Re-Tweet to Work Day, 8th December 2011

Good skills going to waste is a tragedy.  While looking for income myself, I identified businesses that want my skills but can’t afford them. Having used Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media as sales and marketing tools, I and a couple of colleagues wondered how we could use these tools to promote our skills and to match them with the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, social enterprises and voluntary organisations.

Our pitch is to make our skills, knowledge, expertise, creativity and experience accessible to businesses that require them by building an association of consultants and other jobseekers prepared to offer these attributes on an hourly or daily basis.

We set up the National Skills Network and our first project is Retweet for Work Day, taking place on December 8th 2011.  Those who want to be involved provide me, Mark (@loyalhelp) with a 140 character introduction including a link to an online presence. This will be circulated to all association members and we will ask that for one day everyone promotes each others’ services through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook whilst asking for retweets etc.

So in return for a few tweets each jobseeker will receive multiple exposures to new geographical and business opportunities. Thirty tweets could result in 1000s of people reading about available services, and it’s free. Retweet for Work Day was purposefully designed with less than seven days from concept to delivery to meet the urgent needs of those needing short term income.

Participants will circulate details of their skills and links to their own online presence and businesses are beginning to circulate details of vacancies, tenders and temporary work they have.  We are asking for simple reciprocity – you tweet your own details and details other consultants, jobs and vacancies etc to your own networks and in return each other member of the association does the same, introducing you to new networks and information.

December 8th 2011 is the first national re-tweet day, and we expect to start with a small number of jobseekers. We will continue to promote the network and work opportunities to members and businesses and will run national events through the next few months.

For more information see: http://nationalskillsnetwork.wordpress.com/