Internet Inspirations: Last Gasp for Winter

Winter’s last gasp!

Enjoy these interesting reads from around the internet as we wait for spring to evict winter from Maryland!

Here’s some great tips over at PT Money about checking out a potential employer’s approach to work/life balance. Even in this tight job market, it is still important to align jobs with your values.

We’ve written about how Craig’s List can be a great source for job listings, but as we mentioned, do your due dilligence. The Job Bait scam is described in this Wise Bread article. Use common sense and be careful about what personal information you share.

This article is part of a series on Women and Money over at Bargaineering.com and includes some good ways to keep your professional life moving forward even when you’re out of the traditional 9 to 5.

I loved, loved this article at the Jane Dough weighing in on the whole women and working debate that has been raging lately. The title alone is fantastic: “Why We Don’t Need Any More Female Billionaires Telling Us How To Have It All”. I really like the point Colette McIntyre makes that not all women have the same advantages as billionaire CEO’s and where are the men in this conversation?

And for something completely different…

I thoroughly enjoyed this guest post over at Mr. Money Mustache from David Cain entitled, “How To Walk Across A Parking Lot.” No, really. Read it and think about it.

Posted by: Heather C.

Internet Inspirations: Spring is Coming Edition

Get inspired to spring into March! Photo (c) Heather Comstock 2013.

It is the end of February. The groundhog predicted an early spring. The daffodils are up and the grackles are cackling in the trees of my neighborhood. As the weather turns warmer, here’s some inspiration to kickstart your March from around the internet!

Over on Jon Acuff’s blog, he’s got a great piece of the power of finding 30 minutes a day to move forward on fulfilling your dreams! John notes that “rescuing the first 30 minutes” is the hardest.

On the Harvard Business Review blog, Peter Bergman gives you “Nine Practices to Help You Say No”. When you say no, you create space to allow yourself to “Yes” to something more important.

While this advice may seem counter-intuitive when job searching, Learnvest has a great rundown on Signs You Shouldn’t Take That Job. Employment situations should be a good fit for both you and the employer for long-term success!

PEC Boardmember Cheryl Pullins has a great post on her blog about how to pry your ego out of the driver’s seat so you can move forward fulfilling your dreams. Plus, bonus Kool Moe Dee reference!

 

 

 

A Recruiter’s Perspective: Staying Ahead in 2013 with LinkedIn

This is a guest post from local recruiter Stuart TenHoor, who provides some valuable insight on how he uses LinkedIn to evaluate potential candidates with some tips on how you can harness LinkedIn for your Job Search!

Are you using online resources to maximum benefit for your job search? Learn more here.

Today’s everyday technological advances are head spinning, and that applies in the job finding and career building arena as well. Who would have looked for a job without a resume in past years? Today, the question is who would look for a job without being on LinkedIn? As a legal search consultant (recruiter/headhunter others might call me), when I look for talent to help my law firm or corporate clients, I do it in multiple ways. One way I always use is to check a candidate’s resume against LinkedIn. Essentially LinkedIn is making advances toward replacing the resume as the most important job finding and career building tool.

LinkedIn does three things for you. First, it establishes a certain aura of “being with it.” Some employers would see you as being behind the times or not taking yourself seriously if you lack a well written and informative summary of your career on line. Further, most entries have a photo with them. Ten years ago I frowned on candidates with photos on their resumes; today, the savvy entries all include a photo. If you don’t have one, probably someone you know has a digital camera or smart phone that can produce quality photos. You don’t have to look like a movie star to produce a confident looking photo.

Second, you control entirely what goes in your LinkedIn profile so, as in writing a resume, put your best foot forward. The rules for a LinkedIn entry are much looser. Not everything should go it your entry–just the highlights. So spend some time thinking about how you want to present yourself on LinkedIn; in other words, those things that show you headed in a clear direction. I will uniformly ask a candidate to rewrite her resume if it tries to be “all things to all people.” When I work with a Supreme Court law clerk looking for a position, their resume is invariably one page with a lot of white space. So do your best to project how your abilities will meet an employer’s need, as succinctly as possible. The more your confidence oozes out of your resume/LinkedIn entry, the greater your chance of landing an interview for a job you want.

Finally use LinkedIn in searching for information about employers that interest you. Find out who the President and key officers or the person interviewing you is by first using the employer’s website. Your next step is to then look up the individuals on LinkedIn and see their career paths. You might find out that a prospective interviewer went to your high school or college, or they are active in a civic association of which you are also a member. Remember employers want to hire people that “fit in” and learning about potential commonality that you share with a prospective employer’s key people can help you win big bonus points.

LinkedIn is an excellent tool which should be in the “toolbox” of every job seeker and career builder. I am sure there are many uses I have not even begun to tap into even with my years of experience with it! There are many low-cost seminars and how to use it for your career advancement purposes. Explore all tools to help you find that next good job but be sure that LinkedIn is one of them!

Stuart TenHoor is President of TenHoor Legal Search Services, Inc. and has over two decades of experience matching candidates with the right employers. You can learn more about him at stuarttenhoor.com.

Want help with updating your LinkedIn profile? Contact us at410-782-3002 xt 501 to schedule an appointment!

The Right Tool for the Job

PEC Board member Cheryl Pullins shared this piece with us from her own blog which is chock full of great information and inspiration!  Cheryl works with women entrepreneurs to elevate their businesses to new levels.

The right tools create interest and highlight positive attributes! (Photo by Mauro Cateb via Wikimedia.org)

In years past tools for a job search included the help wanted section of the Sunday edition of the local newspaper, a red ink pen and your resume. You could spend hours on a Sunday afternoon combing through the help wanted section to identify jobs within your industry and/or skill set.

How have things changed.

With the onset and growth of social media, the job search has progressed to a whole new level. The development of the internet created an opportunity for job seekers to do some detailed research on a prospective employer. However, if we fast forward, job seekers can not only do research about the company they can now interact and connect with potential employers on a deeper level. With access to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn individuals can now experience the prospective employer’s culture, become exposed to the organization’s corporate values and engage with key staff.

Facebook and Twitter ranked number one and number three in social media popularity, but LinkedIn is a robust social media site where job seekers can find enormous value. With over 75 million members and executive level representation from all of the Fortune 500 organizations, LinkedIn has created a platform for job seekers to showcase their skill and experience, in addition to building and connecting with those who can provide value to the job search.

For more information about LinkedIn visit www.linkedin.com.  Don’t forget to join the Pinnacle Empowerment Center group to stay up to date on the latest from PEC!

Photo by Mauro Cateb of a diamond measuring tool via Wikimedia.org.

Possibilities and Opportunity: Where your talents and the needs of the world intersect

By Lisa Dolce

New Year’s Day has always been a day of reflection for me for as long as I can remember.

Find the intersection where your talents meet the needs of the world!

I celebrate the successes as well as the learning that came from the challenges of the past year. I take a deep breath in and exhale anything that may be holding me back and then breathe in all the possibilities of the coming new year.

The last few years have been tough for many of us personally and professionally. There seemed to be much that was out of our control. The good news is that not everything is out of our control. One of my favorite quotes comes from Aristotle, he said, “Ones purpose is knowing where your talents intersect with the needs of the world”.

The job market may still be tight but it is not without it’s needs, possibility and opportunity. So the big question is where do your talents intersect?

For some of us it may be the perfect time to reinvent ourselves. You have probably known for a long time that it was time to do something else, but it never seemed to be the “right” time to do it.

It may be a career change, going back for that degree or finally starting that business you’ve been talking about. Now is the time.

For others it might be time to find more meaning or balance in their work and in their lives. What are we chasing after and why? What beliefs or dreams are we holding onto that no longer serve us?

So as we enter 2013, breathe in all the possibilities this new year has to offer, and take the time to clarify what your talents are and how you can share them to fill a need in this new economy. Make a list of your top skills that you already have and ways you can reconfigure them to meet the opportunities that the new job market will yield–then go out and explore, network with others and learn what new jobs will emerge as government bail-out plans unfold, companies restructure and new leadership takes over.

And to help get you started, and as a New Year’s gift to you, the Pinnacle Empowerment Center is offering free monthly career clubs, empowerment circles.Come join us and other career seekers for inspiration, motivation and strategies for matching your talents with the needs of our community.

Wishing you a new year filled with exciting possibilities and opportunity!

Believe in Yourself

This is a post from Job Coach Cindy Virtue who encourages us to make the most of the holiday break and to BELIEVE in ourselves!

Believe in yourself and your dreams!

Today my calendar was marked to sit down and write the blog for Pinnacle Empowerment Center this morning. It was on my to-do-list for 9:00am to hold me accountable or Heather may not be too jolly with me come our Wednesday Open House Celebration. Well it is now 4:00pm a little later than anticipated, but as everyone knows little bumps in the road sometimes comes up. Here is my bump:

I have a good friend who wrote a book 8-years ago, which had sat on her bookshelf just getting dusty. While reflecting over the last holiday season and with the encouragement of her friends and family she decided to submit it for publication. She found three possible publishers in March and submitted her transcript. To her surprise two-weeks later she was sitting with a contract with a target publishing date for October 2012 in time for the holiday sales. Since this was a book about the meaning of Christmas timing was an issue. She worked very hard over the summer, meeting demanding deadlines for rewrites.  Unfortunately, due to factors out of her control, the book was finally printed mid-November missing the shelves in major book store, but it is now available online.

As we were catching up last week and she was filling me in with all the details of what the publisher will do to promote her book they also encouraged her to reach out to her network. Well, this is my area!   I could see she felt so overwhelmed so I helped her come up with a promotional plan- which is very similar to what I do when I help job seekers.

We sat and brainstormed on how to best use the limited time left before the holiday to market her holiday book. Helping her understand how to reach out to her network, making phone calls asking her friends for help to spread the word, identifying upcoming events to attend and possibly ask if she could setup a table for a book signing  such as the Dec, 20th Girls Night Out Even in Downtown Ellicott City. Finally, why not create a FREE website through wordpress.com which will make it easier for her network to spread the word. This was my BUMP since I only have created one several months ago this took longer than anticipated, but was well worth it. I am much better or should I say faster in helping job seekers with Linkedin profiles then I am in creating a website, so I may need to keep my day job. In the end, she took a leap of faith and she is now a published author!

With the holiday upon us and as you may be job searching you need to believe in yourself. Take this time to regroup, take a fresh look at your resume and Linked profile, come up with a game plan on how you can reach out to your network, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Pull out your calendar now and start setting deadlines and goals for the New Year. Attend PEC FREE Job Club or Empowerment Circle for help. The year 2013 will be your time but you need to make it happen!

Note: January Job Club has been moved to Tuesday, January 8^th due to the holiday. Please contact me for times and location at cindy@empowerctr.org or (410) 799-1097 ext. 300

Have a safe and wonderful holiday season!

Want to learn more about Ellicott City newest author? www.missmarybelieves.wordpress.com

Talk Back To Us – Ask A Coach!

We’re all ears for your questions! Join us for Ask A Coach!

Ever heard that it’s okay if you talk to yourself but you’re really in trouble if you start answering back?  Well, we want to avoid that!  We want to start conversations about what’s on your mind so we’re creating an Ask A Coach feature and we need YOUR help!

• What questions do you have about how to get started with updating your resume?
• Do you need ideas on how to explain gaps in employment?
• Have you been at home with the kids for the last several years and want to know how you can make your resume more marketable?
• Do you have questions about how to get that small business started?
• Do you feel like there could be more to your life or career but aren’t sure how to identify the changes you can make?

Send us YOUR question and we’ll answer them on Facebook, on the blog, or in a message back to you.  You can post on our Facebook wall, send us a Direct Message, or just send us an email at info(at)empowerctr.org if you’d like to keep your query private.

Don’t forget we have lots of friends in a variety of fields to so if we don’t have the answer, we’ll activate our network and find out!  Look for answers on Thursdays.

Remember, the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask!

Don’t want to wait?  Take our poll and let us know what topics interest you most!

What Can Coaching Do For You?

This Harbor Seal at the Oregon Coast Aquarium is a natural swimmer but she might benefit from coaching for her job search!

I learned to swim as a kid in a succession of hotel and friend’s pools during the summers of my childhood. I can pass the Boy Scouts swimming test but I am not going to break any speed records! My son has learned to swim the same way so I recently enrolled my son in a swim conditioning class at the local rec center. The goal was to make him a more confident and efficient swimmer. This is accomplished by having his swimming technique observed, corrected, and refined by an experienced swimming coach.

His coach breaks down the complexity of a swimming stroke and using various techniques focuses on one thing at a time – breathing, arm movements, or kicking. Then she brings it all back together. When they do it all at once though, the perfect stroke may degenerate as they try to do it while kicking and breathing – all at the same time. The coach brings her experience to bear, provides feedback, and cheers the kids’ on to continue working at it even though the payoff isn’t immediate.

Does this feel like your career or your job search? That’s why career and job search help is called “coaching”. The coach isn’t going to do the work for you but will help you identify problem spots and work with you to refine your techniques and help you become more confident and efficient. Over the last few years of working with the lovely ladies of the Empowerment Center, I have been privileged to watch how they help and work with their clients and truly coach clients toward their goals.

When you’re job searching, how much time are you spending looking at job postings on the internet? You may be spending hours doing that weekly and feel like you’re being productive in your search, but the reality is, you can’t hide in your house and expect to find a job that way. Job Search Coach Cindy Virtue points out you shouldn’t be spending more than 5-10% of your time using the internet. She notes that you get more bang for your buck networking in person. You’ll have more success with those job postings if you can make a live contact at the company via your network. As part of her coaching technique, Cindy evaluates clients and identify areas that need strengthening such as whether they’re spending too much time on activities that won’t pay big dividends when job hunting. She provides feedback and encouragement as the client moves forward on her job search.

Perhaps you’ve been in your position for years. You’re bored with the work and would like to move upward in your career but you’re not sure if it is within the same company or another job altogether. You live for the weekends when you can hike and bike outside and volunteer with a local recreation league that helps adapt outdoor activities for people with disabilities. You meet with a Life Coach who helps you identify that what you like about the job is the security of the paycheck but the work itself isn’t what you want to do for the next 20 years. The coach helps you develop a plan to go back to the local community college and get your credential as a physical therapist while keeping your day job. Life Coach Maria points out that much of what she does with clients is to help find a path, break complex issues into smaller, more manageable pieces, and holds the clients accountable as they work through their plan toward their goals.

Consider some of the biggest names in sports – Michael Phelps or Gabrielle Douglas. These athletes have amazing talent but they still have coaches in their corner helping them work on their weaknesses, inefficiencies, and pushing them to continue to work harder. Who is in your corner? How can one of our coaches help you meet your goals?

Using the Virtual Career Center’s Resume Builder to Get Started

This is the second post in a series about Pinnacle Empowerment Center’s Virtual Career Center. As I explore the system, I am sharing highlights of how it works.

So the biggest thing in my career exploration that I had been dreading was writing my resume (insert doomful music here). It had literally been years since I had updated mine. Did I take the good advice to add new things and accomplishments as I did them? Nope. Thank goodness I had been keeping an electronic portfolio of sorts of the things I have been up to both career-wise and for volunteering. Still, it was a task that almost made me want to go scrub the bathroom instead.

One morning, I got up early so no one could distract me, got a huge cup of coffee,  and prepared to do a brain dump. I figured I would log into the VCC and spit it all out and worry about the order, grammar, and keywords later. I eventually figured out that you could put each accomplishment as a bullet in an individual box. It also saved these so if you needed to recycle them for another job position, you could.

A screen shot of where you entered your various accomplishments into the resume builder.

I could edit and move things around fairly easily, but honestly I still needed input from someone with expertise. Naturally, I called on Cindy for help! And as always, she shared her insight. I downloaded the resume out of the VCC into Word (you can also export into a PDF to keep your formatting solid). Cindy offered some fantastic tips and adjusted the formatting a bit to help me better organize my thoughts.

A screen shot of the re-ordering tool. You could drag bullet points into different places.

As with the assessments, this is a great tool to use to make your one on one coaching sessions more productive. Using the setup provided by the VCC, it broke the resume building down into more management, less intimidating chunks. Cindy then took the information I had provided and gave me a solid critique on how to better organize it before submitting. Knowing that I need to customize the resume for each position means that I can rearrange the relevant pieces as needed.

For someone getting started with such a big task, the VCC broke it down into more manageable chunks.  I was also able to save and work on it over the course of several days as I had time and energy.

Check out our VCC at one of our upcoming live demos! Email cindy@empowerctr.org for more information!

Putting the Fun in Funeral: Lessons about Work from My Dad

Rocking a handle bar mustache and a Dorothy Hamill haircut like only we could in 1979! Magnificent hair is another legacy from my dad.

My favorite thing about the movie My Girl is that the main character is the daughter of a tuba-playing small town undertaker – VERY familar. We didn’t live at the funeral home growing up but we did have their phone line at our house and I have fond memories of wandering over to the office during the summers to mooch coca colas when things were slow. And my dad does play tuba. And euphonium. And several other brass instruments in his spare time. When my dad wasn’t warning me about the dangers of dating brass players, I learned a few things by example from his own career that held me in good stead as I have navigated my own non-linear professional path.

My dad had always wanted to be a funeral director but his parents steered him toward another career path that seemed to them to hold the promise of more financial stability (a great read on this is over at Laura Berman-Fortgang’s Huffington Post blog). Over the years, life happened and my dad’s dream faded until his mid-thirties when an opportunity presented itself for him to go back to school and finally train to become a funeral director. It hasn’t been an easy road over the last thirty years as the industry has changed dramatically. I have watched my dad roll with it and re-invent himself career-wise a few times and here’s what I have learned.

It doesn’t matter that you’re a girl or who your family is or any other external defining factor. When I got accepted into an special academic program at school, he was proud, but he warned me “…that and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee”. Over and over again he emphasized the importance of getting a good education and working hard. He knew I would be judged based on what I produced, not on any other factor.

You’re never too old. I didn’t realize it as a kid, but it must have been quite an adjustment for my dad to leave a known job for the unknown of funeral school and apprenticeship.

Don’t be afraid. As the funeral industry has changed, my dad has dealt with periods of career upheaval. Along the way, I never saw him give up hope. Even as he explored other job options, he found opportunities to learn from these situations. Fear holds you back and closes your mind to new experiences.

Change your perspective. My dad is no longer a full-time funeral director. He keeps in touch with the industry he still enjoys working as a substitute but his full-time job is in insurance. Years before, he had to get a state license to sell insurance products. This additional credential allowed him to segue into a different career when the labor market tightened for the funeral industry. If he hadn’t been flexible in how he viewed his credentials, he would have missed an opportunity.

Do what you love. My dad is good at what he does and his favorite part is helping families. His interest in serving others held him through a return to school and constant change in his industry. Even though he doesn’t do it full time, his background and commitment to helping families serves him well in his new career.

What did you learn from your dad about work and career?  Tell us in the comments below!

We here at PEC wish everyone a wonderful Father’s Day!  

Posted by:  Heather Comstock