You looking for a lucky break? You aren’t alone.

Some 84% of 7,000 professionals surveyed by LinkedIn say they believe that luck plays a part in a booming career.

Lucky breaks seem random. It’s a tip on a new job; a chance meeting with a prospect that leads to a big sale; overhearing details of a business deal while at the coffee shop.

But oddly enough, the survey discovered that luck is less random than it seems. It’s almost like a job skill.

Five factors were named by a significant number of poll takers as contributions to luck, with women and men both saying the single most important factor to luck is hard work.

Read the full article on businessinsider.com!

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

Read the full article on blogs.hbr.org!

Design isn’t just wire frames or visual style; it’s about the product as a whole, writes Sahil Lavingia.

“Designers, designers, designers” has become the new “developers, developers, developers.” Witness the ever-growing list of job postings for product designers, UI designers, user research designers, UX designers. They’re posted faster than I can read them. Someone needs a “senior design champion” (versus a normal design champion?), while another is looking for a “catalyst of creativity.” Designers are becoming the new hotness, just as front-end engineers blew up job boards when businesses started taking the web seriously. We need a designer. You need a designer. We all need designers.

I agree, we all need designers. But I’d argue that we already have them. They’re us: you and me. Design shouldn’t be designated a specific function or industry. The discipline is just as fundamental as technology and profit are to a business that it doesn’t need to be isolated to a single role. It should be considered part of every role.

Read the full article on fastcodesign.com!

Good afternoon to you! Take a look at this thought-provoking article on creativity! Via npr.org

With the economy still struggling to recover, key indicators of economic performance are largely focused on traditional employment — we are fixated on how many people have managed to find on-site, single-employer jobs. But is this an outdated perspective?

Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath would say so. In a recent blog post for Harvard Business Review, McGrath questions the pervasive assumption that “regular” employment is always the most stable and desirable. She writes, “Many of the assumptions about society that we take for granted are based on the notion that relatively stable employment relationships are the norm. When will our thinking catch up with the new reality?”

Read the full article on techcrunch.com!

The Bermuda Triangle and Sasquatch. Now those are real mysteries. As for how the modern recruiting and staffing world operates, that topic isn’t quite so enigmatic — although many job hunters continue to seem utterly baffled by it.

Over the years, I’ve had literally hundreds of clients throw up their hands in exasperation, wondering why their friends and co-workers keep getting called by recruiters and “placed” in various jobs, while they, themselves, go unnoticed. Essentially, it’s because there are basically three kinds of people in the world when it comes to how marketable (or not) any individual professional is going to be to the recruiter community.

Here’s the breakdown:

Read the full article on blog.nwjobs.com!

“My manager expects me to be at my desk from 9 to 5,” a highly successful salesperson lamented during a break at a session I was delivering at a progressive company in Silicon Valley. “I love my job,” she went on, “but I have an hour and fifteen minute commute each way, and it’s just wearing me down.”

“Could you do your work from home?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she told me.

How crazy is that? Her boss shouldn’t just be allowing her to work from home, he ought to be encouraging it.

Most employers still tell their employees when to come to work, when to leave, and how they’re expected to work when they’re there. Why not measure employees by the value they create, rather than by the number of hours they sit at a desk?

Read the full article on hbr.org!

Businesses tend to have a narrow view of customer needs or expectations. And, rather than design to evoke human emotion, journeys are designed with a “mediumalistic” approach, where platforms and devices take precedence over the human connection or aftereffect. Products, pages, profiles, and entire click paths are narcissistic by design, taking into account the needs of decision makers and stakeholders over the customers they’re designed to entice. The need to plug into trends trumps the opportunity to innovate and improve the customer journey.

Read the full article on fastcompany.com!

More than a quarter of people who have found jobs since the recession ended have landed in temporary positions, reflecting a fundamental change in the workplace, with neither businesses nor employees expecting to stay together for life.

The nation’s unemployment rate is falling faster than expected, but what counts as a job has become increasingly murky.

More than a quarter of people who have found jobs since the recession ended have landed in temporary positions, according to government data, though private estimates range far higher. The numbers reflect a fundamental change in the way Americans work, with neither businesses nor their employees expecting to stay together for life.

Read the full article on seattletimes.nwsource.com!

Today everyone is using social media in their job search.

People make connections and share their work on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — and with the recent explosion of Pinterest, there’s a new player in the game. 

The visual nature of Pinterest, which allows users to create virtual boards onto which they can pin images, is perfect for showing prospective employers what you’ve done so far. 

Tons of users have pinned web images of creative resumes for inspiration. But a few innovative souls — graphic designers, photographers — have already started using Pinterest to extend their personal brand, uploading their resumes, linking to their work and creating an online portfolio.

See the rest on businessinsider.com!

“What time do you want me to start work?” That’s the question a new hire recently asked me. She looked a little startled by my reply.

“I don’t care.”

But it was the truth. I didn’t care—and I never have—what hours are kept by the people who work for me. You could say I’m the opposite of a control freak, in the sense that I have always resisted rules, for myself and for others. Why? Because once you have rules, you have to enforce them—and there’s no more tedious task in life.

I’m relaxed about timekeeping in part because I had great bosses early in my broadcasting career. They didn’t care about hours either. They trusted that, with a broadcast date in the schedule, any producer would work their socks off to make the best program on time—because that’s how you advanced your career. Nobody ever said, “Wonderful timekeeping, shame about the show!”

Read the full article on inc.com!

The book explains how you have to treat your career as you would a start-up company. Even if you don’t want to start a company, the lessons you will learn throughout the book will help you advance in your career. You need to invest in yourself, build strong relationships and take risks if you want to make it in corporate America or start-up America. Here are ten quotes that stood out to me while reading this amazing book:

1. “All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.”

2. “Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a stricly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.”

3. “Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you – as entrepreneurs do.”

4. “When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.”

5. “You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.”

6. “Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality.”

7. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”

8. “The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.”

Read the full article on forbes.com!

A new career website that launched on Monday aims to be a one-stop shop for hiring managers and job seekers. GetHired.com was co-founded by Suki Shah, 28, who was inspired to create the integrated site after running his own medical diagnostics company and experiencing difficulties with the hiring process.

“We created GetHired.com out of a pure need that we experienced in the market for both employers and job seekers,” he told Mashable. “There is no solution that currently integrates job postings, prescreening via audio and video, applicant tracking, interviewing, and social recruiting.”

His goal is to streamline every task of the job search into one place. On GetHired.com employers can search for candidates, sift through multimedia resumes, schedule interviews (and sync those appointments to their iPhones) and video chat with potential hires.

Job seekers can upload a video of themselves explaining their background and expertise, or answer employer-submitted questions via an automated phone system and upload the sound bites to their profiles.

Read the full article on mashable.com!

I want to write a screenplay.

I wanted to write one last year, but other work took more time than I expected, and I kept pushing “write screenplay” off my to-do list.

I know I’m not alone in struggling to make incremental progress on long-term projects or goals. How do you get started when you have “all the time in the world”?

Maybe you have a project with no deadline, like my screenplay. Or maybe you have a deadline that’s months away — like preparing a speech, developing a business plan, or designing a training program. Perhaps you have a habit of procrastinating on projects with generous schedules until “next month” is “next week” and suddenly your long-term project has morphed into a panicky, short-term stress-inducing nightmare?

Read the full article on blogs.hbr.org!

While December 2011 employment data (released in January 2012), showed the U.S. unemployment rate was continuing to trend down, the number of long-term unemployed held almost steady at 5.6 million. This group is comprised of individuals who have been jobless for 27 weeks or more, and makes up 42.5 percent of the total unemployed.

The commonly flawed hiring process—lack of an acknowledgement of resume receipt, hiring managers who do not know what they want, inept interviewers, and little follow up by companies—is particularly frustrating for this group of individuals and the reasons are understandable. Some have sent hundreds of resumes without response, and completed dozens of phone interviews, in-person interviews and interview call backs without an offer. They are beyond frazzled; they are fed up.

Read the full article on glassdoor.com!

Claims for U.S. jobless benefits fell last week and productivity cooled in the fourth quarter, signaling hiring may accelerate as companies reach the limits of how much efficiency they can wring from existing workforces.

Applications (INJCJC) for unemployment insurance payments dropped by 12,000 to 367,000 in the week ended Jan. 28, according to Labor Department figures issued today in Washington. Worker output per hour increased at a 0.7 percent annual rate from October through December, down from a 1.9 percent gain in the prior three months, another report showed.

After focusing on cutting costs during the recession, American businesses are taking on more staff as they gain confidence the recovery will be sustained. In prepared remarks to Congress today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke today highlighted improvements in the job market and production, while cautioning the outlook remains “uncertain.”

Read the full article on bloomberg.com!

Pinterest is social media’s rising star — and now has the traffic stats to prove it.

The darling network of brides-to-be, fashionistas and budding bakers now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January, according to a Shareaholic study.

Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic, while Twitter just barely edged ahead of the newcomer, accounting for 3.61% of referral traffic. In July 2011, Pinterest accounted for just 0.17% of referral traffic, proving the site’s blockbuster growth.

Read the full article on mashable.com!

When I began writing Passion & Purpose in 2009, I met Susan, a young woman on the brink of quitting her investment banking job to pursue her lifelong passion of starting a nonprofit. A year later, when I asked how her new venture was going, I was surprised to hear that she “couldn’t bring herself to quit” in the first place. And when we bumped into each other last week, I found her toiling away in exactly the same role, still dreaming of her nonprofit venture, but now more depressed than ever.

Why can’t Susan just leave the job she despises? More generally, what powerful forces are pulling us back toward the “devil we know”?

As job dissatisfaction rates climb up towards 80%, it’s pretty safe to conclude that many of you reading this would rather be doing something else professionally. But in my interviews, I was surprised to find that people’s inability to quit their current jobs had nothing to do with the perceived riskiness of their new professions, the fear of unemployment if job options fell through, or even how well they had defined their proposed new career step. An overworked lawyer was hesitant to pursue his dream of regaining balance in a comparatively safe nine-to-five corporate job, despite given numerous opportunities to do so. A marketing professional who dreaded the thought of planning the next strategic campaign couldn’t bring herself to move into management consulting, a move which she acknowledged would be both exciting and a much-needed change. And the many young men and women I met who hated their jobs but didn’t know what to do instead? Most of them are in the exact same place today.

Read the full article on blogs.hbr.org!