Everyone knows great employees are dependable, reliable, proactive, great team players, have strong workethics… all the standard (yet often uncommon) qualities. So what traits take a great employee to the next level and make them a truly outstanding employee?
The extra 1%: The qualities that often go unnoticed (and unremarked in performance evaluations) yet make a major impact on performance.
Read the full article on bnet.com!
Panelists will share their expertise on how to safeguard your reputation online:
Location: Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, 200 East Randolph Street, Suite 2200
Tuesday, September 20 at 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
I recently found an array of online job postings that greet seekers with these encouraging words: “MUST BE CURRENTLY EMPLOYED, NO EXCEPTIONS.”
How lovely. In a country with 13.9 million unemployed residents, that’s akin to a restaurant requiring a hungry person to bring a sandwich in before they can buy a sandwich.
Still, these postings are on multiple job-search sites, coming from companies ranging from retail shops to law firms.
Read the full article on chicagotribune.com!
So you have been looking for a new gig for a while and finally you find one that is worth checking out. You get on LinkedIn and see if you know anyone in your network working there now or even in the past. You find out the company is indeed a place you could see yourself in the future and continue to take the next steps.
You ask your colleague to make an introduction for you with the hiring manager and you also apply online through the company website.
All of this assumes of course you actually HAVE a LinkedIn profile which you have been building as well as the fact you are utilizing the relationships you have been cultivating. If however, for some reason you have not then please let me know and I would be more than happy to assist you.
Read the full article on recruitingblogs.com!
Personal Marketing Plan
What is a personal marketing plan?
Well, it’s just that! It’s a marketing plan that you create to promote your most important (and probably favorite) brand- yourself. It brings focus and direction to your job search and allows you to spend your time actually getting closer to your goal instead of figuring out what to do.
In short: it’s a plan that lays out how you will launch your brand into the workplace.
Why It Works
There are two main reasons:
1. It provides personal focus and direction for your job search.
2. It directs networking contacts to provide the right type of help.
You will see what I mean by this if you continue to read on.
Read the full article on brand-yourself.com!
“Creativity is like chasing chickens,” Christoph Niemann once said. But sometimes it can feel like being chased by chickens — giant, angry, menacing chickens. Whether you’re a writer, designer, artist or maker of anything in any medium, you know the creative process can be plagued by fear, often so paralyzing it makes it hard to actually create. Today, we turn to insights on fear and creativity from five favorite books on the creative process and the artist’s way.
See the list on brainpickings.org!
Millions of professionals donate their time volunteering that impacts the lives of others, but it turns out volunteering is as good for your career as it is to those you help. Here’s how:
Helping Others Matters – All that time you spent raising record amounts of money, the year-end event you planned to perfection all felt like real work and…it was. New research from LinkedIn shows that one out of every five hiring managers in the U.S. agree they have hired a candidate because of their volunteer work experience. Your volunteer experience counts and if you don’t include it in your profile, on your resume or when you’re negotiating for a promotion you’re not getting the credit you deserve.
Test-Drive Your Passion – A truism of career success is that passion correlates with talent and talent translates to reward (both financial and emotional). One of the safest ways of test-driving your passion as a career is to volunteer your talents. Not only do you get to try your hand at a repertoire of new skills and experiences in a low-risk forum, but you’ll also be showcasing these talents to a whole host of peers who may just happen to have the connections you need to get hired.
Read the full article on linkedin.com!
(WASHINGTON) — Companies advertised the most job openings in three years, a hopeful sign after the worst month for hiring in nearly a year.
The Labor Department said Wednesday that employers posted 3.2 million jobs in July, up from 3.17 million in June. That is the largest number of openings since August 2008. Typically, it takes anywhere from one to three months to fill an opening.
More openings don’t guarantee more jobs. The government said last week that employers failed to add any net jobs in August, the worst month for hiring since September 2010. The unemployment rate stayed for the second straight month at 9.1 percent.
There’s heavy competition for each job. Nearly 14 million people were out of work in July. So roughly 4.3 unemployed workers were competing for each opening. That’s a slight improvement from June, when the ratio was 4.45. In a healthy economy, the ratio is closed to 2 to 1.
Read the full article on time.com!
Most people view creativity as an asset — until they come across a creative idea. That’s because creativity not only reveals new perspectives; it promotes a sense of uncertainty.
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
Read the full article on sciencedaily.com!
(WASHINGTON) — Employers added no net workers last month and the unemployment rate was unchanged, a sign that many were nervous the U.S. economy is at risk of slipping into another recession.
The Labor Department says total payrolls were unchanged in August, the weakest report in almost a year. It’s the first time since February 1945 that the government has reported a net job change of zero. The unemployment rate stayed at 9.1 percent.
A strike by 45,000 Verizon workers lowered the job totals. Those workers are back on the job.
Read the full article on time.com!
What makes entrepreneurs different, and where do they come from? Are they born or taught? Are they unusually mobile in their careers? Does geography play a role? Do mentors and relationships matter?
Numerous studies explore these questions by surveying hundreds of entrepreneurs. At LinkedIn, we take a different approach, on a different scale. By sifting through more than 120 million public profiles, we can analyze tens of thousands startup founder profiles – and find common threads linking their careers.
See the results on linkedin.com!
An article about quitting in today’s economic climate may seem slightly oxymoronic, but an increasing number of people are discovering that it is actually more monetarily advantageous to create their own small business and work from home. Small things like being able to eat three meals a day in your home, no longer needing weekly dry cleaning service, cutting down on childcare costs, and reducing the necessity to pay for gas or other commuting fees, can have a large impact on a family’s economic health.
Branching out on your own requires a lot of planning, and if you have a number of monetary responsibilities it is advisable to achieve a certain level of stability with you small business, before leaving your primary position. If a level of stability has been achieved, and leaving your current work environment is an option, there are appropriate ways to go about giving your notice, and a couple of actions that should avoided.
Read the full article on thejobbored.com!
A new study by the Ethisphere Institute and Jones Lang LaSalle found that telecommuters are less likely to have ethical violations than their in-office counterparts.
Fascinating and also absolutely logical. Now, for the record, I question the validity of their “study” (and not just because Jones Lang LaSalle doesn’t appear to be able to afford commas and the word “and”) because they surveyed 200 companies, only 68% of which had telecommuters in the first place. Then they asked about ethical violations. My questions, just who did they ask? Because my bet is some HR person. In a small company that HR person would know the answer. In a big company, the head HR person probably has no clue how many people are telecommuting.
Read the full article on bnet.com/blog/evil-hr-lady!
A few key stretches throughout the day can keep us limber and refreshed. This manual of exercises for office workers is great for people like us who are prone to never moving anything but our fingers for eight hours straight.
Provided by Comcare, an Australian government workplace health organization, the PDF document (actually part of a larger manual for occupational safety) includes basic but essential stretches you should do whenever you can take a break: neck rolls, wrist and elbow stretches, eye exercises and so on. Download the instructions via the link below and post it on your corkboard or somewhere to remind you to get moving now and then.
Read the full article on lifehacker.com!
AT the recent Aspen Ideas Festival, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman said that when he graduated from college, he was able to go find a job, but that our children were going to have to invent a job.
Jobs, careers, valued skills and industries are transforming at an unheard-of rate. And all of the change and uncertainty can make us risk-averse and prone to getting stuck.
Despite these realities, our education system emphasizes teaching and testing us about facts that are already known. There is much less focus on our ability to discover, create and reinvent.
The same often holds true in the workplace. Perfection is rewarded, while making mistakes is penalized. It’s no wonder that “failure” has taken on a deeply personal meaning, something to be avoided at nearly all cost.
Read the full article on nytimes.com!
Q. I dread going to work every morning and count the hours until quitting time. I feel removed from clients, irritable with co-workers and think I may expire from terminal boredom. But in these hard times, I’d be insane to quit this well-paying position. How have others dealt with burnout? — G.R.
A. You have company. According to surveys this year by CareerBuilder and Right Management, nearly half or more of employers think their workers are burned out on their jobs for various reasons, ranging from stress levels to work overload.
Read the full article on chicagotribune.com!
According to BusinessDictionary.com, perks are “privileges granted to employees in addition to their salaries and benefits,” and may include such things as “the company car, vacations, reserved parking spaces, spacious offices, private dining and washroom facilities, etc.”
It’s the “etc.” that seems to be changing with the times.
Until recently, most discussions of perks focused on what high-tech companies in Silicon Valley were offering their employees: free gourmet meals, 24-hour gym, yoga classes, on-site nutritionist, massage therapy, concierge service, discounted artwork, auto detailing, even botox injections and bring-a-pet-to-work day. The idea was often two-fold: (a) make the company an attractive place to work, and (b) make it easy for employees to work long hours — without worrying about leaving to eat, get to the dry cleaners or exercise. Yet the question arises: If the idea is to encourage employees to work harder, then are free meals really perks? As Steven E. Gross, a senior partner at Mercer Human Resource Consulting, notes, “some people would view that not as a perk, but as serfdom.”
Read the full article on knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu!
You’re out of work, you can afford to keep looking and you just got a job offer that can best be described as, eh. What do you do?
The answer the follows is long and filled with advice from experts that essentially say that as long as you can afford to say no, you should turn it down. They caution that with a lower level, lower paying job you won’t be able to put as much money in your 401k, future raises and promotions will be based off the lower salary and you may hate it so much that you’ll quit in 3 months, making your resume even worse than it is now.
Seriously? Are we such a nation of whiners that career experts are telling people not to accept jobs on the fear that they will hate them so much that they’ll quit after 3 months, without another job lined up? If you are such a whiner, I have no sympathy. I tend to go back to the idea that they call it work because it’s, you know, work.
Read the full article on bnet.com!
When we experience an “aha!” moment, our brains experience very high gamma activity as new neural networks are formed. Psychology Today writer Dan Goleman offers some advice on triggering creative ideas:
What’s the best way to mobilize this brain ability? It’s first to concentrate intently on the goal or problem, and then relax into stage three: let go. The converse of letting go – trying to force an insight – can inadvertently stifle creative breakthrough. If you’re thinking and thinking about it, you may just be getting more tense and not coming up with fresh ways of seeing things, let alone a truly creative insight.
Read the full article on lifehacker.com!
As an experiment, I recently asked 20 friends to write me a recommendation on LinkedIn. About 25% of the people I asked actually completed a recommendation. Even then, I didn’t really like everything that everyone said. I chose not to show all of them on my profile.
As a job hunter, having recommendations available online is a really valuable thing. Most employers do some level of online background checking. It usually amounts to a quick look at your Facebook and/or LinkedIn pages. Having several recommendations visible when they look will instantly add to your credibility.
Read the full article on glassdoor.com!
