footprint2021 | Shea's Blog

How might your digital footprint affect your future opportunities? Give at least two examples.

– Your digital footprint can both negatively and positively affect your future opportunities. For example, if when your name is searched, negative things show up like videos of you drinking while under the required age or a picture of you vandalizing someone’s property, employers won’t want you associated with their company’s name. While those are the downsides, if you have a good track record of volunteering and doing things that a company would want to be associated with, you’re more likely to get a job.

Describe at least three strategies that you can use to keep your digital footprint appropriate and safe.

– The first and most obvious one is to just not do anything unprofessional. While this is probably the safest one, to live a life only ever doing what will get you jobs and a good reputation would be extremely boring. If your life is just spent trying to please the industry, your whole life would be bland and uninteresting. But that’s just my opinion, people can do whatever they want with their lives as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.

– The second strategy is to keep your personal life away from social media. If you stick to posting professional things, you’re a whole lot less likely to have a negative digital footprint. The only thing here is that if you do something unprofessional, and someone else films it, it could still end up on the internet attached to your name.

– The third and final strategy is to use a username and or profile that isn’t the same as your real name. As long as unprofessional behavior isn’t traced back to you, it’s doing relatively no harm in the sense of it impacting people’s public perception of you. This isn’t to say that you should go around breaking the law and putting it online just because your possible employers won’t see it, there’s still the fact that it’s illegal. Even if it’s not illegal and it’s just something unprofessional, if someone gets ahold of you username, it wouldn’t be good.

What information did you learn that you would pass on to other students? How would you go about telling them?

– I think that it would be important to know that everything you do online is tracked and recorded, no matter how careful you think you are, there’s always a risk. I believe that it’s also important that you think about how you want to approach creating your digital footprint. Whether you want to ignore the fact that it’s there, keep it in mind every waking moment of your life or anything in between is up to you. I think it’s always best to tell it as it is, no need for sugarcoating; the impact of you’re footprint is and always will be big not to mention the fact that as the online world expands, your footprint will grow with it.