Career – Page 3 – Live & Learn

Worried about your job? Hope is not a strategy…

July 3, 2012July 3, 2012 Live & Learn15 Comments

HBR Blog Network: “…It would take something like 1,000 hours — and maybe a lot longer — to recover from a forced career change…

…If disaster were to hit, you’d like to believe that you could find another job. Well, as the cliché goes, hope is not a strategy. Especially in this job market.

…It certainly seems we are running harder and harder to keep up with the required knowledge in our specialized fields. What would you actually have to invest in order to stay in this race? In this race, information is the tiger and there doesn’t seem to be an end to how fast the tiger can run. But remember, the good news is that you don’t have to outrun the tiger. You simply have to outrun your competitors, people like you who are going to be looking for a job, once their industry becomes obsolete…”

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Feeling Blah about work?

June 26, 2012June 26, 2012 Live & Learn14 Comments

I received some backchannel email blow-back on my last post (10 Most Loved Jobs. And 10 Most Hated) and the related posts on Doing What You Love. (Whispering to me: Here you go again. Not everyone is in the situation YOU are in. Try to walk in someone else’s shoes for a change. Tired of you preaching about Doing. What. You. Love. Some of us can’t walk away to a lesser paying job to Do.What.We.Love. We need to pay the bills. We can’t relo away from aging parents, family, friends. We can’t walk away from our house and the mortgage. We need to keep the Don’t-Love-My-Job we have.)

OK. I get it. Yet so many are unhappy. Feel stuck. Are unfulfilled. Or are frustrated in their current station. The three articles below share some excellent advice on how to make the most of the current job you are in. My Cliff-Notes recap is summarized here:

Do. (Continue) to do an excellent job.
Connect. (Develop deeper relationships with people you work with)
Learn. (Learn & apply new skills and knowledge which will fuel higher levels of engagement)
Contribute. (Achievement and contribution gives us a higher sense of purpose.)
Don’t Complain. (…And drag down your colleagues and pollute your brand.)

“There’s no justiﬁcation for an employee to wait expectantly for the organization to furnish engagement, as if it’s something somebody can give you. The key to sustainable high engagement is taking primary responsibility for it. Now is the time to own your own engagement. (FastCompany)

Here’s the 3 self-help articles on the topic…

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10 Most Loved Jobs…(and the 10 most hated)

June 24, 2012June 24, 2012 Live & Learn21 Comments

From the HBR Blog Network: Happiness Will Not Be Downloaded. I draw the line on a solve being fixing things yourself Smile otherwise a great post. A few excerpts from the post below along with the charts for the 10 Most Loved Jobs and the 10 Most Hated…

“…The proliferation of cooking shows, blogs, celebrity chefs…taps into something more primal: it’s one of the last jobs that still does what most of us don’t — make things…In this sterile, white-collar world, where meat comes from ShopRite and homes are built by “guest workers,” cooking is the last physical job many of us can relate to.”

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