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Handling Workplace Conflicts
No matter where you work, you will end up dealing with some workplace conflicts. It’s just a fact of life that you will disagree with other people, and sometimes these disagreements will occur at work. While conflict isn’t fun to deal with, it’s important that you don’t ignore it. Instead, you should deal with it in a healthy way. Workplace conflicts can come from a number of places: favoritism, opposing opinions, compensation problems, or just someone having a bad day. But many of these problems stem from two main areas: poor communication...
read moreThree Tips for Effective Communication
During my time scrolling through job boards and looking at hundreds of job ads, I noticed a common trend between them all. Every job called for communication skills, either written or oral. Every job, from the highest paying CEO positions to the very bottom entry level positions, requires communication skills. This shouldn’t be surprising: we live in a world that has become increasingly connected via the internet. With people now communicating over text, email, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and a whole list of other communication apps, it’s...
read moreThe Importance of Communicating Well
Communication. It’s a word that everyone agrees is important, yet many people have difficulty accomplishing it well. There are a lot of measures to define communication effectiveness. The one that I use is to ask myself 6 questions about my communication to ensure that I am communicating well individually and organizationally to build trust, and also ensure that I am accomplishing what I say I will accomplish. Why? When I think through the purpose of a message/conversation, I ask myself what I am trying to accomplish. I think we’ve all seen...
read moreThe Importance of a Summary Section
You might be surprised to hear that many recruiters, business owners, and hiring managers do take the time to read an applicant’s summary section. Still others choose not to go on and read the rest of the document if a summary section is not included or poorly written. Yet despite this, many job seekers choose to eschew a summary section, or put it in as a sub-par afterthought. This is a bad decision. The summary section is often the first thing a hiring manager will read about you, and if it’s written poorly, it could be the last. Most...
read moreCreating a Killer LinkedIn Headline
Is your LinkedIn headline less than it could be? The LinkedIn headline is a surprisingly important part of the networking site. It’s one of the key pieces of information used in the search algorithm, and it is the first information someone will get upon doing a search. Yet many people leave the LinkedIn headline as-is with the basic LinkedIn formatting: your current position AT your current company. This is a perfectly fine starting point, but to have a really good LinkedIn headline, you must change it up. Your headline is a snapshot of who...
read moreTo Put or Not To Put: Resume Writing
When I wrote my first professional resume, my instinct was to include everything I’d ever done on it. This not only resulted in a poorly written resume, but it never landed me any interviews because my accomplishments weren’t relevant to the position, or didn’t include the right keywords. I thought a successful resume included everything, rather than being targeted The Hamlet reference in this article’s title (and photo) encompasses the question I learned to ask myself whenever I wrote a resume. To put or not to put, that is the...
read moreChronological Versus Functional Resumes
Resume writing. Whether you love it or you hate, it’s something you’ll probably have to deal with at some point in your life. Many people write resumes with the understanding that it’s the resume that gets them the job. This is a misconception; resumes don’t get you the job, but they can ensure you don’t get the job if you submit a bad one. A resume’s purpose is, instead, to entice hiring managers to interview you. The interview is, ultimately, what will get you the job. Having said that, a well-written and formatted resume is paramount in a...
read moreThe Value of a Summer Job
It’s the summer of 2009, and I’m looking to land a job. I paint the town with my resume, and even check back with each business a week later. To my distress, however, no jobs become available for a teenager with no prior work experience except doing chores for my parents. Luckily for me, one of my parents’ friends hears that I like clouds (this is a true fact; I think that clouds are quite beautiful). Did I want to work for a meteorology lab? They were looking for new data processors. It was going to be boring work—running programs, and then...
read moreSummer Jobs: Resource Round-Up
Summer jobs are an all-important rite of passage for many young adults. Though the prospect of flipping burgers or bagging groceries might not seem glamorous, there is a high correlation between teen employment and better job prospects later on in life. So, if you’re looking to find some seasonal employment this summer, here are four resources to jump-start your job search: Local job fairs. Many cities and states offer regular, local job fairs for job seekers. You can do an internet search for “Your location” and “job fairs” to see what may...
read moreCareer Research: Online and Off
It is difficult to know what to expect going into a new field. Every industry has its own standards, practices, terminology, and work expectations. When you decide to try a new career path, it can be difficult to orient your skills to seem attractive in that industry, let alone actually know what you’ll be getting yourself into. However, we at Career Solutions Group are big fans of career research, and there are a few different ways to do it. Career research means proactively seeking out information about your field of interest and using it...
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