Its A Wrap! See You Next Year!

Its A Wrap! See You Next Year! I have dozens of ideas on how to wrap up this blog for 2007, but I just couldnt figure out which one was the best. So, Ill save some for next year, and Ill end the year sharing one of the best posts Ive seen recently. Joe Miller is a contract attorney in D.C. and a very sharp guy. A couple of days ago he had a brilliant post: How to Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever: 22 Tips for Keeping Your Edge While Doing Contract Work. Check it out whether you do contract work or not, this applies to you, and makes my favorite posts of 2007 list! Thanks for making 2007 an excellent year! Please be safe, and I hope to see you next year! Its A Wrap! See You Next Year! I have dozens of ideas on how to wrap up this blog for 2007, but I just couldnt figure out which one was the best. So, Ill save some for next year, and Ill end the year sharing one of the best posts Ive seen recently. Joe Miller is a contract attorney in D.C. and a very sharp guy. A couple of days ago he had a brilliant post: How to Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever: 22 Tips for Keeping Your Edge While Doing Contract Work. Check it out whether you do contract work or not, this applies to you, and makes my favorite posts of 2007 list! Thanks for making 2007 an excellent year! Please be safe, and I hope to see you next year!

Resume Summary Examples - How to Write Your Resume?

Resume Summary Examples - How to Write Your Resume?In the world of resume writing, you will find a number of resume summary examples that show how to summarize your application and make it concise and professional. By using these, your resume will not only look professional, but also help your chances of getting the job.These resume summary examples provide all the information needed to compose a professionally written resume. They serve as an overview or as the first part of your resume to make it read clearly. The intention is to send out the message that you are the right candidate for the job, thus making it easy for the hiring manager to see your experience.Now, how to write a resume without using resume summary examples? You will have to do some research and use those resume templates that are already standardized by many employers and recruiters. With these, you can expect the same results from them. You may use those examples with other things to change and even improve your resume.However, there are some things that you have to keep in mind when you come across these sample resumes and then realize that they do not fit your personality and different aspects of your job. For example, if you are a project manager who gives presentations, a resume summary example with a presentation will not work. It is best if you follow the style that is more appropriate for your personality.Before you start writing, think about different parts of your job. Ask yourself what would be best for you in terms of your personality and where you are in your career. That way, you won't be overwhelmed and will be able to organize yourself when you write your resume. Your resume will be on track so you can have a solid chance at getting the job.While you're at it, try to create another resume summary example using only the information that is necessary to use your resume. Instead of being so much, the information will be kept simple, concise and relevant to the specific job.Remem ber, this should be a professional way of presenting yourself to your future employer. To make this as effective as possible, you will have to think about a few things in advance and ask yourself if you have the skills needed to do the job. That way, you will get exactly what you are looking for.Use resume summary examples to give yourself a jump start. Most people are unsure of how to go about it. However, it will be a fun way to prepare yourself for when you submit your resume for the first time.

7 Resume Mistakes Candidates Probably Didnt Realize

7 Resume Mistakes Candidates Probably Didnt Realize If you’ve worked long and hard on your resume only to find that it’s not getting the response you hoped for, it may be because you have made one or more common mistakes. Over my career, I’ve seen tens of thousands of resumes and I’ve seen just about every mistake you can imagine. But some are more common than others. If your resume isn’t working for you, check whether you have made any of these frequently seen errors. 1. Focusing on Yourself Rather Than on the Employer Think of a resume as an advertisement for a product, only the “product” is you. Just like any other advertisement, positioning is everything. The person who receives your resume will scan it quickly â€" perhaps for no more than 20 seconds â€" to determine whether you can help her company. Your job is to say quickly, clearly and loudly that you can! Don’t just launch into a chronology of your career history. Instead, determine your own positioning by spelling out your message at the start of the resume and giving the reader your version of events upfront. For this reason, you should use the first 1/3 of your resume to create a compelling personal profile which highlights your key strengths in an attractive, easy-to-read format. 2. Starting with an Objective Don’t start with an objective. Recruiters and hiring managers don’t like them because they focus on the needs of the job seeker rather than the needs of the potential employer. Consider this objective statement: “Seeking a software engineer position with a progressive employer where I can contribute to the development of new technologies and work with bright, committed people.” This may be very honest but it is irrelevant to the reader, who does not care what you want and only cares what you have to offer. Instead of an objective, try using a positioning statement that clearly and concisely explains what you have to offer. “Senior Software Engineer with 10 years experience developing leading-edge technologies.” Now the reader can immediately see your value to the company. (For even greater impact, tailor this statement for each position so that the reader immediately sees a match between his/her needs and your skills.) 3. Focusing on Responsibilities Instead of Results Don’t provide a laundry list of responsibilities without showing what results you achieved. Most employers already know what the main responsibilities of your job were. They want to know what makes you different from all the other applicants. An effective resume summarizes job responsibilities in a few sentences and then provides details of quantifiable achievements. 4. Not Being Specific You must place your achievements in context by providing specifics. For example, don’t say something vague like “contributed to product design.” This tells the employer nothing about your actual contribution. Instead be specific about what you did: “Conducted market analysis for (name of product) to determine design and mechanics. Led changes to original design spec. despite initial internal objections. Received critical acclaim and sold over 4 million units.” See how being specific makes a difference? This level of detail shows the reader the contributions you have made in the past and therefore the contributions you can be expected to make in the future. 5. Poor Design and Layout At least 50% of the impact of your resume derives from design. A strong resume design will pull the eye through the document, making it easy to keep reading and will highlight your key strengths clearly. But if your resume is badly laid out, disorganized or hard to read, it will be discarded before the reader knows how qualified you are. To see examples of good designs, check out our sample resumes. Take time to understand how the page has been laid out and then apply what you’ve learned to your resume. 6. Writing about Everything (Including the Kitchen Sink) Think of your resume as a brochure, not a product catalog. It doesn’t have to tell your entire story â€" just the parts that will help you find your next position. So be selective about what to include. Don’t mention experiences and accomplishments that have nothing to do with your career goals. Don’t include outdated skills or computer knowledge. Also avoid including personal information. Don’t detail your marital status, age or the number of children you have. Don’t mention non-professional affiliations such as political or religious volunteer work unless it directly relates to the position you are applying for. Information like this runs the risk of turning the reader off. However proud you are of personal achievements, you should not run the risk of alienating someone before you even have your foot in the door. 7. Not Having a Clear Focus This is absolutely essential. You cannot appeal to a target audience until you know who that audience is. You must determine the types of positions you’re seeking and identify what is important to hiring managers filling those roles. If you have several different career goals, create several different resumes, each one carefully targeted to appeal to employers in that field. If you try to appeal to very diverse audience with one resume, you will simply wind up appealing to none of them. In Summary When you send your resume out, it must speak articulately for you. You can’t explain inconsistencies, clear up confusion or fill in things that are missing. Your resume has to make your sales pitch in a clear and compelling manner within 20 seconds. Invest the time to make it exceptional and you will see an immediate increase in the response rate. Related: 4 LinkedIn Mistakes that Could Damage Your Career. Louise Fletcher co-founded Blue Sky in 2002 after a career as an HR executive. She admits to being a ‘wordnerd’  at heart and loves to write. She developed the Blue Sky resume approach, has written two books, and has been a featured expert for sites such as Monster, The Ladders and HR Guru.

Keys to getting unlost

Keys to getting unlost My garden is full of vegetables that I never would have guessed I could grow. There is so much that I am not sure what to do with it all. Because the acorn falls close to the tree, my son decided he wanted to sell rhubarb at our local farmers market. To be clear, a farmers market looks very different in a community of farmers. Its very unregulated, and people sell stuff off their trucks. Also, two farms sell heirloom rhubarb, ours and one owned by an Amish family. If you havent noticed, the Amish are very good at what they do. They know their customers, and they always have something fun to sell, no matter whats in season. My relationship with my customers centers on my ability to always piss off someone, no matter if its on my blog or in person. To make up for that, I tied ribbons around the rhubarb. I think the only thing I accomplished was a nice picture. My son is enterprising, though. And he realized that what people really want is our eggs. (Farm eggs are way better than supermarket eggs even organic ones.) So he sold those at the market, and we took the rhubarb home. The farmers market exhausts me. You might think Id be fun to talk to, but Im not. I get anxious with unstructured conversation, and also, I feel that I should be friendly to the Amish but I feel awkward and really just want to ask them if they can take my kids in and teach them to speak only when spoken to for a few weeks. I have other ideas. Like, maybe I want to be a CSA. But by the time I put a box together, and put it in the car for my little brother to drive to New Jersey for my not-as-little brother, I think, I would never want to do this for someone who is not my family. So, to be honest, the only thing that I have figured out to do with my excess vegetables is have Melissa take photos of them. Here is Swiss chard and radishes. I told Melissa that we should use Photoshop to insert some goat cheese and then this can be an ad for my new company. Which hopefully I will launch before the turn of the next century. Then I told Melissa that I need her camera. I want to be good at photographs and I have learned enough about photography to know that my $100 camera is fine for taking photos it knows how to take. But my imagination is wider than that lens. Is that a cliche? I have not read enough about photography to know if I am writing in photography cliches. This is a rule: If you want to be good at something you need to read a lot about it. (Maybe this is an Asperger-only rule, since Asperger people learn visually.) So if you dont like reading, think of your own rule. But also, if you dont like reading, how are you even going to get through this post? Because Im about to start meandering off topic. Here is the key to getting unlost when you are in your twenties: Get married or make a lot of money. Dont tell me Im shallow. I dont care. Life is shallow, really, since we have no idea why were here. In your twenties you feel like you need to get settled, and find your place. Some people need to have a special person in their life that they are connected to and making a home with. These people are caretakers and fusers. Other people need to make a lot of money, not because they want a BMW (although many do) but because its a way to measure how valuable you are as an adult, to the other adults in the world. I tell this to Melissa and I tell her she doesnt need a traditional job because she wants to get married. And when it comes to getting married, men do not value women with careers. Here is the blog post about this with very good research. Also, do not tell me youre the exception to the rule. I dont care because no one is the exception to that rule. And anyway, just because you want to have sex with a banker from Goldman Sachs doesnt mean you want to marry her. So I tell Melissa she should look for a husband. I keep telling her that the blog was a great dating tool for me. Eventually that will happen for her. (Note to potential city suitors: I think she will be happier in the country.) By the way, I did not want to be married when I was in my 20s. I wanted to make money. That is fine, too. You need to know yourself. When you are in your 30s, the thing you need to do to feel not lost is to figure out what you want from kids. You dont need to want kids. In fact, your life will be happier and more stable if you do not have kids. Fortunately, for the human race, having kids is not a rational decision. So we keep having them and then we spend the next ten years trying to figure out how to be a parent and how not to feel like an imposter. And how to get some semblance of our own life back after the kids take over everything. (Incidentally, here is one of my favorite examples of me in the middle of this absurd struggle. During a live, video interview at BNET, my kids invaded, just seven minutes in.) Certainly there are people who choose to not have kids. (Note to men: This will hurt your earning power. One of the most notable statistics of corporate life is that men who have kids get more promotions than men with no kids.) If you choose to have no kids you will spend your 30s getting comfortable with the fact that the rest of society will accuse you of being an uncaring, Peter-Pan-syndrome mutant who is too narcissistic to have kids. You will get over this. All women I know who did not have kids have come through their 30s just fine, but they have war stories to tell of the verbal bombs people tossed. In your 40s, you get used to being lost, and it even starts to look interesting. I find that now, more than ever, I trust myself to get unlost, so I dont mind as much having to tell people I am lost. But in your 40s you start to worry that youre finding your way through the wrong maze. Like, you only have a few more decades of life, right? You dont want to waste them on what other people think is important. I spend most of my worry time making sure Im worrying about the stuff that I want to worry about. I think I like worrying about if I need to buy a different camera. The camera Melissa uses is a $4000 one. The oven I want is $9,000. (Black and gold, if you want to buy it for me as a present.) I think, at this point in my life, I spend more time cooking than I do taking pictures. But I think I want it to be the opposite. So maybe I should buy the camera and not the stove. And maybe you can figure out where to spend your worry about being lost by where you choose to spend your money. Or maybe I should earn enough money to buy both things. And that is why I have such a large readership of people in their 20s. Because I have yet to stop being like them.

Resume Writing Service: How to Find One?

Resume Writing Service: How to Find One?A resume writing service San Diego is not really that easy to find. But if you look for one, you are going to have a very difficult time. It is so hard to find this type of service because most of the businesses in this regard are in fact closed.Certain companies specialize in only one or a few types of resumes. If you're searching for a resume writing service in San Diego that will help you with all your needs, you will just end up having to give up. You will just end up spending a lot of time trying to locate one. You will not be able to get the right person for the job.In addition, it can be a very stressful task because most people don't even know where to start with career development. They just want to know what they need to do to develop a good resume. This can be quite a daunting task for people who aren't accustomed to thinking about their future.Fortunately, there are many ways that you can hire a resume writing service in San Diego. For example, you can contact the Chamber of Commerce or you can use online services. There are other services you can try out as well.But whatever you do, make sure to read the company's credentials very carefully. You should also see if the service is certified by the state. If not, then you should steer clear of hiring them.Another thing that you should do is to ask them for a specific need. If the company cannot really offer this to you, you can always look into other options for getting this done. So make sure to clarify your needs first.One last thing that you should take note of is to make sure that the resume writing service that you hire is certified and trained. Otherwise, you can be making yourself vulnerable by exposing yourself to potential threats to your identity. It is better to be safe than sorry.A resume writing service San Diego can certainly help you a lot. All you have to do is ask them to write your resume.

How to Run a Resume Writing Service on Campus?

How to Run a Resume Writing Service on Campus?If you're interested in how to run a resume writing service on campus, it is possible to have a professional working for you. Using the Internet can be an effective way to find and take advantage of opportunities that are available to college students. This article takes a look at some of the things you will need to consider when deciding to offer your services on campus.Education - There are several schools that offer a diploma or degree program. Be sure to get the education you need before offering this service. When the school runs out of space to hold more students, many students fill up their catalogs with years of schooling they never received. Do not become a slave to the system and expect students to come to you because of a lack of space.Work Experience - Try to acquire at least five years of work experience in the computer field. Also include computer-related skills such as programming, scripting, data entry, and the like. If yo u are going to be an administrative assistant, try to maintain a good grade-point average. Show your skills will help you with different aspects of the job.Skills - Just like employers are looking for people who have what it takes to work at their particular company, they are also looking for people who can handle their needs. Learn about the kinds of jobs people seek and can find from the Internet. Take a look at the types of careers that are available and see which skills and qualifications they require.Character Traits - You will want to show your personality and be prepared to talk about your experiences, talents, and abilities. Make a few positive comments about yourself when the opportunity arises. Most people who have a passion for something are often more successful than those who do not.Personalities - Write a personal letter and then send it to the employer. Always include your contact information and make sure to describe your work environment. Include some information ab out your successes and accomplishments to the employer know you can do a job.Training - The more time you spend doing work, the more knowledge you'll accumulate. Give the employer a copy of your training curriculum so they know you have a good record. If you are currently receiving training, add it to your curriculum.Interviews - Prepare ahead of time to be prepared. Find a day when the candidate does not know where you are and to show up. This will help you gauge how well you know them.

Beat the Odds - Job Search Strategies by the Numbers - Sterling Career Concepts

Beat the Odds - Job Search Strategies by the Numbers Beat the Odds Job Search Strategies by the Numbers Job searching is not an easy project in today’s employment market. There are no shortcuts to persistent hard work, networking, and follow up.   Part of it is definitely a numbers game. Submitting to, say, 10 online postings may leave you with a sense of satisfaction, but it’s a mere drop in the bucket. Gone is the job market from 10 years ago where you could apply online and have decent odds of getting a call back.   Generally speaking, responding to only online postings in the job market will not generate the results you want. The number of available applicants and the number of people applying online these days are just too high. Employers today are receiving many resumes for any one position. One effective way of getting yourself into that call pile is through networking and following up, and going the extra mile that many other applicants wont. A few suggestions backed up by HR professionals: Differentiate yourself by connecting with people. Pick up the phone (or email) to follow up on submissions, or walking in or hand delivering a resume in to a company rather than emailing or mailing it. “If you are trying to get a job at a specific company, often the best thing to do is to avoid HR entirely. Find someone at the company you know, or go straight to the hiring manager.” Shawna Moerke, an HR administrator in Alabama Your resume should be fine-tuned so that it conveys your strengths and experience most appropriate to your target job position. “One size fits all” does not apply to resumes today. “Resumes don’t need color to stand out. When I see a little color, I smirk. When I see a lot of color, I cringe. We will judge you based on your email address, especially if it is something inappropriate.” Rich DeMatteo Resumes posted for online submissions must be effectively searchable based on the keywords. This is something that a professional resume writer can assist with or you can use www.preptel.com, a free online tool for job seekers. If you are finding yourself submitting primarily online for positions, its important that your resume contain the keywords that are in that companys job posting to give yourself the best odds possible of getting into the review or call pile. “Most of us use applicant-tracking systems that scan resumes for keywords. The secret to getting your resume through the system is to pull keywords directly from the job description and put them on. The more matches you have, the more likely your resume will get picked and actually seen by a real person.” Chris Ferdinandi, HR professional, Boston area. Hiring opportunities can arise at any time. If you have had a chance to speak with a hiring manager of a target company that is not presently hiring, drop the hiring manager a thank you note or follow up letter as a way to keep your name top of mind and place his or her name on a call cycle to follow up in a few months. “Checking in once or twice if fine. But if you call and call, you’re not going to get the job, because you’re annoying.” HR manager at a medical equipment sales firm. Take it from me and the HR experts, it’s not just a roll of the dice to get a job these days. Job search strategies are key. One last important note from an HR director in a health care facility: “When it comes to getting a job, who you know really does matter. No matter how nice your resume is or how great your experience may be, it’s all about connections.” Please note resources for HR experts quoted in this blog: Yahoo article: 13 Things HR Wont Tell You and Readers Digest Work Career article: What HR People Wont Tell You About the Job Interview. Connect with a resume writer and career strategist who can help you “win the odds” in your job search. Call or email today!

Dont let life get in the way of your career change - Hallie Crawford

Don’t let life get in the way of your career change We have prospective clients contact us all the time who have thought about making a career change for years and life just got in the way. It’s understandable, and I often joke that I feel like the dentist. People wait to contact the dentist until they need a root canal, as opposed to a cleaning. Things will happen in our lives, some more dramatic than others. Sometimes making a career change is just not a good idea. If you have kids, a mortgage to pay and other obligations, you absolutely need to be cautious about making a transition. On the other hand, you dont want to let life get in the way forever, or allow excuses to prevent you from working on finding a career you enjoy. A career coaching  client of one of our associate coaches,  Stacy Smyk-Santiago, sent this to us recently and it reminded me of the need to push yourself out of your comfort zone to achieve your goals and not let the noise of life get in the way… Life has a way of crowding out what can be best for you or what you are meant to do if you let it. My biggest reasons for hiring a coach were to assess my strengths and try to take the noise out of my life in order to achieve my goals. I felt I had a lot of ideas and no clear way of getting to any of them. I was unfulfilled and overwhelmed with ‘risk’ of trying something new. Ask yourself, what are the top 3 things that prevent you from finding a career that you enjoy? Write them down so you can see them in black and white, then analyze each one. Which one is just a fear you can overcome? Which one is a practical reality you need to take into consideration but can work around? And which one is a distraction you need to minimize in order to move forward? Remember, to say yes to a career you love, you usually need to say no to something else. Say no in order to say yes, and take a stand for enjoying your work! Career Coach P.S. Get one of the most information-rich career newsletters on the web delivered straight to your email inbox! Check out our  Free Newsletter  to help you along your career journey today!