Saturday, May 30, 2020

Modern Office Trends for 2020

Modern Office Trends for 2020 Professionalism in the workplace is a topic that continues to evolve as we head into a new year and a new decade. Gone are the days of the completely formal office environment stuffed with cubicles and suits. Today those are being rapidly replaced with open floor layouts and casual dress codes. Business owners are shifting their office culture and office layouts with their employees need in mind first and foremost to adapt to the demands of the modern worker. So how does this shift impact both business owners and employees? Olivet Nazarene University recently surveyed over 2,000 American workers to try to gain more insight into this trend. The goal of this survey was to learn more about the average American workers satisfaction with their current office environment and how it contributes to their happiness and productivity in the workplace. Let’s take a look at what they found: Modern office layouts Olivet Nazarene first asked respondents about the type of office layout they currently work in. Cubicles, which were once the most common type of office layout, have now been replaced by a mixture of open floor layouts and private offices. Listed below is the breakdown of the top 5 most common types of office layouts: A mix of open floor and private offices (34%)Cubicles (28%)Private offices (21%)Open floor plan, assigned seats (13%)Open floor plan, no assigned seats (4%) The survey found that over 77% of American works are currently happy with the way their office is set up. Workers in private offices reported the highest levels of happiness with workers in cubicles reporting the lowest levels of happiness. Productivity levels while at work A majority of employees (67%) reported that they are currently as productive as they can be in their current office layout. Once again workers in private offices reported the highest levels of productivity and workers in cubicles reported the lowest levels of productivity. American workers stated a quiet location as the thing they need most in their office to be productive followed by a dedicated working space and a comfortable chair or desk. Workers were also asked about the things they like most and least about their current office environment. When it comes to what makes us happiest while working, amenities like free food and drinks, exposure to natural light, pet-friendly working environment, outdoor space and access to nearby walkable locations should come as no surprise. There were however a few surprises on the list of things that workers dislike most at work. Noise, lack of privacy, distractions, lack of energy and isolation were among the top answers for things that people dislike the most while at work. Workplace distractions Digital distractions are becoming a more common problem in many of today’s workplaces, negatively impacting office productivity for many workers and business owners. Technology has made it more convenient to communicate with colleagues through channels other than face-to-face interactions. Today the average employee has more daily conversations through messaging apps (9) than traditional face-to-face conversations (8). There is also a negative connotation with messaging platforms as work with nearly half (45%) of all workers believing that these messaging platforms are used for employee surveillance. Working from home The last part of the survey asked about the often-controversial topic of letting employees work from home.   59% of workers said they dress more casually than they would while at work. Surprisingly enough 1 in 3 workers admitted to having worked naked or in their underwear while working from home. Also, 58% of workers reported being less productive on work from home days. Workers admitted to having trouble dealing with distractions and communicating with colleagues while working from home as well. About the author: Matt Zajechowski is a content strategist at Digital Third Coast. He is passionate about surveys, data analysis, and data visualizations. In his free time, he enjoys traveling and live music. Connect with him on  Twitter  and  LinkedIn.  

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Resume Writing Management Consultant

Resume Writing Management ConsultantIf you are the owner of a small business, consider hiring a resume writing management consultant to help you create a professional resume that gets you hired. It is so important to get a great looking resume to get the interview that can mean the difference between getting the job and not getting it.There are many ways to go about creating a resume. The problem with most of them is that they do not reflect your personality or your skills or your accomplishments. By using a management consulting firm or a resume writing management consultant, you can get the quality you need. Here are some tips for making sure your resume is the best it can be.When you have a plan in place, you are going to be on your way to success. Use the tips in this article and follow them to be prepared. One way to ensure that your resume is the best it can be is to get the feedback of a professional resume writing management consultant. If you want to make sure you have what it takes to land the job, hire one to take care of the rest for you.Next, think about what skills you really have. In most cases, it is best to be honest. Being successful will usually come down to the fact that you know what you have to offer. However, you will also have to be confident enough to showcase those skills on paper. This can be easier said than done, but can be done if you have done the work.Once you have a general idea of what you are good at, the next step is to start working on your own resume. You can write your own resume and the experts can make it to where it looks perfect. On the other hand, hiring an expert will save you a lot of time and a lot of money. A consultant can review your resume and give you advice about how to make it standout from the crowd. Remember, every resume needs to stand out, so make sure you choose the right consultant.Last, remember that a resume can be a reflection of your abilities as well as your character. If you are looking for a job that is going to be on the desk of someone who is going to use your skills, then it is very important to make sure your resume reflects your strengths. Having a resume is only the first step. The next thing to do is get it noticed.As you can see, hiring a management consulting firm or resume writing management consultant can be a good investment if you are looking for a job in the available job market. Using these two tools can help you move forward. This means you can not only get the job, but also get the best salary you can.Do you want to know how you can turn the head of your potential employer? I hope these resume writing management consulting tips are going to help you!

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Building Your Brand in 3 Easy Steps - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Building Your Brand in 3 Easy Steps - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career 1. Discover To build your brand you must first explore your current skills, values, and knowledge. Whether you have worked to build your brand in the past or not, you have a brand already, we all do. Explore your current brand to determine whether it aligns with where you would like to move or cultivate your brand. Skills What are your skills? How can you utilize your skills to enhance your brand? Determine how you have leveraged your skills in the past to build your brand. Determine what skills you have that you have not yet used to build your brand. Values What are your values? What are the things that drive you and make you the person that you are? Align your brand with your values. Does your current brand align with your values? What can you do to move your brand to more closely mirror your value set? Knowledge What are your primary domains of knowledge? What do you know and how can you display your knowledge to enhance your brand? What are the areas of knowledge that you have not yet utilized to build your brand? 2. Position All successful personal branding efforts begin with personal positioning. How do you want to display your brand to the world? The difference between “Marketing Expert” and “Marketing Automation and Inbound Lead Generation Specialist” is huge. Ensure that you are properly positioning your brand to the world. 3. Application You must consistently apply your brand every day. Most of the time, we in the chatter class are focused on building your brand through social channels, but your brand should exist well beyond the confines of your social networking. Your brand should be built in your day to day work with colleagues and clients. Your brand should be built in deciding which events to attend and during your attendance. Your brand should be built in everything that you do and in every interaction that you have. Your brand is YOU and it needs to be a reflection of you in all that you do.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

5 Ways to meet a very big goal

5 Ways to meet a very big goal Last week I wrote about how important it is to pick the right goal for yourself so that you are not banging your head against the wall trying to meet an impossible or insignificant goal. I actually think the reason we dont meet our goals is mostly because the goals suck. But if you have a really important goal thats right for you, here are some ways to ensure you see the goal to completion: 1. Think about money. People who get paid to reach their goals are better at reaching them. This is why we typically can meet deadlines for work but not self-imposed deadlines. And thats why movie stars can stay rail-thin, while the rest of us have a harder time losing weight: A movie stars livelihood is based on their ability to lose weight. So if you can think like a movie star, and decide that your livelihood depends on meeting your goal, then youll probably meet it. Here are some mental gymnastics to that end: People who meet one goal can meet more goals because self-discipline is a muscle that gets stronger and stronger. Additionally, most of our career goals depend on self-discipline. So we can all tell ourselves that if we meet our one goal, whatever it is, we will have more successful careers and thereby make a lot more money. Goal setting tip: Dont set a goal about money. It has no intrinsic value beyond your basic food and shelter. Set your goals for things that truly will change your life. The money will come from living life like this. 2. State your goals in a way that encourages sticking to them. You cant structure that change if you are telling yourself only what NOT to do. My friend, Jay, points out that kids are a good example theyre much better at be quiet than shut up. (Which immediately shows me not only why my kids are never quiet, but also that maybe my most important goals should be in the parenting arena.) If your goal is to stop smoking, the goal is actually to replace that behavior with something else. One recent goal of mine was about not eating bread, but I reframed it so that I eat only foods that make me feel good. You cant change behavior if you dont know what to change it to. Dont make your goal so broad that you cant tell on a day to day basis if youre getting there. For example, I have a goal to keep my marriage together. On a day to day basis, though, my number-one thing is to keep my computer turned off when Im home with my husband. It takes discipline and I have to plan for it. For example, at 9am I start making sure that no one is going to be waiting for me to respond to them between 6pm and 8pm. This would be easy for some of you, but I have been responding to email during family time for years, so people expect it. I have to retrain myself to retrain them. Gender tip: Both genders should follow this advice, but for different reasons. Women get grander success when they tell their goals to a friend. But the competitive nature of men makes them very susceptible to specific measures of success, according to research from Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire (via Idealawg). 3. Write the goal down every day, and put the paper on your wall. Many books extol the idea that if you write your goal down each day, it makes you more committed. I tried it. It works. One of the reasons this works is that changing our behavior takes intense focus and writing down our goals reminds our brain. Bruce Wexler is a neuroscientist and author of Brain and Culture. He found that children have brains that can easily change, but adults become more hard-wired and changing their behavior requires a more extreme amount of intense focus than we ever imagine. Writing down your goals will take about a minute a day. Not that long at all. But its a good litmus test. If you cant commit to thinking about the goal regularly, you probably wont have the focus to change. Blogger tip: Susan Johnston told me she accomplishes this through her blog, Urban Muse, where she writes about meeting her professional goals for an audience of readers who are also trying to meet similar goals. She says, The blog keeps me accountable to my goals. I think this is actually true of a lot of bloggers, especially productivity types. 4. Commit to three weeks The hardest part of changing behavior is that your brain is addicted to the bad behavior. For example, when you think about the gym, your brain remembers when you didnt go to the gym and did work instead and your brain gets happy from having the extra time to work. If thats what you usually do. If you force yourself to change your behavior for three weeks, your brain will start to develop more dopamine in response to the behavior that you are trying to change to, according to Monika Fleshner, a neuroimmuno-physiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For example, after three weeks, your brain will start to release dopamine when it thinks about going to the gym instead of when it thinks about ditching the gym. During those three weeks, you need to know, the night before, how you are going to meet your goal the next day. For example, when my goal was to lose my pregnancy weight, I had to organize every day around going to the gym, scheduling the babysitter, and breastfeeding. Each day required a different schedule, but I worked it out the night before. When I was starting out as a professional writer, I knew I needed to write an hour every day, but it was really hard for me. I used to put it off and put it off and then it wouldnt happen. Until I realized that I had to schedule every single day around that hour in order for it to happen. McDonalds tip: You also have to organize your days around avoiding the dopamine triggers of the behavior youre trying to avoid. For example, if you dont want to eat fries, drive three blocks out of your way to avoid your regular McDonalds. According Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for some people, just seeing the colors red and yellow makes their brain release dopamine in anticipation of McDonalds. Your issue might not be fries, but most of us have our own version of the red and yellow trigger. 5. Make some new friends to go with your new behavior People who dont change their behavior tend to justify it by saying that its socially acceptable, according to Cindy Jardine, professor at the University of Alberta who studies public health. This is why, for instance, if you have fat friends you are likely to be fat. So travel in circles where the behavior you want to change is not accepted. And find like-minded people. They will help you to be the person you want to be.

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Try a Resume Writing Workshop

Try a Resume Writing WorkshopA Seattle resume writing workshop can help you get an excellent resume. It can be both fun and informative. You might want to add this event to your calendar for a special evening out at one of the hottest cocktail bars in the city.Most companies today want a solid internet presence to help in their search engine optimization efforts. This allows them to have a 'bigger' page ranking. The best way to achieve this is through the use of the right keywords. While you might think that the right keywords can be found in a simple Google search, this is not always the case.Sometimes it is better to find a Seattle resume writing workshop so that you can get expert advice from other people who have used these workshops. Not all resume writing workshops are created equally. It pays to check into what kind of services that are being offered at these workshops and then ask about the experience and professionalism of the staff. They should be willing to answer your que stions about how they work with different groups and how they can help you write a killer resume.Before you sign up for a workshop, consider the value you will receive. How much do you have to pay? Will you get personalized advice and assistance? How do you know you will be able to learn from the workshop?Many of the online services have experienced resume writers on staff. They have spent countless hours in their day trying to put together resumes for individuals from all over the world. They have seen just about every way that you can get a resume completed. These workshops often take you right into the hands of a talented writer and they will use their years of experience to get your resume written for you.Some of the most important components of these workshops are that they offer the majority of the information needed. They will tell you where to go online to find the templates for each section of your resume. They will also give you a list of the various fields that you will n eed to fill in.An experienced professional resume writing service will be able to customize your resume based on your needs. This means that you will have your resume professionally prepared for you and it will be easy to read. It also means that you will have a nice looking and organized resume that was hand crafted just for you. All the information you need will be there including the skill set, education, any awards or recognition, and most importantly your personality.This type of assistance can be invaluable when you are trying to put together a resume for a job that you know very little about. The best part is that you are getting all of the professional advice you need from a professional. Choose a Seattle resume writing workshop to get your resume prepared for the best possible presentation at a company interview.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Writing On Social Networks How To Use It For Career Development - CareerEnlightenment.com

the key skills they are looking for.”Brush Up Your LinkedIn Profile, and EngageOf all the popular social media platforms, LinkedIn leads the pack when it comes to job placement, with 93% of companies referring to LinkedIn profiles for recruitment. Facebook and Twitter rank a distant second and third at 66% and 54% respectively.And this post by John White, Career Benefits of Writing on LinkedIn, provides ample evidence to support the above surveys’ numbers. Mr. White reports the following benefits since writing a #1 post on LinkedIn:His subscribers increased by 11,000.He landed his first public speaking engagement.He was approached by, and has since written posts for major media outlets and large corporations such as Boeing.His personal brand exposure has increased exponentially, and he is now being interviewed by social media experts.And, he was able to score a choice new position in his field.Pretty sweet results from taking a bit of time to leverage LinkedIn’s writing platfo rm.Some Not So Great Social Media Tactics for Career AdvancementThis infographic from SproutSocial points out a few things to be wary of when posting on your social networks:3 out of 4 hiring managers and recruiters check your social media profiles, even if you haven’t provided them.1 out of 3 employers rejected candidates because of something they found on social media profiles.78% of recruiters disapprove of references to illegal drug use.67% have a negative reaction to posts of a sexual nature.It seems obvious, but worth pointing out, exercising a little discernment when posting online can be beneficial to your career! Think twice before sharing any information that could be considered embarrassing, because it can come back to haunt you.So, if you haven’t been using your writing talents on social networks to advance your career, maybe it’s time to reconsider. It’s evident from the numbers that doing so is one of the best steps you can take for success in any field.

Friday, May 8, 2020

CareerHeads - Book Review - Jane Jackson Career

CareerHeads - Book Review - Jane Jackson Career Book ReviewNavigating Career Crossroads was recently reviewed by CareerHeads.   Karin Schroeck-Singh provided a fabulously detailed review of each and every chapter.  â€œNavigating Career Crossroads” â€" 10 Things I love about this book    # 1 â€" The reader’s benefits. The benefits that the reader will gain from reading this book are mentioned twice in “Navigating career crossroads”, once at the beginning and then again at the end. This approach will make the reader feel that it was worthwhile buying and reading the book. Would I choose a similar strategy if I would write my next book too? Definitely! Thanks Jane for this idea and inspiration!# 2 â€" The topics. I liked the fact that ‘Navigating Career Crossroads’ covered all the relevant topics from finding your ideal career to working at your chosen company. Thus, including advice on career choices, writing your cover letter and CV, job search strategies, preparing for different types of interviews, polishing your ima ge, getting the job, negotiating the job and  starting your new job role.# 3 â€" The experiences. Real value has been added by including the author’s and other peoples’ struggles and experiences from   their personal and professional lives. What does it feel like to be out of work for a long period of time, to do a job that does not give you real satisfaction, to do something only because your parents want you to do it?These experiences (and many more!) that are shared in the book “Navigating career crossroads” will give every reader (who feels being in a similar situation) the impression that they are not alone in going through a tough time. But also many insights have been shared from Jane Jackson’s clients on how they recruit and what they focus on when dealing with candidates. Highly useful!# 4 â€" The focus on Linkedin. I found the section that focuses on how to promote yourself effectively on LinkedIn as very good, effective and quite detailed. The author provided a lot of information, for example the do’s and don’ts of your profile picture (check out also this article: http://careerheads.com/profile-picture-20-tips-what-to-avoid/).# 5 â€" Your image. I noticed that in other career books the “image” topic often focuses mainly on appearance and communication. You should know that the book “Navigating career crossroads” provides you with more details by covering: your hidden, your assumed, your visual, your experienced and your proven image. Never seen before, loved this part!# 6 â€" The samples. Describing something is one thing, but providing a concrete sample makes it much more useful and effective for every reader. Jane Jackson provides numerous samples for: cover letter, CV, thank you letter, career summary, list of referees, LinkedIn profile summary, 7 positive morning affirmations etc. But also what potential behavioural questions an interviewer could ask during an interview.# 7 â€" The self-assessment tools. I found the self-a ssessment tools that are included in the  book “Navigating career crossroads” highly useful since they inspire the reader to look at their own situation in a more reflective way. For example, find out what stresses you the most, what impact stress has on your confidence, what your values, your motivators/demotivators, your skills, your knowledge, your dream role and your achievements are. Analysing your personal situation can become a quite eye-opening experience and that without having to spend hundreds of dollars on coaching sessions. However, should you still consider approaching a career coach I would say that having already all the answers to the questions from this book would give you a great start.# 8 â€" Great resources and statistics. Jane Jackson provides lots of other resources in her book “Navigating career crossroads” for additional research, support and exploration, e.g. other business professionals opinion and experiences, interesting statistical facts, useful websites, links and books for your job search (focusing on the Australian job market).# 9 â€" The suggested tips, advice and strategies. When it comes to networking, she describes 3 different approaches that one can take in order to network more effectively (PAL, PEARL and PEAK approach). Very good points, surely something that they don’t teach you at school! But there is much more advice to be found in this book, also for industry insiders.# 10 â€" Quotes. I noticed that more and more book authors start including quotes at the beginning of each chapter.  â€œNavigating career crossroads” took a similar approach. My favourite quote was “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” by Jon Kabat-Zinn.How would I rate this book? I would give it a 9.5/10.Read more here