Archive for October, 2008

Archives for Education

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Though we hear media reports about casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there is no spotlight shining on the thousands of U.S. soldiers who are unable to return to the jobs and careers that they had before the war.  Even less well understood are the steps that government and corporations are taking to help retrain or prepare these brave men and women for the next phases of their professional lives.

Even as the injured veterans undergo treatment or therapy, the Walter Reed Equal Employment Opportunity Office (EEOO) offers classes to help prepare them for careers in information technology (IT) and tech support.  As a part of the Assistive Technology Training Program (ATTP), educators guide participants to develop the knowledge and skills they need to become Microsoft and Network + certified technicians or even engineers.

Early on, the program was a huge success with a number of men and women passing their first level of certification and, more importantly, gaining needed confidence to excel in a new career.  However, many in the program were discharged from the hospital before they were able to complete the program. They were unable to learn the full set of skills necessary to pass certification exams.

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Archives for Coaching

Carol S. Dweck, author of Mindset, the New Psychology of Success, contends that your success or failure in life, career and relationships is attributable to a fixed or growth mindset. The fixed mindset believes that your personal qualities - intelligence, personality and character - are set in stone. The growth mindset believes that your qualities can improve with effort and experience.

A fixed mindset can sidetrack your career - especially if you’re working for someone who views his or her subordinates as incapable of growing. Of course, says Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, leaders with a growth mindset are willing to admit when they are wrong and adapt to changing information.

People with a fixed mindset are:

• Inaccurate at gauging their own abilities
• Feel that their intelligence level cannot change
• Are judgmental yet misread other’s ability to grow and change

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Archives for Employment

You show up for a job interview at a company you care about. But the interviewer is ill-prepared, ill-mannered or clueless.

Do you take the job anyway if it is offered to you?

I would take a job if I liked the position, the upside and the company. That is, assuming that the interviewer I disliked isn’t going to be my boss or his boss.  But that puts me in the minority. Two-thirds of respondents to a survey of 6,000 staffing directors, hiring managers and job seekers, conducted by Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm, and Monster Worldwide, say they wouldn’t take the job. They would sooner walk away.

Would you say that these job seekers sound a bit brittle? If you’re called in for four or five or six interviews, aren’t you bound to dislike one or two of them? Unless you’re interviewing for a senior position, expect that one or two interviewers will go through the motions or be distracted by a pressing appointment.

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Archives for Career Advice

Have you been distressed lately about the economy, your job or your boss? If so, you wouldn’t be alone.

When times are toughest, most of us tend to wait out the storm rather than seek out other, perhaps even riskier opportunities.

In his new book, Bulletproof Your Job, author Stephen Viscusi says that your “primary objective” at work is to protect your job because it is “your most valuable asset.”

Forget the financial crisis; the issue is more primal than that. “Here’s the cold hard truth: If you don’t click with your boss, all that merit and pedigree won’t get you anywhere when your job is on the line,” writes Viscusi. “What really matters is what your boss thinks about you.”

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Archives for Workplace

Everyone knows a bully. It’s the schoolyard tyrant who swoops in on a target, pushing him around while spewing threats and belittling him in front of others. But childhood isn’t where it stops - it’s also on display in the workplace.”Workplace bullying” is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of a person through verbal abuse, behavior that’s threatening, humiliating or intimidating, and/or sabotage that prevents work from getting done, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash.

Recent research and a U.S. court case have spurred interest in the issue.

About 54 million people, or 37 percent of American workers, have been bullied at work, according to a September 2007 survey conducted by Zogby International on behalf of WBI. Bosses account for 72 percent of bullies, and women are targeted more frequently, according to the survey: 57 percent of those bullied are women. When the bully is a woman, 71 percent of the targets are women.

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Archives for Globalization

Fernando Ara faces an extreme virtual commute from his Orange County, CA office to Madrid, Spain. Ara is in the vanguard of worldwide cross-border telecommuters. Ara is the U.S. country manager for Redkaraoke, a social networking website, but works out of his California-based home office and travels when necessary for meetings.

Ara’s colleague, Justin Abbott, based in Baltimore, MD, heads up business development for the company. Another manager, Jose Miguel Segurra, lives in Japan. They communicate with HQ mostly via Skype.

“The biggest issues are managing between multiple time zones - from Spain, to the United States, to our Country Manager in Japan,” Abbott said. “And, of course, making sure that we all understand each other and are on the same page.”

WorldatWork, a Scottsdale, AZ, Washington, DC and Toronto, Canada-based organization, predicted in a recent report that 100 million Americans will be teleworking by 2010. Most of them will be working for companies located in the U.S.-but as the trend continues, it can be expected that as steadily increasing number of people will find cross-border opportunities.

It’s not just a virtual career choice, it’s a quiet workplace trend that goes mostly unremarked-upon by media or governments.

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Archives for Education

Have you ever visited a poorly translated foreign website and wondered why the company hasn’t bothered to get it right? Building a “culturally-customized” website is not an action item for most businesses, except for those seeking an edge in global commerce.

Effective global websites require much more effort than simply translating content: from rewriting marketing pitches to reflect different cultural values; to reconceptualizing website design and colors; to getting small details right, such as formatting or currency, explains Prof. Nitish Singh, California State University, Chico, author of a pioneering book on this topic.

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