Career Management Alliance Blog

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this and have it be a good read for you.  I hope I can pull it off, otherwise this is just a braggy post. Last week I went to the Career Management Alliance conference in New Orleans.  They just started a new recognition program where they have four awards that they give to people in the career industry (whether you are a member of CMA or not).  I was surprised and honored to have earned the award called the Mentor Award. According to the Career Management Alliance website, the Mentor Award “honors those individuals who have guided, and inspired, their colleagues in tradecraft, entrepreneurship, and community building.” I usually feel like a vendor… I’m not a career coach, resume writer, counselor or practitioner, so to get recognition like this for being a COLLEAGUE is a real honor.  I appreciate the nomination and any discussion about this from the CMA people… thank you! Continue Reading »

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Seeking Admission to Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Duke University or Georgetown University? Read on… Learn all about these amazing schools, and what they have to offer here if Florida or in many other places throughout the U.S.…

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Consider these statistics: China is the number one global producer of photovoltaic (PV) cells used in solar panels.  The Chinese government has a $3 billion stimulus plan for solar.  50% of the cost of large (>500 megawatt) solar installations will be funded by the Chinese government.  China is second in the world in megawatts generated by wind turbines, with a plan to become number one by 2020.  By 2030 it is expected that there will be 295 million cars in China, by 2012 China would like to have 60,000 electric vehicles on the road.  Fixing global warming will definitely have to include China. Continue Reading »

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I am excited to share with you that I was one of 150 career practitioners who attended the 2010 Career Thought Leaders Conference & Symposium at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Baltimore, March 22-24, to learn cutting-edge career strategies, trends and solutions to help you take better control of your career.

With unemployment rates at historic highs and rapid changes in how companies source candidates, it is essential that you be fully equipped to help job seekers manage a full-throttle job search efficiently and effectively. While resumes are still a must-have document for job seekers, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Every speaker at the conference urged attendees to become career communications managers who can equip people like you with social media profiles, personal branded bios, electronic career portfolios and other next-generation documents. Additional conference content focused on social media and online identity, two critical areas for success in today’s job market. Whether or not you are in a job search, it is important to contribute powerful, relevant content about your industry or area of expertise. Actions like this will you help you attract recruiters, hiring managers to your Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn pages. A day-long program on career coaching and job search coaching ended the conference. The knowledge I gained now allows me to provide innovative techniques and up-to-date information to empower and assist you in finding meaningful work.

Please call me if you have any questions.

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Last week I was contacted by a CFO who sent me two resumes to review along with a request to talk by phone. I would normally just do an email review on one of his resumes, but since he was referred to me I deviated from my typical response.

Turns out I was about the 10th in a long line of resume reviewers that he contacted. I guess he didn’t like any of the other feedback and was more interested in finding someone who would agree with what he did, or he just wanted free advice.

What he did, he told me, is pull an “award-winning resume” from another resume writer’s site and insert his name and employer names. Whoaaaaaaaaa! Resumes are about strategy, not taking a template you like and plugging in words.

Every candidate has his own unique personal brand, value proposition, strengths, values, and goals. Someone else’s resume will not foster powerful positioning from “his” (or her) uniqueness but rather, will more likely result in positioning as a commodity.

It’s what is different, unique, and valuable about you - what you distinctly bring that a company is willing to pay to get - that creates powerful positioning ... not those things that are  “like”  or “very similar to” every other candidate.

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We’ve been working on this first major enhancement for a while – designing, tweaking, testing, fixing… and finally last night it was released so it’s available to you. This is a simple thing but will really make your JibberJobber experience more pleasant as you work with your information. Announcing, the ability to edit record on the Detail Pages. Try this out… login to JibberJobber and go to a Contact Detail Page.  Then, mouse over the fields – whether you have information in each field or not.  When you mouse over a field that becomes gray (like this picture below) you can double click the gray area to edit or update that field. Continue Reading »

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As you might imagine, I receive a lot of inquiries from blog readers about my services for job seekers. Sometimes, the communication between us reminds me of just how much help some job seekers need. Recently, a very savvy, high-level professional with a stellar work history contacted me asking for help with her resume and with moving to a digital format. I replied, delighted to hear from someone who was asking me about a digital, or social, resume before I mentioned it first! I explained that I am partnering now with an expert web developer to offer online resumes and described my services, which include a free coaching session “to discuss how to look for a job.” Continue Reading »

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About once a week someone sends me a message saying they are not happy with the job search results in JibberJobber.  Here’s a message someone wrote when they deleted their JJ account:

“All the jobs I find here I’m seeing on other sites.”

They think JibberJobber is a job board. In reality, we tap into a job board service (Indeed.com) and just pull stuff from their site. Providing job board services is not a primary thing I want to offer.  There are already hundreds of job boards that you can go to, why in the heck would you come to JibberJobber for more job boards surfing? Continue Reading »

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With the proliferation of blogs and social networking, many job seekers have begun to wonder about whether to include relevant links to these sites in their resumes. These links could include LinkedIn Profiles, profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, Ning, Zoominfo, or Ziggs, or even a link to a blog. Certainly the number of places where a person can be "found" online is multiplying daily! And we know employers are using these social networking profiles and blogs to search and "qualify" job search candidates (see Online Identity Management and Job Search). What prompted this post is a question from an employed job seeker in Information Technology who writes a "work-related" blog. He felt his blog link should be on his resume, but was confused about where to place it. The straight-forward answer is where it will most easily be seen: at the top of your resume with the rest of your contact information. Continue Reading »

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I’m going to go back to my old posts and share the ones that I love the most…. either because they got a lot of reaction and stimulated discussion (which means the readers back then loved it) or because I thought it was profound, even if no one commented on it :p December 12th, 2006. JibberJobber was barely 6 months old.  I talked about an idea that proved to be a turning point in my job search.  Even though I opted to end my job search, this one action provided the most results in my job search efforts, and it eventually led to my first couple of real job offers. Go check out the post Substantiate Yourself. How can you substantiate yourself?

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