The following articles can help you with these and other career issues:
“Who’s Steering Your Ship?” How to Build Career Confidence and Make Decisions that Move You in the Right Direction
Whether you’re just getting started in your career or thinking about working after retirement, it’s great to feel confident about who you are and where you’re going. What are your strengths and how will you use them? What’s your next career destination, and how will you get there? What decisions will you need to make to keep moving in the right direction? How will you navigate through those chaotic and...
Read More
Using Career Assessment to Help Bullied Clients
By Dean R. DeGroot and Liz Willis Abstract Workplace bullying is a common practice that harms employees and organizations. By employing career assessment strategies, career practitioners can increase both their own and clients’ understanding of workplace bullying dynamics. This benefits clients by enhancing their self-awareness and hope for the future. The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) defines workplace bullying as “repeated, health-harming mistreatment by one or...
Read More
Simple Questions: Surprising Answers
The right interview questions can help you really get to know your clients. More than you might think. In my work with career clients, I have found it useful to have a set of standard questions—a structured interview— that I ask most clients in our first session. My structured interview currently consists of 21 questions in two categories: Work-Related and Personal. At the end of my Personal questions list is...
Read More
What’s Your Game Plan? Assessment Could Hold the Answer.
In my work with clients, I strive to help them answer the following basic questions: What kind of work do you want to do? Where do you want to do it? With whom do you want to work? I call these questions, collectively, a game plan. However, the game plan I use in my process is not a plan in the classic sense. Rather, it’s a set of criteria for...
Read More
The Great Resignation: A Great Time for Career Assessment
Career assessment—interviewing clients, testing them, and helping them define who they are and how they can best use their strengths in the workplace and beyond—is a valuable service we offer as career development professionals. And with the Great Resignation resulting in large numbers of people quitting their jobs and seeking new career opportunities, we’re at a moment when assessment services are more valuable than ever. Let’s look at some of...
Read More
Three Strategies for Avoiding Career Isolation
If you’re feeling alone and isolated, chances are you need to reach out more to others. Here are three powerful ways to connect. Do you ever feel like you’re cut off from the information you need to advance your career? That you’re completely alone in your career quest or job search? What you’re experiencing is career isolation, and if you don’t guard against it, it can keep you permanently on...
Read More
Getting Noticed in the Employment Market
Focus your energy, expand your network, improve your presentation—and watch your job search take off. Although we currently have a job market where there are more openings than job applicants, there’s always a challenge of getting noticed for opportunities that you wish to get noticed for. Here are three ways to ensure you’re moving forward and not just spinning your wheels. Find a Focus for Your Search As the saying...
Read More
Five Steps for Discovering Your Personal Place
A key secret to career success is to discover who you really are and where you belong in life and work. Learn how. Are you living out someone else’s idea of what you should be doing? Perhaps you’re stuck in a career you worked hard at but that no longer makes you happy. Or maybe there’s something you’d really like to do with your life, but the way you currently...
Read More
Do You Have a Velveteen Career?
This poignant children’s tale can teach us much about discovering our authentic selves and making the most our lives. In The Velveteen Rabbit, a young toy rabbit feels different and less valued—less real—than the other toys in the boy’s nursery. But when the boy starts playing with him exclusively, the rabbit suddenly feels loved and appreciated. Later, however, as the boy recovers from scarlet fever, the rabbit is discarded for...
Read More
Bullying References and Resources
This list provides a great overview of resources on the subject of workplace bullying along with strategies and coping behaviors to survive. Davenport, N., Schwartz, R.D., and Elliott, G.P. Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace. Civil Society Publishing, Collins, IA, 2005. Futterman, S. When You Work for a Bully: Assessing Your Options & Taking Action. Croce Publishing Group, Leonia, NJ, 2004. Garms, E. The Brain-Friendly Workplace: 5 Big Ideas...
Read More
Are there other career or job search issues we can help you with? Let us know. Our goal is to help you maximize your potential and achieve true career success.