The Cloud And The College Application
Recently, I saw Charlie O’Donnell at a cafe in the Mission District and introduced myself. It wasn’t long before I was showing him a demo of what I’ve been working on. He listened attentively to my pitch, and gave me some useful advice. Among other things, he suggested I have another look at Previsor’s BrainBench product.
Today, I took a few BrainBench assessments. There’s a long list of observations I made about the assessment process and the generated score reports, but the major takeaway was that my assessment scores are most useful in context of other information - either the aggregate of other user scores, or complementary information about me, such as my resume.
The latest BrainBench report contains a similar finding:
The future differentiator for businesses will lie in the addition and enhancement of “soft skills” - the qualifications needed to do business today, including the techniques and communication styles necessary to facilitate interactions with others in the workplace and around the world. The countries that are be stable to successfully cultivate these important skills along with specific job-related skills - will be the ones who drive the success of global outsourcing
This is why Path101 can be a godsend for individuals wanting to give a full representation of themselves to employers. Ideally, it should be simple and straightforward to share data between different products used to create the relevant data points making up a “cloud resume”, and for employers to look at each piece of data in addition to the big picture.
But as the resume format begins to include links to URLs and online accounts, the task of looking at resumes gets more complex, when it should be more simple, and that’s without accounting for applicant fraud (linking to work that isn’t yours)
At the very least, there’s going to need to be an “OAuth” approach for verifying account ownership, but it makes more sense to take the next step.
Who better to help us tackle this job than Google? We could authenticate, and quickly compile our Youtube pageview data, our Blogger stats, and our Google Reader subscriptions. Google could then help crunch that data as it is received.
Perhaps the most exciting part about this idea is its implications for an easier, more standardized college application process.
Starting at the top schools as an “optional” component for applicants, the cloud resume will quickly become a necessity for the best applicants to differentiate themselves with more than a few test scores, and a couple letters of the alphabet.
These optional data points would give Americans a fighting chance against foreign applicants by allowing them a better chance to display their previous invisible uses of creativity and commitment. If you can establish an Audience, that should earn an A+ in itself.
This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky talk. In fact, I have good reason to believe that one “big name” school in particular is likely to start allowing for such supplements by Fall 2010.
Should I name the school? I’d rather hear some ideas first, and I’ll reveal my prediction and explain it in a later post.
