Work, success, and meaning at every stage of your career
Building skills on the job
Since you’re making all those other New Year’s resolutions, why not add a couple to perk up your career prospects? Here are two suggestions that will add value to your resume and that can be accomplished in your spare time.
Heather Huhman wrote a great post about the personal qualities that hiring managers don’t like to see in a candidate. But it’s the Smart Brief link title that caught my eye: Are you too boring to hire?
Huhman writes:
“Hiring managers don’t want to see a candidate who has no additional interests or personality beyond what’s required to get a job in their industry. You need to show you’re a human being, not a robot. Hiring managers love to see candidates with hobbies, or even those who have taken on a second job—it shows you’re able to make good use of your free time to expand your skills and interests, and this is a quality that’s likely to spill over into your professional life.”
When asked the question “At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” only 20 percent answered yes; the other 80 percent felt that they were not using their strengths in their roles at work.
Buckingham starts out by defining “strength” as “near perfect, consistent performance.” Being pretty good at something is not enough. It starts with talent, which Buckingham describes as an innate ability – something you may have been a natural at all your life. In fact, being a natural is what keeps many of us from understanding true strengths; if it’s that easy for me, doesn’t everyone find it to be easy too?
What could be wrong with being nice? Here are six signs that you might be nice to the point of unhealthy.
This week is the one we set aside to give thanks for our blessings. If you’ve been unemployed for a while, you may have trouble summoning a sense of gratitude for your experience over the past few months (or years.)
Gratitude, like most feelings, can be both an experience and a practice. Many people practice gratitude each day to remind themselves of the abundance of good things in life, even if (maybe especially if)they are going through a difficult period.
Being rejected is not fun. If you’re in an extended job search, every call you don’t get feels like a fresh rejection, and that can wear down your confidence fast. That’s a problem, because your confidence and energy level are two of the first things your network – and recruiters – notice about you. Here are some tips on how to boost your confidence.
I meet people all the time who ask for advice about transitioning to a new field. In this occasional series, I’ll ask friends with cool jobs five questions about how they got to where they are today. This post features Melissa Ross, host of WJCT’s First Coast Connect.
You’ve been on the job market for a while now, and you’re starting to wonder if your only options lie in published postings for established positions. What if you really want a job that isn’t available? Or a job that doesn’t technically exist? What if you find yourself attracted to a certain organization, but the company website has no specific “careers” listing? What if a company has no positions to offer right now, but makes a claim like “We’re always looking for great people”?
According to a Yahoo! news article, researchers at the University of Kansas say that people can accurately judge 90 percent of a stranger’s personality simply by looking at the person’s shoes.
