Don’t Worry, Wiki

Are you LinkedIn? Your resume on Monster? Your mug on MySpace? Your face on Facebook? Do you Yahoo? YouTube? Twitter? To listen to conventional wisdom, finding, keeping and excelling at your job now involves the tools we were only recently beginning to accept as tools for finding love.

Still, not everyone Twitters, Monsters or LinksIn (forgive the bastardization of a brand name), and there remain those among us who feel the Web 2.0 world is for play, not work, or reserved for Gen Y-ers tossing sheep.

But the new world order has preserved an ancient method of self-promotion — publishing.

Like the Academia from which the industry sprung, career techies have long sought publishing — professional journals, trade publications, books — as a means to push their processes, tout their techniques and promote their names.

The concept has never been easier thanks to the wiki, and it’s the first place a Web 2.0-phobe should turn to self-promote and “add business value to your career,” said Joe Gentry, CTO and senior VP of Software AG, who fancies himself knowledgeable in the matters of IT career navigation.

“If you are a developer, analyst or administrator with a couple of decades under your belt, you’ll probably concede (as a good corporate citizen) that there’s a bunch of business domain knowledge stored inside your head that ought to be passed along to others in the organization before you call it a career,” Gentry said. “But writing a stack of traditional user manuals is like eating dirt, right?”

Many companies, such as IBM, are using internal wikis to share and evangelize institutional knowledge. But there are tools such as Zoho, Wikispaces and PBwiki that let you create and share your pages.