visit browse, more often than not you'll find tips and advises that are useful to you and can help improve your performance.
- The Nature Of Career Advices
The term career advice is more than a bit general. This covers advices related to choosing a career line, a job profile, advices about looking for a job, building resume, preparing for and facing interviews, dealing with job changes, career gap and much more. The effectiveness of the career advices found on the online portals, vary depending on the kind of the concerned career advice.
Some career advices have to be highly personalized either due to their importance and long lasting impact or because they address matters that are highly dependent on individuals. For example advice about which career field to select. On the other hand some other career advices can be relatively generic such as how to prepare for an interview etc. In general, the online portals for career advice work well for advices that can be generic, and not so well for advices that have to be personalized.
Although they can help in cases that usually require personalized career advice as well by providing you with the relevant information that can help you reach a decision.
Over all we can say that the online portal for career advice work, but their effectiveness varies and you would be well advised to use your own judgment and never rely blindly on free career advice. Now coming to think of it, not relying on things that are free is of course a good idea in general.