Your New Permanent Record

Recently I was talking to a colleague about new teachers and their use of the Internet. Even though not all “new teachers” are necessarily young teachers many are fresh out of college and part of the MySpace generation. If they posted party photos or TMI (too much information) on their MySpace page and think that they can now remove the damaging evidence they are sorely mistaken. That information is most likely permanently archived on the Internet.

Steve Dembo of the Discovery Channel and the Teach42 blog calls the Web “your new permanent record.” Once you put it out there on the Web you can’t take it back. So, when you are looking for a job your potential employer may just look you up.

According to Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources for CareerBuilder.com, in her article, “The Internet VS. Your Professional Image”, employers sometimes look. She explained that 26% of hiring managers who used the Internet to check out potential employees ended up not hiring those people based on what they found, 63% of managers dismissed employees based on disturbing information they found and 31% said they disqualified a candidate after they found that the candidate had lied about his or her qualifications.

Internet safety and Internet intelligence will continue to be important in teaching young people what’s appropriate and inappropriate to put out there for the world to see. Check out the sources linked in this post and please feel free to comment.