“Using LinkedIn” by Patrice-Anne Rutledge, $20 from quepublishing.com, has some great tips. For example, to find old friends from college, click “add connection” and then click “classmates.” Put in the years you were there and what you studied. When Joy did this for the University of Southern California, over a thousand names showed up. Each name has an “invite” link, in case you want to add them to your network.

The book has videos, podcasts, and screencast tutorials to guide you through the LinkedIn service. Learn how to use the service to find a job. If you have a blog, learn how to link it to your LinkedIn profile . Some say LinkedIn will one day be as big as Facebook, because it follows you throughout your career. Here’s how to make the most of it.

If you want to take a course at Learnable, read the teacher’s biography and look at an outline of the course. All courses are vetted before they appear. About a fourth of the courses involve programming or web design.

Talk about a jazzy resume. The ones we saw at Mashable, a leading tech blog, would blow you away. You can see them at on.mash.to/2jobs. If you’re not applying for a whiz bang graphics job, however, you probably don’t need anything that colorful. For a standard resume, we like the ones in the new version of “Resume Deluxe” from WinWay.com.

We started by filling in a few key words about the type of job we were hypothetically looking for, and the program gave us a sample resume to edit. (There are over 14,000 sample resumes and 400 cover letters.) Next we clicked “jobs,” typed “writer, journalist, editor,” and saw over a thousand job listings from just from one state. A few were a bit off the mark: “surgeon” and “receptionist.” (I’m not really a surgeon but I can play one in this resume.) Still, it was handy to see the whole list without leaving the program, and they all had links to further info online. If we’d actually wanted to post a resume, clicking “post” would bring up links to 15 leading job sites.

The program goes beyond resume building and lets you prepare for interviews through video tutorials. (We always hated the question: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”) Click “salary” to learn how to negotiate the best wage. Under the “Resources” tab, there are links to government jobs, science jobs, hotel jobs, “the green economy,” “work at home” and so on. The program is $30 as a download from WinWay.com or $40 for a boxed copy.

MyJobChart.com is a free online service that lets you set up a task board to assign chores to your children and select rewards for doing them.

One is “company follow.” Once you follow any company, you’ll get updates on new job offerings and find out if you have any connections who work there. Most jobs are obtained through personal contacts. To use “Company follow,” go to LinkedIn and click the “more” link at the top of the page, then “companies.”

You’ll probably find that you have many more connections than you would have guessed. Joy has 42 direct LinkedIn connections, which links her to over 2.1 million other professionals. (Who knew that we knew someone who knew someone at Yahoo?) Bob has 95 connections that link him to 2.2 million professionals. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. Bob said he has to go lie down now.

The second new LinkedIn feature is “Career Explorer.” This is aimed at college students who want job tips. It offers career advice, job news, and companies to follow. So far, “career explorer” has been rolled out on 60 campuses in the U.S. If it’s at your school, you’ll see a link under the “jobs” menu at the top of the screen.

Finally, LinkedIn lists job openings in your career specialty, in a small section on the right hand side of the first page you see when you sign in. Membership is free.

Ron Z.

Elance is one of the leading sites for freelance workers, but we had never used it until today. We paid $50 to get some updates to our website, which we thought was reasonable. We were also trained on how to do some of the updates ourselves. Next time we won’t need Elance.

Elance has writers, consultants, programmers, marketers and administrative help. We used a WordPress expert named Ron Z.

It’s called “UpMo.com,” which stands for upwardly mobile. The service measures your readiness for your next promotion and helps you get there. New to UpMo.com is the “intelligent job search,” which filters jobs using criteria you supply when you fill out your profile page. It uses salary data from 4,000 jobs at salary.com to show what you might be able to earn, and uses simplyhired.com to scour job boards and company websites for postings. You also get a membership in the UpMo group on LinkedIn.com, which may bring you contacts to help get you that next job. (We are both on LinkedIn, by the way, but are not looking for jobs.)

To us, the role models at UpMo.com were intriguing. You can choose a role model from dozens of suggestions in your chosen field. These are real people with real life stories, though you won’t be able to send them an email unless you already know their address. You can see their career plotted on a graph superimposed on that of your own career. It gives you a good idea of what people did to get where they are. Joy chose Dean Takahashi, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who now covers video games for VentureBeat. You can keep selecting role models till you find one that inspires you.

The service is free for the first 10 days. After that it’s $7 a month, or $30 for six months in advance.

The courses offer certification in Linux/Unix System Administration, Web Programming Open Source Programming, and “.NET” Programming. The courses cost around $300 to $400 each. See more info at OreillySchool.com.