Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

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4 Steps in Helping our Clients Describe their Skills : The foundation of the career development process

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I believe the core of our work as career coaches / counselors is to help our clients articulate their skills.
This is an essential foundation for the career development process. I am working with a number of clients right now that struggle with defining what skills they bring to the workplace. Our work together is focused on really mining out what they do and what makes them unique. In other words, what value do you add to the workplace.

For example, after three meetings with this client, he was able to state this as his value-added statement.

I have the ability to find solutions for complex problems by utilizing my work experiences and skills. I enjoy the personal satisfaction of keeping the customers happy by fixing problems quickly and maintaining the equipment to prevent outages. In doing this I have helped Critical Alert maintain a professional reliable reputation with customer service being at the highest priority. I would like to work for a company where I can transition my skills to work in other electronic fields, communications, or cellular areas where that same dedication to critical messaging is at their highest priority.

Once we had this refined, we were able to develop his resume, cover letter, LinkedIn Profile, and prepare for an interview.

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Tech Free for the Day – The Power of Turning Off

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At the end of December I took a tech-free day to write, think, process how 2016 went, and explore my vision for 2017. The first part of this day was shoveling snow, truly a tech-free event, as we had about 14 inches of very wet snow. This delayed my mini-retreat by two hours but I did get my upper body workout in 🙂

As career coaches and practitioners, we can provide better services when we slow down and take time to think, prepare, create, and be mindful of each moment. We serve our clients best when we are in the moment with them. I strongly encourage you to consider a tech-free day. Mine typically starts at 8am and ends around 5pm.

The first thing I worked on was coming up with my 3 words to guide me in 2017, inspired by Chris Brogan who has done this for over 10 years. I then moved to my budget, online seminar offerings, business plan review, and finally to my short and long range “to do” list. One thing I decided on this retreat is that I want to do a tech-free day every month. Last year I had three tech-free days spread throughout the year, plus a 100 mile backpacking trip that was completely tech-free and cleansing. Each time I discovered a renewed sense of purpose. I need to do this more.

I find that life just keeps getting faster and ever more filled with technology creating a sense of being busy. You have to choose down-time daily to take control over this busyness and regain a more peaceful and thoughtful routine.  I’m thinking about this a lot as I will be speaking on March 2nd in Brunswick Maine for the first “To Live For” Evening of Stories and Music where I will talk about ‘Taking 10’ minutes daily to regain our lives. I also had a conference proposal accepted by National Career Development Association on a similar topic for the June annual conference. 

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LinkedIn – Now What Do I Do?

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“I have a LinkedIn profile but no idea what to do with it.”

“There is no time for LinkedIn in my life.”

“I need a career change and have applied to 100’s of jobs, but there is nothing out there.”

Recently I was working with a young man who was desperate to get out of his current job. My first question was, “What have you done so far to find work?”

His response was a combination of all of the above statements rolled into his three-minute overview of what he’d done.

My response to him, “What you have done is a huge waste of time.”

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Pause for effect…         “What?”

And then the session began.

Rule number 1, people hire people. This young man was applying for jobs every night, literally every night, all night until he went to bed. He was SO BUSY that he felt he was being productive.

Rule number 2, see Rule number 1.

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