Skills and Technologies Used by Online Students Important Workplace Skills

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Jennifer Brady

UMassOnline Director of Marketing Jennifer Brady Obviously, what you learn is important to your career aspirations. But how you learn – using online technologies, systems, tools and techniques – is becoming important, too, if you think IBM is any indicator of what life in the corporate fast lane now favors.

While some may question the value of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, profile pages, instant messaging and so on, IBM is assembling variations of all these things to advance its business worldwide. Specifically, in this press release, IBM is announcing a new social networking community designed to help its employees and partners more easily connect and collaborate.

I have to share just a couple of snippets from this release because in them, you’ll quickly recognize aspects of online student life. This means that now, while online students are mastering course content, they are also mastering some technology skills that will be valuable in the workplace:

IBM is responding with PartnerWorld Communities, bringing together the best in social computing technologies and online community building tools to connect more than 100,000 partners worldwide on emerging business opportunities…

PartnerWorld Communities enables members to collaborate through a secure network that connects people around a focused task or goal using blogs, forums, private teaming spaces for solution design and market planning activities, social bookmarking and RSS feeds for real-time access to key topics of interest… partners can collaborate real-time for faster access to other partners and IBM subject matter experts with the skills required for client implementation. Users can also tailor their homepage to automatically follow subject matter experts and business topics to connect with them on new technology developments and selling innovations.

You can check out this great new online community here: http://www.ibm.com/connect/partnerworld/.