Work, success, and meaning at every stage of your career
Losing your job is a traumatic experience. It ranks among the top 10 stressors for adults, along with death and divorce. In fact, being let go feels like an awful combination of death and divorce, an event that will surely shake your confidence. And confidence is what you need for a successful career transition. No … Continue reading The Road to Confidence Part 1: Handling Worry
One of the keys to a successful job search is networking, which can be defined as meeting people you don’t know to ask for something you don’t have. If you’re by nature a shy person, networking can be agonizing. When biologists and zoologists use the term shy to describe animals, it generally means “tends to … Continue reading Shy? Here’s How to Get Over It.
(A guest post by Lauren Walker, from Stellar Select, a UK-based financial recruiting company.) Surviving an interview is one of the most challenging aspects of landing a job. Even if you’re the most qualified candidate in the room, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the finance job that you want, especially if you were unable … Continue reading How to Make a Good Impression in Finance Interviews
In a previous post, I wrote that generalists are more marketable, more employable, and maybe more happy than specialists. Pat Flynn, author of How to Get Better at Almost Everything, says that becoming a generalist has made him both successful and happy. “When I specialized in guitar, I was always comparing myself to others and … Continue reading How to Get Very Good at Being Pretty Good at Everything
Which are you: a generalist or a specialist? Generalists tend to know a little about a lot of things; specialists tend to know as much as possible about just a few things. I believe that we’re hard-wired to be one or the other. We either gravitate toward exploring many topics and integrating knowledge into a broad view of the world, or we gravitate toward exploring one topic we care passionately about until we become an expert.
I get asked for career advice all the time, and I’m happy to give it. It’s part of my job at CareerSource Northeast Florida, of course, but it’s also my personal mission to help as many people as possible find meaningful work and become successful. So I give my time freely, and for free (two … Continue reading Social Versus Market Norms
FIRE is the acronym for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” If 50 is the new 30, FIRE practitioners want to make 35 the new 65. Most of us think of retirement age as somewhere between 62 (Social Security eligibility) and 70 (mandatory retirement age for some professions, and the age when Social Security payments max out.) … Continue reading FIRE: Could You Retire Early?
Recently we covered how to dress with confidence at work. It’s not a frivolous topic; your confidence is directly tied to your performance. It’s part of what people notice first about you. Of course, you have to have great skills and good ideas, but your image is also a critical part of how you’re perceived … Continue reading How to Revamp Your Professional Image
(Courtesy Flexjobs.com) The unemployment rate among military spouses is 16%, more than four times higher than the civilian unemployment rate. According to a FlexJobs and Blue Star Families survey of more than 500 military spouses, nearly half (46%) of military spouses have felt discriminated against in their job search because they are military spouses. Read on for more of … Continue reading FlexJobs: Survey Says Nearly Half of Military Spouses Feel Discriminated Against
For the record: I’m a proud liberal arts graduate. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with big dreams and a double major that doesn’t have a darned thing to do with my work now. If you’re a parent despairing over your new grad’s choice of major, take heart. You could be the proud parent … Continue reading Ode on a Liberal Arts Graduate
Your Work, Your Way 