In an age where “career advancement” is synonymous with “continuing education,” we want to give higher learning facilities a chance to promote their programs, reach out to professionals, and showcase the best their schools have to offer.

Professionals who are looking to improve their career opportunities want to look beyond the typical school website. More and more, universities are using social networking to give professionals a means to communicate with their students as well as their administration and teaching staff.

For those looking to acquire new skills or make a career shift, Viadeo now offers professionals a one-stop resource to find programs tailored to their needs. With Viadeo School Pages, universities and higher learning institutions can use the power of social networking and its high ranking in search results to engage potential students.

Schools have four tabs to create their own mini-site on Viadeo and promote their programs to a targeted, professional audience:

• Overview tab, for introducing their school and sharing news with followers.
• Programs tab, for promoting their school’s curriculum, degrees, and training programs.
• Discussions tab, for creating social interaction with future students and alumni.
• Carte Blanche tab, for adding a personal touch, such as a school website, blog, or landing page.

School Pages are now live on Viadeo! For more information, visit: http://www.viadeo.com/education/

…Our Blackberry app sees the light

We started 2012 in style, launching our app for the more than 2 million Blackberry users which aims to help you make your professional social networking experience more convenient and user-friendly.

…We

…We increased our presence in North Africa  And in Russia

Also at the beginning of the year, we opened a new office in Casablanca (Morocco). It’s not only our first office in North Africa and the Arab world, but also our second one on the African continent, after the opening of our offices in Senegal the year before. With this opening, we continue our commitment to developing our presence in Africa and to building a product that will help Northern African professionals do business.

Concerning Russia, we made a strategic joint venture with a local partner : the Russian media group Sanoma Independent Media at the end of 2011. Early 2012, we released a russian version of Viadeo to make the website available to the 51 million internet users in the country

…We welcomed new investors

Spring brought an important round of fundraising, one of the largest investments made in the European Internet market. The investment, by the Strategic Investment Fund (FSI) and by our new international investors, is enabling us to improve our platform and continue to broaden our services for our users, especially on mobile.

…We changed our look!

In 2012, we also improved our Company Pages with new features. Now, companies have a more direct way of communication with their clients and employees, thanks to the possibility of posting a status, connecting personal profiles to the Company Pages and making your subsidiaries and partnerships known.

For us, it is also very important to help you to take care of your personal brand and to develop your reputation. Therefore, improved the look and feel of user profiles, enabling you to save time and increase your professional visibility.

…Great recruits for our team

As innovations kept coming, our team kept growing with renowned professionals. Jean-Marc Potdevin, new Chief Operations Officer and Mary Beth Henson, new PR and Communications Director, joined Viadeo to contribute to its excellence. Moreover, Sébastian Naji, former Business Strategy and Development Director, was promoted to the position of new Marketing Solutions Director. Last but not least, the team was reinforced by two key profiles: Arnaud Devigne, our new Chief Marketing Officer, and Michel Meyer, Chief Mobile Officer, who will play an important role in 2013. Welcome!

…Back to school with a mobile launch

After the summer, Viadeo launched its great new apps for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone in several different languages. The mobile sector is booming and thus it plays a key role for Viadeo. With these new apps, users will be able to update their profiles any time and everywhere.

…A new tool for recruiters

Last November, an external report unveiled that HR professionals continue to have difficulty filling their vacant positions. With the aim of solving this issue, Viadeo launched its new version of its recruiting tool, Viadeo Recruiter.

With its tailor-made talent pool, powerful search engine, and project management for every hiring project, the new Viadeo Recruiter offers headhunters and HR professionals advanced and innovative features to make sourcing candidates smoother, simpler, and more straightforward than ever.

As 2013 begins we will keep working with passion to offer new features and new valuable content for both users and companies.

HAPPY 2013!

The buyout means that Viadeo members will get access to Pealk’s innovative web app, a streamlined interface that helps SMBs find and contact professionals on social networks.

Pealk’s app has garnered unanimous praise worldwide and gives professionals a seamless, straightforward tool to search, filter, and organize profiles they can contact. Designed for maximum productivity, it allows HR and sales professionals to make the most of Viadeo’s extensive database.

“A PSN’s value depends not only on the size of its member base, but on how members can use it to their advantage,” states Dan Serfaty, co-founder and CEO of Viadeo. “That makes Pealk the most innovative product we’ve released in the last five years, thanks to its ability to democratize social networking for business purposes.”

“We’re very proud and pleased with this buyout, which we consider to be the happy ending to an exciting adventure,” says Boris Golden, Pealk’s CEO. “It’s also the beginning of a new adventure for us, since there are plenty of applications just waiting to be invented that will give professionals more ways to unlock Viadeo’s full potential!”

For those of you who want to reconvert your career in the coming year here are some tips to get started.

1. Discover your real passion. The first step is to take time to know yourself, to discover what you are really passionate about.  Then ask yourself: can I transform that passion into a profession that can satisfy me in the long term?
2. Analyze the labor market. Once you’ve chosen your new professional career, it’s important to analyze the market to find out if the sector that interests you is growing and can offer you opportunities. Are your new goals realistic and achievable?
3. Make the most of your skills and competencies. Once you know what motivates you, take a self-evaluation test to learn what makes you stand out, and what are your main abilities and competences. ow can you use them to apply for your dream job?
4. Round out your education. If you decide to change careers, you need to learn about your new sectorUse Viadeo to find news for your market or useful information about options to broaden your education.
5. Identify key people. Viadeo can help you to easily discover key opinion leaders in your market. Ask yourself:  How can I contact them without being too intrusive? A commonly accepted practice is to request a common contact to make an introduction or to participate in the forums and discussion groups they participate in to initiate a conversation that adds value and shows off your best qualities.
6. Dig up business cards and past contacts. Have a look at your business card holder and get back in touch with former classmates, colleagues or even teachers. Take advantage of professional social networks to make the most of your network of contacts and to develop a relationship with other professionals. You never know who can open doors for you or introduce you to someone who can!
7. Make your new self known. Working on your visibility is as important as the previous steps. Once you know what you want and you are on the way to making it real, take advantage of professional social networks to make your new self known to the world. Complete your profile in detail, not just with your career data but also with your aspirations, professional objectives and skills you want to highlight. Ask for recommendations that would add value to your profile and update it frequently so that recruiters and future employees can easily find you.
8. Use all available platforms. It’s important to exhaust all the available ways to reach your goals. Spontaneous candidatures, consulting firms, head hunters, job portals, networking sessions… These are just some of the tools you can use. Ideally, you should try to use them in a complementary way to increase your chances of success.
9. Commitment and dedication. After making a decision, it is essential to remain true to it and to be constant and organized to achieve your objectives.
10. Keep a positive attitude. A professional conversion can be difficult and can even lead to stress or anxiety. It’s important to be aware that this kind of process can take time and you you’ll likely go through many ups and downs to reach your dreams.

 A career change is an important step that demands engagement and responsibilityKnow your goals, choose an effective strategy, and use all tools available to be sure that you are giving yourself the best chance to attain your new goal.

What are your professional goals for 2013? We’d love to hear them!

 3 free and easy to use features

Status updates

Speak directly to your followers by posting status updates. Whether it’s a simple message, a link, a picture or a video, status updates help you converse directly with your audience.

Connect a professional profile with a Company Page

Viadeo members can become ambassadors of their companies by linking their profile to a Company Page, allowing the company’s information to appear in their profiles, as well as the latest news, job offers, contacts and discussion groups.

Connect to the companies that matter to you: A Company can now link their Company page to that of other companies.  Link up with subsidiaries or associates to offer visitors a social graph showing who you work with.

Click here to learn more.

Interview with

What went into the creation of the new Viadeo Recruiter?

The foundation of project was to create a tool that helps recruiters organize their recruiting projects. With this new version, we put the emphasis on something that every recruiter wants: to save time.

When redesigning Viadeo Recruiter, we focused on what our clients told us they needed:

• A more simple interface that is easy to learn
• A fluid, quick and efficient search system
• Data that can be grouped by recruiting project, for a more global vision
• Rapid processing of information
• The ability to get the most out of previous hiring projects

What innovations does Viadeo Recruiter offer?

Organization

We created a management system of recruitment by project. When you open a job offer, you create a project with the same name and a ‘Project File’ appears in your homepage. This way, when you access a project, all your actions are automatically grouped: searches, job offers, candidate lists, messages, etc. In just a glimpse, you can see the progress of your recruiting projects and process all of the information very quickly.

Search

We made the choice to innovate everywhere with this project – even the search tool has been redesigned to be faster and easier to use. On one page you can narrow down or broaden the search by adding or deleting a criteria; you can also see all you results and drill down to their details by clicking on the profiles of the best candidates.

You can add candidates to your ‘basket’ and of course decide whether to contact them immediately or keep their information to contact them later. The algorithms and results have been improved to increase the efficiency of your searches.

Talent Pool

We wanted recruiters to be able to take advantage of the time and effort they spent on previous selection processes. So we have developed the “My Talent Pool” tab: a personal space that gathers your contacts and all the candidates you have contacted during the hiring process.

This way, recruiters and human resources professionals can build their own personalized talent data base in Viadeo.

Managing Candidates

You can to find, in a clearer and simple way, the profiles of those who have applied as candidates, of those that you have contacted or the ones you have registered. Another innovation we added is a large range of tools that make it possible to search and treat different candidatures, both individually and in groups.

What is your favorite feature of this new version?

We have added a bunch of small extras to increase the effectiveness and the speed of data processing. Among them are the Boolean Operators, the group treatment of candidates, the customization of group messages, the list of people that have registered for your job offer, etc. The list is long and will keep growing in the following months with innovative and very interesting tools.

Click here to learn a more about Viadeo Recruiter.

In pictures, the new versions of the functionalities

The homepage

Candidates & Messages

Search

By Javier Megias, renowned speaker, expert in business models and startups committed to changing the world. He is the author of the blog

We are living in difficult times: pessimism floods the streets and inhibits consumption, and taken together with the difficulty of obtaining funding makes starting any business venture a tough challenge. But, this is also an extraordinary moment for entrepreneurship and I believe there are a lot of reasons to think that we are living in one of the best times to undertake a business adventure.

1. Consumers are no longer subjugated to big brands. In times of abundance, customers have often been the first obstacle for entrepreneurs, as they don’t always choose the best product, but rather the one from the most well-known brand, even if it’s more expensive or less useful. But today consumers are more willing to test new products or services which can really solve their problems in a better way and with a more competitive price (but, watch out! Price must not be the only way for entrepreneurs to differentiate.)
2. Your labour security is no longer a barrier. People who work for someone else don’t consider their jobs as “stable”, and this means they live with a terrible uncertainty. This is certainly lamentable, but since it’s complicated to enjoy labour security…why not start your own business, even if it were only to create your own job?
3. You have neither a “backpack” nor an inheritance to manage: Established companies are now facing heavy cost structures which often make them slow and bureaucratic. They also often have a reactive and not very innovative business culture…which is a disadvantage in the current situation. If you start your business now, you will probably design a very light structure with agile and adaptable staff, which is in practice a key competitive advantage. In addition, you don’t have very high needs of recurrent billing which allows you to rapidly change your direction without having to take into account any useless inherited load.

All this means that, even though it’s very complicated to secure minimum funding to begin with (in my experience, it’s much smaller than you think), it’s actually a good moment to undertake a new business adventure. Since your invoicing requirements won’t be very high in the beginning, because during the first stage your aim will be to validate the business model and its viability…which means that when you are really prepared to grow, the economic situation may have improved  (and if it hasn’t, your business will be fast and agile)

In fact, emblematic companies such as Apple or Microsoft were born with a very light philosophy and in a context of tough economic times and, in spite of it – or perhaps because of it, they managed to defy the status quo and become the references they are nowadays without renting expensive offices or having a lot of support staff at the beginning.

The adventure will be long and complicated, but it will absolutely be worth it.

You are spending more and more time using your mobile phones and in order to make applications that help you better manage your professional life, we have completely renovated our mobile apps to make them more flexible, fast and intuitive than ever. Now you can enjoy the full capabilities of Viadeo whenever and wherever you choose. The apps are free and they are already available on main iPhone platforms (including the new iPhone 5), Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, in 7 languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German and Chinese).

In less than two seconds, you can easily access the functionalities of Viadeo.  Manage your contacts, your connection requests, all of your messages, and even edit your profile.  And for mobile users only, you can use your Viadeo app to call a contact, straight from your Viadeo profile!

Don’t miss anything! The new apps also allow you to create alerts so you can be notified when you have a connection request or a new message.

Because we know that mobile use is growing fast, we’ve also created a new Business Unit dedicated exclusively to the mobile market. This means that we have an entire team fully dedicated to bringing you applications that will continue to improve your experience on Viadeo wherever you are and whenever you need us.

Download the new applications now in the App Store and Google Play.

We hope you like the news appls and look forward to receiving your comments and feedback!

By Berto Pena:

More and more I find people concerned with improving their time, their efficiency, the results they seek or, as it’s commonly said, with making better use of their time. Whether I’m visiting a company, city hall, school, law firm, design studio or communications agency, everywhere I find a similar scenario: good, capable professionals, with a desire to improve their work, without knowing how to achieve the improvement they seek.

It’s really a logical problem and an evident consequence of something that follows us from our childhood: no one teaches us how to work. We invest countless years and resources in “traditional education” when the truth is today, the world that we live in actually demands different capabilities.

Knowing how to work is a skill (and as such, can be learn and developed) that is becoming more and more scarce. And it’s because the environment in which we live is becoming increasingly complex: more gadgets, more services, more information to handle, data in the cloud, interruptions, meetings, working from a distance, teams spread all around the world… in 2012 professionals need, more than ever before, to be the captains of their own boats.

However professionals, especially executives and managers, tend to look for answers in the wrong place. Their response to the challenge of being more productive is usually to “work more hours”, which doesn’t really say much in itself. The fact that a professional works more hours than I do doesn’t mean that he or she is better at their job, or cares more about their job than me, nor are they more productive / nor achieve any more than I do. It just means that they spend more time at their workplace. That usually has a tremendous impact in the most important part of their lives too: their selves and their families.

We believe that results, efficiency and productivity, are measured by a watch. And how wrong we are! They are part of a path. Thus, in the first place, they should have some objectives in sight to follow; it’s about knowing what you want and what you are looking for. In the second place, they depend on each one of your daily decisions, of what you do and what you don’t do. Because if you seek to make the most of your time, to rightly invest your efforts and obtain results, more important even than knowing what you have to do is to keep in mind what you DON’T have to do.

Choosing is the key word in Productivity, the center of the target. Because choosing leads to ignoring and excluding and focusing and doing. But as professionals our ability to choose wisely is getting worse and worse. We choose more applications, more emails, more meetings, more gadgets, more hours and we choose to load ourselves with more commitments without really stopping to analyze (consider, think, calibrate, see) if it’s valuable for us or not. Instead of choosing, we say “yes” to everything, and in so doing, we burden ourselves with more and more weight. We are trying put out a fire with gasoline.

In my past experience in business and department administration, and currently as a trainer and speaker on PersonalProductivity, I see exceptional professionals working in first or second gear, when they really have the set of skills, talent, ambition and even opportunities to be going in fifth or sixth gear.

Everywhere I go I hear a sentence that terrifies me: “We need to work more”. No, what we need is to work better.

Any given time is good to improve and to find a better version of oneself. But no other is better than this tumultuous time in which we live.  The greatest thing about Personal Productivity, which is why I dedicate myself to this subject, is that it does not take anything extraordinary to be achieved. You don’t need to run a marathon, learn a complex new language or sign-up to a two year master degree. Everything you need is there, with you. And it all begins with starting to choose.

To help you better understand, today we want to tackle some of these rules of behavior to help steer you in the right direction when it comes to ‘netiquette’ in professional online platforms.

When engaging with your contacts:

• When adding a new contact, personalize your request. Mentioning to the person something you have in common, the last time you met or a project you’ve worked on together increases the chances of the other person accepting your request
• If someone declines your connection request, move on. Don’t insist or ask why he/she did not want to have you in their network

About messages

• When requesting a recommendation, write a personalized message and avoid standard messages
• If someone writes to you a recommendation, always thank them and offer to write one back (if you feel you are capable of assessing their work of course!)
• Don’t say anything in a PSN that you wouldn’t want your boss or colleagues to see
• If you have a job, but are looking into new opportunities, be as discreet as possible about it: remember that your current employer can see it too
• Don’t spam your contacts with messages about your company. It is ok to send them invitations to your latest events if these are relevant to them, but don’t overdo it or you’ll end up being deleted from many networks

When participating in groups

• What you say in a group or forum speaks about you and helps build your professional profile, so proof read everything before making it public
• Share information that is interesting and relevant to the group you are participating in
• Be respectful. People have different opinions and the groups and forums of a professional social network are outlets to speak up about them. So never disrespect or insult anyone publicly

To sum up, the best way to make sure you follow the correct ‘netiquette’ in a professional social media is to stick true to who you are and be mindful and respectful of your network and contacts.

If you keep these rules of behavior in mind when managing your account at a professional networking site, you’ll be the savviest online professional networker out there!