Career Advice & Insights

Describe your value, then convince others. Your personal brand is the keystone to communicating your value during a job-search campaign. Once you have a clear statement to describe your value to an employer, you can start convincing others to believe it. Gain a competitive advantage by honing a personal brand statement. Include it in your … Read More

Open up opportunities by demonstrating subject-matter expertise with a blog. For job hunters, getting published can help you establish yourself as a subject-matter expert, make new connections and set yourself apart from the crowd. While getting published in a trade publication or mainstream media outlet is challenging, there’s one publishing platform that is completely in … Read More

Even if your ultimate goal is full-time employment, freelance work can open doors. Be careful, though, to make smart choices about what assignments to accept. Even for professionals who’d rather stay on a payroll than hang out a shingle, freelancing and contract work have been lifesavers the past couple of years. As millions of full-time, … Read More

Write and don’t stop until you have a body of material to edit. “Where do I start?” “How do I start?” These are good questions. Whether composing business correspondence during your job search or tackling another writing task, the author must begin without knowing the answers to these questions. They just need to initiate the … Read More

After two years of unemployment, Rob Smith was sad and scared to return to work. You may be too. Although it’s surprising to hear, psychologists and career experts say Smith is more the norm than the exception.   After nearly two years of unemployment, Rob Smith finally got a job offer. It was with a … Read More

Following your heart to a dream job? Research, talk to an accountant, consider a tweak to your current job and whether it is really a change of job that will satisfy you. “Do what you love.” We’ve all heard that career advice before and we’d like to think we follow it, or would, if given … Read More

Depression and anxiety create a destructive cycle for job seekers, making it harder to find a job. Soroush Ghaderi was a confident young engineer. He worked at Sun Microsystems, one of the giants of Silicon Valley, where he had been on staff for 10 years, almost his entire career since college. As Sun’s fortunes faded, … Read More

Some hiring managers relish the opportunity to counsel a job candidate on what he could have improved. You just have to ask the right person, the right way. Read More

Studies indicate the language often used to describe female professionals weakens their appeal to hiring managers. What can you do to level the playing field? Do job references describe men and women in different terms? In subtle ways executives routinely use different terms to refer to men and women in recommendations, negatively affecting job candidates … Read More