by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Oct 5, 2011 | Career Skills
Many professionals start strong but struggle to define themselves when they arrive at the “middle” of their career tracks. Early career moves may have pointed them toward other paths than they imagined, or obstacles may keep them from where they would like to go. This could mean taking on new responsibilities, supervising and mentoring young professionals, pursuing further education, or taking different approaches to your career altogether.
So what can you do when you arrive at the midpoint of your career, to successfully manage career transitions?
We’ll talk about mid-career transitions with Caroline Ceniza-Levine, career expert, writer and speaker, co-founder of SixFigureStart. Caroline has 16 years of experience in professional services as a management consultant and executive and corporate recruiter. She has recruited for leading companies in media, financial services, management consulting, pharmaceuticals and technology. A career columnist for CNBC.com,Vault.com, Wetfeet.com, and Forbes.com, as well as an adjunct assistant professor of Professional Development at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Caroline is the co-author of “Six Steps To Job Search Success” and of the best-selling “How the Fierce Handle Fear: Secrets to Succeeding in Challenging Times” Her career advice and job market insights have been quoted on CBS, BusinessWeek, CNN Money, NBC News.com, Newsweek.
Please join us at 11 am ET Friday!
SixFigureStart offers career coaching by former recruiters. Their coaches have hired thousands of people and know firsthand what employers really want. Founded by two professionals with over 40 years of combined HR experience. More information can be found at the links below.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Sep 8, 2011 | Career Skills, Higher Education, Workplace
Rajashi Ghosh (Photo provided.)
Incivility in the workplace can take many forms, from verbal abuse and harassment, to manipulation to acts of violence. 1.4 million employees experience it each year.
It has tremendous costs, as well. According to Dr. Rajashi Ghosh, an Assistant Professor of Human Resource Development for the School of Education at Drexel University, incivility costs the U.S. economy $23.8 billion each year. And academic environments are not immune.
On this week’s podcast, I will air an interview with Dr. Ghosh , who was the author of a recent article on the “incivility spiral” in mentoring relationships, which was published in a special issue of Advances in Developing Human Resources, which she also co-edited. In this article, Ghosh examined how different acts of incivility between mentors and mentees can devolve into negative relationships.
With mentoring programs being one of the popular ways that we seek to develop up-and-coming professionals, Ghosh recommends that institutions (and their Human Resource Officers) provide structured approaches, including codes of conduct for mentors and mentees, better orientations for both sides of the relationship about roles, boundaries, and conduct, formal processes for reporting inappropriate behavior, and better follow-up from HR and management.
Drexel will host a Human Resource Development Symposium September 17, “HRD’s Role in Addressing Workplace Incivility and Violence. Online registration is now closed, but if you are interested in attending e-mail Dr. Ghosh at rg429@drexel.edu expressing your interest in being on the waitlist.
We’ll also talk about my upcoming webinar on Creating a Killer Résumé on BigMarker, a new free webinar service, Hiring for Hope events, and I’ll take your comments and questions on dealing with incivility in the workplace.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Aug 22, 2011 | Higher Education, hiring, Job Search, Student Affairs
In higher education, as in any industry, credentials and certifications are sought after by professionals hoping to get an advantage over their competition. In an interesting post that entered my tweet stream on Friday, Kenny Silva explored the weight we often place on credentials in the hiring process, in contrast to potential. This is especially pertinent at this time of year, when the academic year is beginning, and the hiring season slows to a crawl.
Back when I was working at Penn State, I often found myself in the awkward position of filling a vacancy or two late in the summer. In part, this was due to the area being mostly populated by upper-class students and returning staff. The priority spots in our large residence hall system were to make sure that the first-year areas were adequately staffed first. When approximately half of your 14,000 students are first-year students, and about 4500 of those live in one area, you must have priorities.
Working with first-year students is, in general, more exciting to many staff, because, well…they need you in a different way. It’s more validating. Upperclassmen don’t get in nearly as much trouble, and mostly, they want to be left alone to do their own thing. So there were several occasions when someone left or was transferred to a new area or got promoted when we had to fill a vacancy post-haste and pronto, and many of the more highly credentialed new hires had already been placed. These are the times when it is especially important to look for potential.
In my time as Assistant Director, I cared more about potential than credentials, and honestly, I still do, because, for the most part, my least credentialed staff were easiest to work with, related better to students, and were more motivated to prove themselves. I always appreciated that perspective, because I have always had to prove myself.
I was the last male resident assistant hired at Clemson during my junior year, and they put me on the top floor of a building where no one ever went unless they had a reason to be there. I went in knowing they expected me to fail and that I had a lot to prove. I made the most of it and went on to win programming awards and have a generally good reputation on campus. Eventually, I made Student Affairs my life’s work. Along the way, I met different mentors and colleagues who kept giving me chances. Like a “diamond in the rough,” polishing up my portfolio and earning credentials took some time.
When I decided to leave the university setting, I had to sort through the value of becoming credentialed as a certified coach, and recently, as a professional résumé writer. I worked with college students for 15 years, had a master’s degree already, and had been coaching young professionals and colleagues on their job search materials and strategy the whole time. I didn’t really think I needed a couple more pieces of paper to prove I could do this, but I got them anyway. I did so because that is the way our field works for some people, and I felt that the credentialing would remove some potential obstacles from my path.
Oddly enough, I can’t remember a single time I’ve been practicing when a client even asked about my credentials. Instead, they ask, “How can you help me?” and “What benefits will I see from working with you?” And they weigh these against other options, many of which are free or available at a lower cost. I end up working with many of people who inquire, and when I don’t, I know that I haven’t distinguished myself in the right way, or shown the value of the relationship. When I do get a new client, it’s because they believe I can help them, and because we connected as people who potentially could work well together.
As Silva points out:
“Our ability to succeed in any endeavor, whether it’s a business or non-profit, is dictated by potential, not credential. It is only potential energy that can be tapped into in order for us to push forward. If you don’t hire the right people to bring that potential energy into your business, you will not move forward.”
I’ve always told my student leaders aspiring to go straight into student affairs that the time period we are currently in, from mid-August to the end of September, is a great time to look for a job, if you work hard to show your potential. Time and again, this worked for me as a supervisor, and I got some great staff members out of the deal.
If you still have staff vacancies, do yourself and the universe a favor: take a chance on a candidate you have a good gut feeling about. Look for the “diamonds in the rough” and help them learn to shine!
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jul 25, 2011 | Job Search, job search tools, Social Networking
Greg Meyer (Photo provided.)
With the growing popularity of social media, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to monitor your connections and stay up-to-date with conversations. This need has ushered in a wave of tools that take Client Relationship Management to the next level, by integrating information from social media into the mix.
Gist is one such tool that can help you find out more about the people you know, and develop a more intelligent view of your network. Bought by Research In Motion in February, Gist seems to be a key part of the Blackberry maker’s efforts to include cloud-based services into new phones and tablets.
Greg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In that role, he interacts with users, takes feedback and gets suggestions for new features, as well as acting as a social media ambassador for the company.
I interviewed him by phone May 25th, and he shared his thoughts on how tools like Gist can be used to find information about people, companies and industries in your network, to monitor your online presence, and to develop a better understanding of how you may be viewed by others, based on the types of information you are making available about yourself through social media.
Part 1: An Introduction to Greg Meyer, Social CRM, and Gist
So can you tell me more about yourself? Who is Greg Meyer, and how did your education, skills and experience lead to where, you are now?
Sure. Absolutely. At this point, I think I am a little bit over-educated. I started out doing undergrad in Fine Arts and History, I thought I wanted to be a a history professor. And then I went to graduate school and found out that the process to become a professor was a lot different from what I wanted to do, which was to read books and organize information.
Then I found myself in the computer field, and then went into a number of small companies. I was with a company called Allaire, which is now part of Adobe, and I was part of some big companies as well.And then I went to graduate school I worked for T-Mobile and Expedia, and as part of that, I discovered that I wasn’t as good at the technology part of the business as I was about seeing systems, and connecting people and information, so I went back to school again and got an MBA from the University of Washington. I actually used those skills to make my current job, because my job is a combination of three things. I’m a customer experience manager, and I do high-touch customer support. I also do some product planning and recommendations for products from the user base, and then I also do some technology work as well as some traditional marketing evangelism and social media.
Could you give the uninitiated a kind of “thumbnail sketch” overview of what Gist is an how it works?
Sure. Gist is a web service that helps you to take all your contacts and keep them in one place. Whether your contacts live in a web email like Gmail or whether you use Microsoft Outlook or whether you’d like to take those contacts and incorporate the contacts on your phone, say your iPhone, Android or Blackberry device, or whether you are interested in connecting to the people you know on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, what Gist does is take into account all of those contacts and we go ahead and look out over 50,000 news sources and 20 million blogs and build the complete social business profile for that person. What that means is that you would see news about them or their company, and you’d also see a history of your interactions, and we do that, and make it all available to you on all those different platforms.
So this is really taking that whole traditional idea of Client Relationship Management or Contact Relationship Management really to that next level, because of the way you aggregate that information from the public stream along with all your back and forth about a client. This may be a really stupid question, but what do you think the value is of that additional functionality to the CRM process?
Well, Sean, for starters, I don’t think there are any stupid questions. But I think that the value in understanding what makes somebody tick and how you can have a better interaction with that person is really, really key. Because if you find out on Twitter that somebody is talking about going on their vacation, that might be a signal that you might not want to talk to that person that day, because maybe they’re out of town, or if you find they are interested in a particular personal interest, like maybe they like baseball, maybe the next time you see them, you’ll want to invite them the a game, and you can use that information to make that interaction better. Now that doesn’t mean that you should use all the information you learn in every interaction, it means that it gives you better tools to make that interaction better.
Next: Knowing Your Network
Article first published as An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer: Part 1: The Power of Social CRM on Technorati.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jul 20, 2011 | cover letters, Job Search, job search tools, Resumes and CVs
Cover letters come in all different styles, and it’s not always easy to figure out the best way to outline your arguments for a job and keep the reader interested. So it’s not surprising to know that many job-seekers obsess over their cover letters. Others spend more time on the résumé, and barely any time at all on the cover letter. Others skip writing cover letters altogether.
The advice you’ll get on cover letters is likely to be mixed, too. You’re likely to hear any or all of the following:
- Write a new letter for each position and try to show your potential match for a company’s current needs;
- Write a generic letter for each type of position, but worry more about the résumé; and
- Forget about the cover letter–nobody reads them anyway, so you’ll be wasting your time.
Given the different approaches candidates take, and the dubious assertion that you always need to write a cover letter, should you bother to write one? And if you do, what approach should you take?
It’s true that some recruiters are avid cover letter readers, others barely skim them, and some skip them until reviewing the resume. But none of these truths justify leaving a cover letter out of your application materials.
Here are 6 reasons why you should write one anyway:
- You are not a mind reader.* As such, you can’t be sure about the preferences of the person(s) screening the applications. (*apologies if you are indeed, a mind reader!)
- If a committee is handling the screening, people on the committee might have different thoughts on the value of a cover letter. Better to cover your bases.
- The recruiter(s) are not mind readers, either. Cover letters provide context about your education, experience, motivation, and possible fit. Your résumé should include plenty of information about education and experience, but the cover letter lets you tie all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Essentially, the job of the cover letter is to make the screener’s job easier, by helping the reader see how your motivation rounds out your education and experience, and molds you into someone who will fit their needs.
- Not sending in a cover letter will make you look lazy. Basically, it sends the message that the recruiter needs to do the work to figure out why you are interested in a job, and then to sell you on the value of working for their organization. And the recruiter probably has enough work to deal with already.
- The recruiter may interpret the lack of a cover letter as an indication that you are desperately applying for anything and everything, and that you haven’t really taken the time to determine why you are interested in the specific position.
- Some recruiters will consider your application incomplete and remove you from further consideration.
What do you think about cover letters? Do you write them for any of the jobs you apply for? Why or why not? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
