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Career

Nation on speed. E-mails, Tweets, Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more.

February 5, 2013 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

floridamoney

How many of you find yourself attached to this “stinking” computer like an umbilical cord?  Reading e-mails from co-workers, clients, supervisors, friends, families, spammers, bloggers, and who ever else invades our lives like one of the 7 plagues.

We are like a nation on speed.

– Turn on computer

– Read email

– Respond immediately

– Read another email

– Respond immediately

– Bamm, what else you got?

– Bring it on

-Keep sending them, I’ll get through them all!

Really?  Is this what work is supposed to be like?
Whatever happened to the times when you could walk across campus to actually TALK to someone?  Who turned the treadmill onto 8 m.p.h.?  Where is that downtime when you could read an article or simply just sit and think?  Shouldn’t we as professionals in the career advising world be modeling something better than this?

[Read more…] about Nation on speed. E-mails, Tweets, Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: meditation, mindfulness, reflection, stop and think, thinking

“It’s Not What You Know….” cuts both ways.

January 16, 2013 by Jim Peacock 2 Comments

IMAG0758

Sometimes knowing a person can be a problem.  My mother-in-law has always stated “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  And I argued with her once (only once 🙂 that you also have to KNOW something AND be a good person as well. I KNOW some people and I can guarantee I would NEVER hire them!

As career counselors / advisors, we all know the power of networking and how important it is to find someone on the “inside” of a company, but that is only the first step.  I know a college student who reached out to Alumni with a clumsily written, grammatically incorrect email, that did not bode well for him. (or the college).  Or the typos on a resume / cover letter, or the lousy handshake, or even worse, bad breath.  Knowing someone is great and important, but you have less than 15 seconds in most cases to make that an advantage.

[Read more…] about “It’s Not What You Know….” cuts both ways.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: first impressions, instincts, network, networking

Failure Makes Me Happy

January 2, 2013 by Jim Peacock 6 Comments

Crazy Peacock

Failure #1.   My very creative son who has been drawing since he could hold a crayon. And at 4 years old on an Etch-A-Sketch created a multi-sail pirate ship that was jaw dropping, and in college majored in Advertising, and who took every new career assessment I wanted to try out and always came up “creative”, has taken a job as an analyst working with medical electronic records.  Hardly creative.  I blew that one!  Out of the 1000 occupational titles this would have been 985 just above anthropology, aerospace scientist, and electrician for him.  Nope, would never have guessed it as a career counselor or a father.

You know what?    I failed as a career counselor.  Never saw it coming.  But happenstance in life takes many forms and the end result, at the end of the day, career counselors should be happy if our clients, students, or sons are happy with their occupation.  He is happy.  If he is happy, I am happy.

[Read more…] about Failure Makes Me Happy

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: failure, failures, happenstance, learning from failure, unexpected opportunities

Fight or flight in career decision making

December 18, 2012 by Jim Peacock 2 Comments

Trust Those Instincts

Every decision a CEO makes is based upon incomplete information, often less than 10% according to The Two Second Advantage book I recently finished.  Why would career decision making be any different? 

For 1000’s of years human have relied upon instincts to keep us safe, fed, and happy but somewhere in the past century we have come to believe that technology can solve all our problems.  I think Daniel Pink is right about the Whole New Mind and how right brain people are important to our future, but I believe.  Technology has solved so many problems, assessments allow us to quickly create a common language to explore, the Internet gives us access to information at our fingertips, but instincts is what made us who we are, and we need to encourage people to listen to those “little voices”.  Our society has given us false hope that everything can be solved simply with logic and technology.

When changing careers, each person must gather as much information as they can about a possible occupation, but how much can they really know?  Career advisors can encourage use of ONET and Occupational Outlook Handbook, but that is merely a snippet of information.  Informational interviews are great and we can get closer to understanding a job by asking “what a typical day is like” or a “typical week”.  But this still does not give us a complete picture.  How will my life style change?  What is the culture of the company like?  Will I fit in?  How do my work values mesh with the company of the position?  So much information is still missing.

Each person is a puzzle. To us and to themselves.  All the assessments in the world still will not give a person EVERYTHING they need to find an occupation.  All the research on occupations can’t fill in all the pieces of the puzzle.  At some point a person must rely upon those instincts, hunches, the gut feeling that has guided us for thousands of years.  You know it when you feel it.  When you meet someone and you “just like them” immediately.  Or you meet someone it it “just feels creepy” or uncomfortable.  Those are our instincts and we need to trust them.

Career decisions will always require factual information, logic, and common sense to help us decide, but what we really need is “expert intuition” to determine what we don’t know but do “feel”.  People will never have all the information they need to make a decision, but down deep, I believe they do know.  It is like Mark Savickas preaches that people will TELL you what they are thinking even before they can articulate themselves. It just comes out of their mouths as they talk to you. Decisions will come from within a person, something deep inside, something we just KNOW is right.

Trusting hunches and instincts, (with quality research) will help our clients in the decision making process and we need to encourage people to listen to those feelings and to be open to the surprises they bring.

Do you have any stories about trusting your hunches?

Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a monthly newsletter for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

Sign up here to receive my  TOP 10 TIPS WHEN WORKING WITH AN UNDECIDED PERSON.  You can also receive the career practitioners newsletter which includes a variety of career topics, industry news, interesting events, and more. 

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: career decision making, instincts, intuition, trusting your instincts

Have you thanked your network recently?

November 20, 2012 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

A network is only as good as you make it.  Have you thanked anyone in your network recently?
Thanksgiving seems like a great time to show my gratefulness to a few people in my network.  I have so many people to thank that I have decided to start today with five somewhat random people in my network and simply thank them for being a part of my network.

A couple of years ago, I read a blog titled “Four Easy Network Tips fro 2011” by Shoya (see link below) that encouraged people to do four things each month to keep your network current.  These pop up on my calendar each month as a reminder I am not alone in my profession.

[Read more…] about Have you thanked your network recently?

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: academic advising, grateful, LinkedIn, networking, thank your network

Unexpected opportunities

November 11, 2012 by Jim Peacock 5 Comments

dscn1932

In August 2012,  I backpacked the John Muir Trail / Pacific Crest Trail in California, a 195 mile backpacking trip with 2 great friends.  We have now hiked around 1400 miles of the PCT over the past 31 years but this section was amazing!

As you look at this beautiful picture of the mountains we hiked in, try to find the trail that lies ahead of us.  Every day we looked ahead for the trail and we usually saw something that looked like this picture.  Is the trail going to go up this valley to the left?  Or is it going to go up and around the far side of that tall peak in the middle?  Or will it head into the valley and go right before that peak?  Often we did not know for sure.

As people head down their own career path, they all too often cannot KNOW where the path will go exactly.  They can choose a direction but the actual path appears in a serendipitous manner.   We need to help our clients embrace serendipity,  “discovering opportunities by accident”.  We need to help them be open to possibilities that lie ahead.  We can help our clients plan a path, but we need to be open to the possibility that it may not lead to exactly what we thought.  It may veer to the right or left, but I can say that it will take us somewhere.  And that “somewhere” may turn out to be even BETTER than the original path.

[Read more…] about Unexpected opportunities

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: Career opportunities, chance, happenstance, intentional serendipity, serendipity

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