Exploring Your Digital Portfolio with Erin

Over the past decade, Social Media has become a huge phenomenon around the world. Apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and more offer up a place for anyone and everyone to create, share, and find new content on a wide variety of different subjects instantly and with ease. Some have even made a career out of social media, with influencers and Youtubers becoming some of the most followed users on these platforms. With its widespread usage and many valuable functions, social media has also recently grown to be an extremely powerful force in the traditional professional world as well. With its ability to spread advertisements to a large population and multiple demographics for free and instantaneously, gain new clientele, and provide users with the opportunity to connect with those in their field easily, social media has become the avenue of choice for many when it comes to growing their professional learning networks and careers. Though it has been used in...

When it comes to working on computer-based projects, what applications do you automatically think of as the most helpful? For many, Office365 (or the Microsoft Office Suite) comes immediately to mind. Almost everyone who has a computer has at some time or another been exposed to the Microsoft Office suite of products. Whether you are creating a Powerpoint presentation for a big project in the office, typing up your resume, or creating a passion project for your own enjoyment, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Publisher are all common and great tools to use to get your products to be the best they can be. However, they do have their downsides including their cost, their lack of free autosave features, and sometimes difficult interfaces to work with. Many professional and academic settings still use Microsoft Office to increase their professional connections and success because of the universal knowledge that has been built about it through the years, but some are transitioning to newer and a...

Picture this. You type in a search on Google for content concerning a specific topic within your professional realm. Millions of search results from various websites instantly pop up on your screen, some even from pages that you do not recognize. After clicking on a few links and becoming distracted by all of the different information available, you find yourself so far from the topic and websites where you started. After being so frustrated with wasting your own time, you decide to write a rant on Facebook and instant message privately to your friends about all of the websites you visited and how they do a horrible job of managing their information. Sound familiar? With so much available information across millions of different sites on the internet, falling into the trap of an internet deep-dive is extremely common. We also tend to share everything we do on our social media these days, which can be extremely detrimental. To combat these issues, many top professionals use an array of ...

When first entering the professional space of any particular field, creating a successful professional track record and developing a professional network of connections are some of the most important steps for success that one can take. Though this can seem extremely intimidating and complicated at first without the right tools, failing to take these steps can potentially make or break the success of a career. Past decades of networking required frequent coffee dates with potential contacts, physically mailing information to large groups of people, and local face-to-face interaction (limiting the outreach that each individual had to grow their platform). Fortunately, the internet, more specifically the processes of blogging and the act of posting on social media sites such as Twitter , have both risen to the top as some of the easiest and most impactful ways that one can expand their professional network and gain personal contacts that will help move their career on the right path....