How to get the experience you need for the job you want.

Experience can be a dreaded word when you’re doing a job search — especially when you are looking at employment listings for the job you want, and noting that you don’t have the required number of years for doing that kind of work. It’s not easy. All you want is a toehold, a way in,

On coaching humans about their jobs

Sometimes, Monday mornings bring flashes of insight and happiness. Today, it’s this: I am a career coach. I come by it honestly. As a new college graduate, I started (fell into) a career in human resources. After 16 years in HR work, I left it and vowed not to look back. People don’t like HR people

Leaders spend (a lot of) time hiring people with potential.

My daily social feeds are chock-full of moans and laments about a lack of leadership or the gotchas while hiring people for jobs. Both can change everything. Here’s what I have to say about it. Leaders spend a lot of time on hiring. Don’t fly through the hiring process. Hiring decisions deserve time. I know

Determining what positions you need on your team.

So far, I haven’t visited a campus where resources were flush — where there were plenty of dollars for every position needed for a marketing or communications team. If you lead a team, you likely dream of adding to it. Yet, if given the opportunity to add one position in the coming fiscal year, how

Are you managing your career?

Remember how you felt at the start, when you were looking for your first job? All you wanted was a toehold, a way in, a chance. But it felt like everyone else had control of your future. I got my first job out of college because I could type. And yes, I was taken aback

What about you and the leaders you meet?

The fact is, when you have a job, you are going to run into bad leaders. Why? Because leadership is difficult. Even for those with natural leadership ability, it is not easy. As the saying goes, “People quit their bosses, not their jobs.” In earlier posts, I wrote about two extremes of leadership: the good

Do you know a good leader when you see one?

My earlier post identified leadership as the good, the bad, and you. I wrote about six behaviors typical of bad leaders. While the opposite of my six observations of the bad are a place to start, there will be no getting off easy for me. Here are my top six qualities of good leaders. You

Leadership: The good, the bad, and you.

For simplicity’s sake, we can boil leadership down to: the good, the bad, and you. This is the first of three posts to cover all three. When the topic of leadership comes up, most people think first about “bad bosses” — they skip right over the good, to the bad. So here goes, I’ll use

Your First Job: What you want out of it.

When you’re searching for your first job, you don’t usually concentrate on much beyond the starting salary and general aspects of the work you’ll do everyday. Once you land that first gig, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief and start managing any jitters about the first day. For most people, it takes hindsight to understand

8 Job Hunting Mistakes Made by Recent College Grads (Part 2)

Wait, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, job hunting mistakes. We started this conversation with the first four in part one. Notice I’m skirting around the typical—bad grammar in your cover letter or not sending a thank you note—that stuff is table stakes. Read on for my final four. 1: Failing to coach professional