Have a Question? Call Now.

(706) 363-0539

Schedule An Intake Meeting
Deciding On Careers Outside Academia

Deciding On Careers Outside Academia

by | Oct 18, 2011 | Career Skills, Job Search, transferable skills

At some point, many educators find themselves looking at career options outside of academia. There are many reasons one might consider doing so…feeling stuck in a career rut, a change in interests, new opportunities that arise through networking, or perceptions of “greener grass” just beyond the academy walls.

But how should you go about deciding on a career outside of higher education? What do you need to consider in putting together a plan for making a successful transition?

In this week’s edition of the podcast, we’ll get perspectives from Dr. Laurence Shatkin, who made a successful transition to the  corporate world after several years as an adjunct.

In his current position as Senior Product Developer for JIST Publishing, Shatkin researches career topics and writes books, including “The Sequel: How to Change Your Career Without Starting Over.” You can find more information about Dr. Shatkin and his books at shatkin.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @LaurenceShatkin

The episode will air at 11 a.m. ET this Friday. The interview with Shatkin is being pre-recorded due to a scheduling conflict, but the rest of the show will be hosted live. Please call in with your questions and comments. The call in line is (347) 989-0055 or you can connect via Skype from the episode page, once the show is on the air, by clicking on the Skype “S” click-to-talk logo.

Check out The Sequel and other titles on Dr. Shatkin’s page on Amazon.Com (affiliate link).

Free Webinar: Creating a Killer Resume

Free Webinar: Creating a Killer Resume

by | Sep 20, 2011 | Job Search, Resumes and CVs

A good résumé can make all the difference in your job search. It either gets you in the door for an interview, or it fails to capture the screener’s attention and falls through the cracks.

I know firsthand that experience alone won’t carry you through the job search process. You have to place your qualifications in context and illustrate your unique skills if you are going to outline a successful argument.[

In a free webinar this Thursday at 6 p.m. ET on BigMarker.Com, I’ll outline some strategies for creating a résumé which flows well, is visually appealing, and has great content, to help you get the job you want.

BigMarker.Com is a new webinar service, and this will be the first event I am hosting there. My DimDim account recently expired, and that service was being  phased out after DimDim was acquired by SalesForce.Com. I’ve been looking at other possibilities for hosting my webinars and for using for client coaching meetings held online. I would love it if you could attend and give feedback about the user experience. Some features that you would expect from a regular paid webinar service aren’t yet available on BigMarker. I have also looked at GoToWebinar, WebEx, FuzeMeeting and FreeScreenSharing (a service by the same people as FreeConferenceCall.Com.)

I will be recording the webinar and if all goes well, will make it available afterward as part of an upcoming members area of my site. At the end of the webinar, I will be giving a sign-up link to attendees who would like to get more résumé resources via e-mail, and announcing a special on résumé coaching services for those who sign up through the special link.

Sign up now for the webinar, and tell your friends, too. It’s free, so you really have nothing to lose. I hope you’ll attend and that we’ll connect on the webinar!

An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer – Part 2: Knowing Your Network Using Social CRM

An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer – Part 2: Knowing Your Network Using Social CRM

by | Jul 27, 2011 | Job Search, job search tools, Social Networking

gistlogoGreg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 2 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talks about knowing more about your network, and figuring out what’s important, using Social CRM tools.

Obviously, my niche is career coaching, but I am also a small businessman, so I see the utility of Gist in both roles. How do you think Gist could be used by job seekers or small businesses to really gather information about their employers, partners or even their competition?

I think that, for a job seeker, it can really help you to see what is going on out in the marketplace, about either the individual you are dealing with in a hiring process, or to just get a better scope of what goes on in that business, how that brand communicates, and to be more knowledgeable, so you can start acting as if you work at that company already. If you can show them how you can contribute from day one, it is much more likely that they could easily imagine you in that job.

And as far as a small business owner, if you are keeping track of trends in an industry, and you want to tag all the relevant contacts you have in that industry, your competitors, suppliers and your customers, that Gist can definitely help you either to reach out or to them by amplifying them privately, or by amplifying them publicly by sending them out via Facebook and Twitter.

On the flip side of that, social media has done so much to deliver information to us quickly and affordably, but there are definitely days when I feel like I have so much information, it’s like I’m drinking from a fire hose. How do you think users can use Gist to keep from suffering from that information overload?

Well, I think the first thing they can do is go to Gist.Com and sign up for our e-mail digest. And that would allow them to get information about the people they care about once a day or once a week. We talk about sitting down for your morning coffee, that you might take 5 or 10 minutes every morning or maybe a couple of times a week, to go down a tag list or a list of all the people in your network, and try to find one or two or three that you’d like to reach out to personally. It can definitely help you do that.

I encourage my clients (both career clients and small business clients) to use social media for monitoring their presence and their reputation online. How do you see Gist or other Social CRM tools helping someone to do that?

Well, you know when people sign up for a new tool, they want to see “what does that tool know about me,” because I know most about what information is right about myself. So you can go in and actually the first contact that is built in Gist is your personal contact. You can find that at gist.com/people/me and you can go ahead and edit that contact if it is not quite right. It should mostly be right, but if it’s not quite right, you can edit that contact. You can learn more about how to edit the contacts of your friends, and understanding so far what’s out there, it’s really good at being able to scan the horizon and understand that there are mentions they are likely to see of you, and there are mentions they are not likely to see of you.

Next: Reputation Management and Social CRM

Article first published as An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer – Part 2: Knowing Your Network Using Social CRM on Technorati.

An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer: Part 1: The Power of Social CRM

An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer: Part 1: The Power of Social CRM

by | Jul 25, 2011 | Job Search, job search tools, Social Networking

gregm_beach

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.

Cover Letter Strategy: Get to the Point, Get Interviews

Cover Letter Strategy: Get to the Point, Get Interviews

by | Jul 21, 2011 | cover letters, Job Search

Is there a perfect format for writing a cover letter?

I was recently asked this by one of the members of my mailing list. She was wondering if a new approach to writing cover letters might help improve her chances.

First off, I would have to say that there are many different approaches to writing cover letters that might work, and it would be hard to nail down specific problem points without reading some recent letters. But, in general, my preference has always been direct and to-the-point, without a bunch of extraneous “flourish.”

As mentioned in an earlier post, what works for one recruiter might not work for another. Some recruiters love to read cover letters, others slog through them, and others don’t read them at all. I contend it’s best to write one anyway.

If you aren’t getting the responses you hope for, are you writing each toward a specific position or just toward a “type of position? Remember the cover letter has to outline the “What’s In It For Me” from the recruiter’s perspective, so you need to figure out what their needs are, and then write toward how you plan to fill it. It’s okay to outline your general arguments for each type of position, but you should always fill in specifics for each position.

While there is no perfect format, here’s one I like to use. 

Dear (Name):

Paragraph 1: I am writing to apply for the X position which I saw advertised at Y. This position is a strong match for my education, skills and experience.

Paragraph 2: Briefly summarize your education and experience. For example:

Since graduating from X program, I have… or Over the past Y years, I have…

Paragraph 3: Transition into some specific examples of your experience that match the needs of the position. This is a great place to mention accomplishments and awards.

Paragraph 4: Briefly state why you want the job, and show that you are motivated.

Paragraph 5: Ask for the interview, indicate how you may be contacted, put in any brief details about your plan to follow up with the recruiter about your candidacy, and thank the reader for reading.

Sincerely yours,

Name

Let’s go through the logic for each paragraph.

Paragraph 1: It’s simple and direct, and that shows respect for the reader’s time. It also ends with a bold premise: that the job is a strong match for your education, skills and abilities. The reader will want to know why you think that, and will read on to confirm or refute that assertion.

Paragraph 2: Gives your history in broad strokes, to pique the reader’s interest in learning more  (from the letter, and hopefully the résumé.) Again, be brief and encapsulate as much relevant information as you possibly can. If you aren’t sure what to say here, go back to your elevator speech, if you have one.

Paragraph 3: Gives a few specific examples that relate directly to the job you are applying for. This shows that you are not making a generic application, and that you have applicable skills and experience

Paragraph 4: Reinforces the idea that you are motivated toward the specific position. And motivation is a big part of the concept of “fit,” and that is the overriding concern of most hiring agents.

Paragraph 5:  Ties everything together by directly asking for an interview, clarifying how you can be reached, and laying out your plan for following up. (Which again shows you are serious about your application.

This format just lays out a simple structure for putting together an argument. You can write the letter in paragraph form, bullets, or a mixed format. Your unique education, skills, experiences and examples will be what keeps the recruiter reading. You can adjust this if you need to, but resist the temptation to go long with multiple examples or too many bullets. You don’t want your cover letter to read like a laundry list. It will get boring and repetitive and the reader may “lose steam” and move on.

Remember that the cover letter’s job is to make the recruiter’s job easier, by highlighting relevant information about your career and getting the person to read your résumé. Your résumé needs to keep this attention and leave the reader feeling that they want to know more about you, and that results in an interview. So don’t overdo the details on your cover letter. Describe the breadth and depth of your experience and give a few examples that are directly relevant to the position. Show that you are motivated, and ask for an interview. Than promise to follow up. Leave the rest for your actual interviews.