Career Tips

Are you looking for a new job? Want to give your career a new direction? Do you need help in finding a new job or taking the next step in your career? Many times, people either feel shy or too insecure to take a drastic step in their career. They feel a little lost and nervous about it because when it comes to career, it is hard to know which step is right and which is not.

In order to create a successful career, you should first know your inner thoughts and beliefs. You have find out what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, which are the things that matter to you in life and what motivates you. These are the key questions which must be answered correctly in order to find the right career path. But most of us, feel quite confused while answering them.

Won’t it be easy to have someone to guide you and help you in answering these questions? Getting career advice from a professional can be just the thing you needed to find the right career path for yourself.

Well if you are looking for such a helping hand, then Career Energy is the right place with you. They are pioneers in career advice and outplacement of high rank officials. They can help you in finding a new job, guide you in reaching your career goals faster and more efficiently and will coach you to make your career long and successful.

Their experienced career consultants work with each of their clients on personal level. You can contact them by phone or Skype or visit them in their Birmingham office. The great careers advice will surely help you create a career path that will lead you to your ultimate career objective.

By choosing a career you enjoy, you’re more likely to pay attention to it. You’ll give your career path the care and upkeep it needs. Part of keeping your skills current and in demand is knowing your industry and having a strong personal network – people who serve as a sounding board, give you information what’s going on with other employers, teach you new skills, and set an example you want to follow.

A career network safety net includes people who support and strengthen you in your career, with whom you stay in touch and connect.

Here are 3 tips for keeping your network strong:

1. Don’t wait until you need something to make contact. Try to set up regular contacts – whether through a coffee date, an email newsletter, attending a group networking meeting, or a phone call.
2. Offer to help when someone needs it, even if you think you don’t have time for it or you think they don’t need your help. If someone loses their job or has a personal crisis, try to find a way you can help – even if it’s just a phone call to lend support. You know how karma works…
3. Set a monthly goal for maintaining your network. Whether it is attending a networking function or making one phone call, doing something will keep you from killing the goose that lays the golden egg – your network.

I thought of this topic because over the last few months I’ve heard from friends and colleagues I haven’t heard from in awhile (and with whom I have not stayed in regular contact). It reminded me that in times of crisis and uncertainty, it’s your relationships to people that matter the most. People who listen (who you trust not to share your information with the world) and people who are sources for job search advice and connections. People with whom you’ve built rapport.

I need to improve my attention to my personal and professional relationships – maybe you do too. Let’s remember to regularly reach out to our friends and colleagues in our weekly/monthly/yearly goal setting.

P.S. Having trouble tracking and categorizing your networking contacts? Read this blog post by social media expert Chris Brogan.

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Finally the sun has come out here in the Pacific NW – as the East Coast is being hammered by a huge snowstorm. A little spring fever is just what the doctor ordered for me.

All weekend I’ve been working on marketing and publicity for The Career Key’s new products – a giant hole of time, energy and money – that marketing stuff. But a necessary ingredient to success. If you help run a business, like I do – you know how this works. You plan carefully, do what you can – and hope for the best!

Sounds like running the biggest democracy on Earth, eh? I think I’ll stick with The Career Key…

And to think people still have time to “tweet” on Twitter! But I confess I did get a little Hulu time this weekend. I love 30 Rock…

Stay tuned for our news about Career Clusters, Career Key Canada, and our newest eBook, “2009 What Job is Best for Me?” – that, by the way, is a huge success. Thanks to our customers who have emailed me with praise and suggestions.

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Many people choosing or changing a career encounter these top 3 barriers:

1. Cultural transitions: military to civilian, government to private sector, immigrant working in a new country;
2. Career indecision: being overwhelmed, fear of the unknown, and/or you’re just an indecisive person.
3. Practical obstacles to employment: affordable childcare, disability, or finding reliable transportation to work, a lack of job skills or education

Not knowing how to work through and overcome these barriers is the biggest problem of all. Add the stress of tight finances, insecurity about your own abilities, and family pressures, it’s amazing anyone makes a breakthrough. But you can, using the suggestions below and the other resources on The Career Key, Career Key Canada and Self-Employment Key websites.

Whether you find this comforting or not, ultimately you are in the driver’s seat for your career path. I have 3 suggestions that will help you deal with whatever barriers apply to you:

Holland’s Theory of Career Choice.
Don’t try to “reverse engineer” your career choice – like, I can do X, therefore I must be X. It should be forward looking: I am most interested in and my personality fits ________, and how do I make that happen?

Learn about how Holland’s Theory helps you choose a satisfying career. Choose your career first, worry about how to get the job skills and education later while exploring careers and making a high quality decision.

Long-term planning.
If you plan towards a specific career goal, you’ll be more likely to reach it. It will also give you hope and motivation. Whether you’re a gas station attendant, foreign trained doctor, or a laid off executive, it’s possible you have to work in a lower paid job than you’re used to while you go to school, network for your dream job, or start your own business. If possible, choose an interim career that matches your personality.

And if you’re an indecisive person to begin with, try finding your specific career goal by using these proven 4 steps to making a good career decision. We offer you a free downloadable “Decision Balance Sheet.” If that doesn’t help, try these other activities including personal career counseling.

Networking.
Both online and offline, networking offers your best chances at learning about the careers that interest you, affordable childcare options, the best nonprofit and government resources, and getting moral support from other people. If you’re an Internet junkie, get outside and meet people in person. If you’re not familiar with online networking, figure it out – and talk to people who are doing it.

In future posts I’m going to focus on each of these top 3 barriers to career decision-making. Right now, I’m working on post about making a military to civilian transition. If you have something standing in your career path to share, I’d love to hear about it.

Career Key Canada, our new resource for helping Canadians choose or change careers, is off to a great start! Last week I spent 4 days in Toronto at Cannexus 2009, the national career development conference for Canada. Our new site links your Holland personality to Canadian careers and Canadian career information - the only scientifically valid career test based on Holland’s Theory to do so.

Here I am holding down the fort. Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about my laptop going missing since my neighbors were the Canadian Forces. Don’t we all have a renewed appreciation for our Navy folks in light of all the piracy news? Talk about a much needed ego boost for us here in the States, we needed to take out some bad guys…

I gave a presentation in addition to manning the exhibitor table and I have to say this has been one of the best conferences I have been to. The career counsellors I met were very friendly and interested in sharing their goals and challenges. There was a lot of interest and I am working on getting back to the many people I met.

If there are any career counsellors or career development practitioners out there, in Canada or the U.S. who want to try out and evaluate any of our Career Key tests or products, please email me: julietjones at careerkey.biz. I would be glad to help you.

So I’m back to posting to the blog after a little hiatus. I’m not one of those Twitterers or Bloggers who hires someone to blog under my name - so I have to write it myself. Lucky for you!

If you are choosing a career, have you ever considered how all your career options are organized? I bet you haven’t – but why not? Being “well organized” isn’t just for Martha Stewart wanna-bes or accountants, is it?

Being well-organized is cool. The Container Store has made it acceptable to pay $50 for a plastic storage container made in China that you could have purchased at Target for $10.99. The Container Store version is just more beautiful. Also think IKEA. Love those brightly colored containers.

And you know how financial gurus say treat your physical money with the respect it deserves? (not stuffed loose in your pocket for example).

Being organized means you have your life put together – something to be admired and an efficient way to access your stuff. Smart organization can also help you make a big life decision like choosing or changing a career.

You might want to consider how your buffet of career choices is organized. How else can you be sure that when you choose your career, you’re looking at your options in an efficient, comprehensive way?

The Unhelpful Alphabetical Career Laundry List
How many of you have received an alphabetical laundry list of “matching” careers from a valid or invalid career test? “You should be an: actor, architect, art therapist, author…..” Everybody has.

The Smart, Organized Alternative for Matching Careers
If you want to see a science-based way to organize career choices, visit Career Key’s article “Match Your Personality with Careers.” For each Holland personality type, you can see a list of occupations organized into work groups – related careers with similar worker traits, skills, and abilities. If you’re from Canada, go to the Career Key Canada’s article. Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, The Career Key’s author and a vocational expert, organized this system – not a marketing copy writer.

Go to any other website offering a career test to the public, free or otherwise, and you will not find career options so well organized in a practical and useful way.

You have to be a special person/geek to love classification systems for careers – also referred to as “taxonomies.” Recently I’ve met a few like minded professionals who care about them as much as I do. I appreciate them also because my family is largely made up of geeks, linear thinkers, and engineers.

So I dedicate this post to my fellow taxonomy enthusiasts and career development practitioners who see the value in a well-organized and high quality approach to choosing a career. I think users appreciate it too.

I want to say thank you to Ben Eubanks, a writer at the popular Jobacle.com site, for giving us such a positive review for our newly updated eBook, “2009 What Job is Best for Me?” He did a great job and really focused on what’s important about choosing a career.

Recently it’s been hard to find time to blog. I’m preparing for my Career Key Canada presentation and exhibitor table at Cannexus 2009, Canada’s national career development conference, which starts on Monday.

I’ve been addicted to TED and Slideshare watching better presenters than I am to improve my presentation skills. Even though I practiced law and did courtroom litigation for a number of years, I still have to refresh my presentation skills. And just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t make you a good public speaker. I was also reminded that practicing, out loud any oral presentation is absolutely crucial.

And as you can see from the photo of the wonderful Julia Child and her monkfish at left, practicing over a few days gave me the clarity that this was not the right picture of her for my presentation. Associating monkfish, no matter how great it tastes, with my company is perhaps unwise. Don’t get the Julia Child, Career Key Canada analogy? Sorry, have to attend my Cannexus presentation to find out!

If you’re interviewing for a job, conducting an informational interview, or any other oral presentation, I highly recommend practicing what you’ll say in front of the mirror or someone else. It takes me a few “takes” before I realize I can talk less and more effectively say the same thing. And you gain confidence each time you present it, which makes success a self-fufilling prophecy.

My mother told me practice makes perfect - when I was learning the piano. And like any good daughter, don’t I hate she was right! About a great many things…

Job dissatisfaction? Having trouble paying your rent? School graduation? Some events triggering a career decision may be in your control – like school graduation. But others, like layoffs or disability, are not. Either way, you can make progress towards choosing a career that meets your needs by looking at what motivates you.

First, make sure you do the suggested exercises in our article, “Learn More About Yourself.”

Second, think about how your career needs fit into respected psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. This diagram of the hierarchy, courtesy of Wikipedia, may help you prioritize and put your career criteria in perspective.

To give you some ideas, I applied career choice to Maslow’s hierarchy, from the bottom up:

Physiological: physical and mental ability to do the job, income helps you meet your physical needs (food, water, shelter)
Safety: positive job outlook and security, doing what is morally comfortable
Belonging: being part of a team, professional network, community
Esteem: pride in your work, your career, and confidence in your abilities
Self-Actualization: reaching your potential and maximizing your life experience

See how your matching career options fit with Maslow’s 5 categories of needs. While no career is perfect, your final career choice should meet your needs in all these areas.

My guest post this week is from CEO Boris Epstein and AskBINC contributor Tawny Labrum at BINC, a Professional Search Firm specializing in software engineer jobs and the software engineering industry. They know the Investigative personality type and what software engineers want in their careers. (Disclaimer: I’m married to a software engineer, techies check out his C++/D blog and Linux debugger Zero Bugs; I can’t agree more with BINC’s observations)

I asked BINC to talk about their experience with Holland’s Theory and how it relates to job and career satisfaction for their software engineer clients and employers.

BINC:

The saying, ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is used when people with similar characteristics or similar interests choose to spend time together in business and in social scenes. This also seems to be true in the employment industry.

Take for example the Software Marketplace, in which BINC specifically works. We have the opportunity to deal with some of the most intelligent people in the scientific community. They compete with one another to have the honor to work together as a team. And as Dr. John Holland has shown, people who are most successful and satisfied with their careers tend to work with other like minded people.

If you look at the six different personality types of Holland’s Theory described on Career Key’s website, the Investigative personality type screams to those who are employed as Software Engineers:

“- Likes to study and solve math or science problems; generally avoids leading, selling, or persuading people;
- Is good at understanding and solving science and math problems;
- Values science; and
- Sees self as precise, scientific, and intellectual.”

If you ask any of the recruiters at BINC to describe a true software engineer and their ideal opportunity this is the type of result you would get:

• A position that will promote intellectual growth and high level thinking. Software Engineers are extremely analytical individuals who would rather deal with problems that require thought and have a proven answer. This ability to study and solve problems makes software engineers invaluable to their employer because the word of technology is changing rapidly and engineers need to continue to seek new answers or better methods.

• A position where they are inspired and the work they are doing somehow is contributing to the greater good of society. Software engineers often have tasks that are mind-numbing to anyone who doesn’t love what they do. Staring at code, creating and solving mathematical problems, repeating processes without the passion to do so can be wearing, but great software engineers thrive in such an environment.

• Engineers are passionate about what they do and they possess a true love for programming, they strive to be around like minded people. Very rarely is there a job where we place a software engineer in by him or herself. Very often they work in teams and the dynamic has to work or the employer is robbed of the creative energy and passion to get the job done. A successful software engineer seems to thrive in environments where they fit in culturally and their investigative personality type is put to use.

• Engineers look for a supportive working environment with a vision, where ideas can be heard and their paycheck serves as a bonus, not a primary motivator. Part of our job at BINC is to find that right fit for engineers and employers to enable their strengths and provide an atmosphere they will love working in.

As you can see the Holland Theory matches closely what we’ve seen in our day-to- day experience. Software engineers, in general, love solving problems, they love math and science, and they’re passionate about their work. These are the type of people we’ve found thriving in their workplace and loving their careers.

Discovering your passion may seem like a daunting task, but the long-term benefits of investigating your personality, your abilities and your talents will go a long way to helping you find the perfect position. If you’re interested in more of our tips and tricks please visit our blog - AskBinc.com or visit us at bincsearch.com.

NOTE: Career Key thanks BINC CEO Boris Epstein and AskBINC contributor Tawny Labrum at BINC for this great post. To see more careers of the Investigative Personality type and the other 5 personaltiy types, read our article “Match Your Personality with Careers.“