Making the Most of a Career Counselor or Coach

You’ve chosen a career counselor or coach. How do you make the most of the sessions?

1. When you set your appointment, ask if there’s some homework you could do in advance of the session.

2. Ask if you can tape record the session. You’ll find that you’ll get more out of listening to the tape than from the session itself. That’s because, at home, you have more time to reflect on the question, you’re not trying to impress the counselor with your answers, something that’s almost unavoidable, especially in a first session, and you can play the tape for another person, who might offer a useful perspective.

3. Be concise, even in answering open-ended questions such as, “Tell me about yourself.” Practice the traffic light rule. During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green. Your counselor is paying attention and what you say is probably important. During the second 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is yellow. Your counselor is increasingly likely to be getting bored, and what you say is less likely to be important. At the 60-second mark, your light is red. Yes, there are occasional times you’ll want to run a red light, but you’re generally wise to stop or ask a question.

4. Open up. As mentioned above, it’s natural to want to come off as smart and together. But if in fact, you don’t understand something that’s said, or you’re really a basket case, tell your counselor or coach. Otherwise, he’ll proceed on false assumptions, which will set you up for failure. For example, if he assigns you a homework assignment, and in your heart of hearts, you know you’ll procrastinate it, by all means, say so. The counselor will change the assignment or better help prepare you for that assignment. For example, if a counselor asked you to make 20 cold calls to prospective employers and that terrifies you, say so. He’ll role play with you, perhaps even write a script for you, or urge you to practice first with a trusted friend. But if you simply nod and accept the assignment, you’ll likely not do the homework and return to the next session with your tail between your legs, or worse, cancel the session, and stay stuck.

5. Be open to the coach’s or counselor’s ideas. Many clients merely want their apriori beliefs supported. But chances are, if you picked a counselor you like and who specializes in your situation, her views are worth serious consideration. Of course, don’t don’t be afraid to raise a concern about a suggestion, if you truly have doubts about it.

6. End the session by summarizing what you got out of the session and then asking the counselor/coach if you missed anything.

7. Ask for concrete homework.

8. Before starting the homework, listen to the tape, perhaps with someone you trust. Take notes. Perhaps revise the homework based on what your heard. After all, this isn’t like school, where you have to do what the teacher says. You’re in charge here. But then do that homework.

9. If after listening to the tape, you’re unhappy with the counselor/coach’s work decide whether you think offering feedback will likely result in a good-enough second session, or whether you should cancel and find another counselor/coach. Remember, if you google “career coach” or “career counselor,” you’ll find hundreds of career pros’ websites. And, you can always do self-coachingor co-coaching. (See my articles on those two options.)

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/making-most-career-counselor-or-coach_id1507

Choosing a Career Counselor or Coach

So you’ve decided you need to spring for a pro to help you find a career, land a job, help you be more successful in your current job.

Here’s how to find the right one for you:

First, decide if you want a career counselor or a career coach.

While there is overlap (indeed, I feel my practice is truly a cross between the two) career counselors are more likely to:

1. Help you develop insight into who you are: your strengths, weaknesses, and predilections.

2. While not providing psychotherapy, help you understand fears that are keeping you from choosing a fully self-actualizing career or conducting an aggressive job search.

3. Teach you sound methodology for landing a job.

4. Help you craft a resume and cover letter.

Career coaches are more likely to:

1. Ask questions to help you identify goals and objectives for improving your performance on your current job or for getting promoted.

2. Ask questions to help you identify goals and objectives for improving your life outside of work.

3. Focus on the here and now rather than looking back to childhood-rooted psychological factors in your behavior.

Once you’ve decided whether you want a counselor or coach, how do you find the right person for you?

Sure, ask friends for recommendations, but I urge you to talk with three candidates before choosing one. You’re unlikely to get three names from friends, so I recommend you simply google “career coach” or ‘career counselor,” visit the websites of a number of them and then phone up those that sound potentially right. Don’t worry if they’re halfway cross the country. By-phone counseling can work almost as well as in-person. Better to have a superior counselor/coach by phone than a mediocre one in person. That said, if it’s important that your career counselor know the local job market well, google “career counselor’ and your locale.

On the phone, start by saying something like, “Hi, my name is X, I’m looking for a career coach and liked what I saw on your website. Would you mind answering a couple questions?” The person will undoubtedly assent, whereupon ask:

“Clients in what sorts of careers or situations are you most and least effective with?” (Do not tell your situation first. That can tempt the person to shade his answer to match your situation.)

If your situation doesn’t match with the person’s strengths, thank the person and say you’re looking for someone who specializes in people in your situation. Don’t let the person convince you otherwise. There are thousands of counselors and coaches. You have the right to hold out for one who’s particularly effective with people in your situation, for example, one that specializes in disgruntled lawyers or stay-at-home mom who’s ready to reenter the workplace. I, for example, specialize in helping people of exceptional intelligence become happier and more successful in their current career.

If the candidate counselor/coach does specialize in people in your situation,

1. In about 30-60 seconds, describe your situation and ask “How would the process likely work in my case?”

2. What is your hourly rate? I recommend against working with anyone who insists on a prepaid multi-session fee. Good counselors are confident enough in their ability not to try to get your money for multiple sessions upfront. So, if you like the counselor but he only mentions a multi-session prepay, ask, “I’m only willing to work with someone who charges by the hour? Are you willing to do that? And if so, what would that hourly rate be?”

3. Of course, this will vary, but approximately how many hours, over what period of time do you guess we’ll likely end up working together?

4. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me or ask me?

It’s usually recommended, at this point, that you ask for references. I don’t believe that’s worth it. Even most bad counselors can dredge up a few people who will say nice things. And many excellent counselors will refuse to provide references because they don’t feel the need to take the time to get clients’ permission to release phone numbers and impose on his clients to offer references.

At this point, if you haven’t yet spoken with three counselors/coaches, but like the person, say something like, “I’ve really liked talking with you and will probably call back to schedule an appointment, but I’ve planned to talk with one (or two) other people and I feel I should do that. Is that okay?

If the counselor is anything but supportive of that, beware. It, at minimum, suggests a short fuse that could blow at some point during your work together.

Next week, I’ll teach you how to make the most of your work with a career counselor or coach.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/choosing-career-counselor-or-coach_id1508

My Predictions for 2006

My goal here is to offer predictions that might inform your decision making in the workplace and in choosing a career path.

Of course, it’s oft said that he who lives by the crystal ball eats broken glass, but my annual predictions in previous years have been reasonably on-target. I must admit that’s partly because my predictions are rarely radical—they’re usually predictions of extant trends that I believe will accelerate. I’ve found that rarely do things radically change from one year to the next. The moderate nature of my predictions come also from my nature--Constitutionally, I’m somewhere between an early adopter and the average resident of Peoria. That puts me in a good position to predict things that will affect the mainstream. The accuracy of my past predictions may also be the result of the procedure I use in developing them. During the first days of January, I create a list of predictions based purely on my synthesis of what I’ve read, heard, seen, and experienced. Then on January 10, by which time, most prognosticators have rendered their annual forecasts, I read dozens of sets of predictions from a wide range of sources and, as a result, modify my own. What you see here is the result.

MY PREDICTIONS

Technology

Webconferencing will grow. Webconferencing is getting ever easier to set up, and the quality of web-based video conferencing is rapidly improving. At the same time, mid and late adopters are getting more comfortable with the idea of virtual rather than in-person meetings. News the Career-Minded Can Use: If you’re a manager who traditionally has had people fly and drive in for meetings or trainings, consider trying out a state-of-the-art Webconferencing service such as WebEx. (www.webex.com.).

Nuclear will boom. The nuclear (George, that’s “nuclear,” not “nucular,”) threat from Iran or North Korea will burgeon, forcing an at-least symbolic increase in U.S. nuclear weaponry. On the peaceful front, the U.S. will move closer to building its nuclear plants in decades because of American desire for energy independence from Persian Gulf nations and anti-American Venezuela, plus reassurance from the techies that new-generation nuclear plants are remarkably safe. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Jobs in the nuclear industry should be plentiful, as will be jobs in the oil and gas industries. (The latter is not a prediction. It’s long-standing fact. See my blog post of Jan. 7, 2006.)

Search will expand. Google enjoys a reputation as a premier employer involved in creating important (and cool) projects. So, I’m not surprised to be hearing, again and again, that some of the world’s most capable people are applying for jobs at Google—for most openings, it receives hundreds of strong applications. Ultimately, the best company is the one with the best people, so I believe Google will continue to be the leader in search, staving off the upcoming challenge from Microsoft and Yahoo!. Extending that leadership, I predict that in 2006, publishers--with author permission--will decide to allow Google to index all its books. As a result, Google users will be able to read segments of a book up to a page or two in length for free, with additional amounts requiring a fee, to be split among bookseller (Google), author, and publisher, just as in traditional book sales. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Consider working for Google. Google most often hires software developers, but like other companies, also employs accountants, HR people, marketers, etc. Another implication of the boom in search is that the demand will increase for information brokers, self-employed people who are masters at using search engines and other resources to unearth needed information for clients.

Toyota hybrids rock; U.S. cars roll. Hybrid cars will grow in popularity as gas prices remain high and environmentalism-as-religion grows, but in 2006 and 2007, none will be as popular as the Toyota Prius because of its extraordinary gas mileage in a futuristic looking, surprisingly spacious and powerful, and rock-solid reliable car. By 2010, the inexpensive and sometimes downright sexy Chinese cars yet will become reliable enough to generate significant sales in the U.S. Meanwhile, U.S. carmakers such as GM, which is losing $25 million per day, will have an ever tougher time competing as they continue to sign union contracts that give its average worker $27 an hour plus thousands of dollars per worker in health insurance ($5 billion in total) and a pension most people can only wish for (GM has $86 billion in its pension fundt), while granting them security of employment despite U.S. cars’ high defect rate. I predict that as the US airlines that recently declared bankruptcy, GM and/or Ford will declare bankruptcy in late 2006. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Work for Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, or a Chinese car manufacturer. Buy stock in Toyota; sell stock in GM and Ford.

Commercials come to the Net. With ever more of us using computers with broadband connection, ever more Web sites will force us to watch commercials before being able to view our desired content. That, of course, is particularly likely to occur on sites with in-demand content, for example, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and who knows, maybe even US News and World Report. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Get in on the ground floor of this trend by: 1. Learning what makes an effective Webmercial. One way to start is simply to watch some and ask yourself, “What about this Webmercial makes me want to or not want to watch it? What, if anything, about it would motivate me to buy from that advertiser?” 2. Deciding whether you’d rather: a. work for an ad agency that could or already develops Webmercials. b. For your current or future employer, work with an ad agency to create Webmercials. c. Be an ad salesperson specializing in Webmercials.

Apple will start rotting. Its profits are too dependent on the IPod. Competitors will likely bite into Apple’s dominance of the MP3 market. In addition, IPod sales will be sliced because IPods have now been around for more than four years—hipness declines with age. Cool-hungry teens and 20-somethings will have moved onto the next fad. Apple will be additionally sliced by Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, which slice Mac sales. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Apple stock could be eaten to the core. It’s still in an uptrend, gaga over IPod sales and hype. Sell when it drops more than 10 percent. Also, work somewhere else, for example, the reinvigorated HP.

Employment

Ever more job openings will be for temporary positions. The ever faster pace of change means that companies need fewer full-time permanent employees and more short-termers with the precise skills to complete a specific project. Employers also prefer temp employees for a reason they less readily admit: temps are less likely to sue for wrongful termination, because the employee was informed, upfront, that the position was temporary. Companies also like temp workers because the benefits costs are lower--temp workers aren’t around long enough to qualify for employee paid retirement plans and other perks that go to long-term employees. In an era of historic-low unemployment, why do job seekers accept temp jobs? In part because they’re optimistic they’ll do well and the temp job will become permanent. Alas, that’s less often true than they hope. Also, they believe, incorrectly, that the free agent life offers freedom. Alas, too often it provides the freedom to be unemployed, without health insurance and without a retirement plan. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Try to convert your temp job to a long-term one (few jobs, anymore, can truly be called permanent) by letting your boss know that you appreciate working with him or her and the company, building relationships with higher-ups, and developing and/or touting skills the employer will always need, for example, sales or project management. And at the risk of sounding like your mother, come in a little early and stay a little late.

Telecommuting will rise. As traffic from the suburbs to downtown increases and more jobs can be done from home, ever more employers will allow workers to work from home, at least for part of the week. Indeed, that was salary.com’s hottest compensation trend for 2006. And why not? If an employee works at home, that’s one less desk of real estate the employer needs to provide. And with so much more work done on computer, it’s easy for employers to keep track of the home-based employee’s productivity. A final reason telecommuting will grow in popularity is that many employees enjoy being home part of the week, for example, to be with their kids. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Pitch telecommuting to your boss but think twice about telecommuting full-time. Often, if you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind when it comes time for the boss to assign plum projects. And, from home, it’s harder to build the relationships with higher-ups that are key to getting promoted. One more tip: turn off the web cam when you and your baby are playing patty cake.

The Economy

Little will be done to curb offshoring of U.S. jobs. Why? The Right is too committed to open markets and the Left doesn’t want to risk appearing that it is hurting U.S. companies’ ability to compete with foreign firms, which are offshoring with impunity. Bolstering U.S. employers’ eagerness to offshore is that firms that help employers offshore are getting ever better at training offshore employees to please American employers. News the Career-Minded Can Use: If you’re a top performer—smart, motivated, tech-savvy yet with good communication skills—you probably can always count on a good job in the U.S. Otherwise, and especially if your work could be offshored, consider switching to an offshore-resistant field. Some of my favorites: audiologist, librarian, speech therapist, medical equipment technician, physician assistant/nurse practitioner, electrician, and--if you think that if you can’t beat ‘em you better join ‘em--cross-cultural trainer, who teaches offshore employees how to work successfully for American employers.

Little will be done to stem illegal immigration. Why? The Right is too eager to provide cheap labor for Corporate America and the Left is scared of alienating minorities, a key part of its base. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Work for a company or start a business that serves illegal immigrants. For example, in areas of the U.S. near the Mexican border, find work in the non-profit and government sectors that would heavily serve illegal immigrants: public schools, hospitals, and government agencies.

China’s economy will grow even faster than expected. China has the ingredients for growth: quickly increasing business savvy, an enormous, motivated, intelligent, technologically savvy, low-cost workforce, and a willingness to violate patents issued in other countries. The latter is critical to their ability to copy American and other products and sell them for a fraction of what U.S. companies must charge. So, it’s no surprise that China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world tripled in 2005, to a record $102 billion. I predict China’s meteoric rise will continue, much of it at the U.S. economy’s expense. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Consider learning Chinese and working for a U.S. company involved in joint ventures with China. Or propose to your employer or a prospective one that you would like to create such joint ventures.

E-Commerce will grow faster than ever. I’m now starting to see even tech-resistant, late adopters doing much of their shopping on the Net. I predict the contraction of bricks-and-mortar stores, especially those selling technology products and those requiring extensive floor space. That has already started to happen: For example, Good Guys, a 30-year-old electronics chain, is closing all its 46 stores. Moving forward, I predict, for example, that the number of auto dealers and Sears stores (all those floor-space consuming washing machines and lawn tractors) will decline. Conversely, I predict that the stock of Amazon.com and shippers such as FedEx and UPS will rise. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Seek employment with e-commerce leaders such as amazon.com, and with the e-commerce divisions of leading retailers, especially Wal-Mart. Buy stock in amazon.com, sell Sears.

Politics

Dems win big in 2006. The news media, Hollywood (film and TV), and the book publishing industry, significantly affect who citizens vote for. In recent years, all three have grown ever more willing to abandon neutrality in favor of promoting a liberal agenda. Hollywood has been emboldened by the media’s continued adoration even when, to serve the liberal agenda, Hollywood portrays fiction as truth, for example, some of the contentions in Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 911. The media is ever more emboldened by the public’s relative silence in the face of biased journalism—“reportorial” is a word many journalists don’t even know, let alone practice. I receive the catalogs of major publishers. The ratio of liberal-slanted to conservative-slanted books has grown to, I’d estimate, at least ten to one. The few conservative books that get published are usually written by long-standing famous conservatives such as George Will or Thomas Sowell. I predict that the media’s and moveon.org’s efforts to “educate” America will, despite an apparent small number of ostensibly competitive races, result in the Democrats gaining control of both the House and Senate. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Government job openings, already extensive, will increase further. The job market in DC, Northern Virginia, and blue and purple (a mix of red and blue) state capitals will be strong, especially for government and government contractors. The defense industry, except for anti-terrorism initiatives, will suffer serious declines.

Terrorism will increase. Likely, there will be a significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I must admit that I predicted that would occur in 2005 and fortunately, I was wrong. But ever growing Muslim hatred of the US combined with terrorists’ past successes (for example, affecting the outcome of Spain’s presidential election), increases further the probability of a successful terrorist attack occurring on the U.S. News the Career-Minded Can Use: I predict that jobs in the security industry, especially for prestigious firms such as Kroll will increase, and will, pardon the expression, explode following a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil. We tend to overreact to disasters. For example, after 9/11, airplane security was massively increased while cargo ship and water supply security received far less attention. Following Hurricane Katrina, we’re focusing on rebuilding levees. So, immediately following a terrorist attack on the U.S., consider seeking employment in firms preventing the type of terrorist attack that was used.

Health Care

The U.S. will take more steps toward national socialized medicine. Health care reform is in the media’s crosshairs, and, in turn, the public’s. The media presents story after story highlighting the current system’s flaws and the upsides of Canada’s socialized medicine system. Also as boomers age and therefore need more from the health care system and too often are disappointed, calls for change will accelerate. So if as I predict, the Democrats regain control of the House and/or Senate, expect to see renewed moves for taxpayer-funded national health care. I’m guessing that conservatives will go along with socialized medicine if patients remain allowed to choose their own doctor and if rigorous evaluations of individual physicians and hospitals are made public. News the Career-Minded Can Use: I believe that a graduate program in health care management with a public health emphasis will be valuable in both the near and long term.

A breakthrough in genetic testing will occur. The continuing increase in computing power combined with increased understanding of the human genome makes it likely that a breakthrough in genetic testing will occur in 2006. Perhaps it will be a blood test to help prospective parents predict the likelihood their child would suffer from severe depression, a DNA sample that would determine an adult’s susceptibility to a cancer that his father had, or a better test to help in-vitro fertilization doctors identify healthy eggs and sperm to use in helping infertile couples get pregnant. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Consider careers in the biotech industry. Fortune magazine, on January 11, rated leading biotech company, Genentech, the nation’s best place to work. Even if you’re a non-scientist, all biotech companies employee people in non-science areas, for example, marketing, accounting, human resources, etc. Yes, even for non-science jobs, biotech companies often require conversance with key biotech concepts and jargon, but you may be able to acquire that knowledge just by taking a course or two offered by a community college or a university’s extension program.

Media

The print media will struggle. The major book publishers will cut their budgets and devote an ever larger proportion of their list to books written by celebrities and other big-name authors. They’re under pressure to stick with sure winners because although 2005 was better than 2004, the long-term trend is for fewer people to buy books: they’re able to get information from the Net and television, and because readers can now so easily buy used books on Amazon and its thousands of affiliated used booksellers. Thus, the same book can get recycled multiple times, even though the publisher and author have been paid for only one copy. For this reason, as mentioned above, I believe that most publishers will agree to allow Google to index their books in exchange for consumers having to pay a fee for reading more than a page or two of a book. Newspapers and magazines too will be forced to cut their budgets as ever more people get their news from the Internet, made easy thanks to RSS feeds, which drop news from the multiple media outlets of the user’s choice into their email box, free. And no- and low-cost online advertisers such as Craigslist, Ebay, and Monster will ever more hurt advertising revenue. News the Career-Minded Can Use: If you want a career in the media, the Internet is its present and the future. Learn to write in a style that works on the Net, create video content inexpensively for the Web, and/or.learn the art of marketing Internet content.

The Culture Wars

The trend to make men irrelevant will accelerate. Male bashing has accelerated in 2005. For example, Maureen Dowd’s New York Times bestseller, Are Men Necessary? has become a national phenomenon—to wit, the most read article of 2005 on NYTimes.com was an excerpt from that book. Supporting the validity of this trend, I see ever more male-bashing books in the catalogs of major publishers yet have seen not one female-denigrating book. Could you imagine a major publisher publishing a book if it were entitled, “Are Women Necessary?” let alone “Are Blacks Necessary?” Could you imagine such books being then showered with positive publicity by the media? Additional evidence for the anti-male trend is that, in the confidentiality of my private practice, many of my female executive clients admit to preferring to hire and promote women. In contrast, most of my male clients usually are open to hiring the most qualified candidate of either sex. Evidence of the sexism of this American trend is found in a Gallup survey of employees in 22 nations.That survey revealed that both men and women more often prefer male bosses, and the longer their history with female bosses, the more this is true. News the Career-Minded Can Use: Men should be alert to the possibility that, in some workplaces, New Girls’ Networks are as biased against men as the Ol’ Boys’ Network was against women. Try to get jobs and projects in which the people in power are mixed-gender or male-majority.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/my-predictions-for-2006_id1298

My Ratings of Career Web Sites

There are at least 40,000 career Web sites. Here are evaluations of 37 noteworthy ones. Criteria used were:

Quality of information: 30 points

Importance of information: 25 points

Quantity of information: 15 points

Ease of navigation: 10 points

Cost. (Except as noted, all sites are free.) 5 points

Holistic appraisal of utility: 15 points

Key:

90-100 points: ¶¶¶¶¶, Likely to be very helpful

80-90 points: ¶¶¶¶, Likely to be helpful

60-80 points: ¶¶¶, Often is helpful

50-60 points: ¶¶, Sometimes is helpful

Below 50 points: ¶ Skip it

The Best Comprehensive Sites

¶¶¶¶¶ OneStop Coach: www.onestopcoach.org. This is a portal to federally-funded career Web sites offering quality help at every stage: identify your skills, find careers that fit, get trained, find money for training, and land the job. Plus, if you need human help, OneStop Coach links you to your local bricks-and-mortar federal OneStop Career Center. Many California high school and college career centers subscribe to EUREKA, a similar but more user-friendly, California-centric site.

¶¶¶¶¶The Riley Guide www.rileyguide.com/prepare.html is the portal best for those trying to choose a career.

¶¶¶¶¶ Job-Hunt. www.job-hunt.org: the portal best for those who have a career goal and now are trying to land a job.

Best Sites for Specific Purposes

The above comprehensive sites, which link to many sites, can be overwhelming, so here are my favorite individual ones:

WHICH CAREERS FIT YOU?

¶¶¶¶¶ University of California, Berkeley Career Site: www.uhs.berkeley.edu/Students/CareerLibrary/Links/occup.cfm. Extensive, well-organized information on hundreds of careers. Not surprising for a university site, the focus is on careers requiring a degree.

¶¶¶¶Vocational Information Center: www.khake.com. This site focuses on careers not requiring a college degree, usually with links to training resources.

¶¶¶ www.mylifecoach.com: This site offers an online version of the Strong Interest Inventory, the most carefully validated of all career “tests.” This half-hour assessment yields a synthesis of your interests and an annotated list of well-suited careers. While other sites offer the Strong, mylifecoach.com is my favorite because for just $24.95, you receive a comprehensive report plus a by-phone 20-minute consultation to interpret the results. That fee also includes free access to Focus, which enables you to link your Strong results to information on well-suited careers.

¶¶ Career Compass:. www.careervoyages.org/careercompass-main.cfm. This takes just one minute but can be quite helpful. You simply pick your first, second, and third choice among six interest areas (hands-on, investigative, artistic, social, entrepreneurial, and business detail) and up pops a list of matching careers. Click on a career and you’re teleported to a detailed profile of that career.

¶ Keirsey.com. This site offers a free version of the wildly popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality test, called the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II. In my view, even at its price of zero, I believe it as well as the Myers-Briggs are overpriced. While many people find it fun to take and interpret its results, psychometric researchers have long criticized its validity. That means that by following its results, you’re too likely to pursue an ill-fitting career or inappropriately eliminate careers that might suit you. Often, the descriptions of the 16 personality types are so general as to feel applicable to nearly anyone, sort of like horoscopes.

TO RESEARCH A FIELD OR EMPLOYER

¶¶¶¶¶ Google.com. Although not a career site, my clients and I most often end up using Google for all aspects of career research. When I want to find information on a career, I google it. When I want to find a person, for example, a VP marketing at Hewlett Packard, I google it. When I want to find the name of a professional association, I google the name of the profession along with the word “association,” “organization,” “society,” “American” or “National”. When I want information on a particular employer, I google its Web tab and also its Groups and News tabs, the latter two which are more likely to unearth dirt.

A client of mine was unsure which of two job offers to accept. To help decide, he googled one of his potential bosses, Doug Dahlin. He discovered that Dahlin is a legend in his field, beloved by all, and was recently inducted into his industry’s hall of fame. My client’s choice became clear.

Lest I be too frothy about Google, Internet career librarian and author of the Guide to Internet Job Searching (McGraw Hill, 2006) Margaret Riley Dikel warns, “Don’t use Google unless you have a narrow search term. Otherwise, your on-target links will be buried amid hundreds of off-target ones.

¶¶¶¶ The Bureau of Labor Statistics Publications: www.bls.gov/opub/home.htm. Offering far more than statistics, this site is home to the Occupational Outlook Handbook. That contains definitive narrative profiles of 250 careers, each ending with links to additional information. This site also contains the Career Guide to Industries, which provide authoritative data on which industries are hot and not.

¶¶¶ Job Web’s links to Professional Associations: http://www.jobweb.com/career_development/prof_assoc.htm This site links to thousands of professional associations’ sites, for example, the American Accounting Association or the National Nursing League. Alas, some of the links aren’t current. Most association sites provide career information from leading practitioners. Also, such sites often include a list of its members, which is a terrific source of informational interviews and job leads. In sddition, such sites often contain job listings in that field that attract fewer applicants than those on general-interest sites such as Monster.

¶¶¶¶¶ Amazon.com. If you’re still interested in a particular career after reviewing it on Google, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, and the profession’s association Web site, your next stop should probably be Amazon, where, usually, you can quickly find a well-regarded book that profiles life in that career.

¶¶¶ Business.com. Your local Yellow Pages is an easy way to find target employers locally. Business.com enables you to extend that search nationally: it’s a searchable database of tens of thousands of U.S. businesses.

¶¶¶Vault.com and Wetfeet.com. Find scuttlebutt on large companies in vault.com’s by-company discussion groups and Vault’s and Wetfeet’s insider profiles. Alas, too often, those reports are based on a small number of employees, perhaps those with an axe to grind. Basic content is free but access to the good stuff costs. At Vault, $41.70 buys you six months of access to everything on the site. At Wetfeet, profiles of individual companies are $15.95 to $24.95 each.

¶¶Linkedin.com is a database of five million professionals looking to make professional contacts: looking for a job, customers, or investment capital. It’s based on the notion that we’re just six degrees of separation from anyone, but as Dikel warns, even two degrees of separation may be too far: She has a friend who was a communications director in the Clinton White House and so casually knew Bill Clinton. “That’s a long way from meaning she can get me an appointment with Bill.” In addition, most people I know who have real power say they’re too busy to take the time to be on linked in, let alone risk their reputation introducing strangers to their professional contacts. That said, linkedin does contain an enormous database of professionals, and so if you’re looking for a job, for background information on someone you’re about to meet, a salesperson looking for customers, or an entrepreneur looking for funding sources, it may be worth a try.

SELF-EMPLOYMENT

¶¶¶¶¶ Small Business Administration: www.sba.gov. Created by the federal government, this site offers extensive information on starting, financing, and managing your business.

¶¶¶¶¶ Entrepreneur’s Resource Center: http://edwardlowe.org/index.peer?page=CNTcontent. This site has a wealth of articles for businesses that are ready to move from the start-up to the growth phase.

FOR CREATING YOUR RESUME AND COVER LETTERS

¶¶¶¶ Resumemaker.com ($29.95 for students and entry-level workers, $39.95 for others.) Here, you’re handheld in crafting your resume and cover letters from start to finish. Resumemaker.com offers dozens of resume styles, and for inspiration, hundreds of professionally created sample resumes and cover letters Alas, like most resume/cover letter software and coaches, Resumemaker encourages you to use canned, bragging adjectives such as “self-starter” and “team-player.” Those create distance between applicant and employer. Better to tell brief anecdotes of problems you faced, how you approached them, and the outcome.

JOB OPENINGS

¶¶¶Individual companies’ Web sites. Once you’ve identified specific employers you’d like to work for, there’s no substitute for checking those employers’ sites every few days for new listings. Or at some large corporation’s sites such as Microsoft’s, sign up for their service which emails you every time it posts a job opening that matches your chosen keywords. www.jobcentral.com aggregates job listings from 200 large corporations’ Web sites.

¶¶¶ Field-specific job sites. There are hundreds of sites devoted to jobs in a specific field. These are worth checking because relatively few job searchers scan those sites yet they’re on-target for your career Also, those sites usually contain career advice specific to that career. Top examples: www.auntminnie.com for radiologists, www.efinancialcareers.com for finance careers www.biospace.com for the biotech industry, www.acs.org for chemists, www.astd.org for human resources professionals www.talentzoo.com for advertising, marketing ,and PR, www.6figurejobs.com, www.execunet.com and www.ritesite.com for senior executives. Rite Site requires a caveat. Unless you knew the man behind the site, John Lucht, you’d probably leave it before it even loaded—it takes forever. And once loaded, it reminds you more of a cheesy affiliate marketing site than a useful site for connecting top executives with elite retained recruiters. But for more than a decade, I’ve known and respected John Lucht, a top headhunter and author of the long-time bestseller: Rites of Passage at $100,000 to $1 million+. So, I looked past the too-slick site and concluded that senior executives should indeed check it out.

You can find links to hundreds of other field-specific job sites on the aforementioned portals: www.rileyguide.com and www.job-hunt.org..

¶¶ The megasites: Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Hotjobs.com, and Craigslist.org.

Unless your resume is extraordinary, you probably won’t find it worth spending much time searching the ads or posting your resume on these sites. That’s because the odds are tiny that an employer will pick you from among the millions of job seekers who troll these sites. Mark Mehler, of careerxroads.com, a Kendall Park, NJ-based human resources consultancy, urges that if you decide to post your resume on these sites, to choose an option that allows you to decide who gets to see your resume. If you simply let it float out there, you’re a candidate for identity theft. If you’re employed and your boss gets a hold of it, you could be fired. And, unscrupulous headhunters could spam your resume to every employer on the planet and then demand a heavy commission if you’re hired. (The headhunter finds out you’ve been hired by googling you later.) That commission is enough to make most employers move on to another candidate.

What I like best about the megasites is their discussion groups, which provide useful tips from the job search trenches. I also like some of their articles, which you can get by signing up for Monster’s and Hotjobs’ free career advice newsletters.

¶¶¶ Indeed.com and Simplyhired.com aggregate job listings from hundreds of employment Web sites, including the big ones. As a result, you can instantly screen over four million job listings from one site. Watch out for stale listings. It is worth scanning job listings on these sites because it’s a fast way to be exposed to hundreds of career options and to see what job titles and skills are in-demand.

¶¶¶¶ USA Jobs: www.usajobs.opm.gov. As of this writing, USAJobs contains 20,723 federal government job openings scattered all across the country and even overseas. Alas, this site only contains two-thirds of the federal openings. To find the rest, you need to search the 150+ federal agency sites individually. A gateway to those sites is: www.firstgov.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/index.shtml.

¶¶¶¶ State Jobs: www.statejobs.com. Thirteen million people are employed by state governments. This portal links to all 50 states’ state government jobs Web sites. For some states, the site also links to county and city job sites.

¶ Resume Distribution Services. Resumeblaster.com is the best known of these services that spam your resume to thousands of employers and recruiters. I don’t recommend them because they rarely yield a job offer, let alone a decent one. And in the process, you’ve lost control of your resume, which, as explained earlier, is dangerous. You’ll probably be throwing away $50 to $100 and, in exchange, getting nothing more than a headache. Besides, do you really want to be a spammer?

CAREER ADVICE

¶¶¶¶¶ Career Journal: www.careerjournal.com. This includes material from the Wall Street Journal as well as articles written just for careerjournal.com, most of it of unusually high quality. There’s ample material for those just starting out, but its focus is on middle and senior management.

¶¶¶¶ U.S. News’s Career Center. www.usnews.com/career. Obviously, I’m biased because I’m the site’s Contributing Editor, but I do believe it merits four stars because I had the advantage of developing it recently and therefore was able to learn from other sites’ mistakes. Instead of overwhelming you with mountains of articles, I’ve developed the site’s material based on one criterion: does it provide maximum benefit per second of reading? So, for example, the site includes such articles as “The World’s Shortest Management Course,” which can be read in three minutes, distilling the best advice from dozens of well-reviewed books and articles on management and leadership.

JOB SEARCH SUPPORT GROUPS

¶¶¶¶ Five O’ Clock Club: www.fiveoclockclub.com. Just as many alcoholics are more likely to remain sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous’ group support, many job seekers are more successful if they join a job-search support group. My favorite is the Five O’Clock Club. Offering both online and in-person sessions, their weekly small groups are led by a career coach well-schooled in the proven Five O’Clock Club job search methodology. It costs $20-$70 a session depending on your income and the number of sessions you purchase.

¶¶¶ Job-Hunt’s links to local support groups: www.job-hunt.org/job-search-networking/job-search-networking.shtml. This links to hundreds of support groups, arranged by state.

SALARY ADVICE

¶¶¶¶¶ www.salary.com AND ¶¶¶salaryexpert.com. These sites estimate salary for hundreds of occupations, adjusted by zip code. It’s wise to use both sites because they use different sources for their data and so their estimates can vary widely. Basic reports are free, and reports customized based on your experience, size of the employer, and the characteristics of the particular job are $29.

Advice I’d Give My Child

It’s tempting to spend most of your job-search time on the Internet. But most successful job seekers spend most of their job search time networking and cold-contacting employers. I recommend you do the same.

Marty Nemko is Contributing Editor of U.S. News.com’s Career Center.

In addition to the cited sources, Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute and Peter Weddle, author of the Weddle Guide to Employment Web Sites were interviewed for this article.

My Seven Favorite Professions

If my relative asked me, “What are the best careers?” I wouldn’t cop out and simply say “It’s a matter of what fits you.” Here are seven careers that I believe, for many of college-educated people, are an ideal combination of money, status, meaningfulness, quality of life, and a good job market for the foreseeable future.

Orthodontist. It’s one of the few medical specialties in which self-employment remains a possibility, and the average self-employed orthodontist earns $200,000+ a year. Too, you develop a long-term relationship with most of your patients, and at the end of treatment, you’ve succeeded with nearly all--they walk out with a better smile. American Association of Orthodontists: www.braces.org.,William Proffit’s book, Contemporary Orthodontics, 4th edition.

Optometrist. Same deal: high cure rate, self-employment possibility, and six-figure average compensation. Plus, aging boomers mean increased demand for optometrists. American Optometric Association: www.aoa.org. Theodore Grosvenor’s book, Primary Care Optometry, 5th edition.

Audiologist. I rate this just a bit lower than optometrist because despite ever improving hearing aids, success rate is lower. So is the average compensation, though you’ll hardly starve. Too, the degree requirement has been ratcheted up: Until recently, a master’s would do. Now it’s a four-year doctor of audiology. Still an unusually rewarding career. The nation’s most famous hearing aid wearer? Bill Clinton. American Academy of Audiology: www.audiology.org Frederick Martin’s book. Introduction to Audiology (9th Edition)

Physician Assistant. You derive most of the rewarding aspects of being a physician with far fewer headaches. You get to do health exams, diagnosis and treatment (even including suturing) under a physician’s often not-close supervision, and instead of a dozen post-bachelor training years, it’s two. And there’s far less insurance and government paperwork. And while salaries aren’t doctorly, they’re pretty healthy: averaging $80,000 a year. American Academy of Physician Assistants: www:aapa.org. Terence Sacks’ book, Opportunities in Physician's Assistant Careers.

Higher Education Administrator. A college campus is among of the most pleasant and stimulating work environments. And with education ever more viewed as the magic pill, ever longer legions of students are lining up to enroll. That means a better job market for you. Perhaps the most fun niche: student affairs administrator: you might coordinate orientation, student housing, or extracurricular activities. Student Affairs Administrator in Higher Education: www.naspa.org. Nancy Archer Martin’s book, Career Aspirations & Expeditions: Advancing Your Career in Higher Education.

Landscape Architect. Just a bachelor’s and you can be designing resorts, industrial parks, and rich people’s backyards. And today’s newest religion is environmentalism, so there are lots of jobs in, for example, coastal habitat restoration. America Society of Landscape Architects: www.asla.org. John Simonds’ book, Landscape Architecture, 4th Edition

Librarian. Forget about the image of librarian as mousy bookworm. Today’s librarian is a high-tech information sleuth, a master of mining cool databases (well beyond Google) to unearth the desired nuggets. Plus you’ll probably have regular hours and good job security. American Library Association: www.ala.org. Priscilla Shontz’s book, The Librarian's Career Guidebook and Laura Townsend Kane’s book, Straight from the Stacks: A First-Hand Guide to Careers in Library and Information Science.

Does a specific career intrigue you? The next step is to check out that career’s professional association’s website (listed for all the careers above). If it’s still interesting, read the book I list. If the career remains in the running, find at least two people in the career (one can be misleading) willing to let you watch them in action for an hour or two. How to find professionals to shadow? Try the professional association site. It often includes a membership list or at least a list of its local chapters. Attend a chapter meeting, chat with a few people during a break and, voila, you’ll likely find people willing to let you observe. Don’t just watch; ask. These questions usually reveal the career’s dirt as well as its delights: Describe a typical day. What are the best and worst things about this career? What’s the wisest way to get trained? Are there particularly desirable niches within this career? Why do people leave this career? Anything else I should know before choosing this career? (A catch-all question is always a good idea.)

Of course, my favorite seven professions might be your nightmares. For one-paragraph introductions to 500+ careers, you might look at the brand new third edition of the book, Cool Careers for Dummies. Take that recommendation with a grain of salt--I wrote the book.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/my-seven-favorite-professions_id1534

Commencement clichés, debunked

I didn’t attend your graduation ceremony, but I’ll bet that the speaker exhorted you with clichás such as “follow your passion, “ “make a difference,” and “education pays.” Such idealism is inspiring, but in the real world, can lead you astray.

Cliché: “Follow your passion.” We all know the storyline: People from Abraham Lincoln to Oprah grew up modestly but followed their passion and thus succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Reality: For every Oprah, there are 10,000 schmucks who never made more than McWages in following their dream. So, they’re now working as marketing assistant for the Western Widget Waxing Company, Inc. While ambition, drive, and intelligence are obviously important, it usually takes considerable luck to make a living doing what you love.

Advice for mere mortals: Do what you love, but don’t expect to get paid for it. Want to be on stage? Act in community theater. Want to be an artist? Convince a restaurant to let you decorate its walls with your creations. To make money, pick a field that pays decently and has few liabilities. Chances are, that will lead to more career contentment than pursuing a long-shot dream as your career. Treating a long-shot dream as an avocation gives you most of its pleasure without forcing you to endure a life of poverty.

Cliché: “You’ve got to pay your dues.” Usually you hear this from that CEO who started in the mail room.

Reality: Many higher-ups think of employees willing to do scut work as drones, even losers.

Advice for mere mortals: If you want to be a star, demonstrate your potential from Day 1--first impressions tend to be lasting ones. So impress the hell out of them, right out of the gate. For example, propose doing an innovative project, on your own time if you have to. If you hear your boss complain, tactfully propose a solution or offer to help.

Cliché: “Make a Difference.” Many commencement speakers state or imply that to make a difference, grads should work for a non-profit organization or the government.

Reality: The nonprofit and government sectors are notoriously inefficient. Working for an ethical business—or starting your own--may make a bigger difference to society. Even a company that makes the most mundane of products--for example, nuts and bolts--adds value to the world: imagine your car or home without nuts and bolts. Can you assert with confidence that workers for the U.S. Department of the Interior or for the Interfaith Anti-Poverty Council will make a bigger difference?

Advice for mere mortals: You can make a difference while making a profit. You needn’t work for Ben & Jerry’s. Any business that sells a good product at a fair price and treats its employees well is a worthy place to work.

Cliché: “Education pays.” The speaker gushes about the joys of learning…and that more degrees means more bucks.

Reality: Remember, the source is biased: No university will ever hire an education skeptic to speak to thousands of new alumni and potential donors. Professors and university mouthpieces are also likely to be cheerleaders for getting more degrees--that’s what universities sell. Please know that the university-trumpeted statistic linking higher pay to higher education may be misleading: The people who get more education are brighter and more motivated in the first place, with better family and professional connections. They’d make more money even if they were locked in a closet for their grad school years. And to the extent that statistic was true in the past, it may be less so in the future: More people are getting graduate degrees at the same time that companies are eliminating, automating, or offshoring more professional jobs.

Advice for mere mortals: Where possible, get your learning in the real world. Grad school is a must if you want to be a brain surgeon or a professor, but for many careers, you’ll learn more of practical value on the job—plus, instead of paying tuition, you’re getting paid.

Cliché: “Be true to yourself.” That’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

Reality: Many people, especially as new college graduates, are not wise. Many aren’t even ethical.

Advice for mere mortals: It may be wiser to be true, not to yourself but to an older person you respect.

Anyone want me to give a commencement speech?

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/commencement-clicheacutes-debunked_id1532

Eight Keys to Making the Most of Your New Job

You think landing a great job is important? Even more critical is what you do to make the most of it. Here’s how:

Don’t let the cement dry. When you start out on a job, your feet are in wet cement. If you don’t get out fast, you’ll probably be stuck there a while. So when your boss says you’ll be doing tasks a 12-year-old could do, aim higher. Say something like, “I’m willing to pay my dues, but believe I could contribute more. I’m a pretty good researcher and writer.” Planting that seed often results in an upgrade to your job description. You’ll do more interesting work, plus honchos and co-workers will see you as an up-and-comer.

Be Time-Effective. The most productive employees have a little voice on their shoulder, whispering in their ear, “Is this the most time-effective way?” You want to work in a way that produced the most benefit per minute spent. For example, when filling in numbers for a spreadsheet, ask yourself, “Is it worth it to dig up the exact numbers or, in this case, will estimates do?” When you’re writing a report for the boss, is it worth interviewing one person, five people, or basing it purely on your own experience?

Get credit. Find tactful ways to get recognized for your good work Have a great idea? Don’t just tell your boss—he might steal the credit. Bring it up at a meeting. Have you created a draft work product you’re proud of? Consider sending it to respected colleagues for feedback--and to show them that you’re hot stuff. At evaluation time, ask, “I’ve kept a list of some work efforts I feel good about. Would you like to see them?”

Get the truth—about yourself. Garrison Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion, speaks of the imaginary Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. In real life, that’s how most people think of themselves—which is one reason employees who get fired are shocked. So from Day One, ask for candid feedback, not just from your boss but from respected co-workers, customers, and others. When you get that feedback, you may or may not decide to change, but think hard about what people are telling you.

Train for your promotion. What’s the next job you want? What skills and knowledge don’t you yet have? Get them. If your company is expanding its Beijing operation, should you download those Learn Chinese lessons? If your nonprofit needs help with its fundraising, should you bone up on the best donor-tracking software?

Recruit a dream team of support. Identify a half dozen people you admire, at your own workplace as well as other places you might like to work next: potential bosses, that in-demand computer genius, the political mastermind who seems to get whatever she wants. They can support you on your current job and in getting your next one. But remember the old Chinese warning: Ask before you’ve developed a proper relationship and you will be denied. So build relationships with them: Ask them out to lunch; offer to help them; invite them to a party.

Confront problems quickly. If you put problems off, they can metastasize. So when you don't undertstand something important, don’t fake it. Ask for help from your boss, a co-worker, or an outsider. Afraid that someone hates your guts? Tactfully address it. For example, tell the person, “I’m worried that I’ve somehow gotten off on the wrong foot with you. What can I do to make things better?” Dislike your job description? Politely ask for a change. Do it now.

Ask for what you want. Want to tackle a special project that you’d find fun? Ask. Want an exemption from the reporting requirements? Ask. Deserve a raise? Ask. Most people know that asking is key to happiness and success, but they’re too wimpy to speak up. Don’t be like them.

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/eight-keys-making-most-your-new-job_id1531