Book: Your First Job: How to make a success of starting work and ensure your first year is the launch of a successful career.  Author: Mark Blayney. Complimentary copy provided by the author for an honest review As most of my clients are senior executives, I was unsure if "Your First Job—how to make a success of starting work and ensure your first year is the Read More

Leave Your Job Gracefully You’re miserable. You've tried to cover it up, but really, this job isn't for you. Maybe the problem is a toxic environment, you’ve burned some bridges and relationships are strained. Or feel stuck in a rut and seek new challenges. Whatever it is, you know that it’s time to leave your job and move on. How you leave your job is often just as Read More

  My first real job was as a “Turn on Clerk.” I’m not kidding. This was a rather descriptive (and enormously funny) title for an administrative job that involved turning on the gas supply and creating accounts for people who were moving into new apartments. While a great job, it was never meant to be my life’s calling and I eventually moved on – thank Read More

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an industry that continues to do well in the global economy, enjoying consistent job growth, rising salaries and a rosy future outlook. Yet there is still one area that the industry struggles with, a shocking deficit of women in the workforce. Women are significantly underrepresented in the Australian ICT sector compared to Read More

My "Inbox Question of the Day" today comes from an individual asking the question, "Tell me the essential skills graduates need". If you're talking about professional skills—then of course skills can be as wide and broad as the occupations for which a graduate can apply. However, I've narrowed it down to three big-picture attributes, and those skills are just not Read More

Changing careers can be fun, scary, and often impossible without the right education or know-how. Wanting to pursue a new career and convincing yourself that you can do the job due to a tenuous link to it, may seem like a 'no brainer' to you, but to the people who are making the choices, no amount of presenting the information in a compelling way can make up for what is Read More

How will we approach our careers in the future? Imagine if by 2050 people are living until age 120, or by 2100 we're living until 150! Maybe we should rethink this historical "job for life", and instead break our careers into three or four distinct phases that work best for us at different stages of our lives. It's not an usual concept as far as lifestyles are Read More

Why not use professional resume writing services? I took a call from a fellow just recently and he'd lost his job. As with most people who don't have oodles of disposable cash lying around, he wanted to get another job quickly. That made sense. What made zero sense, was that he wanted to spend as long as it would take to write the perfect resume himself. (Assuming Read More

Companies looking to hire have created protocols that suit them. It usually works like this: Advertise the position Tell the candidate proper response methods. (phone, online, job fair) Respond to the candidate in a timely manner… (that's more of a wish-list item than an in-stone commitment) Interview the short-list Appoint the lucky candidate With this information, Read More

I know the process of job search is hard. People ranging from your mum to the supervisor at work and the friend-of-a-friend who is a manager will give advice that ranges from outdated and absurd, to the cutting edge. I also know it is confusing. The fact is, you can show your resume to ten different people and you will receive ten different pieces of advice---much of it Read More