emilyoncareers.com

The end of the Great Recession – are we there yet?   Half of our workforce can hardly wait. According to a recent survey by the Adecco Group North America, 54% of employed Americans plan to look for a new job as soon as the economy improves. You too?  That’s a lot of competition – if I were you I’d start now.

I’ve always tended to toward the “Lord helps those who help themselves” approach to things.  So please, help yourself to a few, proven strategies to get ready for when the job market improves:

Become the Ideal Candidate  Read more...

I have pirates on the brain. Swashbuckling pirates. First there was Talk Like a Pirate day, then  Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl   played a million times on cable and now I’ve got that pirate song stuck in my head. It’s the one they sing at the top of their lungs while happily hoisting mugs of grog:

“Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!”

I ask you, who has a happier career than a pirate? No one. They are the poster children of career satisfaction.  And why? Because they are absolutely, positively, perfectly suited to being pirates.  It is not just that they have superior pirate skills or that they love their pirate job duties. Those things are important, but there’s more to it than that.   Read more...

God invented word processing so that we can create a tailored resume every, single time we apply for a job.  I am absolutely certain of it.

In ancient times –  B.W.P. – (before word processing)  there was no “insert”; no “delete”; no “search and replace”. Imagine…an entire world without “undo”!  It was so sloggingly slow to modify a resume that pretty much everybody wrote one resume; end of story. 

Inexplicably, even in our modern, A.W.P. times, most  job seekers still use just one resume.  And it is easy to understand why. The thought of it is just so deliciously, temptingly easy: you write your resume once – and you’re done.    

Sadly, easy is one thing; effective is another.  Read more...

As in Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad JOB SEARCH Days.

As in actually checking to see if email is down because apparently no one cares enough to even send you spam Days.  Or making sure your phone is working because you can’t remember the last time it rang Days.  Or having absolutely run out of ideas and not knowing what to do next Days. 

From the kid perspective,  Alexander’s day in Judith Viorst’s children’s book  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day would seem to have lived up to its name. Gum in your hair? Terrible. Lima beans for dinner? Horrible. 

From the adult perspective, Very Bad JOB SEARCH Days are much, much worse than lima beans. And I say that as someone who has deep, personal experience with both.   Read more...