Create your professional identity

During your time at college you will be writing or updating your CV to send out to employers for work opportunities.  You will also be using social media and email to network with people outside of the college.  You need to think about how your email address represents you.  This article by Andrea Coutu highlights some of the 'terrible secrets revealed by your email address'

If you have an email address already is it one that you would like employers to see, or perhaps its something like cutiesuzie@domain.com or coololdhamguy@madeupdomain.com ?

As a student at Oldham College you will be given access to Microsoft Live and your email address will be [studentnumber]@live.oldham.ac.uk.  However, that address will not be available after you have finished your course.    Therefore, in this session your tasks are to:

1.      Create a new Gmail account.   As you will be using Blogger in this course together with other
         Google applications, for example YouTube, then Gmail is definitely the best option.

2.      Change the settings in your live.oldham.ac.uk account so that all emails sent to that account are
         forwarded to your new Gmail account.

You will need to complete 4 steps:

STEP 1 - Choose your email name

a)  Select a username which is not only easy to remember but easy to pronounce too.
b)  Think of your email address as your online identity. How will your email address sound after 10-
     15 years from now?
c)  Your email address is all about you, so don’t link your Email address with your
      boyfriend/girlfriends name.
d)  If you are from a culture where your surname (family name) changes after marriage, try
     to avoid using your surname in your email address. Instead use something which defines you.
e)  Avoid putting the year of your birth in your email address. 

These tips have been adapted from http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-select-name-for-your-personal-email-address.html

STEP 2 Create a Gmail account by following these steps.

STEP 3 Try it out! 

http://learn.googleapps.com/products/gmail/get-started/#section-1-1

STEP 4 - Forward your live.oldham.ac.uk emails to your new Gmail account

Set a rule in your [studentnumber]@live.oldham.ac.uk to forward emails to your Gmail account by following these instructions http://email.about.com/od/windowslivehotmailtips/ss/wt_forward_wlhm.htm

Learning Outcomes

If you have followed all the above steps you:

• used independent learning skills by reflecting on how you want to present yourself
• used critical skills to create a professional Gmail account which you can use in any business communications.
• used digital skills to enable live.ac.uk account emails to be forwarded your Gmail account.

Make sure you test both accounts to make sure that you can send and receive emails, and that any emails sent to your live.ac.uk account will be forwarded to your new Gmail account.