Photo Credit: Flickr.com, Sister72

In a previous post, (Forget Sticks & Stones: Lose This Dream Killing Word) I channeled Yoda and asked people to lose ‘try’ and to replace ‘can’t’ with ‘won’t’ so you are taking responsibility for saying ‘No’.

I work occasionally in a local job search training program – and in the group we’ve talked about instituting a ‘swear jar’ for times when we use ‘can’t', ‘just’, ‘should’….. because these are words that lurk in our subconscious and pop out in our speech – and learning to catch ourselves using the words can help us learn to catch them earlier and weed them out.

Our conversation about ‘Dream Killing’ words then changed to people in our lives who had been very effective dream killers in our formative years – and far too many people had stories of parents, teachers and high school career advisors who were dream killers.

It’s time to run some of the $h!t #DreamKillers say through the Socratic Thought Challenge technique to help make us more aware of where their cognitive distortions lie – so we don’t take on these attitudes and pass them along to our own kids.

Let the dream killing buck stop here!

Here’s my example: My high school physics teacher had a 2-step process – only engineers need to take advanced physics, and only men should be engineers. #DreamKillers

What’s yours?

Work You LOVE

Photo Credit: Flickr.com, stevendepolo

… and tweets and status updates is that every job hunter is in a unique position. There is no ‘quick fix’ or ‘one-size fits all’ answer to many of the job hunters’ questions.

Reading blog posts and getting involved with social media as a way to expand your networks is absolutely what you need to be doing – but don’t walk away with a subconscious belief that there’s a magical fast-track, short-term job search technique that will allow you to graduate and THEN begin a job search.

Here’s the one BIG piece of advice for job hunters that’s universal:

• Get started on your Personal Brand and Personal Marketing Strategy (or whatever you want to call it) TODAY!

Do NOT think you can start the process of self-assessment, working through putting words to your strengths, pulling together effective online and ‘IRL’ personal marketing materials and plan (and have it WORK) in 6 weeks. Consider:

• The average length of time for a job hunt is on the order of 10 months. Highly qualified and experienced people are in this boat.
• Depending on the stat you read 60-85% of jobs are sourced through the ‘hidden job market’. These jobs are often never posted – YOUR job, then is in knowing how to access this market. Phoning HR to ask if they’re hiring yet is not an effective method.

DON’T PANIC!

Getting your ‘poop in a group’ isn’t difficult, but doing it right requires some up-front work that is best started yesterday – but today is also excellent!

We spend so much time in school learning about ‘what’ we want to do – and so little time thinking about ‘why’ we want to do it and ‘how’ best to package and market our skills. As a result, most of us still have difficulty identifying what our skills really are – let alone communicating them effectively and learning enough marketing to know how to access the right people to communicate them to!

Clearly, this can be a difficult process to manage alone – so don’t. Find someone (or many someones) to connect with who can help you with various aspects of this process – which even I’ve tried to ‘simplify’ for marketing – but you can see how different each of these areas is from each other.

Build on Strengths | Embrace Technology | Work Your Networks

Help your fellow job hunters out – where do you access help for your job hunt? Who do you seek out for advice? 

Work You LOVE

Photo Credit: Flickr.com; SOCIALisBETTER

By far the biggest struggle most job hunters have is in figuring out who they are and putting their personality type, interests, skills and values into a compelling resume format. Finding the words to describe your passion is difficult. Simon Sinek’s book, ‘Start With Why’, is an important read not just because it explains why we need to find work/ run our businesses in alignment with our passions, but because he also explains ‘why’ we have such difficulty with this process. (It turns out that the emotional center of our limbic brain isn’t directly connected to the more recently-evolved language center of our brain. This is why we pay big bucks to Hallmark for Valentines cards.)

If you are a highly qualified, positive, intelligent person and find yourself shaking at the thought of getting down to writing a stellar resume, you’re not alone. If you believe that you’re unqualified, under-educated and can find no work because everyone is better than you, then you’re wrong AND you’re not alone. The 2 biggest hurdles people put in their own way are: not recognizing their own skills and minimizing their accomplishments. If you’d like to spend some time analyzing yourself, see:  The 3 Most Important Questions Socrates Would Ask YOU (To Help You Find Work You LOVE).

If you’re ready to get down to putting yourself onto paper, then here are some links to online self-assessment resources you can use to get the ball rolling. These aren’t merely fun activities to file away in your career binder when you’re done – the point of doing the self-assessments is 2-fold:

1. The descriptions of your personality type, interests, skills and values are made of the words YOU can use in your resume. Take these inventories and choose the top 3-5 one-word or short-phrase descriptors given. Highlight them in yellow – or write them on a separate sheet of paper.
2. For each of these descriptors, write about a time when you demonstrated this trait. On your resume, and in interviews, you need to illustrate ‘a time when’. Even a 1 – 2 page resume tells a story – your job at this point of your job search is to start generating these stories of your skills so you have a bank to choose from.

We will talk about how to structure your resume statements in a future post.

Free Online Career Self-Assessment Tools

• Myers-Briggs: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
• Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences: http://www.bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/questions.cfm
• Government of Canada Employability Skills: http://www.jobsetc.gc.ca/toolbox/checklists/employability.jsp

Low-Cost Career-Related Self-Assessment Tools

• Self-Directed Search (Holland Interest Test): $4.95. https://www.self-directed-search.com/
• Strengths-Finder 2.0: If you purchase a copy of the book, you receive a code allowing you to take the online Strengths Test. You can purchase an e-book and do the test ASAP. Here’s the website: http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx.

OR

• Strengths-Explorer: I am a big fan of the teen version of almost anything. You get the same information often in a much cooler format that lends itself to using coloured pencils (and grabbing a glass of wine). You can do the Strengths Explorer online for $7.95 – and download all of the student resources for free. This assessment gives you your top 3 strengths (rather than the adult version`s 5) – and the resource booklet leads you though the ‘illustrate a time when’ activity mentioned above. Website here: https://www.strengths-explorer.com/

Remember, not everybody shares your particular combination of assessment results. Yes – you might know 100 people who just graduated with the same degree you have (hi Ryan!). That doesn’t mean there are no jobs for you – it means that you’re looking at things from your own vantage point, not from the vantage point of those of the employers out there who need you. Your job now is to break out of that pack of recent grads or current job hunters and find your new pack – the one at work!

Need help with this? You can access a more detailed ‘Who ARE You’ module with or without 1-1 coaching. Click Here For Info!

Work You LOVE

Photo Credit: Flickr.com, BrianFit

Happy New Year!

There are still a few days left in the current holiday season for you to do what could be the most important work in your 2012 job hunt: Take a fresh perspective on your search for work.

Looking for work can be a long, frustrating and tiring process. It can be easy to lose faith – and your focus – especially after such a commercial holiday season. This is a perfect time to reflect on your personal marketing strategy – and to bring some new perspective to your situation.

Here are some things to consider:

Work is NOT a 4-Letter Word.

In the career world, ‘work’ is a word with special meaning – work is your (a)vocation – it’s aligned with your ‘soul’. When you are doing your ‘right work’, motivation comes from within you – and you are more fulfilled than when you merely have a ‘job’.

This is why career counsellors want to spend so much time doing assessments of your personality type, interests, skills and values. These are absolutely critical to begin the process of helping you find work that’s right for YOU. When you find the right way to describe yourself, you’re doing the critical work required to market yourself effectively.

If you’re still in the camp that thinks that finding any job in this economy is good enough – it’s time to consider that in a competitive job market, it becomes even more critical that you know who you are and can put words to your skills. If you still can’t put your personal satisfaction first, consider that looking for work that’s right for you puts you at a competitive advantage in a tough market.

Your Resume is Your Most Important Job Hunting Document – But Not For the Reasons You Might Think

People hire other people that they know, like and trust and your resume alone doesn’t get you into this category. In a web 2.0 world, it’s also likely that your resume isn’t the document that gets you selected or weeded out of an interview process.

At many points in your job search, though, you will need to provide a copy of your resume to potential employers – I’m not suggesting that you ditch your resume. Quite the contrary. I’m suggesting that people stop spamming out bland and non-targetted resumes and spend more time writing components for their master resumes that focus on their skills and strengths and use specific, powerful Challenge-Action-Result statements. When it’s appropriate to send out or provide a resume, the resume you provide will be spectacular!

By working through your past work experience and writing Challenge-Action-Result statements, you’re also creating a bank of examples to use at interviews. Your resume now does ‘double duty’ as a cue card for directing discussion during the interview process.

You Have The Power

You have more power and control over the outcome of your job search than many job hunters like to acknowledge. Unfortunately, it’s far more common for people to pay heed to fear-mongers and their incessant demoralizing negativity. Today’s tough job market is just easy pickin’s! When you forget that you have personal power and responsibility, it’s too easy to start to believe that looking for work is hopeless, especially in this economy – and who would hire me anyway? (See The 3 Most Important Questions Socrates Would Ask YOU to help you get on top of this ‘stinking thinking’.)

Decide in 2012 that there are actions you can take to improve the effectiveness of your job hunt!

What do you need to know more about to get your 2012 career hunt moving in the right direction? Please let us know -

Work You LOVE

With a few ‘tweaks’ to your existing personal marketing plan, you can effectively integrate your online marketing with the in-person marketing strategies you’re already using.

In this workshop we’ll discuss:

• Basic offline marketing materials and networking strategies most job hunters currently use.
• Why WordPress is an excellent choice for the novice website creator.
• How to determine what information you want on your website and how best to display it.
• WordPress integration with current marketing materials and networking strategies.
• Integrating WordPress into new-to-you social media platforms.
• How to use your website planning and creation to help you focus your message.

When you’re looking for work you LOVE, your job search is your full-time job. Using all of the free and low-cost marketing tools available to you helps you expand your reach and create more ‘buzz’ about yourself than you could using off-line tools only. Having a central online hub that you control is critical to simplifying your online networking. Find out why WordPress fits the bill – and how easy it can be to get yourself started with WordPress.

Level: Beginner to Intermediate.  Target: job hunters, career changers and those with a message to get out to the world.

Find this workshop at WordCamp Victoria 2012. See the speaker listings and register here: http://www.wordcampvictoria.ca/speaker-biographies/.

Work You LOVE

Even better than being able to discuss your ‘computer skills’ is being able to show people your skills, either directly through the personal marketing materials you show-off online such as your web/blog site and social media profiles – or by having some examples only a hot-link click away.

In getting your personal brand online, you have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate a variety of ‘Computer Skills’. While you’re busy putting together your brand, don’t forget to take stock of the computer skills you’re using.

5. Typing Skills

Your typing skills should be sufficient so that they don’t impede you from carrying out the job you have to do. If your job requires you to compose and edit documents, your typing skills should be fast and accurate enough to allow you to write and manipulate the required information without thought to your typing. Ditto for coding.

You require typing skills for other higher-level computer skills.

4. Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations

Even if you are not are aiming for a position that requires you to hold some sort of certification demonstrating competence with the standard office suite of software, there are some fundamentals that you should be comfortable with.

• When word processing, are you familiar with keyboard short-cuts for basic formatting actions? Are you familiar with basic formatting actions themselves. If you aren’t comfortable using tables and tabs for formatting text, if you use the space bar to try to center text,  it’s time to take stock of your basic word processing skills. A quick ‘Google’ search can help you define basic word processing skills – and find online free tutorials.
• The same holds true for using spreadsheets – you should be able to do basic mathematical functions in a spreadsheet, and be comfortable adding and deleting rows and columns as well as carrying out basic cell formatting. If you can’t set different numbers of decimals in numbers, it’s time to spend some time on your spreadsheet skills.

You demonstrate your facility with using word processing software when you create your own resume and export it as a PDF file. Incorporating tables and using other formatting skills can help you make your resume stand out from other, more basic, resumes.

Looking to demonstrate your facility with presentation software such as Powerpoint? Think about creating a visual slideshow-style resume in Powerpoint (or similar software) that you can upload to Slideshare for display on your LinkedIn profile.

3. Setting Up & Using Blog/Website Software

We’re still in the realm of computer skills where having good typing skills is of significant benefit. Everyone should have at least a passing familiarity with the ‘how-to’s of using blogging software. Those of you who have been around here for a while know that I’m a BIG fan of WordPress as a content management system. Whether you’re using the free-hosting of WordPress.com or have moved into your own hosting situation, knowing your way around a WordPress (or similar) dashboard is an invaluable skill.

This skill is easy to ‘show’ people when you’ve set up your own WordPress website (or blog) as part of your online ‘footprint’ because (hopefully) your web address is on every piece of marketing you use when connecting with potential employers (resumes, cover letters, business cards, email signatures…..).

2. Domain Registration & Forwarding

Sure, not all of us will be required to set up and forward domains as part of our ‘jobs’, but all of us can benefit from having a passing knowledge of how these things work. Being familiar with the ‘how-to’s of registering a domain, forwarding the domain and knowing how to set up and use a customized email address is a valuable ‘life skill’ in the 21st century. From a personal branding standpoint, these skills allow you to maintain a free WordPress.com website and for about $10/year create your branded web address with matching email – allowing you to ditch the @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com and even @gmail.com extensions.

1. Navigating a CPanel

When you get to the point that you think you’ve outgrown using the free WordPress.com site for your website, you’re ready to move it into a self-hosted situation. The ‘cpanel’ (control panel) is the dashboard behind your website. Certainly not everyone wants to know how their website works in such technical detail, but having a cursory understanding of what can be done ‘behind the scenes’ gives you more control over either doing things yourself, or being in a better position to discuss the things you want done with your webmaster.

Regardless of the specific ‘computer skills’ skill-set you possess, it’s important that you clearly define these skills when required. A claim of  having ‘excellent computer skills’ on a resume or cover letter is meaningless. Find a way to highlight the skills you have using specific, clear and powerful language – and better yet, find a way to demonstrate them online.

How do you demonstrate your computer skills with the online component of your personal brand?

Work You LOVE

Image: Flickr.com, picturesquire

One of the biggest impediments we humans seem to have when it comes to building on our strengths is our brilliant capacity for getting in our own way with our attitudes and thoughts. While we understand on one level that negativity is a barrier to success, it’s surprising how often we unwittingly utter negative perceptions as if they are ‘fact’.

If unrecognized and left unchallenged, these toxic tidbits can derail not just what has the potential to be a screamingly successful hunt for work you LOVE, but in the bigger picture they impact the whole of your life.

Think about the following bits of ‘common sense’ that relate to finding work you LOVE:

• There are no jobs in this economy.
• If you can’t find work, you should get more schooling.
• Cover letters aren’t read, so they aren’t needed anymore.
• I’m too (old, young, fat, skinny, over-experienced, under-experienced, light, dark, short, tall….) to find anything good.

The trouble with these statements is that within them lie bits of truth as well as errors in thinking. Success lies in examining these ideas more fully in order for you to take away a more constructive mindset – or else you risk creating the ugly reality you’ve just imagined.

Enter Socrates. He used a questioning technique that challenged people to question their own assumptions and inner thought process in order to become better able to see arguments and situations from multiple perspectives with the aim of weeding out the half-truths, errors in thinking and, well, whining.

He believed that your underlying beliefs influenced your thoughts which in turn influenced your actions which would, of course, reinforce your beliefs. Today we talk about having ineffective ‘scripts’ that give rise to ‘negative self-talk’ and ‘stinking thinking’. Good to know that humans haven’t changed a whole lot since 400 B.C.E.

When you hear yourself (or someone else) make a statement that you recognize as something that sounds suspiciously like a half-truth, an error in thinking, ‘common sense’ or whining take a few minutes to run the statement through the following 3 questions:

1. What are the ‘facts’ of this statement/situation and what are my perceptions?
2. What are my errors in thinking? (This is also known as cognitive distortion – find a list here.)
3. How can I look at this from another perspective?

Work You LOVE

1. Focus on Your Strengths

What ARE your strengths? What passions, personality characteristics and personal values make you excel? What is the main area in which you excel? For a whole host of reasons, many of us leave high school more able to list our short-comings than our strengths. Further, we don’t have a clear understanding of the kinds of employment we can find or create using these strengths and passions, and as a result we often find ourselves without work we LOVE. We get a short-list of ‘careers’ as we go through school — doctor, lawyer, plumber, teacher…. without ever really knowing the wide variety of ways that our strengths can be used to contribute value to our communities. And when we contribute ‘value’, we can exchange that for a decent salary or a fee. It’s more important that we know our strengths than it is to know ‘what we want to be when we grow up.’  What we really want to be is who we are, and to be recognized for being ourselves. Without a doubt this can be the most difficult part of the Personal Branding process – but it’s critical. Find a career counsellor or personal branding specialist who can help you discover and put words to your strengths.

2. Establish A Focused Online Presence

Once you’ve determined your personal direction by putting your strengths into words and creating a Personal Brand Statement, then you’re ready start getting your ‘brand’ online. Your online presence works for you 24/7/365! It’s there to ensure that people looking for you online find you AND see the message you want them to see. It’s there so you have the confidence to direct people to your online network and it provides a tool for others to spread the word about you to their contacts.

3. Understand, Establish and Work Your Networks

The ‘Hidden Job Market’ is made up of positions not advertised publicly. Sometimes a position becomes available and is filled by a person already known to the company or one of its current employees. Sometimes positions are created specifically to include people the business realizes it needs to have on board. Finding these hidden jobs requires having a well-developed personal network.

Networking effectively means understanding what a network really is. Think about the ‘six degrees of separation’ concept. If you want your information to move beyond those who know you directly, you need to provide people with a reason and the tools to pass your information along to others in their networks. Having an online presence makes it easy for others to pass your information along.

Knowing and communicating your strengths effectively makes people want to pass your information along. Now is the perfect time to get started putting together your personal brand, getting it online and beginning to spread your ‘buzz’ through your personal networks. Getting started has never been easier as career counsellors and personal branding specialists have their own established online presence – and offer lots of opportunity to learn more and engage with them on social media.

Work You LOVE

HR professionals are well-versed in what information they can and can’t consider when making decisions about hiring – but not everyone who’s involved in hiring is an HR professional. Decisions about a candidate’s suitability can be made in a heartbeat, and reasons for keeping or chucking your application may not even be conscious on the part of the person involved. Maybe they don’t like your piercings or tattoos. Maybe a movie you like or a group you belong to makes them draw a conclusion that shouldn’t be made. And frankly, legal or not, you’ll never be the wiser.

Now that I’ve scared you, I’ll give you my favourite piece of advice: Don’t Panic! And don’t ditch your presence on Facebook, because there are things you can do to create a professional Facebook presence and maintain your personal private space.

When you sign up for Facebook, you create a personal profile. This is the ‘personal’ you – where you ‘friend’ people and have the ability to ‘like’ business, community or celebrity pages. The relationship you have when you ‘like’ a business is different from the connection between personal profiles who are ‘friends’. Businesses can’t see your personal information – aside from the information visible on your public profile to people who aren’t your friends.

What if you ‘nailed down’ the security settings on your personal profile, and limited your friends to those people you interact with in your personal life, and created a professional page where employers and potential employers can go to find out more information about your ongoing professional development? This page can also be a place to interact with work colleagues that you may not want to let in on your personal profile. Creating a professional space on Facebook also saves your family and friends from seeing posts related to your work that they are probably not interested in anyway.

Here’s How To Do It:

1. If you have never created a page before, head to Facebook.com/pages. You’ll need to log in to your profile to begin. Hit ‘Create a Page’ at the top right of the page to get started.
2. Choose the most appropriate category for yourself – probably ‘Artist, Band or Public Figure’. Don’t choose ‘Cause or Community’ – these pages behave differently from the others.
3. Set up your page just as you would your personal profile. Use a different image than on your personal profile – otherwise it gets confusing later as to whether you’re on your profile or page.
4. Start using Facebook as your page. Under ‘Account’ in the top right corner, choose the ‘Use Facebook As Page’ option – and make sure you ‘switch’ to the page. You are now operating as your professional self.
5. Find professional pages of groups or businesses in your field and ‘like’ them. Now anything they post can be found in your page’s newsfeed – and becomes easy to share to your own wall by clicking ‘share’. You’re now establishing your professional presence! Congrats.
6. Whenever you comment now on a post from another page, the comment comes from your professional image! Keep it up!

Done! You can ‘switch’ back and forth between your personal profile and professional page easily through the ‘Account’ tab at the top right of the Facebook page.

Got questions?  Find me on my Professional Facebook Page: CampbellDuke.com/facebook.

Work You LOVE

First of all, social media is a marketing tool that you use in conjunction with all of the other tools you’re already using. It doesn’t exist on its own – indeed, the true power of social media is amplified significantly when you use it strategically with the other activities you’re already involved in.

Zoom out to see the big picture of your search for work. You already have a strategy for finding work. In a perfect world, you’re working your personal brand and have made the decision to find or create work you love, rather than resorting to the spam-out-my-resume-to-anyone-standing routine. In either scenario, take a look at the tools you’re using. These include tangible items like your resume, cover letter, portfolio and business cards and the more intangible attitudes you have and actions you take. For example, how broadly you define networking? Do you volunteer your skills in the community or do you limit your networking to more traditional career-related fairs and events?

Think about how the buzz, “I need to find out more about [your name here]” moves through this network – from person to printed item to person…. Remember that people buy from (in our case, hire) those that they know, like and trust. You have a significant challenge as a job hunter when people don’t know you, and you’re one of many in a crowd. If you’re sending out tons of resumes with nothing more than your phone number and email address, that’s a networking dead-end. Even without adding social media, you can begin to see how creating a robust network is critical in getting yourself into the ‘known, liked and trusted’ category.

Enter social media. You can create many more connections in your marketing network by adding well-chosen social media applications to your personal marketing strategy.

• Question: Whenever someone reads your resume, or gets your business card either directly from you or (better yet) because it’s passed along to them by a trusted connection, how easily can they find more compelling information about you? NOW?
• Answer: They go to the website you have clearly visible on every piece of paper that leaves your hands! If they conduct a Google search for you, they find the professional you on Facebook and LinkedIn. Your goal is to create an online network of positive and compelling information that potential employers can access easily, at any time. Regardless of where someone first finds you online, whether it’s from Facebook, LinkedIn or your website, they can easily find and navigate to any or all of your other online social media hubs.

If the thought of all of this is making you panic just a bit, take a breath. You don’t have to create all of this immediately.

1. Begin with creating a compelling LinkedIn profile and learning how to use the tools this valuable site provides.
2. Add your LinkedIn profile URL to your resume and business card.
3. Breathe.
4. Start by spending short periods of time on LinkedIn every day finding new contacts, joining professional and local groups, and using the ‘Answers’ forum to connect with people and find answers to your job hunting questions.

When you’ve got the hang of that, check back for more information about incorporating a professional Facebook page to the mix.

Work You LOVE