Career Changers… you should have already loaded all those RSS feeds into your readers (RSS Feeds Blog Entry ). If you’ve never heard of an RSS Feed head to wiki and then choose a reader – Google’s is pretty user friendly. RSS feeds are great for gaining situational awareness, but once you read about a particular technology… where to turn?
More Online Resources:
Well you’ve always got regular Wikipedia and you can check out iLeonardo and what we are doing with them. I was shown another nugget today at iTuneU. Jump onto your iTunes and go into iTunes Store, under that you’ll see iTunes U. Click in there and you’ve got access to a bunch of great information in the form of lectures by professors from top tier universities from around the world on whatever you want to learn about. I was flipping through a few under “Smart Energy” by Stanford, each is a quick snippet about 15 minutes or so of an interview with a famous professor talking about their subject of expertise.
Pretty nifty stuff – you certainly won’t be able to be the CTO of a fuel cell company after spending the night at a Holiday Inn Express and hearing a some prof’s lecture, but you’ll have a good starting point. And it goes to my thesis and why we are here, that is to say that if you are a marketing professional, and you like the space, have done some research, know what competitors are out there and you know what the implications for the greater energy space are for the product of the company you are applying for, then you are in pretty good shape, and you probably know enough about the CleanTech space to get that job (if your marketing background is solid).
Also, don’t forget you can always go to the library; librarians are amazing – they actually love doing your research for you – it turns out that the internet is not the only source of information we have available to us! It is a great resource you may have forgotten to turn to if you have been out of school for a while. The CleanTechies team went over to the SF Public Library yesterday and it was pretty bleak. We were among the 30 people born after the 1969 – and a great many folks there were just using it as a good place to nap!
Hope it helps. Keep learning, we need you.
-Ian
