What Kind of Job Do You Want

One of the biggest mistakes job seekers make is to start looking for a job before they're really ready — even before they have figured out what career field they want to work in and what job they are qualified for. Before you begin your job search, you must have a clear picture of what you want to do, what you can do, and where you want to do it. You need to define your objectives clearly. Good career planning is essential. Remember, it's not just a job; it's a step in your career.

Self-Assessment

If you are in the process of choosing a career, a self-assessment is in order. A self-assessment looks at your interests, values, skills, and personality. These factors help determine which careers you will find most satisfying and in which you will be the most successful. Although it's been said that you are what you do, think about this phrase reversed: You do what you are. Your personality, likes, dislikes, and values should determine what you do and where you work, not the other way around. Self-assessment is usually done through vocational or career tests that include interest inventories, values inventories, skill assessments, and personality inventories.
Interest inventories let you home in on your interests by presenting you with a series of statements and then asking you whether you agree or disagree with each one. The premise of interest inventories is that people with similar interests will be successful in the same type of work. Here are some statements you might find on an interest inventory:

• I enjoy playing golf.
• One of my favorite activities is reading.
• I would rather participate in sports than watch sports.
• I would rather watch sports than participate in sports.

A test that focuses on your values will consider the importance to you of different values. Here are some questions you might find on a values inventory:

• Do you enjoy making a difference in people's lives?
• Is having a prestigious job important to you?
• Do you need to have a lot of leisure time to be happy?

A test that assesses your skills will not only ask if you have certain skills, it might also ask if you enjoy using them. Although you may not have the skills you need to work in a particular field, it doesn't mean you shouldn't consider that career for the future — after you've obtained them. Here are some questions you might see on a skills assessment:

• Are you good at working with numbers? Do you enjoy working with numbers?
• Do you pay attention to details? Do you like having to pay attention to details?
• Are you good at working with people? Do you enjoy working with people?

Career-planning professionals have discovered that people with certain personality types are well suited for some careers but not for others.
A personality inventory like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator will look at factors such as traits, motivations, and attitude.
http://www.netplaces.com/job-search/before-you-begin-your-job-search/what-kind-of-job-do-you-want.htm

A Good Match

Time and again, career counselors report that one of the most common problems job seekers run into is that they don't consider whether they're suited for a particular position or career. Keep in mind that, on a daily basis, you'll spend more time on your job than you spend doing anything else. It's important to know that you'll enjoy the work. If you are thinking about becoming an elementary school teacher, be sure you enjoy spending a great deal of time with children. If you want to be an accountant, ask yourself if you're meticulous and if you like detail-oriented work. If you want to work for a daily newspaper, be sure you can handle a fast-paced, high-pressure environment.

A Job and a Lifestyle

When you choose a career, you are also choosing a lifestyle. If you decide, for example, that you want to be a management consultant for an international firm, it is likely you'll be spending a great deal of your time in an airplane. You'd better like to fly!
You also have to think about where you will have to work. Some jobs exist primarily in certain areas. Do you want a career that would require you to live in a large city? Or would you rather live in a less populated, rural area?
Compensation is another important factor you must consider. Do you feel it is more important to make a lot of money or to be fulfilled by your work?
What will your work schedule be? If you want to have a flexible work schedule, you will have to choose a job that allows for one. Are you willing to work the long hours that are common in certain fields? If not, there are some jobs you shouldn't consider, like most jobs in the legal profession.
Think about how fast you want to advance. Some careers offer a much greater chance than others do to advance quickly. In other fields, the opportunities for advancement are virtually nonexistent. When looking for a particular job in your field, you should also be aware that companies do not all offer the same opportunities for advancement.

Are You Working Long Hours on Work You Love?

Are you working more, enjoying it less, and dreading the time you spend most days at your work place? If you answered "yes" to this question, take some time to explore your current career choice and consider all of the other options life has to offer. You spend a substantial portion of your life at work. Why not make that time as professionally and personally rewarding and fulfilling as possible? You have nothing to lose, and potentially a great deal to gain, by spending time exploring your interests, values, and options. I believe you really, ought to want to love what you do at work.

You Work Long Hours: Invest Them in Work You Love

The average American manager works 42 hours per week, but a substantial number of managers and professionals - three in 10, or 10.8 million people - work 49 or more hours per week. Of male managers and professionals, four in 10 work 49 hours. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2000 report, this number of working hours is substantially unchanged since 1989. More managers and professionals are working over 49 hours, but more are also working less which keeps the number steady.
Comparatively, the hours that people work in non-supervisory or production jobs have steadily declined since the early 1960s in all categories except manufacturing, construction, and mining. In these jobs, hours have increased, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review, July 2000.
While the overall trend in working hours is down, with the average non-supervisory or production employee working 34.5 hours in 1999 as compared to 38.7 in 1964, this figure is skewed by workers in services and especially retail, who are working substantially fewer hours.
Remember, too, that these hours do not include time spent dressing for work or commuting. Getting to and from work can add an additional five to 20 hours to your work week. So, when you consider all of the time you spend related to work, you are working long hours.

You Feel as if You Are Working Harder

Managers and professionals perceive that they are working harder. Combine the extra hours relating to work with the actual hours worked, and a substantial portion of your week is filled. The pace of the modern work place is stressful. With most spouses and partners working and two schedules to balance with the needs of the family, life, in general, is stressful. Technology inventions allow you to communicate with work twenty-four hours a day if needed. With email, cell phones, laptops, and PDAs, is it any wonder that you feel as if you are working all the time? Even if you're not, you have the constant potential to fill every waking hour with work.
A Gallup Management Journal Survey summary reports that nearly one-fifth of workers are actively disengaged, or disconnected from their work. These workers have high absenteeism and are less happy with their personal and professional lives.
According to the report, "Gallup has calculated that they are penalizing U.S. economic performance by about $300 billion, or about the size of the nation’s defense budget." These attendance and dissatisfaction issues make work longer, harder, and more stressful for the remaining workers.
Additionally, in many work places fewer people are doing more work as workers are not replaced when they leave or retire. In other organizations, finding qualified staff remains problematic, especially in areas relating to engineering and other technical careers.

Solutions to Ensure That You Love Your Work

Now that I've convinced you that you're working long hours and working hard, why not follow this prescription for making sure you love your work. If you're going to work this hard, your work must be something you love. You need to take some career exploration steps to find work that you really love.
So often in life, people seem to fall into jobs because one was handy or available at the right moment. Maybe you started in one position with a company hoping to move into something you liked better later. Maybe you started life as a teacher and continued to teach out of inertia or because you had so many years invested in the retirement system.
No matter your current position, every once in awhile, it's time to assess whether the career you have created is the best career for you. Recognizing that there are certain economic and social realities, think about where you'd really like to spend the time of your life. These steps will help you explore and find work you really love.

Spend Some Thinking Time to Know Yourself

Take time on your vacation or on a long weekend to devote exclusively to thinking about your work and career. Ask yourself some tough questions. Do you get to do what you like to do at work every day? Does your job match your values and make a difference? Do you make the money you need to achieve your goals?
Does your career provide the work-life balance you desire? Do you love your work or is there another type of work you'd prefer? Be honest with yourself and if you answer these questions negatively, it's time to explore further.
One exercise that I have found particularly useful is to write down everything you want to do, accomplish, see, try, visit, and so on. If your current career will allow you to accomplish these goals, okay. But it's not okay, if you don't have a shot at getting what you want from life.

Read Career Books and Do the Exercises

Here are several excellent career exploration books. Take time to read several of the books and do the exercises recommended by the authors. Think of it as guided career exploration to discover work you will love.

Take Career Assessments to Find Work You Love

The Web provides an excellent opportunity to take online career assessments to identify your strengths and explore your needs. Purchasing the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, also provides an access code to an online assessment called StrengthsFinder.com, which is useful.
Several sources of career assessments you might want to explore to learn about yourself include these. You can pursue these assessments on your own or you can consider talking with a career professional.
http://humanresources.about.com/od/careerplanningandadvice1/a/loveyourwork_2.htm

Create Your Own Path: Career Promotion Tips

Tired of watching other workers advance their career as you continue to exceed all expectations, without promotion, in your current position? Successful workers create their own path to promotion; they don't rely on luck. Self-promotion is key to your career success.
If you have experienced this situation, even once, you know that you can’t continue to wait for others to decide when you should be offered a promotion. Even if you are not ready to make a job or career change today, you will benefit from knowing how to put into action a successful self-promotion plan.
Unfortunately, if no one knows how much you contribute to the company, you will continue to miss the next great promotion opportunity. Letting people know that you are interested in advancing your career is the first step in an effective self-promotion plan. You can simply advise your immediate supervisor or a representative from your human resource department, but remember the old adage that "actions speak louder than words," and plan to make a lasting impression.

Create a Career Opportunity

One successful technique is to single out an unresolved challenge that exists in your company. Try to pick a situation that will benefit from your combination of experience and skills. Write a memo that outlines the need you've discovered. Highlight how you will use your skills to resolve the problem and contribute to the immediate objectives of the team or department involved. Send your memo to the person who will benefit most from your unique approach, for example, your boss or a human resources representative.
Don't wait for your organization to discover the same need. By waiting, you take the chance that they may decide to post the position. (If posting positions is policy in your company, at least your name is on the promotion list first.)
Without your proactive approach to your career and potential promotion, they may decide to promote one of your peers. By being proactive, you create a win-win situation. You may gain a challenging, enjoyable career opportunity and eliminate the need for a competition. Even if a new career or promotion opportunity does not result from your actions, you have successfully created an opportunity to demonstrate your value to the organization.You have increased the likelihood that they will consider you for the next rewarding career or promotion opportunity.
Volunteering is another way to promote your career and demonstrate your value while expanding your knowledge in critical areas of your company. Volunteering also provides a great way to earn a reputation for being reliable, professional, and cooperative, worthy of promotion. Keep in mind that while you are volunteering, you may discover a need that you have the skills and experience to resolve. A great advantage in this situation is that by being involved, you know the right person to contact; it may be the person you are working with in your volunteer position.

The more you know about yourself, the more you will communicate about your value to the right people at the right time to promote your career. Record everything that you do to enhance the company's bottom line. Start today by dividing a blank sheet of paper into three columns with three separate headings: action, result of action, and impact of action. Keep this paper with you as you do your job.
Your key accomplishments are probably actions that you take for granted. For example, if you are responsible for accounts payable, in column one write "paying invoices;" in column two write the result of this action, for example, paid in time - no interest payments, and in the third column write the impact of this action, for example, a decrease in the cost of production. Did you think of this action as related to decreasing cost, or did you think of it as doing part of your job? How do you think others view this action?
Scheduled performance development planning meetings provide the perfect opportunity to showcase your accomplishments for career promotion. By being proactive and creating opportunities, you improve the likelihood that you will gain the attention of your employer and the career promotion that you deserve.
http://humanresources.about.com/cs/careerdevelopment/a/aapromotion_2.htm

Network Your Way to a New Job or Career

When Cookie Burkhalter relocated from Colorado to Wilmington, Delaware three years ago, she thought finding a new job would be easy. With first-rate qualifications and more than twenty years of professional experience at Fortune 500 companies, she figured she would land a new position quickly by surfing a few Internet job boards and sending out her résumé.
But Burkhalter, an IT project manager, quickly discovered that it wasn’t going to be so easy. After months of applying for open positions, “I never got a single interview from a posting on the Net,” she declared. “Applying for all those jobs was a complete waste of my time.”
Her job search began to turn around for Burkhalter when she realized that the missing element in her job search was the human factor. “Even though I grew up in Delaware, I had been living out of state for a long time,” she recalled. “I had almost no local contacts, so I was relying on postings and ads to find out about available jobs. But by the time I saw the ad, so had thousands of other people, and one of them was always just a little more qualified than me.”

Network Your Way to A New Job

So Burkhalter set about rebuilding her business and social network. She joined two women’s groups made up of others who shared some of her personal interests and hobbies, and began to meet new people. When she let her new friends know about her job search, all of a sudden, she began to hear about jobs before they were advertised, and interviews started to materialize. When she finally did land a new job, it was the direct result of a referral from a friend.
You may not recognize what Burkhalter did as business networking, but that’s exactly what it was. Many people think of business networking as circulating around a room and exchanging business cards. But a broader view of business and social networking is that it creates a pool of contacts from which you can draw leads, referrals, ideas, and information for your job search. You can network without ever attending an official business or social networking event, although attending events is useful in networking.
Texas resident Maria Elena Duron found an executive job as a result of working as a community volunteer. “I was volunteering at the Midlands MexTex Fiesta, and I found myself flipping burgers side-by-side with a board member of the Austin Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation," Duron remembers. "He asked me if I had ever been involved in fundraising, and when I said I had, he asked for my résumé. He forwarded it to the Foundation with his personal recommendation, and three weeks later I was hired as Executive Director for the West Texas Region."

Find Your Job and Career by Business Networking

Your career network can and should contain current and former co-workers, alumni from your school, a wide range of people in your industry, and personal friends. Making time for lunch or coffee with these people can be much more productive for your job search than reading the want ads or surfing the web. In fact, surveys consistently show that 80-85% of job-seekers find work as the result of a referral from a friend or colleague, and only 2-4% land jobs from Internet job boards.
If you have been out of touch for a while with people you already know, don’t let that stop you from re-establishing contact when you start your job search. Everyone you speak to will have had to look for work at some point in their career, and most of them will be sympathetic and helpful.
To spread your business and social networking net even wider, you may need to start making the acquaintance of new people also. Every time you talk to a friend or colleague about your job search, ask for suggestions of other you might speak to, and follow up on their referrals.

Use Organized Events for Business Networking

Attending organized events may also play a role in your business networking and job search, since this can be an easy way to expand your business network quickly. Here are some popular choices for business and social networking events:

• Chamber of Commerce mixers,
• Service clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis,
• Trade and professional association meetings in your industry,
• Lectures, workshops, conferences, and fundraisers hosted by educational institutions, community organizations, and affinity groups,
• Social, cultural, and sporting events that include receptions or other mix-and-mingle time,
• Private gatherings organized for the purpose of meeting new people and schmoozing, and
• Job clubs.

You will have more success at this kind of business and social networking if you go back to the same groups over and over than if you keep going to new groups all the time. Find two or three that seem to have the right mix of people, and keep going back.

Follow-up Is the Key to Business Networking

If you don't follow up with the people you meet, though, you are wasting your time in meeting them. You may think that once you have told someone what type of job you are looking for, if they hear of something, they will call you. The truth is that if they have met you only once, they probably don't even remember you, and it's even less likely that they will remember where they put your number.
After meeting someone new, send them a “nice-to-meet-you” note and invite them to attend another event with you or make a date for lunch or coffee. Find out what the two of you have in common, and see if there is an activity you could share.
Building relationships likes this takes time and effort, but relationships are the core of networking. The people in your network should be people you truly enjoy interacting with, because if you’re doing it right, you’ll be spending a lot of time with them.
Says Duron, "Don't limit yourself to just networking in your industry; everyone is interconnected. Getting to know a day care director makes sense even if you don't want a job in day care, because she knows so many people. Waiters and hairdressers are often the first to hear about coming changes that lead to open positions. As long as you have your antennae out and listen, you can connect with anyone."
Don’t expect business and social networking to be a quick fix for your job search. It can take time for your relationship-building efforts to pay off. You need to put in the effort to get to know people, and trust that you will see results from it. But the best time to begin building your business and social network is while you are still employed.

http://humanresources.about.com/od/interpersonalcommunication/a/networking_jobs_2.htm

Internal Job Application for Job Opportunities

These directions provide guidance for employees who wish to apply for internal jobs within your organization. They accompany the two-part internal job application that are pages two and three of this feature. Please feel free to use and/or modify the format to meet your organization's needs.

Internal Job Application

(Your Organization Name) is dedicated to assisting employees to reach their professional goals through internal promotion and transfer opportunities. One of the tools the company makes available to employees in managing their career is (your organization) internal job posting. This procedure enables current employees to apply for any available position either before or at the same time the position is advertised outside of the company.
Internal job opportunities are regularly posted on the "Career Opportunities" bulletin board on the right side of the lunchroom. Job openings are also posted on the “General Information” board by the time clocks.
To apply for an opening:
Step 1: Ensure that you meet the following eligibility requirements.

• You are a current, regular full- or part-time (your company) employee.
• You have been in your current position for at least six months. (Exceptions to this six-month requirement can be made by your current supervisor and should be consistent with company business needs.)
• Your performance meets performance development plan (PDP) standards or established work standards in your current position.
• You have not had an employee counseling or corrective action within six months. You are not following a performance improvement plan for your current position.
• You meet the qualifications listed for the position on the job posting.

Step 2: Complete an Internal Job Application form.
Applications are available from Human Resources, the reception area of the front office and in the form bins on the right wall of the lunchroom. Attach your resume, if you have one, to the completed application.

Step 3: Submit the Internal Job Application to your supervisor for approval.
Step 4: Submit your completed and approved Internal Job Application to HR.
Step 5: Candidates who are qualified will participate in an initial interview with the supervisor of the position, if they have not interviewed with that particular supervisor within the past six months. Finalists will participate in two additional interviews, with an HR representative and with an internal customer of the position or a manager. The selected person will be notified by the supervisor of the position.
http://humanresources.about.com/cs/recruiting/a/intjobapp.htm

Why Shine at an Internal Interview?

I have a question for you which I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have a presentation to make to an interview board followed by an interview tomorrow for a position which I am afraid I will not be seriously considered for. I am not being defeatist; it is just that I am fully aware who is ear marked for the job. I have in fact been told as much. I do, however, want to give a good account of myself, but I am finding it difficult to motivate myself. What do you recommend?

Answer: The internal job interview serves many purposes. The employer holds an internal interview to assess the skills and experience of a current employee. The internal interview can be so much more than just a job interview, though. You might want to solicit opportunities to participate in an internal interview. Here's why you'll want to participate enthusiastically in an internal interview.
This is the most important thing you need to remember about an internal interview. Even if the position has someone else's name written all over it, organizations use internal job interviews in multiple ways - ways that you can take advantage of to further your career aspirations. You can use an internal job interview for career development.
Organizations use internal interviews to become familiar with a range of employee skills and interests, in addition to selecting an employee for the current opening. Thus, the internal job interview is your opportunity to have an audience that wants to get to know you and potentially appreciate what you have to offer.
Even if you believe that you are not seriously being considered for the current job, the interview is your opportunity to shine for all of your future opportunities within your organization.
The interna interview is a terrific opportunity to display your talents, skills, interests, and potential to make contributions. Don't blow a wonderful opportunity to impress the interview team with your interest, talents, skills, passion, potential to contribute, and regard for your organization.
Don't think of the internal interview as your opportunity to obtain a position that you believe has already been tagged for another employee. Think of the internal interview as an opportunity to shine for your career. More opportunities will appear. If not, you can always target another employer; the job interviews you experience with your current employer will prepare you to shine for a potential new employer. Practice does make job interview comfort and efficacy improve.
And, just in case you're wrong about the employee that you think will receive the promotion, use the job interview as an opportunity to learn more about your organization and the interview team members, your colleagues. You can put your very best foot forward for your future in the internal job interview.
Is this motivating enough? I hope so. Good luck and best wishes. Don't mess up your time to shine, learn, and practice during your internal job interview.
http://humanresources.about.com/od/career-development/f/Purpose-Of-An-Internal-Job-Interview-For-Career-Development.htm?nl=1