Smart Lemming Career Management Brief: How the Mighty Fall, Volunteering, Success at Work
Career Management Brief: Highlights of the Week
How to Behave at Your First Job: You’re one of the lucky ones to get a job during this recession. You need to hit the ground running. What steps can you take to start successfully?
Tara Weiss at Forbes.com recommends subscribing to Google Alerts, dress in professional attire, learn competitive intelligence, have clear directives, set realistic expectations, participate in meetings, and never look down on the work given to you. While some of Weiss’s advice is common sense, she does offer insightful tips on how to get up to speed on the learning about the company and its competitors.
How to Strategically Work for Free While Unemployed and Why: A great to get your foot inside the door is to volunteer to the organization or company that you want to work for. It’s a way to test drive the company and for this company to learn how valuable you could be to them as a future worker. Volunteering is also a way for college grads to polish their new skills and make contacts. Experience workers should take great care in how they volunteer their services and time. Look for opportunities with a strategic outcome.
Meeting savvy - Be smart, not smarty pants: Business Management Daily offers advice on how to behave in a meeting, so you won’t look like a know-it-all. Assuming you have confidence to talk in a meeting, take great care in how you interact with others, how you use your body language, and how you add your perspective. In “Another Meeting? Good. Another Chance to Hear Myself Talk,” Jared Sandberg explains that while there’s a public disdain for meetings, privately, people like them. “The drive for social connection is a very strong one,” while sitting in a cubicle is “stupefying” and isolating, only intensifying a social need.
6 Blue-Collar Jobs for Career Switches: Liz Wolgemuth at USNews.com recommends six blue-collar jobs for white-collar workers, looking for a dramatic career change. These recommendations are based on Glassdoor.com’s data that produced a list of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs and the Labor Department’s outlook for the job over the next decade. Related USNew.com posts include: 30 Best Careers for 2009, 15 Best Small Businesses to Start in 2009, and 13 Overrated Careers.
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
