Every year, I start the holiday season with good intentions…making lists, coming up with the perfect ideas for each person on my list, and taking some time to get a good head-start on things.
And like many, I fall short.
I began writing this post the night of the 19th. At that point, I hadn’t begun my Christmas shopping. Yesterday morning I was going to go out, but all the sudden it was nearly 2 p.m. before I was finally heading out the door to do some shopping. I still have a few more things on my list, but they will have to wait. Today is my daughter Susie’s 2nd birthday and we are eating cake, opening presents, and (undoubtedly, because we do this every day) watching Team UmiZoomi about 20 times.
My wife, Sarah, is one of those people who buys ahead and finds all the great deals. So she and I periodically talk about ideas and she buys many of our children’s gifts early. And my siblings, parents and the other adults in our family have moved on to doing a “country gift exchange,” so I don’t really have all that many people to shop for, but the ones I do are pretty important to me.
If you are a last-minute gifter, and you have a higher ed job seeker on your list (or you are one, and hope to give yourself the gift of a new job in the coming year), here are a few ideas for last-minute gifts:
Buy the person a website to set up a job-seeker blog. If possible, register a .com address and use the person’s name, so they can stake out a “home base” for their personal brand. You can find plenty of good web hosts out there, and it’s really easy on most to set up a blog using WordPress. I use FatCow, which has a lot of nice features and add-ons, and a really affordable annual rate, with unlimited storage and bandwidth, as well as e-mail addresses for your domain. They are running a $4.67/month hosting special right now, which you can get by clicking on the link above or on the ad in the right-hand column. The deal includes hosting for one year, one domain, and a lot of easy-to-use tools. For example, easy set-up of a WordPress.Org blog like this one, photo galleries, forums, Moodle and Joomla sites, even an online store. Users also get ad credits on Google AdWords, Facebook, and Yahoo, which your job-seeker could use to place personal “Job Wanted” Ads.
If you self-host a WordPress blog, you can install a standard template or get a little fancy. My blogs run the Thesis theme framework, which has some built-in features that help with Search Engine Optimization. You need to have some confidence with technology to get it installed and set up, but once you do, the dashboard is pretty easy to master, and you will enjoy better search results without having to get a certificate in internet marketing.
Buy your job-seeker some assistance with writing and editing their job search materials (or if your job-seeker is going back to school, with admissions essays). I offer these services as part of my 1-on-1 coaching packages, and would be glad to speak to you or your job-seeker about what I can offer, but I also recently became an affiliate for ResumeEdge and EssayEdge, the leading resume and essay editing and assistance services on the internet, so please check them out as well.
Screen grab of Module 3 of the Placement Partner Program Moodle Course
Give the gift of coaching. I am opening a job seeker group for spring. I am offering first spots to people on my mailing lists, so sign up here to get information. There will be a limited number of spots for this program, because I want to offer members a quality experience and to give them personal attention, so list members get first crack. If there are available spaces in January, they will be opened up to the general public.There will be three levels of participation:
Value Edition: Online group with self-paced activities and forum discussions ($180 for 6 months access. You must register for this option to be offered the opportunity to upgrade to either of the other levels. The first five modules of this 26-module program are now live and available for those who are ready to get started with their exploration and planning over the holiday break. The rest will go live in sometime in early January.)
Standard Edition: Online group, plus free access to webinars and 2 1-on-1 meetings for resume assistance and mock interview practice, and e-mail coaching through the duration of your enrollment($300-with the option of paying for the upgrade all at once or in 6 monthly installments.)
Personalized Edition: All of the above, plus 6 additional coaching sessions. ($500-with the option to pay for the upgrade all at once or in 6 monthly installments.)
If you are looking just for 1-on-1 coaching, my rates for one-on-one coaching are reasonable, and depend on the length of the session. If you’re interested in 1-on-1 coaching, visit my public calendar to schedule a free initial consultation. There is no obligation to purchase anything. We’ll talk about what you are looking for in a coach. I will tell you a bit about my coaching methods and business practices, and we’ll discuss the going rates for the services that interest you. If you like, I will even give you a couple of other resources to check out. Every job seeker has different needs and the “fit” between coach and client is just as important as “fit” is to landing the right job. So the consultation will be an opportunity for both of us to assess whether we might be able to work together on your job search.
Or you can buy a gift certificate (that can be used at my webstore toward any of the programs above, or 1-on-1 coaching, or other products and services to be offered soon, including e-books, webinars, and job-seeker tools and resources.
Whatever you end up getting your friends, your loved ones, or yourself, I wish you the best this holiday season, and good luck in your job search!
I am glad to be presenting on Monday at 1 pm CST/2 pm EST at the BreakDrink free fall conference. The topic will be “Mastering the Job Interview,” and it’s about getting in the right mindset to prepare for your job interview. An extended version of this presentation (and others like it) will be part of the Placement Partner hybrid coaching program that I am opening up shortly and that will continue through May.
This program is a “hybrid” mini-course for higher ed job seekers. Split into 25 sections, this program begins in December and goes through May, the traditional season for academic hiring for the upcoming academic year. There are self-paced activities that you can go through on your own on a Moodle group, and a forum where you can share your questions and ideas with other higher ed job seekers. You can add on webinars, resume coaching and assistance, e-mail coaching and one-on-one coaching.
There are three levels of participation:
Value edition-Moodle activities, plus occasional free online chats and call-in group coaching.
Standard edition-Everything in the Value edition, plus free admission to some webinars on job search and career-planning topics. (Value edition members can pay for those webinars they would like to attend.) Plus 2 sessions of online resume coaching and assistance, and e-mail coaching. ($300 for 180 days of access)
Personalized edition: Includes everything in the standard package, plus 6 sessions of 1-on-1 coaching between enrollment and the end of May. ($500 for 180 days of access.)
The Moodle group is shared between all levels of seekers, and the “Value Edition” is offered at the base price ($180). Users get access to the site for 180 days ($1/day).
To upgrade to the standard edition or personalized edition, participants will be given the options to add these on after registering for the Value edition. Just go to the “Overview of the Placement Partner Coaching Program” and subscribe using the PayPal buttons for the other editions. For upgrades, you have the choice to pay the entire amount, or to spread it out over 6 installments.
Tickets to the webinars will be issued as they are scheduled to participants in the Standard and Personalized editions, and members of the value edition will be offered the opportunity to purchase tickets to the webinars before sales are opened to the general public.
Please contact me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com if you have any questions.
Last Friday, I was glad to have my friend Mark Dykeman from ThoughtWrestling.Com on my BlogTalkRadio show. We talked about how job seekers could use mind-maps to plan their job search or to come up with a strategic plan for their career.
Mark recently released an e-book called Unstuck, Focused and Organized. I bought it, and have found it is really helping me focus my thoughts on some new programs I’d like to offer, set (or revise) some of my priorities, and basically get my act together. He’s running a great promotion this week on the e-book, the e-book plus interviews with Chuck Frey, Michael Martine, Chris Brogan and Dave Navarro, and all of the above plus one hour of consulting with Mark. Follow the affiliate link above to find out more.
Mark also made a generous offer to give away a copy of his e-book to support an idea I thought would be cool. So this week I am challenging readers to create their own job search or career-planning mind-map and share it. Embed it in your blog or send me a link via e-mail to sean@higheredcareercoach.com. It can be about any part of your search and how you hope to approach it, Just start with a central idea and then explode it, deconstruct it and see where it takes you.
I did a basic mind-map on Prezi that illustrates the Life Purpose Process and its different parts, to give readers and idea of the basic parts of the coaching model I use with clients. The model was put together by Fern Gorin and taught through her Life Purpose Institute.
The hardest part of doing anything is just getting started.
If you are considering a job search this year, you probably all too aware that the hardest part of doing anything is just getting started. This can be especially true for projects that involve putting yourself out there in the public sphere and being judged.
As an academic job seeker, your job search may follow the academic cycle, with a majority of positions being posted by March, followed by interview periods from April to August, and start dates in August or September. So it’s important to a avoid stumbling out of the gate.
Mark Dykeman, creator of the Unstuck, Focused and Organized System
Mark Dykeman, my guest this morning at 11:00 a.m. on the Higher Ed Career Coach Show on BlogTalkRadio, has a good method for getting your plan together: mind-mapping. Mark is the creator of the blogs Thoughtwrestling and the Broadcasting Brain. I met him through Third Tribe (affiliate link), a membership site put together by Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone and dedicated to helping small business owners authentically market their products and businesses.
Mark is a well-known and well-connected social media entrepreneur, and a really nice guy. He’s known for helping people get unstuck, focused and organized, and he’s a strong proponent of the idea of mind-mapping to clear out your mental clutter, unlock your creativity, and move forward with new ideas and plans.
I recently bought his new product, Unstuck, Focused and Organized, because I’ve been looking for ways to get more organized and stay on task. I’ve been getting much busier lately, and needed some fresh perspectives on how to organize my ideas and thoughts. I liked it so much that I joined his affiliate program, and invited him to talk about how job seekers can use mind-mapping to move forward in their search.
In today’s BlogTalkRadio show, Mark and I will talk about using Mind-Mapping to et unstuck in your job search and plan your way forward. I was able to ask Mark a few initial questions ahead of time about his program and ways that job seekers could use his approach.
Unstuck, Focused and Organized: Mind-Mapping for Higher Ed Job Seekers
(Questions are in bold, Mark’s answers are inset and italicized.)
How could someone use mind-mapping to plan their career?
Mind mapping could be used in a number of different ways. For example, if there are different stages of your intended career and different milestones, you could use the mind map to examine each stage. Here’s a simple example: have major categories or branches of the mind map to correspond to different levels of corporate hierarchy:
consultant/team member
team leader
manager
director
vice-president
You could explore each role in detail, including key education requirements, work experience, networking, mentors, and so on. This would be a useful first step in coming up with a plan. You could also do something similar with the type of companies that you would want to work at as well, focusing on both functional experience and industry segment experience.
If you were planning a job search during the next year, how could mind-mapping help you focus your efforts?
There’s several different ways that you could plan your job search. You could conduct a SWOT analysis using a separate branch for each aspect. You could use a mind map to compare your skills and experience to different types of jobs about there: the mind map could help you find key skills to emphasize in your job search as well as important gaps or shortfalls to consider.
You could also use the mind map to explore all possible ways to network and search for the job, which is much better than firing resumes into the ether and hoping for the best.
What’s the best way to start?
The best way to start mind mapping, if you’ve never done it before, is to use a pencil and a huge piece of paper. Write your central or core idea that you want to explore in the center of the paper. Then start writing down every thought or idea that you can think of around the center of the paper. When you’ve gotten everything out that you can think of, take a few minutes and look at it. Look for connections between things. See if you can group similar things together into major categories. Draw lines between things that could be connected. Doodle and draw on it, if you feel like it, in ways that would be meaningful. Look for holes – things that are missing.
The reason for using a pencil? Because you’ll probably want to redraw the mind map after this first try!
We’ll discuss the features and benefits of Mark’s UFO program and different ways to use mind-mapping to plan your job search and your career in general. He’ll also announce a special promotion he’s running next week.
Please join us at 11 a.m. today (Friday, November 5) for the podcast, and call in with your questions and comments to (347) 989-0055 or via Skype click-to-talk.
RescueTime is a great tool to help you get a handle on how you spend your time. If you are interested, sign up for the free acount through my referral link and I’ll earn two weeks of free RescueTime. Sign up for a paid account, and you’ll help me extend my account by 30 days. This is also a great way for you to get to use this tool, since referrals earn you free time. I’m sure that many of you will be interested after watching my tutorial video.
Also, if you are entrepreneurial at heart but struggle with marketing yourself, learning how to run business, or you just want to be immersed in social media and have the opportunity to learn first-hand from some great business minds, check out Third Tribe. They have an affiliate program, too, so if you sign up through my link, I will earn a commission.I have found the advice I get there to be worth several times the membership cost, and I can safely say that if I have to trim back on expenses, this will be among the last to go. The community there is awesome, and it goes way beyond the founders (Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone).
I hope you found this tour of RescueTime interesting and that you’ll give it a spin. It’s really been helping me, and I think it could help you, too. My best wishes to you as you find ways to rescue time and find more life in your work/life balance.
There are some important periods of the academic year to pay attention to when you work in higher ed. Everyone acknowledges that the busiest times…welcome week, exam week, and closing for the summer… can eat up your time and energy. But it’s equally important to pay attention to the times which are slower-moving, because they sometimes represent “the calm before the storm”
When I worked in Residence Life, I always had a mid-semester slog starting around October. People were settling into routines, events were happening here and there, and my calendar would feel pretty set, with regular committee meetings, 1-on-1 meetings with supervisees, and loads and loads of busy work. It was always around this time, too, when we’d start to see roommate and neighbor conflicts pick up, alcohol poisonings increase, and psychological issues rear their ugly head.
This period between early October and Thanksgiving always felt to me like wading through molasses. When this feeling hits you (and it will, sometime between now and Thanksgiving, I guarantee it!), you may do one of two things…bury yourself in work so that you feel busy and productive, or avoid work like the plague, put off unpleasant tasks as long as you can, and just hope to ride it out until break. Neither of these methods should be mistaken for work/life balance.
Times like these call on you to stop ad pay attention to how you are balancing your priorities. If you don’t, it can be like a slow, smoldering burn, ready to flash into a fireball at any moment, and leave you ashen, grey, or even burnt to a cinder.
So do yourself a favor: Pay attention to how you are spending your time, and find some time for yourself. If you don’t insist on work/life balance, you won’t have any!
What do you do to make it through your mid-semester slog? Share your ideas, questions and thoughts in the comments below.
Sean Cook, Certified Life Purpose & Career Coach
Sean Cook is a certified Life Purpose and Career Coach based in Athens, GA. Before completing his certification from the Life Purpose Institute, he earned his M.Ed. in Counseling and Guidance Services from Clemson University, and spent over 15 years various student affairs roles in higher education. He specializes in working with college students, recent graduates, and higher ed professionals, and acts as publisher for HigherEdCareerCoach.Com and HigherEdLifeCoach.Com. You can listen to his periodic podcast, the Higher Ed Life and Careers Show, at 11 a.m. Eastern on Fridays on BlogTalkRadio.com. Look for his upcoming contribution to SelfGrowth.Com’s new book “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career” later this Fall.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
I am glad to be presenting on Monday at 1 pm CST/2 pm EST at the BreakDrink free fall conference. The topic will be “Mastering the Job Interview,” and it’s about getting in the right mindset to prepare for your job interview. An extended version of this presentation (and others like it) will be part of the Placement Partner hybrid coaching program that I am opening up shortly and that will continue through May.
