Career Success Blog

New blog, good career success, management, leadership, teamwork, competence, power, motivation, communication, cover letters and resume information! Updates every day or so orglearn career success blog.

You can also follow the author on Twitter rictownsend

Free online blank resume and handy resume form with positive examples and a free backup service.

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Sample Resume | Resume Blank | Resume Form | Resume Examples | Resume Sample | Cover Letter
Fill in the free online blank resume form (positive statement examples), a handy self-analysis to evaluate the commercial realities of what you have to offer current or potential employers.
Free blank resume form with examples and samples.

Is Your Company Watching Your Social Media Activities

Maybe you don't care what your company thinks of your social media activities?

Do you ever think about how your social media activates will effect your future employment prospects?

An interesting report...

Social networking and reputational risk in the workplace -

What effect can social media have on you if you are on the "other end of the stick" as a business owner? Have you developed any policies, plans or protocols to deal with social media and how your staff (or customers) could destroy your reputation?.

What work have you done on your organizations culture, values and ethics to take account of (and hopefully mitigate) the risks to your reputation and business viability that online communities present. Is social media part of your S.W.O.T. analysis?

Ric orglearn blank resume resume form Is your resume posted online... is it helping or hurting... a lousy online resume is a negative, time to fix it or remove it.

Visit the site...

Sample Resume | Resume Blank | Resume Form | Resume Examples | Resume Sample | Cover Letter Fill in the free online blank resume form (positive statement examples), a handy self-analysis to evaluate the commercial realities of what you have to offer current or potential employers.


Free blank resume form with example and samples or.....

Know Yourself - Free Resource - Online Personality Test

Take the free iPersonic personality test!

As the site says "No registration required!

Takes less than 5 minutes to complete.

Free, immediate and accurate results."

iPersonic test.

This is a good five minute online test!

Ric career advice blank resume form at orglearn.org

Mentoring 101 Article from HRlink.in

Hone Your Mentoring Technique (Good article from HRlink)

"Tips for becoming a better mentor:

• Establish a partnership that helps your protege learn.

• Foster discovery. Thought-provoking questions are more powerful than smart answers.

• Allow for mistakes. They are necessary for growth.

• Put your protege at ease by being authentic, open and sincere.

• Act more like a friend than a boss.

• Give feedback that helps your protege improve his performance.

• Continue your support after meetings.

• If your mentoring relationship isn’t working, discuss your concerns."

The full article is here: http://hrlink.in/topics/mentoring-101 and is worth a quick read!

Ric career advice management cover letters and resumes

The 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss in his popular book "The 4-Hour Workweek" uses the acronym DEAL It stands for: Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation.

Definition define what you want, get over your fears, look past others "expectations" and figure out what it will really cost to get you want to go.

Elimination concerns effective use of time by using the old 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. Again Ferriss use the efficiency versus effectiveness idea.

 

Automation to do this you need to build a sustainable, automatic source of income. This includes techniques such as where as a retailer you set up a system whereby the wholesaler ships direct to you customer so you don't have to (transport, hold and deliver stock), marketing he suggests can be by Google adwords/asdsense of course many other functions can be outsourced.

Liberation is dedicated to the successful automation of one's lifestyle and the liberation from a geographical location and job.

Rather than seeing technology based communication such as email, instant messaging and Internet-enabled PDA's as helpful he promotes the idea that they complicate life rather than simplify it. As I heard him say in an interview you need to control or avoid these devices to "cut out the static" from your life. This point I particularly agree  with he uses on his blog the expression " cultivate selective ignorance - and create time - with a low-information diet". Good advice for all of us perhaps.

Probably much to the chagrin  of the rapidly growing number of American (and other) unemployed at the moment he is also a strong advocate of hiring "virtual assistants" from developing countries such as India to free up personal time.

From the radio interview I mentioned before some of his main points were:

Stop spending your time doing emails, let them wait, answer them at set time each day "say 11.00 and 4.00 so you can focus on doing one task at a time and doing it well. He also says we need (If we want to work less hours and remain productive) to "control our impulses".

Having sat down to a meal with many friends who spend much of their time reading messages on and instantly responding on their "Blackberries" or mobile phones I can particularly relate to this point. Many today seem to suffer from what I like to call the "Pavlov's Dogs Syndrome".

Ric-orglearn Management Training Career Advice Cover Letters and Resumes

Robert Iger C.E.O. of Disney Interview Leadership Lessons

Interview by Adam Bryant. "Corner Office" of  "The New York Times"

The guts of it...

Most important leadership lesson

RI  "optimism is a very, very important part of leadership. However, you need a dose of realism with it" ...'be patient ...be focused and don't overreact to things that are said'

Best and worst bosses

RI  'Roone Arledge - drove everybody to levels of perfection or to come as close as possible to it'

'Tom Murphy and Dan Burke - the importance of trust and managing people' 

'Michael Eisner - creativity' 

'My first boss at ABC told me I wasn’t promotable, so I’d have to put him in the category of “bad boss.” I rose above it very quickly, and there was a lesson in that. I think it toughened me up a little bit more.' 

An insight that put your career on a different trajectory

RI  'The first lesson, if you’re not good at one thing, try something else. Don’t stick with something unless you think you could turn yourself into someone who [is] good at that.'

Career advice to others

RI  'patience is extremely important because people set goals for themselves that often are unrealistic and... everything changes' [opportunities arise]

To managers about leadership

RI  '...the need to be direct with your people [and] ...the need to be accessible — [both] very important [attributes] for a leader.' 

How to stay in touch employees/colleagues

RI  '...face to face, you’ve got to project an accessibility — the elevator ...the employee cafeteria ...stroll a floor ...I make it part of my schedule to do that.'

Hiring. How do you do it?

RI  'Carefully. I try to get to know someone ...references [are] an important guide. [Quotes]: Warren Buffett... “When you hire someone, you look for brains, energy and integrity and if they don’t have the third, integrity, you better watch out, because the first two will kill you.”

I also look for qualities in people beyond that...' 

Then he talks about "I love curiosity" and other issues... the full article is here

Good advice for all of us! leadership orglearn

Career Help/Tips/Advice and Experience

Three positives that worked for me:

1) Being published in a prestigious magazine as an technical 'expert' in my field - So work at getting yourself published because it gives you credibility with your bosses and colleagues and brings 'status' to your company.

2) Asking for a promotion that I knew I was qualified to handle when a vacancy in a position I sought appeared - If you get a no then ask what do I need to learn to be suitable the next time a similar position is available (then learn it).

3) Undergoing retraining in a new skill set as economic or technological change made past skill and experiences less valuable - Deregulation of the Australian finance/banking sector meant my kill set became redundant, moved into manufacturing then retrained into advertising then retrained into management and leadership training facilitation.

One Positive from a friend:

4) You hear it all the time... but I think you can never do it enough and that's NETWORKING. Stay in contact with people from past jobs, vendors you worked with, others from your same career field, neighbors, the list goes on and on. Can't tell you how many times a person from my past positively affected my career when I least expected. If I hadn't stayed on contact and kept the relationship nurtured those positive outcomes would have never happened.

One negative for me:

Stopped listening to my staff and their concerns as I became totally focused on my perceived goals and what the senior management wanted - You can't do it alone nurture you staff and co-operate with your colleagues, particularly in HR the staff and other divisions are your internal customers not somebody to hold power over and rule. the best way to make yourself look good is to make you staff look good and publicize their successes.

Wisdom

"In the Midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you." 

- Deepak Chopra 

From ELBERT HUBBARD'S historic book "A MESSAGE TO GARCIA"

'My heart goes out to the person who does their work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he [or she] is home. And the person who when given a letter for Garcia [(task)], quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off," nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long, anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a person asks shall be granted. He [or she] is wanted in every city, town and village - in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he [or she] is needed and needed badly - the person who can carry a message to Garcia'.

"A MESSAGE TO GARCIA" SURELY A MUST READ FOR ALL - COMPETENCE AND COMMITMENT THE SECRET OF SUCCESS.

Ric-orglearn career advice & resume form

In Management, Keep it Simple (from BNET)

Good BNET article by Steve Tobak

"Some people have a knack for making things more complicated than they need to be."

"In 9 Notable Management Trends (or Fads), you’ll notice that simple concepts - such as core competency - have been successful over the long haul, while complex ones - like matrix management (which Yang employed at Yahoo, incidentally) - haven’t stood the test of time." 

The rest is here http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2109&tag=nl.e713

Ah yessss... the old "value adders" versus "energy suckers" problem!

In a complicated company, working for a complicated boss... new career... a resume form to get ready to move on :-)

'It's time for an assessment of career goals'

Some truly well thought out advice...

"Whether you are jumping into a job search or considering an alternative path, you need to revamp your resume while your work experience is still fresh on your mind. You don't need to hire a professional to do the work for you. Resume writing is a skill that everyone should develop, and there are cheap and easy ways to learn." There is more about doing your resume.

This comes from an excellent article in the Winston-Salem Journal where they also discuss; if you are "laid off" the following questions need to be considered...

"Do you need job re-training?" Do you want the same profession? "Do you want to return to work?"

The article is here:

 http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/apr/12/after-a-layoff-its-time-for-an-assessment-of-caree/business/

Free resume form fill in the blank resume online! More career advice !

Ric www.orglearn.org

Five Ways Managers Breed Incompetence.

"The Find: If you’ve got incompetent employees the fault may not all lie with them; there are a handful of ways managers commonly breed incompetence in their teams.

1. Using numbers as the only device to measure performance.

2. Spreading workers too thin: cost-cutting is an essential component of survival, but... "

The rest of this very astute piece of advice is here:

http://blogs.bnet.com/bnet1/?p=1604&tag=nl.e713

Author: Jessica Stillman

career advice at orglearn.org

CAREER ADVICE - how to write a resume

New information regarding how and what to emphasize in your employment cover letter has been added to orglearn as have new resume examples and information.

There is now additional career advice on management in the form of a series of short lessons/articles.

The user interface has been further resourced with more tips on how to write a resume and usability has been expanded in that you can now join the resume form site and submit questions or make comments. 

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