A few posts ago we announced that Career Resumes does LinkedIn Makeovers.  On December 17th I’ll do a 90 minute webinar on how executives can use LinkedIn (and Facebook) for their job search, and what roles they have in your career management.

Here’s the info for the webinar, you can click on this Experts Connection link to register (it’s only $50):

Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Time: 4:00-5:30 PM Eastern, 1:00-2:30 PM Pacific

Class Description: LinkedIn is the professional network recruiters and hiring managers use to find talent. As important, it is the social network other professionals and executives use to find partners, customers and business relationships. It is not a hotbed of job seekers…rather…decision makers. If you are not using LinkedIn, you are missing out on a viable way to optimize opportunities that are available. This presentation is designed for executives…to help you understand ways to optimize LinkedIn. We’ll cover a number of tactics you can implement immediately to grow your network, nurture individual relationships, while putting your professional brand in front of your immediate and extended network.

Facebook is regarded as a popular hangout for a younger crowd…but that crowd has grown up and started in hiring manager and influencer roles. We’ll explore techniques you can implement on Facebook to network, share your brand and communicate with other professionals.

In this 90 minute session you will learn:

• How to create your LinkedIn profile to increase odds of being found.
• How to best communicate with your LinkedIn network.
• How to use the LinkedIn search features for an executive job search.
• How to use LinkedIn “Answers” as a strategy to enhance your personal brand.
• How to use new LinkedIn features to communicate with network contacts and professionals who should know you.
• The best way to get the “right” recommendations on your LinkedIn profile.
• How to create a compelling Facebook profile.
• Two techniques to find professionals in your field on Facebook.
• Elements of a connection strategy for both platforms.

You can register here. Also, I just learned that Amazon is now shipping the second edition of my LinkedIn book … so if you order it from there you’ll get the newest stuff

A couple of months ago Peter asked a question to his LinkedIn contacts: What is the worst career advice you’ve ever heard? Here are most of the awesome replies (there were 42 responses - see them all here):

• You’re set for life! (… when someone has just taken a job in the public service. Set - yeah, like a jelly is set!)
• get a degree in accounting
• “So, you want to be a lawyer?!! Get a real job first! Work in a factory for some years, to see the real life!” I didn’t follow the advice…
• “You have a good job at a utility: stay there.”  Safety equals dullness. (there’s more)
• The worst career advice is not to have any when you are first starting out, especially with the graduation door slamming shut on your rear -end on the way out!
• 1976, upper midwest, town of 7,000, 10th grade - you guys don’t need to learn to type…typing is for girls.  How’s that worked out for you guys?
• “Listen, I know you have a staff job but I think you should take that really great, totally secure freelance position!”
• “Seek advice from random strangers on the Internet.”  (lol - thanks Alex)
• In a counselling setting: Don’t worry if people don’t come back, they just didn’t like what you said to them. (of course I worried about why they didn’t come back.)
• In a government job: Don’t leave, there’s a lot of job security. (I left)
• In private practice: You don’t have enough experience to do that. (I have it now!)
• You have to not work so many hours. (But I love my job and am enjoying myself so much)
• “Your neurosis problems are making you fail in your job…”
• 26 years later, I still try to find out if I have neurosis problems and I have found nothing…
• “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Yes, it is a question, but it implies that you should have a 5-year plan, Total BS this day and age.
• Always say you have extensive experience doing X when someone asks you if you’ve done X before.
• “You’re a Rhodes Scholar! You’re all set! What could go wrong?”
• You deserve better, they are just exploiting you. If you resign, we will immediately take you… Needless to say that words vanish like smoke….
• ” When you are a “fresher,” better stick to your company atleast for one year”
• To volunteer for low level tasks as an intership or job starter.
• “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Management will notice.” I was thinking ‘yeah I want to be known for my clothing and not my experience or education.’
• “Plastics.” (Anyone remember THE GRADUATE with Dustin Hoffman?)
• [my current job is] a total wrong fit and whenever I talk to people and ask for some advice the line I get is “at least you have a paycheck.” And I think to myself, great, what do I do with this?
• don’t push to have a managerial post, just settle to become a secretary a top noch one, though…..
• I approached [a speaker] and asked how I could move into that career (I was already a trainer for a company). his response…”Just do it guy.”
• “don’t take risks by thinking outside of the box so much”
• “In order to become a Genetic Engineer, you have to study Civil Engineering!”
• “You’ll be limited if you don’t have a degree”
• “You have to wait for your turn and grow your wings before you can be considered for leadership positions. It’s the same with other companies.”
• “Closing three small deals is better than going for that big ambitious project.”
• You have so much potential - hold out for 2 more years and you will go places!
• “around here, you are nothing more than a strong back; get about a good 8 years of experience in the lab, and then you can break into the 60k salary tier!”
• Stay at a job your unhappy with - you have too much tribal knowledge.
• I arrived for what a thought was a job interview and turned out to be a head hunting firm. Looked at my resume calculated I had been in the work force over 25 years and said you have one good job left in you.
• “Hey go check out Enron, they’re looking for talented auditors”
• “You are too smart to be a business major! You should do engineering.”
• “You have a special calling to do this.” I gave working in the church a try before becoming a recruiter.
• My Father: “No Daughter of mine is going into this business!!”
• “The IT job market is HOT!”… Uh… no… IT workers have about a 13% unemployment rate, and over the next few years I expect 1/3 to 1/2 more Americans in IT to permanently lose their jobs. Every day I ask myself… Why, oh why, did I not become a Dentist? Now there is a stable career.
• “Do ANYTHING you can to get into __________ firm.”
• “Girls can’t be engineers - only teachers or nurses.” - Midwest, late 1960s. HA!
• “A Bachelors is all you need”

What’s the worst career advice YOU’VE ever heard?

When I started learning about all the different service providers who help people with career issues, I was confused.  I thought a career professional would do it all for me, but I learned each professional specializes in different parts of what I needed.  And, many career experts have a preferred type of client, such as executive, or IT, or recent graduate, or Christian, etc.

Career Resumes provides resume writing services, but does not do career coaching, job search coaching, or career counseling.  Let me give you an unofficial, incomprehensive view of what different service providers would offer.  Understand that some services providers offer multiple services, while other service providers specialize in just one service:

Resume writers: professional resume writers should have some kind of formal training on current resume trends, resume best-practices, and especially resume gaffes.  Before you engage a resume writer you should find out if they belong to any career associations, have any certifications, etc.  It’s just too easy for someone to say they are a resume writer and have no training or credentials.

Career coaches: Career coaches will help you with your career issues.  You can engage a career coach even if you aren’t actively in a job search.  Those who are unhappily employed are great candidates for a career coach.  Career coaches can help you with self-discovery to help you figure out who you are, what your specialties are, what kind of role would make you happy, etc.  Career coaches sometimes specialize in personal branding. Some career coaches do life coaching, and some life coaches do career coaching.

Job search coaches: Job search coaches specialize in the nuts-and-bolts logistics of a job search.  Not all career coaches like or specialize in job search coaching.  The job search coach will meet on a regular (weekly) basis and coach you through the job search.  It’s a critical role for any professional in a job search.  A successful job search coach will work by job search principles (as opposed to the job search techniques I assumed would work, but didn’t), and hold you accountable.  Those are two key issues when you work with a job search coach.

Career Counselors: Expect a career counselor to be a lot more on the “what do you want to be when you grow up” side.  They should know about a lot of different tests and resources and I’m guessing they drill down on your personality a lot more than a career coach would, but they aren’t necessarily going to do career or job search coaching.

You don’t necessarily have to pay for a professional to help with any of these things.  If you go to a job search networking group you might find someone there who could be your job search coach.  There are pros and cons to doing that, of course.  If you are in the higher income bracket, you probably can’t afford to NOT pay for professional help.

Next up, we’ll talk about something I was not offered when I got laid-off: outplacement services.

Almost three years ago someone on this blog wrote a post titled How to Pick Good References.  It’s a great post, timeless as most everything written still applies (some of the stuff written, such as providing references on a job applications, will likely depend on what level you are applying for).  Someone recently asked a question as a followup to that post:

What if you have spent the last 10 years in the same company and all of the good professional references are within this company but you cant let anyone in your company know you are looking for a job?

I think it depends on how time-sensitive your needs are.  Obviously you could ask some very key, close contacts for letters of recommendation, stressing they please respect the confidentiality.  I know I have some professional contacts who would have respected that request, partially because we have great (strong) relationships, and partially because we all know that at any time we might be the one asking for a confidential recommendation!

Here’s another idea, though, which might mitigate any negative backlash, or associate you with a job seeker (or, in a serious job hunt): what if you work on collecting and strengthening your LinkedIn recommendations?  Here’s why:

LinkedIn is not just for job seekers. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of professionals who use LinkedIn for professional relationship stuff that is completely outside of a job search.  They work on their own recommendations, which are essentially third-party endorsements… not a declaration of “I’m in a job search.”

Asking for a recommendation on LinkedIn is not the same as asking for a letter of recommendation. If I ask for a letter of recommendation I’m clearly saying “someone is asking for it, probably a potential employer.”  If I ask for a LinkedIn recommendation, I’m simply saying “we’ve had a great working relationship, would you mind endorsing me… in about one paragraph?”

A potential employer can view all of your recommendations and get a feel for the overall value you bring. If you have a lot of recommendations (let’s go out on a limb and say “a lot” is…. 10 or more), from different companies or jobs, they should paint a picture of a well-rounded professional.  In my recommendations I see common themes, which is kind of cool that different contacts that I knew in different capacities see the same strengths.  I get the benefit of having multiple strengths pointed out, as well as multiple people reinforcing the same strengths.

A potential employer can see who the recommender is, and even follow up with them. An employer can check out the recommender’s profile, see what stature they have (in the post about getting letters of recommendation almost three years ago, the author suggests having recommendations from people who are supervisors or above), and even contact them, without me knowing it.  The very same thing can happen in a non-job-search situation.

If there are certain recommendations you like, from certain people you like, it will be that much easier to ask them for a full letter of recommendation. Now you can just approach them and say “I have a recommendation from you on LinkedIn, and I need one for a company that is looking at me… could you please incorporate that into a longer, more specific recommendation? Also, please focus on (your attributes here)…” This gives you the opportunity to drive the brand that is being conveyed.

You’ll have these recommendations available and viewable for a long time, which could come in handy when you least expect it. Once you land, you don’t have to hide the recommendations, and future employees, partners, vendors, customers, prospects, etc. might happen upon your profile and make decisions based on your LinkedIn recommendations.

Understand, I’m kind of biased about LinkedIn, and LinkedIn recommendations, as I wrote the LinkedIn book called I’m on LinkedIn — Now What??? Perhaps there are other ways of doing what you need to do, but for me, I consider this a must-do, low-hanging-fruit activity for your job search.

This is the third in a series of eight posts, each linked to one of eight categories in the Career Resumes blog. These posts sum up the best pieces of advice, tips, direction, insights, and answers discovered and shared on the blog by Allen Voivod, Chief Blogger for Career-Resumes.com from October 2006 to September 2008.

Edu-ma-cation. Hittin’ the books. Readin’, writin’, ‘n ‘rithmetic.

If you thought those days were over when you left high school or college, you’ve probably learned how wrong you were.

From the kinds of continuing professional education credits required in some fields, to staying up with changes in technology so your job skills don’t get out-moded, and everything in between, constant learning is the baseline expectation of the professional workforce, at every management level.

Here are the four things I’d like to leave you with, when it comes to the “Career Education” sub-focus of the blog:

1. Education helps everyone. Why does the lion’s share of companies offer to fund continuing education for their employees? Because it doesn’t just improve your game, it improves the game of everyone around you.

2. Education comes in many stripes. College or university, online or off, industry or trade group, theoretical or functional. Don’t limit yourself! Make a case for the kind of learning you want to pursue, so that it’ll clearly help your organization (and your performance in that organization).

3. Evolve or die. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’re not working to get better at what you do, then you’re not just stagnating. You’re actually falling behind, as thousands of other people learn to do what you do, only better. And let’s be honest – sometimes those big learners come younger and cheaper, and in a tight economy, you can’t afford not to stay ahead of the pack.

4. Do your risk/reward analysis. Sometimes people don’t take their companies up on big educational investments advanced college degrees because, if they decide to jump ship for a new position, they’ll have to pay back all the tuition reimbursement money. If that’s you, I’d ask you to consider the longer view. If you could get $30,000 more every year in salary, but have to pay back that much in tuition fees, would it be worth it? Personally, I’d say yes – it’s a short-term hit, but an investment in long-run prosperity.

So you’ve taken classes related to your job. Maybe they were formal classes at a college. Maybe they were for continuing professional education credits, or maybe it was a job requirement.

Either way, you’ve probably got notes, handouts, and other materials on your shelf, in your drawers, or tucked away in boxes. Not doing you much good there, are they?

We call this sort of stuff “shelf help.” Catchy, no? It sounds even snappier in the so-called self-help industry, where they can say things like, “Has your self-help become shelf-help?”

Well today, you’re going to change that. Here are your action steps for making the time and money spent on your job education more useful:

1. Grab a hold of the first set of materials you can get your hands on. Don’t discriminate. Just grab the first one and go!

2. Flip through fast. Your goal is not to re-read the whole thing. Instead, you’re looking for notes to your future self – the things you wanted to remember the next time you cracked open the stuff you’re reviewing now. In other words…

3. Find your first “Aha!” Depending on the material and how you take notes, this might be a section you highlighted in a book or handout, or something you wrote in larger print in your notes, with underlines drawn dramatically underneath.

It should be something that, when you found it, you believed that implementing this idea could help you and/or your business save time, save money, get more money, boost reputations, or create some other helpful benefit.

4. Set a goal. It’s simply, “I will implement this idea by X date.”

5. Write out the action steps you’d need to take to do it. Each step should take no more than 15 minutes to do, so as to defeat overwhelm.

6. Put the steps on your calendar. And make them the first thing you do each day, even before you check email That can be your reward for doing it. You love to check email, don’t you? If you’re like me, you probably do it every 15 minutes, even though you know you shouldn’t.

And voila! You go from shelf help back to self help!

Do you know more than you think you know?

Or have you forgotten more than most people will ever know in your field?

Or do you believe in the saying, “You teach best what you most need to learn”?

Then when it comes to career education, may I suggest the reverse of what I normally talk about, and get you to actually consider teaching in your field?

From Chambers of Commerce to Rotary Clubs, community colleges to graduate schools, industry events to professional chapter meetings, getting in front of an audience to share your knowledge can be a very good thing.

Why, you ask?

1. Gets you better known in your field. Think that would help you from a networking perspective, when it comes time to shop around a resume? You bet.

2. Makes you more highly regarded in your field. Also very useful at resume time.

3. Keeps you on your toes. It’s great practice for the one-on-one of interviews – especially since public speaking often hits in the top 2 or 3 things people generally fear most. If you can do public speaking, job interviews are a comparative breeze.

4. Improves your confidence. Also great for your job search process. No one wants to hand a six-figure salary to a nervous person, right?

5. Lets you know what people are thinking or wondering about in your field. When you find out what topics people want you to speak about, and when you get the targeted questions thrown at you after a speaking engagement, you get the kind of market research that comes in handy when it’s time to make a case for yourself as the best new management hire a company could make.

Need some speaking practice? You’ll find Toastmasters chapters all over the country. Don’t worry about the fact that you’ll be starting small with them. It took dozens, even hundreds of speaking engagements for some of the world’s best speakers and performers to get comfortable in their craft. Might as well work the kinks out with a small and supportive audience…

Don’t gamble with your résumé. Get a free résumé critique from Career-Resumes.com® today. Peter Newfield, President of Career-Resumes.com® and the résumé expert for BlueSteps.com, The Ladders, and former expert for Spencer Stuart Talent Network, leads a crack team of résumé writers with over 100 years of combined experience. Invest in your executive career at Career-Resumes.com®.

Let me guess. If you’re thinking of getting some additional college education for your career this year, the only form of financial aid you’ve considered is whether you company offers tuition reimbursement, right?

Well, you’d probably be doing yourself a disservice. Because the government (federal and your state combined) gives out something like $100 billion in grants, loans, and work-study opportunities every year. Not to mention all the large private organizations and foundations that also give scholarship money – and the college itself!

Going back for a college degree will cost you a chunk of change, no doubt. So why wouldn’t you take advantage of every option you have to let someone else pay for it instead?

The absolute baseline for getting access to money for college is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the “FAFSA.” Education.org (via YouTube) is currently featuring a breezy little five-minute video intro to the FAFSA, created by FastWeb.

And speaking of FastWeb, they claim to offer:

The largest and most complete source of scholarships available

Personalized matching of scholarships to your unique profile

Millions of scholarships worth billions of dollars available!

New scholarships added every day, all year long

The best way to get free money for school!

Now, that’s if you want to do all the research yourself. Alternatively, you can use a service like Dream Strategy. (Full disclosure: Though there are other folks out there who offer similar services, I can speak to Dream Strategy because I’ve recently provided content strategy and development for them.)

It was Dream Strategy which introduced me to the idea that you can actually negotiate with financial aid offices at the school of your choice for a better package. In a million years, that never would have occurred to me. As for paying for college, they acknowledge you’ll likely have to pay “something,” no matter what kind of asset management and cash flow work you do with them (or any other consultant), but:

“Some options save you thousands in interest payments, fees, taxes, and cash flow. This is where we give you the best return on your college investment.”

Check them out, or look up “college funding consultants” on Google for other options.

Well, I’ve heard of “degree mills” where you can pay a few bucks to get a diploma, but this was a new one on me.

Students in Oregon have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Business Computer Training Institute (BCTI), claiming that they received little or no instruction (or promised job search assistance), and yet were stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans in exchange for a diploma. This after a separate class-action suit, in Washington state, settled in May 2007 for $9 million.

From the article about the current lawsuit:

The former students (in Oregon) allege, among other things, the school defrauded them of their tuition and violated the Washington Consumer Protection Act. They’re seeking unspecified damages.

“I am tired of being hounded for money I shouldn’t have to pay,” said (Amanda) Hawley, a teller at West Coast Bank in Dallas.

Now, I’m not going to cast aspersions on other training or technical institutes out there. But if you’re thinking of taking a few classes at one of these places to shore up a sagging spot on your resume, I’m going to suggest a couple of things you can do to make sure something like this doesn’t happen to you:

1. Google the school. You’ve got one of the world’s best research tools at your fingertips. Use it! All I did was type “career education” into news.google.com to find out about the BCTI lawsuits.

2. Check their accreditation. They’ll have to have an accreditation listed somewhere in their materials or on their website. Follow it down the rabbit hole – go the accrediting commission’s website and see what they have to say, who’s on their board, and so forth.

3. Go to the alumni office. Let them direct you to a few alumni who’ll talk about their experience at the school.

Think of your education like the car buying experience. If you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, you’d want to do some research first, right? Same thing with a degree.

I worked on the marketing campaign and execution for a company’s presence at a large trade show earlier this year, and in the process had to learn a lot about trade show marketing in a hurry.

Differentiation is huge for trade show exhibitors, and yet what I read over and over was that the lion’s share of companies was guilty of a few crimes:

1. Setting up their booth the same way they’ve “always done it”

2. Looking at competitors and telling the marketing team to “do a booth like that one”

3. Create a booth without looking at the research about trade show psychology

This last one was amazing to see in action. One cardinal rule is not to have seating in the main booth area, because no attendee wants to sit down and be trapped. Yet when I went to this recent trade show, I saw chairs and couches galore, and – surprise, surprise – the seats were always empty (and so were the booths).

So if differentiation is such a big deal, how do you get there? Well, the number one idea I found in my trade show research was to go to trade shows entirely unrelated to your industry.

If you’re a biomedical person, check out a grocery industry show. They’re bound to be doing things in a completely different way from what you’re used to. Can you find some ideas there, or at a comic convention, even at a home and garden event?

And how does this apply to resumes, your career, and your job search? Quite simply, if you want to stand out in your field, consider part of your continuing career education to include how executives and managers make themselves stand out in other industries. It’s “form, not formula” when it comes to resumes. There may be certain dos and don’ts to follow, but there’s a lot of room for creating a unique identity as well.

The same goes for your day-to-day work. If you market bar-coding machines, find out how other professionals in your field market chewing gum. If you do manage the accounting for a consumer products company, find out what insurance companies are doing with their accounting systems.

Bring new, unusual, progressive influences into your company, and not only can you help the business, you can help yourself – now, and in the midst of your next job search.

Don’t gamble with your résumé. Get a free résumé critique from Career-Resumes.com® today. Peter Newfield, President of Career-Resumes.com® and the résumé expert for BlueSteps.com, The Ladders, and former expert for Spencer Stuart Talent Network, leads a crack team of résumé writers with over 100 years of combined experience. Invest in your executive career at Career-Resumes.com®.