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Leadership. The key to a great workplace.
I spend my work days helping clients make career progress. In this role, I hear horror stories about subpar working environments. After a while, a person might start to wonder if there are any pleasant places to work. But I gained a new perspective as part of a market research project I’m completing. After interviewing three leaders of local organizations, all with stellar reputations as employers, I’m feeling more optimistic. First was my conversation with City Manager Darin Atteberry, who heads more than 2,000 employees and is responsible for the overall operations of our fair...
read moreA Lean Approach To Career Development
A trusted advisor suggested that I read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries to improve my company. Yet just a few chapters into the book, I realized that not only could it advance my business, it has the potential to improve the career results of my clients, as well. The heart of lean startup is about developing a successful product or service by being as efficient as possible, relying heavily on input from future buyers to direct how it should be created. Say you have an idea for building a better mousetrap. Traditional approaches would have you talking with an engineer to create a prototype. In...
read moreSwitching careers – steps to achieving your goal.
Last week I chatted with a security officer while waiting for a meeting to begin. She was happy to tell me how she’d worked for the organization for seven years, but was now ready to switch careers and work for a different company. “I just want a change,” she explained. As a career counselor, I couldn’t resist asking which field she was targeting next. “Something in healthcare, maybe as an intake specialist,” she told me. “But I really don’t have background doing that. I just need someone to give me a chance to show them what I could do.” I’ve heard the, “If only someone would only give me a...
read moreWhat to say when you don’t have experience!
Recently, as I helped a client prep for an upcoming job interview, I asked him to tell me about his experience with one of the job’s requirements: the ability to use the software program Crystal Reports, a tool to create high-end documents. His answer, “I don’t have experience with that.” Until then, he’d provided impressive responses to every question, and this answer landed like a lead balloon. I feared it might kick him out of contention, so together we came up with this action plan which could be executed before the interview: Do his best to get some hands-on experience with the...
read moreFinding your focus – the key to a successful resume
This past week I led a resume workshop for a group of reading tutors with AmeriCorps. They’re wrapping up their year with the organization, and are prepping for next career steps. Writing a resume can feel like an intimidating experience: what to include? How long should it be? Which format is best? But I let them all in on a secret for simplifying the task: before you begin, have a career focus in mind. One of my favorite analogies related to this is that we all have a career-closet full of experiences: where we’ve worked, education we’ve received, and successes we’ve accomplished. But a...
read moreAn insider‘s perspective – career research
For years I’ve touted the virtues of career research interviews as a way to define great fit career paths. These are conversations with people who have already succeeded in areas that interested career seeker, allowing them to gain an insider‘s perspective on what another’s work life is really like. They are, by far, the most effective route I’ve come across to choosing a career niche. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my business advisor suggested that I have some similar conversations with individuals who have succeeded as entrepreneurs, as a way to shorten the learning curve...
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