Career Space E-zine

The Faculty of Arts at UBC has an excellent website with a number of biographies from former BA students who describe their career paths. Of particular note is Susan Biro’s interview which describes how she became a certified personal coach. She went through a period of time when she felt uncertain about her career path choices and how she might use her BA in Psychology. She eventually went to a personal coach to assist her in clarifying her goals and interests. She found the process appealed to her so she investigated the training and career possiblities in this field and eventually started her own business as a personal coach. Her story is a good example of how the career exploration process may uncover unexpected opportunities. Her website is at: http://www.susiebiro.com/cs.html .

I have been doing a lot of reading lately on career development and career searches and I’ve found a few interesting titles of note. For those that peruse the resume and career development section at your local bookstore you might be overlooking some gems that are hiding in the business section. Here are a few:

• U R a Brand: How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, by Catherine Kaputa (Davies-Black Publishing, 2005) - This piece details how to create a notable brand for yourself and use it as a marketing tool for career development, job search and networking opportunities. It gives the reader some prescribed strategies to realize what is unique about themselves and how to utilize this in their careers. There are some useful ideas here, in particular how to network and get yourself noticed. It does touch on how to use your resume as a strategic marketing tool but I would have preferred to see some more concrete examples of before and after resume revisions as opposed to the brief descriptives offered. I was happy to discover that our local library has this available online as an ebook.
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio, Penguin Books 2006) - While this text aims to be a lively description of how business has changed due to new distruptive technologies (and it does succeed in this goal) it also serves as a good survey of how careers and employment opportunities have changed in reaction to mass collaboration innovations. There have been notable shifts in employment in industries and this is due in part to the adaption of new technologies and the restructuring of companies in reponse of the adaptation thereof. Perceptions of employment have also changed and the number of free agents are on the rise. There are more instances of freelancing and individual doing consulting. One cited example is the website InnoCentive which solicites freelance scientists to create solutions for problems and offers a set fee for a solution used. I mostly appreciated the concrete examples of where collaboration has created cultural changes within businesses. This one is definitely worth a read.
• The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, by Michael Watkins (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) - This text provides a very readable description about the initial period as one progresses into a new leadership role in business. In particular I liked the first chapter “Promote Yourself” in which it effectively gives advice on breaking your old habits (from your previous role) so that you can succeed in your new position. The most difficult issue in this situation is the adjustment to a new “culture” which more often than not determines if you are a good “fit” for your company. This title is also available as an ebook.

Question: Has anyone else read any other books or articles that are useful for career development?

Last weekend I attended a most excellent writing workshop put on by Geist magazine as part of the festivities to celebrate “When I’m 64″, namely the 64th issue of their magazine. Geist magazine is put out by a non-profit organization whose interests are in promoting Canadian writers and photographers. Stephen Osborne lead the workshop on the “Art of the Sentence” to a group of about 20 writers at the Listel Hotel on Robson Street. His focus was on creating interesting sentences following the formula of the 5 Ws (Who, What, Where, Why & When). After 2 hours of exercises we had all come away with a good sense of how to formulate strong sentences suitable for writing narratives, prose & short stories. As a continuation to their workshops Geist has now added “The Writer’s Toolbox” to their website at geist.com . As part of the toolbox (http://geist.com/toolbox) they have included tip sheets and writing exercises suitable for the individual writer as well as teachers to use with their writing classes. This is the second Geist workshop that I have attended and I must say that they are quite excellent!

Last night I attended a meeting of the HTCE (High Tech Communicators Exchange) with a presentation by Tim Bramwell called “Changing the Mindset: What You Need to Know About Marketing Intelligence To Give You a Competitive Edge.” From the HTCE website:

“About the Speaker: Tim Bramwell is a professional business and market intelligence consultant with a significant record of achievement gained from a 20+ year successful sales, operations and senior management expertise gained over a career spanning Microsoft Corp., Ericsson Canada, AT&T Canada and building his own companies. Tim has been a member of, and has led, sales and marketing delivery teams promoting a variety of technology, consumer and business-to-business products and services.”

I’ve been asking myself the questions lately: how does an organization create innovation and maintain it? How does it lead the way? The key is to go beyond marketing research, which is at times too narrow in scope and is time sensitive to that of marketing intelligence which can predict the behavioural triggers in the marketplace.

Some of the “nuggets” I took away from the talk:

• 30-80% of the an organizations inner workings and communications exist in the heads of the employees.
• email was never intended to be used for complex communications - it was never structured that way and stays contained within the email account.
• Marketing research and focus groups are not broad enough, they are time sensitive and aren’t necessarily adequate predictors of behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
• Marketing Intelligence is a set of tools used to create actionable items.
• Good places to gather intel is at trade shows as well as with vendors and suppliers of your competitors.
• Your own company’s salespeople and customer support are a good source of marketing intelligence.
• There are technology platforms that can gather and scrape data from websites using filters for specific information. Some of the information can be gathered from websites, weblogs and podcasts.
• The big question is “what do you do with the data once you have gathered it?”

Coming up soon at the Northern Voice 2007 conference Darren Barefoot will be leading a session on Why Do We Blog? In order to gather empirical evidence for his theories he has posted an online survey for his readers to contribute stats and personal commentaries as to why they have been bitten by the blog bug. The link for the survey is here.

A couple of years ago my classmate Terry showed me the blog he was working on. I had never heard of them before but I quickly picked up on the concept. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently the career experts blog at UBC weighed in about the usefulness of functional style resumes vs. chronological resumes. Historically functional style resumes have been recommended for first time university/college graduates and for career changers. According to one commenter on the career experts blog the functional resume had it’s heyday in the 70s as a clever way to display one’s skillset. Now they are seen as a ‘bluffing tactic’ a way to distract an employer from undesirable information such as gaps in work history. And it’s not unusual for that type of resume to end up in the shredder!  

Blue Sky Resumes has some pretty good suggestions for career changers , Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few years UBC grad student Kaela Jubas and her Vancouver colleague Dr.Shauna Butterwick have been involved in a research project to find out about the alternative pathways’s that women use in the IT sector as part of their career development. This sector is part of the Work and Lifelong Learning (WALL) research network which is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Last year I recieved an invite from the Digital Eve mailing list to be a participant in this study. As someone who is interested in IT and in education I volunteered Read the rest of this entry »