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How to Avoid 7 Common On-the-Job Mistakes
Tweet Share on Facebook June 17, 2011 CommentEveryone makes mistakes—but some of those mistakes are more avoidable than others. When it comes to your job, even just one mistake could result in major consequences for your career.
Impress your employer by avoiding the following mistakes:
Mistake #1: Being unavailable
It’s inevitable that, at some point, your supervisor or co-workers will approach you and ask for your help on an outside project or assignment. Although it might be tempting ignore those emails or say no to additional work, don’t. You might think that no one will notice if you don’t help with extra work, but they will. And, although it’s not technically in your job description, more companies today must do more with less—meaning each employee needs to be flexible and multi-skilled. Make yourself indispensible by pitching in on other assignments when possible. (Of course, don’t overextend yourself to the point where you can’t get your normal work done.)
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Why You Should Keep an Open Mind About Your Career
Tweet Share on Facebook June 16, 2011 Comment (2)Always. Never. Have to. Can’t. They seem harmless enough, but if you’re not careful these words and others like them can keep you stuck in your career. They are all symptoms of the artificially limited worldview created by black-and-white thinking.
Black-and-white thinking offers only two options. Either something is possible or it isn’t. Either you get it 100 percent right, or you have failed. But in reality, this is a multi-chromatic world. While some things really are either/or, most things have numerous shades of the rainbow between black and white.
For example, consider the person who looks at a career change and, based on their current situation, decides they can’t do it. So they heave a sigh and give up. That perspective— career change isn’t possible—only reflects the current snapshot of their life. But if they add the variable time they might find that what isn’t possible immediately is possible over the course of, say, three years.
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How to Manage a Broad Job Search Online
Tweet Share on Facebook June 15, 2011 Comment (1)Like many job seekers, you’re probably applying for various types of opportunities. Depending on your background, it’s possible your job search stretches across several industries, and maybe even more than one field. How should you handle your multi-focused job hunt online?
Joyce Lain Kennedy, author and syndicated careers columnist, posed this question. It’s a dilemma for job seekers, but there are strategies to address it:
1. Don’t post multiple versions of your resume all over the Internet. In general, posting resumes online is not a useful strategy. If you’re a job seeker with several targets, it’s even less constructive to plaster information that may cause someone to think you can’t decide what you want to do.
When you apply for a specific job, target the resume, but resist posting various versions in general resume databases.
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Is the New Career a Perpetual Job Search?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 14, 2011 Comment (2)If you’ve been working for more than five or ten years, you likely expect your career to bring stability, company loyalty, and the possibility of upward progression.
Yet in many professions, that’s no longer the standard. At a recent board meeting, two executives echoed this idea. Their words: “There’s no such thing as a career anymore,” and “The traditional career is a thing of the past.”
Any move away from our long-time employment model, where employees stick with one company for their entire career, will take time. It’s affected by the actions of employers, mainly big companies, and politicians who decide what financial protections—like social security—we’ll rely on in the future.
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17 Tips to Ace Your Next Phone Interview
Tweet Share on Facebook June 14, 2011 Comment (14)It’s easy to understate the importance of a phone interview, dismissing it as merely the first step in the long job-search process. In reality, a seemingly cursory phone interview is actually the most important step, because without success, the next steps never happen.
Follow these phone interview tips and make it your business to secure a face-to-face meeting:
1. Print it out. Have a physical copy of your resume and the job description in front of you during the call. Type up a bulleted list of items you want to cover during the conversation. As each one gets satisfied, cross it off the list. Printouts are necessary in case your Internet access fails.
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How LinkedIn Can Transform Your Job Search
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2011 Comment (9)If you're going to use just one social networking site in your job search, it should be LinkedIn. With far less effort than it would take to go to networking events and build contacts the old-fashioned way, LinkedIn lets you expand and utilize your professional network in a pretty dramatic way.
It works like this: You start by creating a professional profile—essentially a less formal version of your resume—and then connect your profile to the profiles of other people you know. Once you connect to someone, you can then look at the profiles of the people they’re connected to, as well as anyone those people are connected to—providing three degrees of separation outward.
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How to Find a Hiring Manager’s Contact Information
Tweet Share on Facebook June 10, 2011 Comment (3)You’ve applied for a job opening through a job board, corporate careers site, or to anonymous email address in hopes of getting a call back and maybe even landing an interview. But a week or so passes by, and you’re still waiting to hear about your application.
How do you follow up when the initial job advertisement didn’t list any contact information? It’s time to start researching. Here’s how:
Scour the company website for a name. Look through the “About us” section of the organization’s website to determine the name of the hiring manager. You might even be lucky enough to find a company directory of employees with names and email addresses.
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Why Loving Your Work Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook June 9, 2011 Comment (2)If you have ever found yourself looking at your career and wishing you were on a path you felt more passionate and energized about, you may also be familiar with the little voice that says, “Work is a four-letter word. It’s not meant to be enjoyed. Suck it up, buttercup.” Inherent in that voice is the idea that wanting to love your work is somehow unreasonable and even frivolous.
But not only is loving your work not frivolous, it actually pays huge dividends in your life. And many of them aren’t even work-related.
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The Best Way to Take Control of Your Job Hunt
Tweet Share on Facebook June 8, 2011 Comment (3)Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little more control over your job search? It’s frustrating applying over and over again for jobs and never hearing back.
When you apply online, the odds are against you unless your qualifications exactly match what the employer wants. (In other words, unless you are applying for the job you already have.) It’s not impossible to land an opportunity via an online application; many people do find jobs that way, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not likely to get hired from a resume drop.
What should you do instead? Stop looking for a job. Start looking for a company.
You may be surprised, but it may be the best career move you never considered. Instead of spending all of your time searching for appropriate job descriptions and targeting your resume to apply for them, you should consider shifting some of your efforts to identifying organizations whose goals are in line with your interests and whose problems you know you can solve.
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How to Create Your Own Board of Career Advisors
Tweet Share on Facebook June 7, 2011 Comment (2)All companies have some sort of advisory board. The board’s role is to provide an outside perspective, strategic suggestions, and critical feedback.
Often these boards include people from different industries, much larger organizations, or different disciplines to bring new ideas under consideration. They help evaluate decisions on how the company will grow, how fast, and by pulling which levers.
In the end, the decision on which way to go falls with the company.
During a job search, career change, or as you seek to negotiate a promotion or pay raise, where are you getting advice and feedback on your career?
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