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doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today, Katie Donovan, believes that “If you did not negotiate your salary you are under paid.”

She reminds us, “The one thing a job does differently then everything else we do is gives us money.”

Katie is a salary negotiation teacher, coach, blogger, and speaker on equal pay and women’s salary negotiations. She has been quoted in articles on theglasshammer.com, Forbes.com, and Salary.com.

She brings her negotiating experience in the staffing industry and sales to our conversation today.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

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From the show

The actual most powerful moment financially in any employer employee relationship, is from the moment you’re offered the job to the moment you except it.  You will never have that kind of power again about your own pay, until you quite that job.

Every single time you get a new job, without doubt, you should negotiate.  The absolute worse that could happen is you will have the same job offer at the same salary .  That’s not going to happen most of the time.

Play hiring manager for the moment.  If I have a job opening budgeted to pay $50,000.  All I need to do to be a good hiring manager is make sure I get the best talent and pay them less than $50,000.  That can be $49,500.  But I am not going to offer that.  I am going to start most likely with around 40,000 maybe $42, 000 because I expect negotiating. I have to be ready for the percentage that will negotiate.  I don’t know which you are.  It’s a much bigger percentage that won’t.  But I just don’t know which you are.  So I am assuming you are going to negotiate.  Then whatever you don’t negotiate for I can use for other resources.  If it happens often enough I have a whole other body I can hire.

The world of the internet has tons of resources.  Salary.com, payscale.com, glassdoor.com, are three popular salary research websites.

You can go to any nonprofit trade association.  Every industry and every job has a trade association.  If you’re an accountant in high tech, you can belong to a accountant nonprofit trade association or a high tech trade association.  They do research about salary.  They have that available.  You can either find them online or call them, they are more than happy to share that, because they will hope that eventually you will become a member.  If you’re not sure who your trade association is just do a website search. Put trade association into whatever your job is.  You will find it.  I am always amazed how minute a grouping can be that has a trade association that is very active.

Other really good resources are recruiters.  Go to any staffing firm, call them and say hey  I am an administrative assistant, in whatever industry and I am making this, and I maybe am ready for a change.  Can I make more?  Are there jobs available?  It doesn’t mean you have to open your job search.  But you will find out if you’re actually in line or you will actually get more resources by going through the recruiter as well.

Once you get one poor salary your never going to get out of that cycle unless you just stop giving your salary history.

So if you don’t understand how your job actually costs the company or helps the revenue of the company and how you in  particular have either done above or beyond in saving more money or creating more money, you’re not ready for the  conversation about a raise.

My website again equalpaynegotiations.com or you can follow me on twitter @kdb2b that is because I believe when we are doing our salary negotiations we actually are our own business.  We have to think that way.  So it’s me as an employee as a b to my employer the other b.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Katie Donovan

Website: equalpaynegotiations.com

Twitter: @kdb2b

Recommended Resources:

Katie’s new app for iPhone and iPad App: Earn More Girl
     

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

New: Appia’s Just Start Acadamy

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest, career coach Martin Pierce, believes that “15 minutes a day on LinkedIn can revitalize your career”.  He joins us to talk about how.

For the vast majority not having a LinkedIn presence is not an option if you want to be taken as a serious professional. At this time LinkedIn is the “goto” platform for building business relationships, research and access to professionals.

And having a profile is just the beginning, how do you take advantage of LinkedIn’s vast resources, and also become part of those resources.

Martin has worked in corporate and private outplacement, corporate recruiting, and job placement programs for nonprofits.  He has delivered scores of seminars on Resume Writing, LinkedIn, Job Search Networking, Interviewing and Salary Negotiation.

Recent LinkedIn presentations include Boston Medical Center, Suffolk University, and WIND Professional Networking.  Known for his networking expertise, he currently maintains a private career coaching practice in Arlington, MA, where he specializes in LinkedIn consultations and profile writing, career changes and resume writing. Martin also does coaching and training at Career Source Career Center in Cambridge.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

LinkedIn is the world’s largest business networking  site.

It’s the number one social media site used by recruiters. In fact 95% or more of recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn to get candidates.

People how are hiring expect people to be on LinkedIn if they are serious about their careers.

People are realizing that it’s very important to have a professional presence on LinkedIn.

Common mistakes… One of the biggest is not posting a photo.

Networking is all about putting the other person first and how you can help them with their needs and let your needs come later.

Optimize your headline…

In fact along with the photo and the headline, the summary is one of the most important part of the profile .  It can have up to 2,000 characters and it is important to optimize that summary…So similarly in a LinkedIn profile it is very important to show that your clear about what you want to be doing and why and how you can offer value to an organization.

As far as the number of connections, I recommend getting to 100-150 first degree connections on LinkedIn.

Networking is about relationship building and it’s a two way street and these relationship theoretically are relationships we plan to have a long time in the future.

Well I think part of what you are saying is how to have people stand out from the crowd.  One way is to have a well branded summary section, where they really talk about their passions and includes success stories about achievements they have had.  A lot of people either don’t have a summary or have a very boring kind of summary.  It can really come alive and to make it stand out and make people want to get to know you better.  But if you take that opportunity to make it compelling.  Another way is to actively participate in LinkedIn groups.

Don’t get overwhelmed by it.  It can be overwhelming.  Take it one day at a time.  Take a work shop , read a book.  I have a couple good ones in the resource lists.  Budget your time.  Plan a few hours to get a good profile going and then set up a strategy for fifteen minutes a day, and how are you going to use that time.  Stick to it and honor it.  Don’t get so distracted.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Martin Pierce

Email: martin.pierce@comcast.net

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/martinpierce

Martin’s Recommended Resources

On the web:

http://www.linkedintelligence.com/smart-ways-to-use-linkedin/

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/linkedin-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html

http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/ (Jason Alba blog)

http://linkedinforjobseekers.com/  (Jason Alba DVD for purchase)

http://www.job-hunt.org/executive-job-search/linkedin-for-executives.shtml

(Deb Dib article that includes links to 8 sample well-branded profiles)

“How to Find Your Job With LinkedIn” http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2009/05/how-to-find-your-job-with-linkedin.html  (blog)

http://www.cio.com/article/print/474135

Top 25 LinkedIn Groups All Job Seekers Must Join (Career Rocketeer)

http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2010/08/top-25-linkedin-groups-all-job-seekers.html

http://www.careersolvers.com/blog/2010/01/11/linkedin-job-search-tips-from-the-pros/

Click to check out our previous LinkedIn posts on getAppia.com

You might also enjoy our interview with Joshua Waldman on job search and social media in episode 020. Joshua is the author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies.

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Margaret Moore, MBA (“Coach Meg”), an executive wellness coach and co-author of Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time.

Coach Meg is the co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital (a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School) and the founder and CEO of Wellcoaches Corporation, a leading coach training school.

We asked Coach Meg to discuss how we can apply some of the latest research in neuroscience in our everyday lives to be more resilient and on top of things.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

Exercise is the break through medicine…In the last decade there has been more research on exercise than what we have done in human history. When you combine that with the explosion around how the brain works, we have a lot more tools.

Moving the body is vital for the brain’s ability to learn, adapt, to regulate emotion and, of course, the slowing of aging…so moving the body is what calms the heart rate, it calms the frenzy so just about every day you read about its power in improving how the brain functions and improving our  health.

The higher your cardiovascular fitness the lower your heart rate, the more the activation of the recovery branch of our nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system, which leads to a calmer heart.  That directly calms the brain and it improve the attention.  It improves  the ability to deal with impulses and distractions.  It improves the ability to be creative.  So the more fit you are generally, the more benefits you will get to the brain and in the moment.

We can now lay out the conditions, the optimal conditions, for the brain to learn to change and to be resilient.  Some of those are in the Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life book and I am starting work on the next book so it is a combination of a number of things that all work together and it turns out when you look at today’s way of life we are living in a way that works against the fundamental design of the brain.

The real deal is using your brain’s power which means reserving its peak performance for the most important things and giving them your undivided attention.

…where we put our full attention, neuroscientists call that the learning process, when you are really focused and motivated and, you know, you’ve got lots of juice and you are really in full flight, that is where your brain is laying down new connections.  So neurons are making connections with other neurons which have never existed before.  Over time, as you connect more and more neurons you build a new network so whether mastering a new project or mastering a new skill or overcoming a challenge, whatever it happens to be wherever you are giving something your undivided attention that is where your brain is learning. So you want to treat those times during the day…those brain learning times…as precious moments for learning and you want to make sure you are using them for the most important topics in life where you really do need to learn and improve.

If you know Csikszentmihalyi’s work, the more of those moments you have in a day, the more flow experience that you have the higher your  well-being and the better your health too.  So these flow episodes in our day are the peak moments of life where we are completely engaged in something even better that you are good at and have a higher purpose and you feel like a million bucks after those periods in a day.

It is a good thing to note that overwhelmed is a potent part of stress and negative emotions.  Negative emotions dim the light in your pre-frontal cortex so they actually impair your ability to feel better and to get on top of it.  So how you relate to overwhelmed is actually not a bad place to start…

 

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Coach Meg

Email: coachmeg@wellcoaches.com

Websites: Coachmeg.com  Wellcoaches.com

Twitter: coachmeg

Coach Meg Recommended Resources

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Bertrand Russell, the 20th century British philosopher, said, “What is distinctively human at the most fundamental level is the capacity to persuade and be persuaded.”

The ability to influence or persuade is an important competency that affects all areas of our life. Our guest Tim Vaill is here today to share key concepts of persuasion and tips on how we can improve our ability to influence others.

He had an illustrious career in the private sectors of banking and finance before shifting his focus to the public sector. He currently serves as a Special Advisor to Cabinet Secretary for Housing and Economic Development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Tim has always been interested in the interplay of language, communications and persuasion. After taking a course at the Harvard Kennedy School with Gary Orren on “Persuasion: The Science and Art of Effective Influence” he has been hooked and assisting in the course ever since.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

All of us, I think, try to be persuasive  but it wasn’t until I decided to study the science that I  discovered there are specific principles of persuasion that can  make you even better at that…

I think all of our life we are trying to persuade our parents to stay up late at night or to walk home from school or whatever  but we didn’t employ, at least logically, the key principles involved.

Persuasion can be   simply defined as symbolic process where communicators try to convince other people to change their attitudes or behaviors…

It is just that simple.  The key here is to be sure to think about the framework in which you want that person to move to your view or your thought.  Since I became a student of this subject I now think about the principles of persuasion and the principles, therefore, at almost every opportunity.

Let me talk about some of the principles that come to mind but before I do that I need to underscore the fact that we are all in a persuasive situations all the time.

There are many frameworks that people use but the main one that I think about has the following five framework components:  ethos, pathos, logos, agora, syzygy.

I mentioned earlier there are several elements to persuasion and these were developed over the years by writers and others who consider themselves experts in this.  There are 15 or 20 key elements of persuasion such as know your audience; things like scarcity…

Very important is your ability to listen and listen very carefully.  You might think you know your audience when you walk in the door  but you have to, in fact, listen very carefully and if you have done your research ahead of time you are ready to listen and create perhaps the most important work ever.  Here again you have to make your audience realize you are on their side of the line in terms of dealing with a particular topic and understand where they are coming from.

The other principle that I wanted to talk about syzygy.  It is making sure that what you are talking about is relevant to the other person.  It may be relevant to you but if it is not to the other person, you can employ all the other principles you want to and you aren’t going to make any headway here.

I think you have to go back to some other principles that you can put into place. We have all been using persuasion throughout our lives even though we don’t think of it as such.  What I have learned is there is a real science to it so you have to stop and think.  Using metaphors and analogies are very important because you can really relate to the other side by putting salient information in the context that they can understand.

If you go back to the framework and the whole logos business.  The logos is the message and if the message isn’t convincing and you aren’t logically moving through an argument that makes sense then you have a problem.  You have to stop and think before you walk into the room “what is my story?  What is my logos?”   What is the logical framework that I am going to use to convince them that I am the right person?

Another quote I will give you is from Elliot Richardson who was originally a Massachusetts native and who served as Secretary of Defense…  This is a very well known, persuasive guy but he said that in running the government only 2% of the problem is making the decision.  98% is persuading others to accept the decision.

Dwight Eisenhower back a few years ago didn’t use the word persuasion but it really comes through in one of his quotes and that is “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to.”  I will leave you with that because if you can do that then you are very very persuasive.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Tim Vaill Recommended Resources

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

In today’s uncertain business environment, now more than ever, the best way to succeed is through partnerships—with colleagues, with vendors, with competitors, with anyone who might share a common goal and can help build mutual success.

Such partnerships require strong, meaningful relationships. In other words, these relationships require that you become well connected.

We asked Gordon Curtis, author of Well Connected to join us today to discuss his Right Person/Right Approach to social networking.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

As an executive transition coach for maybe more years than I care to share; over 18; I’ve helped hundreds, upwards to a thousand, clients advance their careers and businesses through the traditional teaching workings of inner work of assessment and integration of skills and interest values and experience but my focus has always been to then shift to the outer market facing actualization and work of identifying and approaching decision makers and what I refer to as critical enablers who are instrumental in accelerating client career business objectives to reality.

I’ve facilitated and witnessed thousands of key introductions and always been fascinated with the networking patters of success and true mutual value creation and I’ve also been amazed at the amount of on and offline social networking time and energy people expend with little or nothing to show for it.  I always felt the vast majority of people walked away from networking exchanges on or off line leaving so much value off the table. 

Over time in this analysis, a very distinct pattern clearly emerged of the seven elements or variables that I felt could easily be replicated for predictable exponential mutual benefit and exchange.  I found the most successful networking exchanges all contained these elements and the less productive ones one or all of the elements of the seven were missing.

…a lot of reasons why this book is referred to; Well Connected and the sub title is A Genuinely Unconventional Approach to Building Genuine and Effective Business Relationships; the unconventional part about it is that I found that whoever dies with the most connections doesn’t necessarily win.

What I found is so much of the value that I received in my business came from a very select group of people.

To elaborate a little bit on that value, that sense that so much was left on the table came from countless comments from clients.  How’d it go?  They’d say well, we hit it off and promised to stay in touch but there was nothing to show for it.  So I’m really interested in having measurable results that are true advances in my client’s objectives.

One of the biggest disconnects is someone might be lined up in all of these seven elements but if we’re not articulating exactly what it is that we’re looking for in language that they truly get, we’re often going to walk away with both parties frustrated because there’s not enough value to exchange so that gets right in to chapter one which is Articulating One’s Objectives.

If someone says I’m looking for a job, if you have any ideas let me know.  Obviously I don’t know. I can’t help you.  If you know of any funders, let me know.  That could be a zillion different funders.  Or I’m looking for a really good java programmer.  That still narrows the field down to a million and on and on for every business objective.

Exactly. And that’s one of the key things that I try to accomplish in Well Connected; take the abstract and turn it in to the truly practical and relevant to each individual in to an application that one could confidently say I can do this.

If you do what I call a diagnosis of their needs and analyzing all of the different drivers to their situation, their business success, where do they get their clients, how is their performance measured, what do they like and generally if you look at it through that lens, you will find something.  It may not be business related.  If you then inventory your own reciprocity constantly we are all sitting on a treasure trove of knowledge, contacts, resources that we don’t really think to exercise or share unless we start to sync it up to another person’s needs.  The approach would be to say “I know you can help me but humor me and help me figure out how I can help you first so I will feel better about asking for help.  Based on my understanding of what you do I see that you are involved with this non-profit and I know someone who is in a similar non-profit and they just recently received some funding.  Would that be something that you would be interested in helping?”

Yes, and that is a real confidence builder when we bypass our needs and we are taking risks and adopting the mind set of “I can actually add as much value as I am going to consume or at least I am going to try  and I am going to feel a lot better about approaching someone even if it is just a gesture but if it changes the whole dynamic and the mental block and the resistance that most people experience when most people are asking for help because most people have a problem, myself included, in asking for help.

…in terms of resources, we could spend the rest of our lives going down these tentacles  and I think it is more important to think about how we weave it all together and so not to point everything back to Well Connected but the last chapter I am pulling it all together on how to gain confidence, quality and control  is to apply each and every one of these seven elements to our own cases so that we go from the abstract of looking at so many resources but the personal disconnect of the application. Anyone can research any one of the networking reciprocity.  I get into how to ask for referrals. There is a hole body of  information out there and I must say there is no one resource.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Gordon Curtis

Website: WellConnected.me

Website: CurtisConsulting.net

Twitter

LinkedIn

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

To help us sort through what time means to us and how we can better manage our use of time, we asked Kathryn McKinnon, Time Management Expert, and Author of Triple Your Time Today to join us.

As you’ll hear from her story, her life and relationship with time has evolved over time, and as she took charge of her life and time now focuses on Executive Development & Coaching for Success with Your Life, Career and Your Time!

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

I think we take it for granted.  Time is a state of mind.

The fact of the matter is with time there’s no future and no past. There’s only the present moment.  If you live your life present moment to present moment to present moment, you realize you have a choice in how you spend your time.  There is such a thing as time management and yes you can. You can really manage your time.

When you start to really live in the moment; it’s hard to do at first; but when you really focus in and live in the moment you realize that you have an abundance of choices about how you spend your time.

I’ve been an executive for 32 years and a coach for the past 20 years.  I primarily help women executives, professionals and entrepreneurs and some open minded men learn how to choose more success with their life and their career and their time.  I’ve founded businesses.  I’m a busy mom. I have two active teenage boys, a husband of 23 years who travels a lot so I’m a single mom when he’s gone.  He is really gone for weeks at a time. I’m also a paid professional singer on weekends and I volunteer. I’m the one responsible for keeping everything going.  I want you to know, I don’t have a full time assistant. I don’t work 14 hour days. I keep weekends open for my family. I have a home office that I work from.  I chose this career and I chose this topic and I chose this way of developing my career so that I could have a family.  I think it’s important for people to know that.

How do you make all those choices?  I think the answer is over the years I’ve developed a mind set as well as systems that really help me create more time for the things I need and want to accomplish.

I never saw the truck.  In an instant this two ton flat bed truck ran through a stop sign and it violently crashed in to me.

After a break at the hospital I went back to work.  After months of physical therapy and a year of visits to a chiropractor, I still had that back pain. I also had the stress at work. I didn’t know at the time that there was a connection between stress and physical pain.

At that point I kind of had an epiphany.  As I began to really embrace the process of focusing my thoughts, I started to appreciate my time in a new way.  I realized that all my attempts to be productive and successful had almost succeeded in helping me lose my life.

It was a real wake up call for me.  Since then, which was many years ago, I’ve had a continual awakening to try to stay within my grounded personal energy while consistently moving towards my goals and getting things done.  I made a decision to reclaim my personal power.  I made a choice. I found my purpose.  I embraced how I spend my time in a whole new way.  Life opened up for me as a result of that with grace and certainty and it continues each and every day as I continue using these practices and these systems.

You ask why did I write the book. Well, a few years ago I was seeing a lot of success in the transformation my clients were having as a coach and I wanted to help more people.  I began to shift my business on line.  While looking for ways to build my business, I was told that giving away a free report was a great way to build a contact list.  So I reviewed all my client issues and stories and started looking at what they all had in common.

Interestingly, I notice they all had difficulty managing their time in one way or another. Then I realize that managing time was something that I had become really good at; over time.

The first strategy that I think might be the most important in managing your time is develop the right mind set.  That’s the foundation for everything that I do and teach. We all have the same amount of time every day but do you know how you spend your time?  More importantly, do you know what you think about while you’re spending your time?  If you’re not getting the results you want with your time, maybe it’s because you’re not focused on the right things. When you create the right mind set, you become really far more efficient with your time because you’re consciously aware of what you’re thinking about each moment. That helps you reach your goals…

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Kathryn McKinnon

Website: kathryn-mckinnon.com

Twitter:  @KathrynMcKinnon

Special Offer to Career Tips & Trends listeners.

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Brian Kurth CEO of PivotPlanet, a service providing one-on-one mentorship conversations with successful people doing work they love. Would such a conversation be a way for you to take that next step forward in your career.

PivotPlanet is the next iteration of Kurth’s VocationVacations model which offers face-to-face career mentorships. The model has been referenced in books like Daniel Pink’s DRIVE, and in The Start-up of YOU, by LinkedIn’s co-founder and chairman, Reid Hoffman.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

I moved to Portland Oregon from Chicago and stared VocationVacations  as a hobby business in 2004 and it took off like wild fire, very quickly.  We launched with 10 mentors in Oregon and we rapidly moved into 100’s across the United States.  That was over the course of about 6 years or so and then something happened  called the recession.

The demand for VocationVacations was higher than ever  but the ability and willingness to pay was a problem for  people.  At the same time we were beginning to realize people were asking if they could have a video session  with a mentor first. So we said why not – that is where we should be heading.

Hence that is where PivotPlanet came from.

Vocation Vacation morphed into PivotPlanet and we renamed it because an hour video is not really a VocationVacation.  The word vacation became a misnomer.

We just launched on October 4 and we are thrilled to have 100s of advisers across 100s of professions.  We are already truly global.  We have several advisers coming on board in a few countries.  So we now provide the in person mentorship that VocationVacations used to provide but now the majority of our sessions are live one on one video sessions so people can test the waters remotely then decide  if they want to go live with this and do they want to pursue this career.

You get a lot out of an hour… it is a weather vane that provides you a level of knowledge if this career is something  that you want to pursue further.  Do you want to go back to school?  Do you  want to set up an in person mentorship?

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact PivotPlanet

Website: Pivotplanet.com

Twitter: @pivotplanet

Facebook: facebook.com/PivotPlanet

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our Job Search the Smart Way, online training program in November.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest is Dianne Shaddock Austin. Today we’re talking with an insider about the impact of new trends on recruitment practices and suggestions for getting seen by a large complex organization that by their reputation already attract a high number of applicants.

Dianne is the President of Easy Small Business HR, an online employee management resource, and the host of the iTunes podcast “Employee Hiring and Management Tips”.

She has over 20 years of experience as an HR professional and has successfully helped managers at all levels recruit, hire, and manage staff. She has done extensive work in diversity and inclusion as well as in counseling employees and job seekers alike on how to best position themselves during their job search and manage their career development.

Dianne is the author of several books. Her newest guide “Strategies For Finding and Keeping Your Job: Secrets From an HR Insider” will be published later this year.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from today’s interview…

From the show

Having the best people and the right people is so critical for any organization.  We certainly, as an organization, could not have attained the status of #1 Hospital in the Nation if it wasn’t for our employees; and that’s everyone from our nutrition and food services staff on up to the physicians and administrators.  We do a great job at Mass General– recruiters understanding what talent works well in the hospital based on our business goals and our culture.

We try to make sure our hiring managers are up to speed on the best interviewing practices…

Applicants are competing with hundreds of other applicants.

I talk to people a lot about educating them about the process because I do sense a frustration from so many people who just feel like they have the qualifications and no one is calling them.  Is it a waste of my time to even apply?  Well, it’s not a waste of your time and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what I’m saying in terms of you want to take different approaches towards finding a job.  What I want to emphasize is you don’t want to just rely on submitting a resume and waiting for someone to call you.  When you do go through the process of submitting a resume to an organization like Mass General, you want to make sure you dot all of your I’s and cross all of your T’s.  Just a tip for listeners out there, if you should apply for a job at Mass General, we look very closely at the qualifications that are listed in the posting against the resume.

Just to give listeners another perspective on that, I think first of all; as I mentioned earlier; there are some core requirements that an applicant would need to have in order to be considered for the job.  Now, once that person has those core requirements, there’s always going to be things that, no matter how much expertise you bring to the table that you’ll have to learn in a new organization.  I do understand the frustration of having 80% of the experience. The key is really that you have those core qualifications; the core requirements that are needed.  If you don’t, managers just don’t have the luxury of training or sending someone to training for the core competencies.

I think the first baby step is to do some self assessment.  Thinking about where you are now in terms of your career and what path would you like to take?  You may find through that self assessment process that there is a path you want to take.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Dianne Shaddock

Website: http://easysmallbusinesshr.com

Email: dianne@easysmallbusinesshr.com

Twitter: @diane_esbhr

Resources

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Jim Faber. We asked Jim to talk about what a mentor is, and not only how to find one but how to be one.

Jim has developed an appreciation for the value of effective mentoring in his senior management roles at companies such as Thermo Electron, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Fisons Instruments and earlier in his career at Bausch & Lomb where he has been responsible for effective employee development and mentoring, management of customer loyalty improvement, and complaint management creating growth, and organizational excellence to capitalize on market opportunities.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

A mentor is a person with knowledge of a particular topic and is willing to share it and willing to help others learn the same topic or learn how to do something or learn how to interact with people not necessarily telling them how to do it but convincing them that there are ways to do it and help them do it.

Teaching is part of it but a mentor is a much more close personal relationship.  I used to call it free advice.  When you are mentoring someone you can say “look this is the way you are doing it but there is another way and this is the way you might consider doing it and this would be the outcome,” and if the mentoree likes that, then that is fine but if they don’t then they can discuss it back and forth.  A portion of it is teaching, yes, it is a two way dialog in mentoring.

If there isn’t a bond between the mentor and mentoree,  then it just will not work.  There has to be a trust there.

My mentors have always been people whom I have had good chemistry with, and in some cases they would have been my superiors and in other cases they have been peers and in other cases they were levels above me who saw potential in me.  There has to be a chemistry.

In today’s business world and environment to build that relationship and stay connected is imperative.

Absolutely, as a matter of fact the most ideal job for me would be to enter an organization that has a lot of great people that want to be successful, and helping them be successful.  I am a very big fan of Good to Great.  Good to Great is really mentoring.  You get a bus and put the people on the bus but getting them in the right seats if they aren’t in the right ones is very important and mentoring is the key to moving people successfully to another seat or getting them off the bus.  If you mentor someone to try to do their job better and make the most of the position they are in and they can’t do it right, this is found out very quickly.

Most of my superiors, with one exception, have been my mentors.

Mentoring is the cheapest, easiest and most socially acceptable way of getting people in the right jobs.  It is certainly less stressful on people to get them to fulfill a job requirement that is much easier and much more rewarding.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Jim Faber

JNFaberConsulting@comcast.net

Resources

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Personal branding author and entrepreneur, Joshua Waldman, joins us today. Joshua is the author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, and writes the careerenlightenment.com blog.

We met Joshua at the Career Thought Leaders conference earlier this year. And we’re delighted to be able to continue our conversation with Joshua so our listeners can hear what his latest thoughts are directly from him.

His teaching (and use) of technology and marketing skills helping businesses grow and job seekers get noticed is quite impressive. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go to the Career Enlightenment site and sign up for his blog.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

I think that we passed the time of choice  with social media in the job search and there is a lot of statistic to back up the fact that recruiters, in particular, and hiring managers, more generally, are using social  media, whether they admit it or not.

I think everybody is googling everybody and I think more specifically that recruiters are finding candidates as well as engaging with candidates via social media, sort of part and parcel of the process these days.  Ten million Americans found their jobs with www.linkedin.com and eighteen million with www.facebook.com so there is a lot of evidence to show that if you aren’t on social media your competition most certainly is.

… baby boomers have an incredible advantage over new people in the workforce and that is that they have many, many years of experience being professional and that professionalism, that skill in networking, translates remarkably well when applied to social media.

One of the biggest changes we are seeing is the adoption of talent pools or talent communities because at the end of the day a candidate is going to be passionate about a brand or a company but that company might, or might now, have an active job requisition.

So the problem is as they are writing their profiles, some job seekers are not thinking about how they are messaging themselves, how their image is coming across, how they are going to be consistent across many different channels and they end up looking flaky.

One more time in summary, the three most important steps in doing a job search online are…

What I see most is, well nobody likes pain, and for most people networking is painful.  Raise your hand if you are an introvert and you will know what I am talking about.  Let’s say you are a job seeker and you have a choice.  You can go out and network locally or you can go on LinkedIn and start sending e-mails out to people, but that is kind of painful or uncomfortable, so I think I am going to reword  my headline and rewrite that bio and do a new picture, etc.  A lot of people tend to shy away from that face to face interaction to a more solitary type of fill out the profile type of activity and we just have to be careful that we aren’t choosing one painful stimulus over a worse painful stimulus.

The most expensive mistake that a hiring manager can make is hiring the wrong person and so are you who you say you are?

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Joshua Waldman

Website: CareerEnlightenment.com

Twitter: @JoshuaWaldman

RESOURCES

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Kim Meninger, of Great Heights Coaching.

What do you do when you are working hard, performing well and yet not making the advancement in your career that you would like?

Our guest, Kim Meninger, focuses on helping professionals accelerate their career success. She joins us to talk about what happens and what can you do to maintain your career momentum.

She is a certified career and life coach and holds a BA in psychology and an MBA with a concentration in organizational leadership.

But I think even more compelling; she learned important lessons from her own successful career. She was successful not as she says because “I was the smartest, or even necessarily the highest performer on the team but because I understood the landscape, built powerful relationships, and knew how to strategically position myself for success.”

Join us as we talk to Kim about how organization’s make decisions about people and specific strategies for helping you succeed.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

In some cases the job isn’t the right fit for some professionals – it is not a good fit for their personalities or their skill set or it just doesn’t allow them to achieve their specific career goals.  Career acceleration would be about finding the right fit so that they can then achieve those career goals in another way.  They may need to look more broadly at their career options and might even have to look at changing their career options entirely but others feel happy in their organization, they just feel stuck.  They become stagnant or they just aren’t sure how to get ahead.  For these professionals, overcoming the obstacles that are holding them back is how they accelerate their careers.

It could definitely be lateral or changing direction.  Some people are content and stay at the same level throughout their career.  Not everyone wants to be a CEO.   What it is really about is achieving your own career goals so that you have a feeling of personal satisfaction, that you are feeling a sense of purpose through the work that you do so that if you are personally feeling stuck, you may not have to take the next level up, you just need to find an opportunity across your organization.

It is really the responsibility of the employee to drive their own career.  Some organizations are much better at providing the infrastructure to help people with their career path but for the most part everybody should feel like they are the driver in their own career.  They need to be thinking about that very early on, really strategically managing their own career path.

Yes, because people latch on to what is most obvious to them.  So the performance piece is what they can measure.  It is what gives them feedback.  So they assume if they focus on their job and they do it really well that they will be promoted for that.  That is generally not what happens.  So they get stuck but can’t figure out what they aren’t doing right or what they could be doing differently because they have never been taught.  Few people learn this.  It’s not something that is taught in the school or even on the job.  It is really being strategic in how you manage our own career.

I would say that job performance is a given.  It is a baseline expectation.  You should, in any job you are doing, be achieving or exceeding your performance expectations.  What most people are not doing is managing the other factors that really decide I they are going to get to the next level.  So they are generally committed to being successful and they focus very well on the work they are doing but they are lax in other areas because they just don’t know that they need to be working on them or they don’t know how.  For example…

Absolutely, I think from the get go whether you are just starting your career or starting with an organization, you want to get the lay of the land.  You want to know how things operate.  What is the informal power structure?  How do decisions really get made?  What does the company value?  In some companies they are very aggressive.  They value that competitive spirit so whatever it takes to do well.  In other companies it may be more collaborative.  You want to understand the unwritten rules that you are operating with when you are in an organization in order to know how you will be received and how well you fit in that organization.  In some cases the reason that you aren’t getting ahead is because it is not the right fit for you.  You could do all the right things and it will just never work out because you are not aligned fundamentally with that company’s values.  In that case it may benefit you to look elsewhere.  In other cases you may need to tweak some things or ore advantageously position yourself, maybe take on some more higher profiled projects so that  you can connect with other people and establish a higher level of visibility.

The 5 pillars that I put into place have a way of teaching people that it is not just about your performance.  There are other areas that are critical to your success.  These form the foundation of the program that I use.

The 5 pillars Kim discussed provide a framework for thinking about where we are and our next steps in managing our careers. The 5 pillars are:

1. Competence – doing your job well before taking on more responsibilities
2. Success mindset
3. Perception – how do influential people view you
4. Visibility – do people know who you are
5. And Acting like a leader regardless of your title

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Kim Meninger

Email: kim@GreatHeightsCoaching.com

Website: GreatHeightsCoaching.com

Twitter: @GrtHtsCoaching

Facebook:  facebook.com/GreatHeightsCoaching

RESOURCES

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

“Career Whiplash” starts the introduction in Pam Lassiter’s book The New Job Security.

That sudden jerk or jolt that typically causes injury.

So how do we heal or better yet, prevent whiplash?

We asked Pam to join us to talk about best strategies to connect with work we love.

Alan Webber, Founding editor of Fast Company says “When it comes to the hard work of finding great work Pam Lassiter is the consummate pro. She has the experience, the common sense, and the proven track record. My advice: Take her advice.”

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

Pam, I have totally enjoyed your new book The New Job Security  and you first wrote about this in 2002.  Can you tell us what inspired you to write about this topic?

In 2002 it was a recession, remember back then?  Things were hitting the fan in 2001.  A lot of people were losing their jobs especially in the technology bubble, and I was talking with people constantly, day after day, that were saying the same thing.  “I know you probably never worked with anybody like me and .”  or “I am at a senior level.”  Or “I never had to look for a job before.  I am middle age and what do I do now?”  I don’t say it out loud but I think “I deal with people like you every day.”  I was seeing the universal pain and the universal pain is based on our never having been trained or even think about  our own careers.

Five core strategies that make a difference for your long term career.

There is job security.  It is just the location that has moved.  It has moved from the company control into our control and isn’t that where we really want it anyway?

We didn’t realize we did but now that we have it now it is thinking strategically about how I can take control and how I can do.  So the job security is imbedded inside of us.  And to get in some of these core practices lets you do it over your career.  The objective is to minimize the roller coaster.  To anticipate and be prepared.

I see it as an alignment , you will probably hear me use the word align more than once today because the alignment of what we want  and what the organization wants should motivate both of us.  It’s got to be a partnership.

I think I am going to start backing off that word (passion) a little bit.  Finding something that interests us and may be meaningful  that we can see an area to grow in and then getting a company that aligns with that.

What does the market want to hear?  Who is my market?  What are their names?  I don’t even start a resume development until my client can identify at least a market, then we hear what their needs are and then comes the resume.

We find out what we need to develop by reflecting inwardly but also my clients research ads from across the country.  They aren’t responding to them, they are researching what are the common themes and what is the education companies are looking for?  That is where you may develop yourself into something they may all want but something you don’t have.  So it’s not just random development.  It is targeted development into your interests and if they align to what your market wants to see as well.

Those five core strategies are still the same that I was writing about ten years ago.  What’s different is the tactics which is just amazing to me.

…that whole process has changed on how companies look for talent.  Technology is major overlay on what has affected career management in the past two to five years.  How we look for jobs, how we think about jobs, how we apply for jobs.  People are researching online.  One thousand people can literally apply for one opening.  So the competition has become unrealistic online.

OK, they are all interdependent on each other and they do go in order.  The first one is send clear signals which is clarity about what you are doing and that is the resume and all that.  The irony is that you sell better if you are focused.  Different people want to be all things to all people and it doesn’t work.  You come across as a blob.  Not as someone who could solve that company’s problems.

The second one is to market for mutual benefit which is you figure out what you want then you flip it over to the other side…

The third one is one I want to talk about if we have a couple of minutes, and that is stop looking for jobs…That is where the pain starts and that is what drives me crazy.  People are putting maybe 80% of their time in something that produces a 3% return.

There are all sorts of things going on around any transaction where talent is needed.  Most of the art is following the money.  Where is the energy going and the pressure point moving?  That is where jobs get created.  So problems create jobs.  Change creates jobs.  Trends create jobs.  Think about the political conventions that we are in the middle of right now.  I promise you jobs were created probably several months back and there are even more being created even as we speak from all the staging being created for President Obama’s speech tonight.

…companies are struggling to solve problems constantly.

Yes, the next to last one is networking.  Building sustainable networks.  Sustainable is what I work towards.  You don’t want to use it then lose it type of networks.

The last point is about negotiating networks wisely and round rooms.  Round rooms don’t have corners and what do we not want to paint ourselves into?  A corner.  And painting yourself into a corner is like I was making $89k in my last job and that is what I need in my next one.  That is a corner.

Think creatively.  Thanks for asking.  Be creative at looking through the job market from different angles, pressure points, and trends and problems to be solved instead of boxes to be checked on advertised job postings.  That will give us more opportunities.

The name of Pam’s book is The New Job Security and her website is lassiterconsulting.com.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Pam Lassiter

Website: lassiterconsulting.com

Twitter: @pamlassiter

RESOURCES

Pam’s Book:  The New Job Security, Revised: The 5 Best Strategies for Taking Control of Your Career

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Short of getting a job offer, there is nothing more exciting for a job candidate than being invited to interview. Though there are many things outside a candidate’s control as to how the hiring decisions are made, there are skills that can improve our ability to get the job.

Our guest today, Steve Balzac, works with organizations to help get the right people in the right jobs. Steve holds degrees in computer science and engineering and a masters in industrial and organizational psychology focusing on motivation and performance.

He is widely published and just signed an agreement with Springer publisher for his next book on organizational psychology for managers.

In addition he holds a 5th degree black belt and is a formerly nationally ranked competitive epee fencer, claimed to be the fastest sport, that depends on preconscious anticipation 40 milliseconds before an opponent hits you.

The French microbiologist, Louis Pasteur said, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Steve Balzac, aka the business sensei, joins us today to share his observations from coaching individuals and organizations for high performance to talk about key interviewing skills.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

The biggest issue for organizations is they don’t take interviews seriously enough. A lot of people view it as a drag on their time; something to get done as quickly as possible. In part, because most of the people who will interview a candidate have never had any real training in how to interview well so they don’t trust the results. They don’t trust their process. As a result, they frequently get results they don’t like or they’re afraid to hire highly qualified people because they never take the time to really dig out the process they’re using.

I was a hiring manager many years working at a bio informatics company in Silicon Valley.  The truth was, I could tell people that we have a candidate coming in and I want you to review this resume and be ready to speak to them.  If the interviewers, the other members of the team, looked at that resume longer than five minutes ahead of the interview it was a miracle.

Here’s what’s really happening. People are looking for a candidate that they think they will like to work with and they believe they can figure this out in an hours’ interview.  It’s sort of like marrying someone after the first date.  It may work occasionally but most people don’t like to do that.  One of the key things, on both sides, you have to assume that the organization has not thought this out as well as it should.  The key thing for the candidate is to understand where the employees in the company are coming from and address those issues to allay their fears and seem like a good person to work with.  That’s really a lot of what I work with people on and a lot of what I speak on about interviewing; how to basically connect with people so they feel like you’re going to be the right person to work with.

…you’re not getting hired by a business; you’re getting hired by a person. That person cares about what’s in it for them.  The key thing is to learn how to connect with the person across the table from you so that you can show that person why you are capable of enabling him and his department to accomplish their goals.

The first thing; before you even go in to the job interview; you have to really look at yourself and understand what you really want to do.  What is the job that gets you excited? What is the job that, when you wake up in the morning, you’re going yeah I can’t wait?  Because if you’re not doing that job, you’re not going to be enthusiastic.  But if you are doing that job, you’re going to come in with a level of genuine enthusiasm that really can’t be faked.

…don’t get caught up in the black hole of HR.  I have a lot of respect for HR people. They are in a thankless job.  But unfortunately, they really only get to say one thing. They have one super power.  That power is the ability to say no.

We approach the interview as if the interviewer is our opponent who has to beaten down by logic.  They should be overwhelmed with our brilliance.  No.  It’s like the Japanese baseball player who pointed to the pitcher on the other team and said that man is not my opponent. That man is the person who enables me to hit a home run.  The interviewer is the person who enables you to demonstrate to the company your value to them.  You have to go in with that mindset.

Confidence is ultimately how prepared we are going in to something.  We gain confidence by practice and preparation and study and learning what to do and then practicing it so we can do it.  It’s just like going in for a black belt exam.  The reason you can do it is because you’ve practiced so much that it feels natural.

It helps to go back over your career and identify a few key accomplishments and then really flush out those stories so you can talk about them.

Keep your focus on success.  Focus on your successes in your career because that always sounds good.  People like success.

I find it’s always a good idea at the end to ask the interviewer if they have any concerns about your ability to do the job because if they have a concern, you want to get it out now while you can address it rather than walk out the door and have them say you know, good candidate but I’m still not convinced they can handle coming in early or they will be willing to work late or weekends; whatever it might be.  Get the concerns out right away because you can address them.

Mostly what I’m seeing is a lot of very nervous people; a lot of people who are worried about their jobs; worried about what will happen if they make a mistake and everything else is just a tool to try to make them feel good.  If you recognize that’s what you’re dealing with, it becomes a lot easier to enable them to feel good.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Stephen Balzac

Website: 7stepsahead.com

Twitter: @BusinessSensei

Steve’s about page

RESOURCES

Steve’s blog

Steve’s articles

Steve’s DVD: Full interviewing talk, as presented by Steve at Harvard Business School a couple years ago. Email Steve Directly.

Steve’s Book:

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Organizations have three main objectives when assessing applicants

• do you have skills and abilities to do the work
• your desire or motivation to do the work
• your fit with the culture

This third element, cultural fit, is often hard to define and it’s a two way street. So how do we determine if a role or organizations is a good fit for us.

Today Jayne Mattson joins us to talk about how we can determine fit by asking courageous questions.

Jayne M. Mattson is a Senior Vice President/Certified Master Career Consultant for Keystone Associates, a New England career management firm. Accomplished facilitator, and coach, Jayne inspires individuals to achieve their highest career potential.

A strong believer of giving back, Jayne volunteers her time with youth and non-profit organizations. She is also a motivational speaker within Higher Education and other organizations.

Jayne is a frequent writer/contributor to Monster, Career Builder, Mashable.com and other career sites, as well as print publications including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.”

Jayne holds a Master’s Degree of Management from Leslie University and a Bachelors Degree in Human Resources from Northeastern University.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

Today’s job market as we all know is very challenging for many job seekers and  at times they may feel that they want to get a job and that can be any job, however, it is so important to remember when they are looking for a job that it is the right job.  And what I mean  is that it is a job that uses the skills that you excel in the most, that is a company that will give you the satisfaction of doing something that you really enjoy  and you love and more importantly that you are working for a company that meets your values.

When you have a company that meets your values and holds your interests you are typically satisfied.  But when you are not looking to see if there is a match, you are already going into a job steps behind because it is not going to be a good fit so I am a firm believer in helping the job seeker assess what they got by doing a search and then during the interview process a lot of it is just validating what they are looking for.

… let me share a quick story about when I started here at Keystone  13 years ago. I wanted to work for a company that  supported my values and some of my values were  and still are working for a company that rewards recognition, a manager that I can work for that will give feedback, and a place where I can be open and honest and perhaps even ask a question  that maybe someone else didn’t ask, and lastly working for a company that is fun.  Because I really believe you need to have fun in the workplace.

So when I came to interview here for a job I asked a question and the question wasn’t “can you describe your managerial style?” I asked “how open are you to feedback from other people who work for you  about something, perhaps, that you did?”  I remember asking that question and the person I was asking the question of looked at me like Hmmmmm and what she said was “interesting.  No one has ever asked me that question before.”

I am a very open and honest person  who needs to be able to go to someone and say “there is something that has really been bothering me.” That was a courageous question for me to ask because years later the person I was working for said “you know Jayne, I can’t believe you asked me that question.” And I said “well, the answer was extremely important to me. Because if the answer was something different then this company may not have been a really good fit for me.” So throughout my whole career I have been known to ask the courageous questions and people have often said “I can’t believe you asked it.”  But it is really about having the confidence to ask the questions  but more importantly knowing what makes you satisfied  before you ask it.  So it served me well throughout my career  here at my job at Keystone and in my world of work at a former company as well.

What I tell them when we start to work together is to not rush out into the market too soon because you need to do the assessment of what really brings you satisfaction.  Think back on some of the positions that you held and I want you to think of  a time when you were in your glory and you were doing something that you loved and the money was coming in and think back on the times when you were the happiest  and try to emulate that whether it was the culture or the boss you worked for or whether it was the company  or whether it was the assignments but you really need to go back and help yourself do that.  I work with people and really encourage them to do that.

It’s two way.  It is designed to show behaviors and to dig a little deeper and the reason I call them courageous questions is people are they are afraid of asking at this level.  They are afraid that people are going to think they are too pushy or they aren’t going to answer the question and companies want to know that you are the right fit for them therefore it is about asking really good though provoking questions and understanding what you want before you go in for the interview.  So you are absolutely right, it is a two way street.

It is after you go through all the interview phases.  There is the prescreening, there is the second round and in some cases a third or fourth round. These questions are for when you are in the middle of the interview and you are a good qualified candidate so it could be on a first round although probably not on a screening interview because the person who is doing the screening probably wouldn’t know this level of questioning  and in reality you want to be questioning your direct boss, your peers and, ideally if you have the chance to, interview with your boss’ boss ask them as well because we know when we go to interview  with your boss they may have one opinion but if the people all around them don’t have similar philosophies or strategies  then you could be working in an isolated incidence so these questions are intended really as you go along  to find the fit, to ask them in the middle of it because you had a  lot of information already to draw upon.

As you know the main way to gather information is through informational interviews and if you have a company that you are targeting, and hopefully those who are looking for interviews are targeting companies, the trick is to get in before the interview and ask the questions because you know you get to ask sometimes even braver questions because you are asking in a more relaxed, honest way about what it is like to really work for this organization and you want people to be honest and in a formal interview everyone is on their best behavior and in a more informal way they may be more apt to tell you a lot more about it.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Jayne Mattson

Email Jayne Mattson at Keystone Associates

RESOURCES

Recent Articles by Jayne on Mashable.com:
13 Questions to Ask During Your Next Interview
How to Structure Your Daily Job Search to Help Land Your Next Job
Inside the Recruiter’s Head: What He’s Really Asking You During the Interview

Books mentioned during the interview:

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

We live in a fast paced world where disruption is common place – not only for individuals and companies but for whole industries.

Are there strategies we can use to effectively manage our careers in this ever changing reality?

Our guest, Charlie Kiefer, co-author of Action Trumps Everything and most recently Just Start, works with companies to improve the quality of their thought and capacity to innovate.

He is the founder of Innovation Associates, Inc. (IA) pioneers in the field of Organizational Learning as described in The Fifth Discipline.

Most recently, Len Schlesinger, President of Babson College, and Charlie developed a set of ideas based on the logic and methods of serial entrepreneurs that enable large organizations to operate successfully in the face of extreme uncertainty.

Charlie joins us to share the latest results in their research. We think you’ll be inspired with practical ideas that apply to all aspects of your life and career regardless of the path you choose.

Charlie shared important lessons from serial entrepreneurs that we can apply to all aspects of our life and especially in making choices in moving our own careers forward.

The importance of starting with an understanding of where we are at and where we want to be.

It’s the knowing what we want – that desire that moves us forward and allows us to persist – That “action is in favor of what you want”. It is action that helps us learn. That we can’t think your way into the unknown. The importance of embracing what we find so we continue to learn and build.

But action isn’t reckless.

It is acting smartly and quickly with the means at hand, weighing our acceptable loss (time, money, reputation, opportunity), bringing other people along, and building on what we find.

Summarized as ACT – LEARN – BUILD.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

…the basic idea behind Just Start is that most of us are completely enmeshed and immersed in a prediction oriented kind of logic and what I mean by that is you are in a situation where you know where you are and you know where the future is going to be and the future is pretty well unavoidable from the present.  You can start out with the best place for you to be and the best kinds of things there are to do and the best kinds of results to accomplish.  You can evaluate the various ways of getting those and select the one that is optimal and then put together a plan and get the resources and then go out and execute the plan and should you unfortunately get thrown off course you just get back on plan and off you go and that kind of logic and that kind of tactic in the world is well educated in that before grade school through the rest of our lives and once we get out into the work force, of course, it is reinforced even more.  But if you are faced with a situation that is really unknown, that logic doesn’t work at all.

If you know what the world in front of you more or less is going to be then doing a lot of thinking and thinking your way through it plainly makes a lot of sense but you can’t think your way into the unknown.  You simply cannot do it.

It turns out serial entrepreneurs are less risky than bankers but the image out there is that we are people hanging on the cliff by their fingernails but typically they don’t do that at all.

So the whole idea of how you get into action as quickly, efficiently, and as cheaply as you can.  So first act quickly with the means at hand, and stay within your affordable losses, the third is bringing people along with you.  These serial entrepreneurs aren’t solo acts.  They are always trying to involve other people and they are doing that to spread the risk out  so that everyone is playing within their acceptable loss, if you will,  to bring more resources to the table than they could bring themselves, to validate the fact that they are doing something which is, in a sense, not utterly predictable  but if people are willing to go along with them then that is an indication that what they are trying to do is pretty smart and then the fourth thing is that you build on what you find.

Absolutely, and that is what I was saying, about desire.  First of all it motivates you to act.  Second, and perhaps even more importantly it motivates you to persist.  What makes real success in any endeavor is you keep at it and if the desire isn’t there you aren’t likely to follow-through on this thing is a little tough.

You just need enough desire to get started.  Start taking some steps in a direction that really matters to you and allow the caring for the venture, the caring for the things that you are trying to do build and developed over time.  That is the way it is done.

So this notion of really grounding yourself to the things that really matter to you allows you to bring your best creative energy to something but also if your feet are really on the ground If you are really in the habit of understanding and acquiring current reality and you aren’t blowing smoke in your own face so to speak, what you care about could be a very good guide to what you ought to be doing next.  It is remarkable to see when people really start to pursue the things that matter to them and assuming they aren’t distorting reality and making it better than it is or worse than it but they are actually seeing it straight on that aiming yourself in the direction of things that you care about is a very, very good way of creating what you want.  Probably the only way.

Acceptable loss framework means you are working knowing the answers to the questions.  You know how much money you have.  You know how much time you can put into this.  You know what positive and negative affects you will have on your reputation.  You know what you are not doing in order to do this.  So much so that all of the uncertainty is run out of the system in terms of your next step by the acceptable loss idea.

…if you aren’t doing something 5 or 6 hours a week pursuing something that matters to you, that is essentially your own personal life raft, you are opening yourself to quite a lot of exposure.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

RESOURCES

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

The words we use impact how we are perceived.

How do we quickly make a memorable impression with our words?

We asked Marica Yudkin to help answer that question.

Marcia is the president of Creative Ways and recognized for her ability to find the right words for a message. Today she joins us to talk about creating succinct and memorable sound bites.

Marcia she has over 16 books published, her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, she is a reviewer and judge for various website awards, she been featured in numerous magazines and she holds three Ivy League degrees. You can find out more about her background and accomplishments at her website – yudkin.com.

And for those of you that are interested in creating careers that support a lifestyle, take a look at the choices she’s made in her career to build a life where she has more time to do the things she loves.

Marcia’s newsletter “marketing minute” is one of the few that I read religiously for two reasons, one it’s a quick easy read and two, it has great content.

Though she works primarily with businesses (or maybe because), I think you’ll find her suggestions for creating sound bites useful as you position yourself for opportunities.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

Sound bites are little morsels; little verbal morsels that make you memorable.  I think that’s the challenge in today’s world.  You want to not only be perceived as competent, but you also want people to remember you.  There’s so many different ways to become memorable.  Sound bites enable you to use the language in a way that sticks in people’s mind.  They are combinations of words and ideas that make you sound clever, smart, original and somebody who’s worth knowing.  It’s actually hard to imagine a context in which that wouldn’t help you get ahead in your career; whatever that was.

Let me give you some examples of sound bites.  These are examples taken from sayings that have lasted in the language because they’re catchy, they summarize an interesting idea, and they’re easy to pass along. Think of all the great quotations that we hear again and again like nice guys finish last, God is in the details, education is wasted on the young.  The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug- That’s from Mark Twain.  One of my favorites is the saying on the license plates in New Hampshire- Live Free or Die.  That’s a sound bite.

Sound bites are a way of using language to stick in people’s minds.

There are three kinds of sound bites that I thought would be most valuable for your audience.  The first kind of sound bite is a slogan, a motto or a tagline…

The second type of sound bite that I want to talk about is what’s called a Moniker.  A moniker is an alternate name or a nick name or some kind of title you want to be known by…

The third type of sound bite that I wanted to talk about is the mnemonic.  This is where you take initial letters of a series of words and you turn that in to something that is memorable on its own…

We know from advertising that something that really hits home can last for decades.  Companies often take their tag lines out of circulation way before they should because they get tired of them and they don’t realize that the public is not yet tired of them…

Another pitfall that I see a lot is a wordy sound bite.  Most of the time, your sound bite needs to be 10 words or less and even better at 6 words at less.  I counted up the tagline of FedEx; I don’t think they’re using this one anymore but for many years it used to be When You Absolutely, Positively, Need Something Overnight.  It’s 7 or 8 words.  That’s a rather long tag line.  You don’t want to be any longer than that.  It sometimes takes help and some editing to go from an idea that has too many words to something that’s shorter and catchier.  Get some help if you have captured the right idea but it sounds kind of clunky and there’s too many words.

…if you watch the presidential debates, which are in the future for us at this point, there are usually a couple of sound bites that come out and turn out to be the ones that people remember afterwards. It’s fun to notice them when you hear them or see them and to realize that you were there at the creation…

You have to use words seriously.  You have to use words that mean something; that can be depended on by the listener or the viewer.  The best example of that is the word guaranteed.  Don’t use it unless you’re totally committed to it…

Don’t be afraid to get known for something that’s a little bit different because that’s what’s going to make you all the more memorable.  If all of your colleagues are going in direction A, think about creating your sound bite in direction B.  It’s going to be somewhat surprising.  It’s going to take people aback. They’re going to want to know more and they’re going to remember you more for it.  Of course, it has to pass all those other tests we just talked about…

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

More About Marcia

Website: http://www.yudkin.com

Email marcia@yudkin.com>

The Marketing Minute by Marcia Yudkin

RESOURCES

 Marcia’s Books on Amazon.

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Speaking of just starting, Just Start is a great new book we love. See link below.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding - Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Abby Grant, Director of Employer Relations at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. She has close to 20 years working in the communications field including publishing, advertising and public relations.

Previously Abby was with the circulation Group at the Boston Business Journal – Boston’s premier business publication. Prior to that, she was with Hollister, a Boston-based recruiting and staffing firm, conducting business development for the creative and marketing group. She has held business development and account management roles for several Boston-based public relations and advertising agencies. Abby holds a B.A. from the University of New Hampshire and a M.A. from Emerson College.

As you’ll hear in today’s episode, Abby is passionate about networking, career and work force development. She loves connecting people to work.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

My original career was in advertising and public relations.  I have an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in communication.  I worked in that field for many years doing a lot of different things.   At some point I decided it was time to make a change.  How did I make the change?  I sat in my back yard and did a lot of thinking about what was I good at? What was I bad at?  What did I love? What did I hate?  I kept coming up with this career called recruiting.  So I got my head all around this particular career and started to talk to people about it and it just really psyched me up and gave me a lot of energy.

What I discovered was if you’re looking for a job and you think like a salesperson and you make connections and work connections, you will show up differently and you will be a different type of candidate.

That’s how you can set yourself apart.  I started going around to a lot of these groups and I discovered that what I really loved doing was connecting people to work.  So once again I put on my thinking cap and thought ok, where am I going to do this.  I’m going to make a change again; out in the back yard again.  I did all the soul searching and I came up with something called Career Services.  I started to talk to anyone that I met that was in Career Services; anyone that I met that worked at a college or university or school and the classic networking scenario where someone that met me introduced me to someone who told someone about me who told someone about me who got my LinkedIn.  That’s how I got my current job.  I’m the director employer outreach at a school called The Center for Digital Imaging Arts.  What I do is connect people to work.  So I did it again. I changed again.

…how do you set yourself apart?  If you make the decision to go do something different and you haven’t done it for 20 years like a lot of the other people that you might be competing with, you need to have a real passion for it.  Passion really energizes people and excites people and if you’re a candidate that walks in and you’re so passionate and so convinced that this is what you want to do, it really does work.   You might have to do a little bit … to educate yourself towards where you want to go but the passion is key when you’re making a change.

When you’re embarking on either a job search or a career change, the thing that you are going to need to start with is your tools.  What do I mean by tools?  Your resume.  Your LinkedIn profile. Your business cards.  These things, if you’re changing, you’re going to have to set them up towards where you want to go.  You’re going to need to get a lot of words on that resume to reflect where you want to go. When I decided I wanted to get into career services and I did all this networking with people that were in career services, what they told me was I needed a lot of the words that career services people had on their resume.  So I crafted my tools towards that end. …we’re going to talk about networking a little bit.

I’m actually more of a fan of LinkedIn than a resume.  I think a resume is necessary, but with LinkedIn, there’s so much more that you can do and it’s richer. You have your references and your connections.  When people would look at my LinkedIn page, some of the comments I got were you need words like mentoring, counseling.  I had all the networking and outreach portion but I had to focus and strengthen myself on where I wanted to go and the job I wanted to do and what my weakness were and think well, do I have experience that speaks to these areas.  In fact, I did but I just didn’t have them on my LinkedIn profile.

So then we get our tools and we have the words to where we’re going. We have our business cards so when we go out and network, people remember us. Networking … is all about who you are not necessarily what you’ve done. What’s happening in current searches right now with people who are going to the job boards, those are about words but we want to get away from being just words on a page. We want to be a passionate person that connects with people and people remember us and we go to networking events and that’s how that works… What we want to do with these tools is we want to have the tools so when we make connections with people, then we’re going to work those connections and that’s how we’re going to set ourselves apart.

I typically go to 10-15 networking events a month.

If you’re the person that’s looking for the job, it’s your responsibility to do the follow up…The other point I want to make is you go out and network and you meet all these people, you do your follow up; this is one of the key things – you don’t ask for a job.

Networking, as I touched on earlier, is about who you are and not necessarily your resume and what you’ve done.  One of the things that’s happened in this economy is all of these networking groups have emerged.  People understand that getting out and meeting people is really how we’re all going to make stuff move forward and get things going.  So I like to go to networking events where there are people like me. That would be industry events.  They tend to be content driven. You learn things. Then you can connect with people in your field. I like to go to networking events where there’s no one like me. That would be maybe a Chamber of Commerce event.

I think the most effective process or steps to take is you get your tools and you’re ready to go. You go out and research network events. You can find networking events on LinkedIn. You can find them on eventbrite.com.  All of the American City Business Journals with events.   You find a few events and you go to an event.

What I like to say when I go to an event is I turn to someone that looks interesting and I shake their hand and say “I’m Abby Grant, what brings you here?”

…It’s the same type of relationship a good recruiter has may however open their personal network for you and also make connections, etc. etc. but, that’s really key cause recruiters are looking for candidates that are a really good match for a job that they have open.  It’s not about what you can do with a recruiter it’s about what you’ve done.  And so 80 percent match, link that experience, pretty recent within a year, two years maybe even three years, tops, so not hey I could do this, I’m gonna send it to the recruiter and see if they have an opening they’re not going to send you to their client.  If you’ve done it, if you’re a good match, if it’s current that’s how you work with recruiters.  If you see a job opening that you have all those criteria that are met, send you resume to the recruiter, maybe do a follow up phone call, and if you’re a match for the job, the recruiter will call you.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

More About Abby

You can find Abby on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

RESOURCES

Networking

Finding Networking Events: Eventbrite, find a local Business Journal.

Business Cards: MOO Business Cards and ZAZZLE Business Cards

Managing Your Google Results

Vizibility allows you to create custom QR codes that can be used on business cards and resumes that links to your profile information and a curated google search.

Make a Killer First Impression. Vizibility helps you control, organize and share your online identity in one click, from your curated Google results to your hand-picked online profiles, mobile business card and more. Your personal SearchMe button, link and QR code instantly direct people to your true online identity.

You will be googled, vizibility makes it easy for you to direct people to the real you. Check it out at Vizibility.com

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure –  just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Speaking of just starting, Just Start is a great new book we love. See link below.

Coaching

Tom & Deborah can help you turn your dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

The Entrepreneur’s Source: If you’re thinks of starting your own business, you might want to connect with Suzanne Gray. We interviewed her in episode five (005 Career Tips and Trends: Me, Inc.).

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Karen Putz, a Passion Coach, writer, speaker and barefoot water skier. Tweet this.

Karen joins us to share part of her story of how she lost and regained her passion.

She was a barefoot water skier until she had a fall and went from being hard of hearing to deaf. That change in her life disconnected her from doing what she loved for over 20 years. It was in rediscovering her passion for barefoot skiing that she also discovered her calling to help others unwrap their passion.

From the show

The way I looked at it back then at that time was juggling and I was spinning plates as a mom.  I think a lot of people can identify with that.  You want one plate and you spin it and the other one starts to wobble and you move on to the next plate and spin that one too.  Sometimes, in the whole process, you lose yourself.  You lose your purpose. You lose  the “why am I here and what am I doing”.  It becomes very overwhelming at that point to try to juggle it all.  That’s why I think it’s so important to be doing something that you really are passionate about doing.  It makes that juggling and plate spinning that much more easier.

What happened two years ago was on my 44th birthday I was extremely down, quite overweight, very unhappy, out of shape.  I was at a point in my life where I was sort of questioning everything that I was doing.  One of the things I did at that point was I was thinking back on my life and what was the happiest time of my life.  What was the point in my life before I started to fall out of joy and I was doing something that I really wanted to do?  Waterskiing was the thing that came to mind.

My husband found a link to the station and on the Today Show was a 66 year old woman who was barefoot waterskiing.  That video was not captioned but I didn’t need the captions.  All I could see was a 66 year old woman waterskiing in her bare feet on the screen.  I started to cry because if a 66 year old woman could do this, then what was my excuse?  There was nothing holding me back from pursuing that passion again.

I got in touch with the woman from the Today Show. Her name was Judy Meyers.  I got in touch with her through Facebook. I told her my story.  She said why don’t you come to Florida and we’ll get you bare footing again?  In the spring of 2010, my family and I flew to Florida.  I went to the World Barefoot Center.  It was there that I met the two time world barefoot champion Keith St. Onge.  Keith took me down to the dock. We practiced all the steps to get back on the water again.

In fact, I was so hooked on it that two weeks later I went back again and barefooted a second time. When I went back a second time, Keith and I were sitting in the boat and talking.  I asked him a question that I ask everybody.  What are you going to do five years from now?  That’s a question that I love asking people.  What’s on your mind about your future?  Keiths response was simply that he wanted to write a book and become a motivational speaker. The next thing I knew, he had just finished his book and it would soon be published and sold.

I’m a certified Passion Facilitator.  One of the ways that I do that is to help people identify what their top five passions are.  A lot of times we get so hung up on the how. How will I do this? Right then and there we stop dreaming.  We get so hung up on the “how” that we forget about the “what” of our dreams. I teach people to identify the “what” and the “how” will take care of itself.  One of the ways we do this is using a simple tool called the Passion Test.  I take people through the Passion Test to identify their top five passions in life.

I think they do because a lot of times people will say “I don’t know what my passion is”.  When people respond with that, we take it back to something that’s much more simple. What brings them joy? What makes the heart sing? What fires them up? We take them back to a time when they were happy and were doing something that they really like to do or something that holds their interest for a long time. We go back to the basics and dig deep down.  People often find the answers there.

The more that I posted on facebook and social media about my passion; the more I attracted people to me. The next thing I knew, I had people from all over who were sending me invitations to barefoot water-ski.  That’s true of anything in life.  The more intense you are about your passion and the more you reach out, the more others will reach to you.  The tribe and your platform continues to grow.   The more you strut your stuff and the more you’re willing to learn from other people, again, that tribe and platform continues to grow bigger and bigger.

If there’s one think that I know from this whole passion journey is when you line your passion with your purpose, a lot of other things line up as well.  Those four areas that you mentioned; very true from what I’ve experienced over the last few years.  I have probably met 200 more people as a result and made new friends and had lots of new experiences.  I’ve encountered different sponsors as a result.  It’s been amazing. It’s amazing what happens when you unwrap your passion.

Listen to the full interview by clicking on the player above.

More About Karen

Karen Putz blogs at ChicagoNow and A Deaf Mom Shares Her World. She is the Director of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Infusion at Hands & Voices.

Resources

Additional Resources

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Kevin Boccaccio.  Kevin coaches people to better health. Tweet This.

He works with others through private coaching and public speaking to improve their health.  He is a certified health minister and certified natural health professional.  His website is WhyBeSickAndTired.com.

From the show

A lot of us have grown up where we  have had problems being sick and tired and we kind of think it is almost normal… you don’t have to be.

… especially things like sleep.  We have such a 24/7 society right now and that wasn’t always the way so we lose track of the more natural ways and people tend to think “what’s sleep!  We can get away with 6 hours a night and we can burn the candle at both ends?” But that is setting us up for sickness down t he line and tiredness and fatigue.

The last thing that somebody needs  when they are trying to dig themselves out of a hole is to lose sight of the sun or the light.  And we want that .  We want that encouragement and being coached by someone who has done it before  or somebody who understands the path,  just like what you do, what I do, and all the different coaches out there, all bring to the table the experience and, hopefully, the understanding  of the story behind it and being able to go forward because you will have doubts.

Absolutely, the body is not a static machine like a car.  It is very, very agile.  We have systems  that will help us clean out once we get started but we have to make sure the changes we are making are  changes in the right direction.  What I find with a  lot of people is they make very small changes in one direction , expecting a certain result out of it.  It’s like you were saying “I’m going to the gym” and if your form is not good you can be slow and  be puffing and breathing hard .  If your form is not good your muscles will  probably not be responding in the correct way and you may get some sort of an ailment out of that or some sort of a set back by that.

So start now wherever you are.

… following our bodies’ cycles in a way that helps promote health

Listen to the full interview by clicking on the player above.

Kevin’s contact information

Website: whybesickandtired.com
Email: coachkevin@whybesickandtired.com
Phone: (224) 935-5669 (spells out) (224) WELL-NOW

Recommended Resources

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health

Other resources:

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest this episode is Adam Rico, career coach and recruiter.

We asked Adam to join us to talk about fitting our personality with our work.

From the show

I decided to go to grad school.  Got a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy.  I then moved into that world to become a family therapist.  I thought that would be my career my entire life in some form or another…

…came to this realization that it wasn’t really a good fit for me… I really went through this period of doing some soul searching of what exactly do I want to do?  What is my personality?  What is going to be a good fit for me where I can find success?

I think that is a great point and one of the things that I learned along the way that I wish I had implemented myself was there are safe ways to explore.  You can check things out without fully committing to it and damaging your career path or current financial situation.  Things like job shadowing or volunteering and just getting exposure to certain other types of jobs.  You can still go through the exploratory process but with maybe a little less risk.

Absolutely, the personality assessments can be used for multiple areas of our lives and I think that is why companies give them to their employees because they can be used to increase communication, to navigate conflict, to enhance leadership skills.  There are so many applications that can be done with a personality assessment.

I think in today’s work world things can be described as volatile.  The security of yesteryear where you work for a company for 35 years and get your gold watch, that is not existent any more.  Even people who are satisfied in their careers would benefit from going through this process because there is always the question of what is my next move?  It is rare that people stay in one job for their whole live, even if they stay in the same career path, they are likely going to change employers or slightly change the direction that they are applying their skills.  This is a process that everyone goes through throughout their career.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Adam’s contact information

WorkYouEnjoy.com

Twitter – @adampaulrico
LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrico
Facebook – facebook.com/workyouenjoy

Recommended Resources

Listeners can download Adam’s free ebook “5 Essential Steps to Landing Your Dream Job” when they subscribe to his newsletter.

Other resources:

You can find a complete list of Adam’s recommended reading at WorkYouEnjoy.com.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest this episode is Rob Toomey, President of TypeCoach.

We hear and talk a lot about personality type and its impact on our relationships and success. But knowing our type or preferences is only one part of the equation to succeed.

I attended a presentation by our guest several years ago and was impressed with the practical application of their work using personality preferences.

From the show

I think my rough rule of thumb is if you are not spending 50% of your day doing things that our brain is naturally wired to do, it is not going to feel right and chances are you aren’t going to be that good at it either.  I think that if a lot of people took a close, hard look at their day to day activities through the lens of their personality type, they would realize that they are in that sub-50% and then t he next question is, and the hard one for a lot of people is, OK, what is a better fit and how do I get more in alignment with that?

…when we look at people who are using their natural skills effectively every day for more than 50% of their time, they are just more likely to be successful.

Personality is what comes easy and character is what takes some energy and attention to actually develop so the whole thing works together in a dynamic way.

There are certain places where you want to put your own effort into developing  in that area and there are other places where I recommend partnering for success, which is what you are describing.

It is funny we always say in our business “personality type doesn’t excuse behavior, it just explains it”.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Rob’s contact information

Rob Toomey
President, TypeCoach LLC
Website: www.type-coach.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/robtoomey

Recommended Resources

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals -
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest this episode is Mira Furth. After leaving a successful career as a senior Human Resources executive where she experienced firsthand how managers think about hiring, firing and lay-off decisions, Mira became a Life and Career Transition guide to help clients discover & embrace their talents.

We asked Mira to join us to talk about transitions as a time to repurpose and redefine our natural brand.

From the show:

 …there are two very different kinds of transitions:  one is what I call revolutionary transition and that is, for example, when you are fired, laid off.  It happens really quickly.  You don’t always feel that you had anything to do with it.  It is sudden.  You know you are in transition because, guess what, you are no longer on your job and you are not yet in your next one.  There is also what I call evolutionary transition, for example, having a child.  The moment the baby is born that is evolution.  You are no longer the same.  The father you grow into, that is the evolution.

…you have an experience where you’ve made your way to your next step.  You actually feel that you have expanded.  That is why I think it is such a fertile time.

Transitions are truly a family process.  I am saying process.  The vent is when the person lost the job.  The process is the whole period of time in between.  Everybody has their own experience, in other words, if it is the husband/father who lost the job, the whole family will be effected by that.  There is so many elements that I could talk to and I am going to mention two…

Listen to the whole interview by clicking player above.

Mira’s contact information

Mira Fürth
SHINE from Inside Out
978-683-2023
mira@shinefrominsideout.com
www.shinefrominsideout.com
“Be Yourself. The world worships the original” ~ Ingrid Bergman

Recommended Resources

White Paper: Repurposing and Redefining Your Natural “Brand”

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

Today’s guest is Ken O’Quinn from Writing with Clarity.

Communication skills are a key competency for almost all jobs in today’s world. In a 2012 poll by the Society of Human Resources Management, writing in English was the number one reported basic or core skill gap and the third largest applied skill gap of applicants.

So we asked Ken O’Quinn from Writing with Clarity to talk with us today about communicating clearly and persuasively.

Before become a writing coach, Ken worked as a journalist and now he focuses on helping businesses craft professional oral and written messages that build credibility and influence their audiences.

From the interview…

… everyone can learn to be a better writer.  I think the biggest problem people have or the biggest challenge for people is that they need to make the commitment to be conscientious and to think about the principles and techniques of good writing every time they sit down to the keyboard.

… The biggest difference is that oral communication is not planned.  It is not organized before hand, nor is it edited when we are done.  Oral conversation is spontaneous.  We just speak.

Whereas, in writing there is a higher standard for writing because  readers expect  that you will think about it before you write it and you will clean it up before  you send it to them, which means, removing words they don’t need to read and making it clear and efficient and easy to breeze through and removing embarrassing mistakes and grammar and punctuation.  We tolerate a lot as listeners because, again, it is natural, spontaneous speech and we say whatever is on the end of our tongue but people expect more when they read your work.

… The two biggest problems are wordiness and a lack of clarity.

Wordiness can contribute to a lack of clarity because the more words you stuff into a sentence or a paragraph, the more you camouflage what your main thought is.

If you just take wordiness, where does it come from?  When we write often, we write the way we speak.  Now, for a lot of people, they have heard at some point in their life, often more than once, write the way you talk.  When people give that advice they don’t really want you to write the way we talk because we butcher the language when we talk and use many more words than we need.  What they actually mean is to use a conversational tone, which you should.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above post.

Influencing Your Audience by Ken O’Quinn (pdf)

Recommend Resources from Ken O’Quinn

Mentioned by Tom

Copyblogger: Grab their free online marketing course.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.
~Lao-Tzu

Today’s show is brought to you by Appia, an online workspace where you can collect and curate all your career information. Appia is designed to help career professionals and their clients take their careers to the next level. Currently Appia’s online workspace is only available through one of our training programs or through other career coaches.

Our guest today, Jim Kimberly of Sapphire Consulting, talks about emotional intelligence and the importance of knowing ourselves. Self-awareness is an important first step in understanding how we relate to others. And as we simplify career and life issues, it all comes down to the Small Town Rules^SM – its our relationships and reputation that we build our success on.

Jim helps individuals and teams reach their goals by removing obstacles to both personal and group success. He founded Sapphire Consulting after spending more than two decades in human services and the behavioral healthcare fields.

In addition to holding a master’s in social work, he has advanced certifications in emotional intelligence and has been designated as one of 13 EQi 2.0 Train the Trainers in the US.

In The News

“If all the statisticians in the world were laid head to toe, they wouldn’t be able to reach a conclusion” ~ Anon.

In May economists surveyed by MarketWatch predicted…165,000 jobs would be added. The actual number was reported as 69,000. We need about 250,000 jobs a month to bring unemployment rate back down to levels seen before 2007-09.

According to the Jobs Outlook Survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management, hiring activity and optimism about job growth have improved compared to a year ago. A recent poll by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reports employers planning on increasing staffing for the first time in a year.

Though this is good news, the Society of Human Resource Management is continuing to report that many employers are having trouble matching skills of job seekers with open positions.

• What does this mean to you and your profession?
• Are you maintaining and keeping your skills relevant?
• Are you looking at other revenue streams?
• What’s your reality?

Today’s Interview

In today’s interview Jim recommends a 3-step model to increase our emotional intelligence – listen, learn and lead. Listen to the full interview.

Tip:

A simple way to demonstrate good listening is to use people’s name in conversations, and to use their preferred name. Listen to how someone introduces themselves or signs their name and make sure that’s the name you use. If is not only a sign of good listening, it’s a sign of respect.

To be able to listen and learn often places us in an uncomfortable place. You might want to check out human connection researcher Brené Brown’s TED talk on “the power of vulnerability” -

Resources

For a current list of EQi®, EQ-360®, Certification Training, go to:

www.consultsapphire.com or email Jim at jim@consultsapphire.com.

You may also call (603) 889-1099.

Leadership Skills & Emotional Intelligence

The EQi 2.0 Model of Emotional Intelligence

Recommended Books by Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition; Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence

Mentioned by Tom in the show.

Dan Miller, 48 Days to the Work You Love: Preparing for the New Normal

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.

Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

The process of finding work that “fits” is not a one-time event. Whether you are eighteen or sixty-two, fulfilling work requires an ongoing understanding of who we are and who we are becoming. Each transition point in life (even if unexpected and unwelcomed) gives us a fresh opportunity to realign our daily activities to embrace our continued maturity and our ability to contribute effectively.

Prepare for the new normal. – Dan Miller, Author of 48 Days To The Work You Love

Today’s show is brought to you by Appia, an online workspace where you can collect and curate all your career information. Appia is designed to help career professionals and their clients take their careers to the next level.

Check it out at getAppia.com.

In The News

In an April 10th, Wall Street Journal online column by Lauren Weber, titled Not All Jobs Are Created Equal, the best jobs were rated.

The top 5 jobs were:

• Software Engineer
• Actuary
• Human Resources Manager
• Dental Hygienist
• Financial Planner

What struck me was not the list of best jobs but their criteria. Their five criteria were: physical demands, work environment, income, stress, and hiring outlook.

In line with today’s interview on the parallels in business ownership and the job search, what are your criteria for work you love, for your ideal job?

Today’s Interview

In today’s show we have an interview with Suzanne Gray from The Entrepreneur’s Source, to talk about parallels in business ownership and the job search.

(Click on the link above to listen to the interview or subscribe on iTunes.)

Suzanne Gray was nominated for 2010 Franchisee of The Year by the FSBI Brands.

Suzanne facilitates a weekly workshop in Burlington MA called “Career Transitions“; providing job seeking tools and confidence building activities to job seekers in a safe and interactive environment. She is frequently asked to be a guest speaker regarding career transition and self employment as an alternative career.

Suzanne helps individuals explore self employment. She also works with business clients providing coaching in the areas of Employee Selection, HR Management, Business Planning, Expansion Strategies and Sales/Marketing.

Suzanne’s goal is to assist others fulfill their dreams of self reliance and successful business ownership.

Suzanne worked in management and business development for over fifteen years. Prior to joining The Entrepreneur’s Source she was with National Grange Mutual Insurance Company. She is also a former Board Member of the Association of Career Professionals-New England and Planning Board Member, Fitzwilliam, NH.

Suzanne provided a list of questions to think about when considering business ownership.  This is just a start – each individual has unique goals.  Suzanne helps her clients through the process of clarifying their criteria.

Example job search calendar.

Contact Suzanne Gray

• Suzanne Gray’s Website
• Email Suzanne
• Connect on LinkedIn
• (603) 585-3110

This Week’s Tip

In today’s interview Suzanne mentioned forming a mastermind group.

I first heard of Mastermind Groups in Napoleon Hill’s classic, Think and Grow Rich. Check out this YouTube video of Napoleon Hill speaking on the Mastermind Principle.

Also check out Keith Ferrazzi’s, Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success–and Won’t Let You Fail. In it he goes into the importance of such a group for personal and professional success. Keith is a strong proponent of mastermind groups, comprised of a small number of diverse, high-quality, tight relationships. To be most effective he believes these groups need to be formalized and structured.

Additional Resources

Suzanne recommends The Success Principles(TM): How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

By Jack Canfield. Jack Canfield is a Success Coach; best known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

Canfield has 432 pages of insightful lessons such as these in his book. He breaks it down into six sections, and the chapters are usually less than ten pages long. It is an easy read and I found it inspiring, for business and for life!

*You can support the show by using our amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Best results are often achieved well before you need a job, by consistently networking so that when you find yourself job-hunting you have a large network to work with. – Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics.

Today’s show focuses on preparing your scripts for networking. Our guest is Larry Childs, PhD, career coach and organizational development specialist. You can follow up with Larry by email.

In The News

Experts are beginning to rethink the meaning of Full Employment. In the past most of us thought that when we had 4% unemployment the country was at Full Employment. The 4% reflected the natural job transitions inherent in the system.

According to John Jay Jordan, of The Jordan Company, the new structural full employment may reflect 7% unemployment instead of the 4% most of us are used to.

In other words, when the system heals it is more likely to reset at 7 rather that 4% for the foreseeable future.

The slow recovery and the latest jobs report support this view. The unemployment rate dropped only a tiny amount to 8.2% while the hiring rate slowed down significantly. According to reports employers added only 120,000, down significantly from February’s 240,000 jobs.

Experts think this drop may be due to women leaving the market, and that men are finding jobs as the construction and manufacturing sectors pic up.

Even though the numbers reflect a lot of pain for a lot of people, it’s important to focus on the fact that over 91% of people do have jobs and companies are hiring.

Small Town Rules still apply.

It’s all about relationship and reputation, and as Ed Evarts said in last week’s show, your visibility and your ability to communicate your value. If you missed it, check out the full interview with Ed in Career Tips and Trends episode 3.

80% of doing work you love is getting clear on what that is. Once you’re clear on what you want and why, it’s a lot easier to target companies and key people that can help you get there.

Like St Nick, make a list, check it twice and… strategically build your network -

More on this after our interview with Larry Childs…

Listen to the show and interview with Laurence Childs, PhD, by clicking at top of post or by subscribing on iTunes.

Recommended By Larry Childs

	An exploration of and advice on conversations at work, home and in social situations. Describes how to deal with conversational hurdles such as starting them, bores, liars, and silence.
	Describes how to handle the important conversations in your life where you know opinions of the parties vary, stakes are high and emotions run strong. The authors present an action-oriented model for preparing and then successfully navigating the interaction.
	Provides clear tools to prepare for work conversations to identify barriers to success and to incorporate individuals’ and teams’ perspectives and motivations to improving problematic situations. “Fierce” refers to conversations where opinions and positions may be passionately held and are therefore powerful tools in developing motivation for success and agreed upon resolutions.
	The authors work with the Harvard Negotiation Project (Getting to Yes). They lay out the three underlying questions behind difficult conversations: 1) what happened, 2) what are the feelings about it, and 3) what does it say about me. Their model helps to probe the perceptions of each conversational party and arrive at workable solutions.

Childs, L. (2009, August 3). Another Factory Worker: Case for Empowerment. Retrieved from The NEWS: Air Conditioning, Heating, Refrigeration

Childs, L. (2008, June 23). Getting What You Want from Your Techs. Retrieved from The NEWS: Air Conditioning, Heating, Refrigeration

You can follow up with Larry by email.

Also Mentioned In The Show

4 Simple Steps To Building Your Network And Getting Booked Solid by Michael Port, from the Huffington Post.

*You can support the show by using our amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

We received a lot of great feedback on last week’s interview with Vicky Schubert on the importance of clarifying your core purpose. We appreciate your feedback and would appreciate your giving us a rating in iTunes.

Addressing career and job search questions from our listeners is an important part of the show. Send your questions to QandA@careertipsandtrends.com or leave a voice message at 617-329-1220. Check the career tips and trends website for links.

We will be holding Google Hangouts with listeners to get a better sense of your questions and concerns around career development and job search. Check the show notes for more information and connect with us on google+.

Today’s Show

The theme of today’s show and our interview with Ed Evarts is around visibility and value — And the importance of working in a purposeful way to be more visible in your organization and your industry. This is important whether you’re:

• currently employed
• in transition
• or looking for potential clients

Ed is practice leader at Evarts Coaching. Evarts Coaching focuses on leadership development with mid- to senior-level executives and their teams inspired by his own leadership experience working in corporate environments. Ed talks about the importance of being visible and offering value in your organizations and offers some practical tips.

In The News:

Veterans are returning home and looking to return to the civilian workforce. One of the challenges they have is translating military experience into civilian skills.

The Department of Defense has a Dictionary of Military Terms: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/ that can be helpful. And we can help as friends, colleagues, coaches and employers by learning and understanding a little bit about their language and world.

Another great resource is O*NET, an online program with information on hundreds of occupations. O*Net also has applications for exploring and searching occupations. It is such a rich resource, we connect with O*Net in Appia. The site is http://www.onetonline.org/ – check out “my next move” for veterans.

Though the nuance and context is unique, the problem is the same for all job seekers, how do you translate your skills and tell your story in the language of your future employer.

Interview

Interview with Ed Evarts of Evarts Coaching…

Deborah Burkholder: Tom and I invited Ed Evarts, practice leader at Evarts Coaching to join us today. As we seek to support you, our listeners, in your life and career aspirations, we think you’ll find Ed’s tips for managing career options by providing value and being visible, both very practical and will take away at least one idea you’ll want to implement today. Evarts Coaching focuses on leadership development with mid to senior level executives and their teams and was inspired by his own leadership experience working in corporate environments.

Welcome Ed, to Appia’s Career Tips and Trends

Ed Evarts: Thanks Deb and Tom, it’s great to be here.

Tom McDonough: Yes, great to have you.

Deborah: We’ve gotten to know Ed from his leadership roles in the coaching community. One of his articles on the importance of networking to stay and grow particularly resonated with the skills and mindset we are seeing as important new trends in how people think about their careers. We talk about it in terms of the importance of relationships and reputation. Ed frames it as visibility and value.

Ed, why is raising your visibility and value so important?

Ed: I think it’s important really for three key reasons. First, Deborah, the pace and frequency of change in the workplace is dramatically increasing. By pace, I mean how quickly individuals are expected to move through a change at work and by frequency, I mean the volume of change events that occurring. So the volume of change events continue to increase and the pace business professionals are expected to navigate through these changes are also increasing. It’s kind of a perfect storm.

This increase in the pace and frequency of change is having a pretty big effect on your ability and your listeners’ abilities to build relationships at work. For example, it was recently reported in fast company that a US worker’s median tenure in their current job is about 4.4 years. The average number of jobs for men in their lifetime is at about 11.4 and the average number of jobs for women in their lifetime is about 10.7. In the midst of all this change, organizational structures, roles, job descriptions, bosses, peers and colleagues change more frequently than any time in modern management history.

The first reason is really this increase in the pace and frequency of change that folks are experiencing in the workplace.

The second reason that raising your visibility and value is important is that organizational transparency is increasing at an exponential rate.

So, what do I mean by organizational transparency?

With the advent of social media, the ways that individuals can find information about you is endless. In addition to popular applications like linkedin, organizations are also starting their own internal linkedin sites, if you will, to better understand the capabilities of talent that exist within their organizations. At the same time, with the advent of social media, you have endless ways to tell the world about yourself.

When I think about it, there was a time, not too long ago, when you wanted to find out who the key leaders were in an organization you either had to spend hours in the library going through a Dunn and Bradstreet notebook or maybe your neighbor had to work there. With this increased organizational transparency, your focus needs to be raising your visibility and value on your terms.

The third thing, quickly, is that raising your visibility and value is important to your listeners is because as business professionals, we either spend no time effectively connecting with others while we are employed, and when we do, we over-invest in classic networking activities which are becoming increasingly outdated and ineffective.

Tom: What prompted you to focus on helping others to raise their visibility and value, Ed?

Ed: As a lifelong human resources and business professional, I’ve been networking my whole life. Like most of you, and the listeners, I have networked for employment, I have networked for affiliation and I network today for business development. When I left my last job I was struck by the number of individuals networking who found themselves, what I call, “unexpectedly unemployed”. The key word there is really “unexpectedly”. Most of these folks were top-notch individuals who received and exceeds expectations on their last performance appraisal, who, what I call, “bled blue” for their organization and often thought they would be the last to go, yet here they were at a networking event because they were in transition.

As I came to know more and more of these individuals and spoke with them, a recurring pattern began to emerge. These individuals spent the majority of their careers, really, as head-down contributors, focused on being a great performer, focused on getting that coveted “exceeds expectations” rating on their performance appraisal and in doing so often times became sequestered in their workstations or offices. These are the folks who were often times unavailable or behind closed doors for most of the workday. Once they picked their heads up they realized that they were not visible in their organization and the value they provided their organization either was absent or unknown. Once they picked their heads up it was often too late…

(interview continues)

Post Interview

Tom

Ed’s interview reminds me of a recent opinion article in the NY Times online by Thomas Friedman titled Average Is over. Average Is Over

In it he states:
“In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.”

Deb

Wow, Average is Over. This is another reinforcement of needing to excel in your niche and to stand-out. This requires is to get clear on where and how we want to be known.

Tom

I think this is just another way of saying that we need to work in a purposeful way to be visible and communicate our value to our organization and industry.

As we say in our Small Town Rules presentation, it’s all about relationship and reputation.

Relationships develop based on how we are present with people, and I loved Ed’s statement that our reputation is the “echo” left behind when we leave the room.

Resources

In terms of resources I’d like to recommend my Being at You Best exercise. It uses principles of NLP and Mind Mapping to help us connect with our recipe for being at our best. The goal of the exercise, is to connect with two or three things we need in our life on a regular basis, to be at our best. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a previous post where I described the Being at Your Best exercise in detail.

In terms of clarifying and communicating our value, I have several books I’d like to recommend:

• I Could Do Anything, If Only I Knew What It Was, by Barbara Sher
• 48 Days, by Dan Miller
• Book Yourself Solid, by Michael Port

These three books take different approaches to help clarify one’s niche, the work we are meant to do, the people we serve and the problems we solve, and the work we love doing.

*You can support the show by using our amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

You can follow Ed on Twitter @evartscoaching
Ed’s website evartscoaching.com
Network to Stay and Grow by Ed Evarts

Follow up

If you liked the show:

• Leave a comment
• Connect with us on twitter
• Join our mailing list at CareerTipsAndTrends.com
• Check out Appia’s online career workspace at getAppia.com
• Subscribe to our Career Tips & Trends podcast on iTunes or at CareerTipsAndTrends.com
• Hangout with us on Google+. We regularly use Google+ hangouts to answer career and job search related questions.

That’s it for this episode of Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

It was great to connect with other career professionals and thought leaders in the area of résumé writing and career development. We returned with a lot of material for future topics on “Career Tips & Trends”.

A recurring theme was the importance of clarifying one’s niche. This is true for both career professionals and the clients they serve. The clearer we are on the problems we solve and the people we help the easier it is to find and engage them.

Vicky Schubert, principal of Inspired Alliance Coaching, is a career and leadership development coach who helps people identify and deliver on their greatest promise. In her work with clients she draws on her experience as a consultant and senior manager with both for-profit and nonprofit organizations focused on improving people’s work lives and performance.

Among the tools she uses to help clients navigate their development goals are the Leadership Agility 360 from Changewise and Cambria Consulting, and the Round Resume, a facilitated reflection process that illuminates the values and purpose at the heart of an individual’s career journey.

Check out Vicky’s Website.

Core Purpose Worksheet

Seeing Yourself Whole: A system of Power and Purpose

What’s Your Sentence?

Global Career Brainstorming Day White Paper

Send your comments and questions to Career Tips and Trends or leave a voice mail (see link in side bar).

Recommended Reading

Welcome to Appia’s Career Tips & Trends.

Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

Imagine a world where people are doing work they love, work that matters.

•  A world where innovation and entrepreneurs are expanding the economic pie
•  A world where more people are flourishing in their work and in their life

The changing economic and employment landscape we’re experiencing can be the catalyst for just such a world.

Appia’s Career Tips & Trends aims to inspire you to flourish in your career and in your life – and to inspire others by your example.

As we see it, the changing economic and employment landscape demands that we embrace a new mindset when it comes to how we think about work and employment.

In these podcast, we’ll explore this new mindset, and the tools and strategies needed to flourish.

To succeed, this will need to be a dialogue with you our listeners, as we explore and flourish together.
– Doing work we love, work that matters…

More show notes to follow…

(Correction: Mistakenly referred to Thomas Friedman as “Michael.” See his book below in resources.)

Resources:

Accomplishment worksheet based on Deborah’s Tip of the Week.

Disclaimer – Affiliate links may be used in this post.
Thank you for supporting Appia’s Career Tips & Trends by using our affiliate links when purchasing.

Welcome to Appia’s Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.
I’m Tom McDonough.
And I’m Deborah Burkholder.

We’re excited about the launch of “Career Tips & Trends”. We will be interviewing experts in the field to discuss different aspects of career management and the job search. In addition to looking forward to hearing from the experts we look forward to hearing from you and what’s on your mind.

Career Tips & Trends will be launching this month, March 2012. Check back soon for our first podcast.

Send your questions or feedback to QandA@careertipsandtrends.com or
leave a voice message at 617-329-1220.

Scheduling note:
We’ll be attending The 2012 Career Thought Leaders Conference & Symposium, in Baltimore. If you plan to attend, say hello.

In upcoming episodes we will bring you highlights from the conference as well as interviews with:

• Deborah Burkholder, CEO of Appia (getAppia.com)
• Vicky Schubert, principal of Inspired Alliance, leadership and career development (victoriaschubert.wordpress.com)
• Ed Evarts, practice leader at Evarts Coaching (evartscoaching.com)
• Larry Childs, PhD, independent consultant, outplacement coach and career advisor