Feed Your Career

I was contacted by a dietitian who wanted some direction on changing careers.  She felt rusty and overwhelmed by the job hunting process.  She knew what area in food and nutrition she wanted to switch her career to.  She had applied to several jobs she was qualified for and had not been called back for an interview and was baffled.

First, in the old model for job hunting if you were qualified, you submitted your resume and without anything glaringly questionable on your resume a recruiter or HR person would most likely call you  for an interview. That is not the case  any longer. More commonly what happens is the person hiring is using a requirement description that is outdated and instead is going through resumes looking for something outside of the requirement description. HR employees must quickly scan many  resumes and look for those that catch their eye. If you want to be among the few that are called for an interview, ask yourself, does your resume quickly communicate your value, not simply your education and working experience but your value? Your resume should be very targeted to who you are and what you have to offer.

Think of the employer you want to work for and what value means to them. What are their struggles? What can you offer that will relieve them, help them? Ideally this is a strength of yours and you must bring it out on your resume, this includes both paid and volunteer work. Revolve your resume around this. If you are mid-career your experience and specifics on achievements/results should be brought out.  Do not simply include descriptions of past work, that is the old model, the new model focuses on value and results achieved.  There are resume writers that can help you bring out specifics that will catch the eye of decision makers.  Search online for a resume writer or visit Robyn Feldberg’s site, Abundant Success Coach.  She is former President of the National Resume Writer’s Association.  She was a guest webinar speaker for Feed Your Career last year and had fabulous tips on formulating a branded resume bringing out an individual’s value.  Her site has several free resources.

Next, in today’s marketplace, getting the attention of decision makers is not confined to the submission of a resume.   You must go outside of the resume track for finding a job and take action with offline and online networking. Offline is networking with local dietetic and food related related associations where decision makers and influencers for the position you want will be. I know one very successful dietitian that makes it a goal to do two in-person contacts a month. She introduces herself at meetings and collects business cards.  Then in the following months invites contacts she made out for coffee for face-to-face meetings. It is a great way of building a network. The idea is you don’t tell people that you are looking for a job, but get to know them so you are surrounding yourself with people you might need some day and keeping your name in their mind when a need for your expertise arises. Career management, whether you are job hunting or keeping on cutting edge of your career, means networking and helping others be successful.

Then you must invest time in online networking  — social networking. For starters do you have a LinkedIn profile?  I recommend starting here. If you search your name on Google, see what comes up.  If you have a LinkedIn profile, most likely that will be at the first or second results spot.  Google gives lots of credibility to a LinkedIn profile.  Spend some time on your LinkedIn Profile.  Employers look at and use LinkedIn all the time. Recall from a recent post I quoted a survey that found 80% of companies used LinkedIn for hiring decisions.  You want your LinkedIn profile to be like your resume where it quickly communicates your brand – your value. Include keywords and phrases that you want to be known for but also top achievements at each place you worked. It needs to quickly get your message of value and a doer across.  Do not put people to sleep with a long list of places of employment – I have seen many go this route.

Recruiters are scanning, they should quickly be able to see you are a doer and that you get results.  Again, if you are having trouble coming up with results or achievements, hire a professional resume writer.  They are skilled in asking you questions that help you uncover projects and achievements that are worth mentioning.  I guarantee you have achieved great things, most of us just do not keep a list of accomplishments from our current work or even plant these in the forefront of our minds.  Dan Schwabel has a blog posting with more great info on using LinkedIn to get a job.

Next,  find out who are the decision makers and influencers for the position(s) you want. Setup a Google Alert and Social Mention alert for these key people. Whenever they are posting or mentioned in the media, follow and if possible tweet/comment positively on them or their advice. At least follow them if they are on Twitter. Find their LinkedIn profile, ask to connect with them. The focus is for you to provide value and not stamp across your forehead I am looking for a job. Can you post a comment on a company blog? Can you retweet a tweet they did you liked? Can you connect with them on LinkedIn?

Bottom Line: Create a personal brand that communicates a positive message of your value through simple things like your resume, LinkedIn, Twitter, off-line networking. The brand you create is targeted to something that the employers you want to hire you need and value. This is a no-fail equation for getting hired.

Close your eyes, picture yourself a professional singer.  What appeals to you more?  Thoughts of a loud audience clambering for the stage while you with maddening passion sing your heart out with your band and go club hopping  afterwards late into the night?  The songs you sing are ones you wrote yourself, ones that carry meaning from your own life experiences. You pack up every night and play in a new place, big and small cities throughout the US not laying down roots anywhere for long.  Or does a smile cross your face thinking of concert halls, symphonies, formal dress, fancy dinners, being involved in multiple voice productions in different languages touring the larger cities of the world while based in a large European city.  Both use the gifts voice and stage performance but both are set in widely different environments, thus are matched for different personalities.   Much of what appeals to us and that “fits” us well stems from our personality type.

Your personality type is a framework for describing your strengths and preferences for gaining energy, gathering information, making decisions and approaching life.  There is no one or group of preferred personality types.  Each is just different and suits different environments both personally and professionally.

Think about your own family — children, siblings, parents.  I am blessed with four children.  Each is different, each has a different personality.  The same encouragement, learning settings, organization systems, approaches for change, schedules for the day  do not work for them all – that is largely due to their very different personalities.  The same is true for adults, we all have different tendencies, different preferences, respond differently to the same settings, and have different personalities.

A commonly quoted example is your preference for writing with your right or left hand.  You have a natural tendency for one or the other.  You can if necessary learn to write with your other hand (try it now — write your name with you non-dominant hand) but you will never be able to master it as naturally as you can with your dominant hand.

Same goes for personality preferences.  We can and do EVERY DAY use all of the personality preferences but we prefer the ones that are in our natural state.  Feed Your Career has created our own brief Myers-Briggs test so you can determine which of the 16 personality types you are.  I encourage you first sign in as a member (it is free) and then take our personality assessment.  You can then save your resulting personality type  in your Career Manager – a career dashboard where you save information to manage your career.

Member account login
Personality assessment

Knowing your personality type is helpful because it will tell you tasks, work settings, activities that GIVE you energy for life.  If you think of the effort you exerted to concentrate to write your name with your non-dominant hand a moment ago, what if you were doing activities all day that required this type of concentration?  At the end of the day you would feel whipped!  Now picture doing this day after day — wow, you would over time loose enthusiasm for your work and come home exhausted.  Think about the two singers described at the start of this post, what if they switched work for a day?  For a week?  For a year?  If you are a work setting grossly mismatched for your personality you will become exhausted and over time the passion will die and frustration may even replace the enthusiasm you once had.

You may be saying to yourself — I really love my work so I must be working in my personality preferences.  I don’t need to do this personality assessment.  Not true, in reality very few people are working in environments within their personality preference all day.  Instead, they may have a mixture throughout the day, some activities that give them energy and they soar at and others that drain them.  If you enjoy work every day your overall energy reserves must be above zero.  What if you could send your energy reserves sky high?  What if nearly all day you were operating within a work setting supported by your personality preference?  Imagine how successful you would be then, and the enjoyment every day you would experience.

My formula for success is arrange my days to be doing activities at least 80% in the preferences of my personality and no more than 20% performing activities that are not part of my natural self.

There is no way of avoiding activities and settings outside your natural zone, but if you are only there 20% of the time, then you will have plenty of energy to glide right through draining activities and settings you must encounter in your day.  I like to say when I am performing in my personality zone I am offering my best self to the world.  When you are in your personality zone you make better decisions and are able to be much more productive.

Another way of thinking of it is imagine on Sunday you have the entire day to spend doing activities for yourself –  for me that would be meditating, yoga, reading, slow cup of coffee, long walk, glass of wine, definitely some chocolate and phone calls to girlfriends.  Then on Monday if first thing I was faced with was a  crisis –  a surprise inspection from the state department and my two best employees were out; or the head of nursing called a meeting (this really was a meeting for her to vent on the new tray service policy); or my biggest client was announcing he was taking bids from other clients to determine who to sign on with for the next year, I would be ready and at the top of my game to navigate any of these sticky situations that arose.

After spending a day gaining energy and calm for my personality I would be able to take any of these Monday events  calmly and make good decisions that would benefit me and my company greatly in the short and long term.  In reality, on Sundays I do not get to spend all day on myself – not with four kids at home.    But if I do understand myself and my personality I can rearrange both my work and nonwork time to come more from the activities and settings of my personality and less outside my zone.  I also can have people around me that I delegate both professional and personal activities to that are not within my personality.  The result is – no I am not calm and collected 100% of the time with my 4 kids, however, I do offer my best self much of the time to my work and my loved ones and am aware of when I am pulling from activities that put me outside my preferred natural zone and work quickly to get back to my natural zone as soon as possible.

Your North Star

Good News!!  Feed Your Career has created an interactive Discover Yourself tool free to members.  This tool is your North Star.  It will be a central area with information on yourself to use to guide in work and career decisions.  It will help you either tweak your current work so you are a better fit and in your natural zone or look into a new job that better suits your gifts, personality, values and passions. The first part of the Discover Yourself tool focuses on personality type.

The first step is to take Feed Your Career’s personality assessment as encouraged above.  This is then saved to your account – the Discover Yourself tool.  Once you have completed this step  the interactive tool inserts automatically activities that come naturally to you based on your assessed personality type.  The tool allows you to take off activities or add your own in from the list of generated activities – we know everyone does not fit neatly into 16 personalities – we all are truly unique and different.  The activities are suggestions for you to take note on whether you feel energetic and enthusiastic when doing these activities.  If unsure you can take them off and even add ones not listed.  The tool is meant to be developed over time as you discover more about yourself.

Next on the tool activities that are best for you to minimize or delegate to someone else are inserted — these are big energy drainer activities.  Again, the tool allows you to take ones off that you may not mind doing and add in others that you know are best left to someone else to complete.

Take this opportunity to use the Discover Yourself tool to create a custom profile for yourself.  Start rearranging your work and nonwork time to pull from your personality preferences.  You will be giving to those around you your best self — the most precious  gift anyone could ask for.

Two important career questions to ask yourself.

Does the work you do fit with who you are?

Do you feel purpose and meaning in your work?

For a large number of people – even those who appear to have their act together – the answer to these questions is no.

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who has found a good fit in your work and you feel valued, you find meaning in your work.  If that describes you, then the posts here will give you a structured process to help you continue to make fulfilling career choices.

I want to help you and others discover the truths about who you are, what you do best that will add meaning to your career and those around you.  I want to help you pull back the layers you have put on through the years to find out who you are at your core, in your natural zone. This is why Feed Your Career has developed an online Discover Yourself interactive tool where you select, edit and store important facts about yourself.

It is meant as a lifetime tool to give you direction and guidance whenever making choices about:

* career direction
* career advancement
* maintaining an already fulfilling career
* career change and re-invention
* volunteer and service opportunities

The Discover Yourself information tool acts as a reminder to your career and life priorities, your visions, facts you have discovered about yourself, best practices in order to lead a life filled with passion, purpose and meaning.  It is intended to be a tool you refer to regularly as life itself is filled with distractions and decisions daily that can take you off your intended path.  Never before has a generation had so many decisions on a daily basis that can add or take away from a person’s priorities, their gifts, their life passions and very importantly their life purpose.

Feed Your Career wants to make the journey to definition of who you are as simple as possible and easy to hold on to and build from.  We want your journey to a fulfilling career with the least number of roadblocks and the shortest path to the unveiling of your uniqueness you have to offer in the form of gifts, passions and value to the world today.

Much of what you need you likely already know but just lack the structure to pull it all together.  This is why we created Discover Yourself.  No long note-taking sessions, no big investment in a program required, no long list of  reading to get a clear picture of who you are and the direction you should take your career.  What you need is a centralized place that leads you through the critical information that paints a masterpiece of YOU – your uniqueness, your gifts, your passions.  The Discover Yourself tool is kept in one place for you to go back to to remind yourself of YOU and expand on as you uncover more about YOU and use it to guide you when making decisions regarding:

* your work (paid or volunteer)
* your activities at work
* your goals for your career

This exists now – it is Feed Your Career’s Discover Yourself interactive tool launching August 19th! Watch for more posts on how this indispensable career tool can help you.

Following are latest news bytes in social media realm for August 2010.

Important Stats on Reaching Target Audience Women

Almost half of women ages 18 to 34 consider themselves “Facebook addicts” and 15 percent of moms check Twitter “every waking moment,” according to new research. This confirms whether you’re targeting college students, 20-somethings or moms, you need to be using social media. 54 percent of Twitter-using moms check their feeds 10 or more times per day. Just 13 percent check once a day or less, while 15 percent claimed to check it “every waking moment.” The main reasons moms follow businesses on Twitter:

* To find out about the company’s products or services (67 percent)
* Because they’re already customers of the business (67 percent)
* To get deals (60 percent)

Social Media on the Rise for Recruiting Job Candidates

The most popular social tool for hiring, LinkedIn, was used by nearly 80 percent of companies in the survey — about 90 percent of those had hired a candidate they found through LinkedIn. Facebook was used for recruiting by 55 percent of respondents, and led to hires for 27.5 percent; Twitter was used by 45 percent of companies and resulted in hires for just over 14 percent.

Facebook is NOT Freedom of Speech Advocate

Maybe you are like me, assumed Facebook allowed anything to be written on user walls. Not so for blogger Eric Goldman. He writes a technology and marketing law blog. He has been writing about Facebook’s lawsuit with Power Ventures aka Power.com. The courts the end of July ruled in favor of Power Ventures and not Facebook. Since the court decision anyone commenting on this case on their Facebook wall has found their content blocked. Eric wrote about the new ruling in the case using and his headline did not appear as a Facebook status update on his wall. Something is fishy here.

Facebook Launches Questions and Answers

July 28th Facebook launched new feature QandA. All the content is public, meaning it will quickly form a huge knowledge base and be indexed in Google. Facebook is slowly rolling out the feature so they can closely watch how behavior patterns develop and react accordingly. So only a small group of users now will see the Questions option. I did not yet. It will appear on your home page’s left sidebar under Applications and above listing for Photos. Again, I do not yet see the feature on my Facebook, I will watch for it. Let me know if you are in the small group with the new feature.

Facebook and Amazon Go Public with Partnership

July 27th Facebook and Amazon announce their partnership. Amazon.com now offers a personalized page, where consumers can see product recommendations influenced by friends and their own tastes. They get notifications on when friend’s birthdays are coming up and suggestions on what to buy for them. If you want to try it out login to Amazon.com and you should see on far right side Facebook icon and Title “Tap into your Friends.” Right now it is beta. You then follow the prompts to signin and connect for recommendations. There are huge implications for this for Amazon.  Amazon will be able to use your Facebook profile information to offer you recommendations and even gift recommendations for your friends. Amazon is upfront in saying it will not share your Amazon account history with Facebook nor will it share your purchase history with Facebook. This is a relief to know considering who they are partnering with.

Facebook Broken Into – You May Be at Risk

Facebook profiles were lifted – 100 million of the 500 million were stolen end of July and the scary part is the feat did not even require hacking skills. The thief simply harvested publicly available data from Facebook’s open access directory. The affected users all have one thing in common – they hadn’t changed their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines.  The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, which could contain details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers.

Privacy has been a big issue for Facebook in the past. The latest news is sure to raise the question about whether the default settings should be more protective of user data. I recommend you read my two part blog on Facebook security to make sure your privacy is locked down solid.

I just returned from a 3 week vacation in Spain.  I was told people all over speak English so when I had no time to squeeze in learning a new language before going I was not worried.  When I got there, it was a different reality.  Yes, some people spoke English, but the vast majority did not.  Thankfully the people in Spain are very friendly and patient so my hand and face gestures together with my mini Spanish/English dictionary helped me survive.  I did have a few mishaps (actually more than a few) along the way.

There was the ordering of my favorite drink – hot mocha.  I was craving my favorite drink and ordered coffee, milk and chocolate and got two drinks: hot chocolate and an espresso.  There is no such thing as a mocha drink in Spain.    The word I needed to know was together – junto in Spanish.

Then there is the detergent.  I had rented a flat and there was some laundry left from the last renter.  Using some meant saving a trip to the store.  Word of advise -  know the word for bleach when working with laundry in a different language ( lejía).  The bottle was not regular laundry detergent, it was bleach.  My 14-year olds’ clothes were instantly turned into tie-dye designs.  She was extremely understanding.  She had clothes in that load she had just bought for the trip.  Yes, she had every reason to be upset but thankfully took it in stride.

I found myself at the grocery store for my first trip without my mini-dictionary.  For most food items I could look and grab and know what I was getting.  For milk, it did not work so well.  Being a dietitian I have drank skim milk for past 20 some years.  The next morning on my cereal I tasted whole milk for the first time in a long time.  Wow, that was very different on my tastebuds.  I now know the word for skim milk is leche desnatada.

For me, the best way of learning words and life in Spain was to plunge in and learn as I went along.  Do you have plans for your career?  Where you want to go?  What skills and experiences and credentials you need to get there?  Are you having trouble knowing where to start?  Are you afraid of doing it wrong?  My word of advice is just get STARTED and from there you will learn what you need and are lacking.  If you don’t start, you will never get to where you want to go.  Mistakes are ways of giving us direction in what we want, what we need, how we need to redirect ourselves.  Do not fear making mistakes.  Jack Canfield sums it up wonderfully.

As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

Jack Canfield  – Inspirational Self Help Author and Success Coach, author of book “Chicken Soup for the Soul”

For me, by the end of my trip I was much more comfortable living in Spain and using my limited Spanish to get by with.  I still have a long, long ways to go, but I will not make the same mistakes and was able to create a fabulous daily routine for myself and my kids to enjoy and live life fully for our trip in Spain which was our goal in going.

Mistakes are challenges in disguise. Realistically most of us don’t get it right the first time around. Successful people make mistakes all the time, the difference is that most of the failures go unnoticed because they don’t give up and keep on going.

Successful people evaluate their failures, come up with new solutions to the challenge and try again – this time more educated than the first. Successful people also don’t allow the fear of failure to stop them from achieving their goals.

If you study the failure and challenges of business you will discover the steps needed for achieving success.  These are the key lessons an organization learns as they grow, expand and compete in a changing marketplace. If you want to create shamelessly fabulous success, study all your failures and follow the path that it is laying out for you to sucess. Most highly successful people were not successful from the beginning, they had to struggle a little or a lot to reach their peak potential. Success takes time just as it takes time for you to adjust and learn new skills. But, be aware that mistakes will continue to happen even after you have reached a high level of success. You will always need to be learning something new in business to stay innovative and on top of your game.

Where are You?

Have you started working with social media for your career?  For your business?  What is holding you back?  Much of social media is experimenting and learning  to see what works and does not work to attract new customers.

Thomas Edison was not afraid of mistakes.  He had steel-bending perseverance and determination.  It has been reported that Edison failed over 6,000 times before perfecting the first electric light bulb. On one occasion a young journalist challenged Edison by saying to him, “Mr. Edison, why do you keep trying to make light by using electricity when you have failed so many times? Don’t you know that gas lights are with us to stay?”

Edison replied, “Young man, don’t you realize that I have not failed but have successfully discovered six thousand ways that won’t work!”  What mistakes have you been making and learning from lately?  If none, you are staying too close to your comfort zone.  You need to take calculated risks and learn from them.  There are no successful people who have not made mistakes to get to where they are and they are still making mistakes today.

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins. The first is to act precipitously without thought and the second is to not act at all.

Carl Icahn – Investor and Entrepreneur and Billionaire

What actions are you taking next to find your journey to your success, your dreams, your passion?  What are your mistakes telling you?  Embrace them, they are part of your journey to success.