EnSlychopedia

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Alexander Pope (source: The Phrase Finder)

Meaning: A small amount of knowledge can cause people to think they are more expert than they really are.

In Greek Mythology, it was believed that drinking from the Pierian Spring would bring you great knowledge and inspiration. Thus, Pope is explaining how if you only learn a little it can “intoxicate” you in such a way that makes you feel as though you know a great deal. However, when “drinking largely” it “sobers” you now that you are wise and have a greater understanding, and also “drinking” it “largely sobers” you so you may never acquire complete wisdom and understanding. (source: Wikipedia)

Speaking of Wikipedia, when I was studying reference librarianship at Rutgers, a debate was raging about Wikipedia’s credibility — i.e., that students relied too heavily upon it and other encyclopedias as a final arbiter of knowledge, rather than as a starting point to drill down into the original sources.

The word encyclopedia itself means “training (children) in a circle,” or said another way, providing a central source of knowledge that is accessible and understandable, often at the level of, say, an 11-year-old student (source: Wikipedia).  Just because something is accessible and understandable, however (i.e., “dumbed down”), does not necessarily make it credible.

I mention this because, in this economy, the same credibility issues are now popping up with disturbing regularity in the career-advice space: especially when it comes to the purported effectiveness of networking.

We’ve all heard the old saw: “According to career experts, approximately 75 percent of jobs are found through networking.”  Who are these career experts?  Is this simply another “contemporary legend”?

One rationale for this myth, provided to me by a career coach, is that it’s much cheaper for placement services to shift the onus (and cost) of finding a new job away from more expensive and time-consuming (yet effective) methods, such as direct mail or telemarketing.  As in the movie, “The Matrix,” career-seeking bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source (read: financial windfall) while they are asked to buy into a simulated reality that pacifies and subdues them.

Not everyone is quite so avaricious — most notably, those that have been seeking jobs in the past three years, who now seek to share the benefit of their knowledge to help like-minded others succeed at an ever-more-complicated game.

Case in point: Jason Alba.

I happened to read Jason’s guide, “I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???” this past week. Based on the success of this book, Jason is working on a second edition. In fairness to him, he notes, on page 17 of his book, that “the biggest problem with LinkedIn is not the technology, but the expectations people have that it will do great things for their networking efforts” (i.e., it’s a powerful tool, not a silver bullet).

These expectations will no doubt be brought into greater focus once LinkedIn figures out the optimal way to drill down deeper into this sea of confusion and desperation, perhaps as sort of the “vast vanilla middle-management” version of ExecuNet.  The following quote is instructive: “The big question is the extent to which LinkedIn can convert free users (the vast majority) to paying users, and its ability to monetize, through advertising and other means, its user base to outside buyers.” (source: Deal.com)

In other words, it’s been fun to play in the free sandbox that is LinkedIn and delude ourselves that simply adding more contacts is shoring up our networks, and thus, in some small way, stabilizing our career trajectories.  Once we have to pay for the privilege, however, we’ll be forced to weigh LinkedIn’s cost/benefit value against other, admittedly less “sexy” job-seeking approaches . . . like using LinkedIn to set up more face-to-face personal branding and selling opportunities.

Think of it as a parallel to using the encyclopedia as a source of interesting cocktail-conversation tidbits (a la A.J. Jacobs) vs. a means to bubble up the true knowledge of the ages and form your own opinion about the divergent viewpoints presented.

Sure, you can go to LinkedIn Answers and “score points” for coming up with the best answers to readers’ questions, thus developing your online personal brand.  Or, you can attend a meeting, trade show, or conference to interact with real, live people and listen to what they consider their most challenging problems, so that you can propose solutions that tie directly into your experience and skill set.

I’m not a betting man, but I’m pretty sure that the latter approach has a better chance of putting actual, lasting revenue into your pocket than does the virtual “warm fuzzy” of LinkedIn.