Sam has a title problem. He is VP of IT for a small company. He basically manages all aspects of IT, from infrastructure and application development to information security and cloud computing. He manages a couple of technical resources. But now Sam wants to change jobs. He seeing layoffs at his company and hears rumors of financial insecurity. Now he's started a job search targeting larger, more established firms.
B...
It would be hard to miss the macro trends affecting the IT industry today: BYOD (bring your own device), automation and outsourcing, Big Data, the as-a-service revolution (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, UCaaS, etc.), to list a few. These trends are bringing with them new IT jobs. That's the good news. The bad news is that older jobs that deal with technologies becoming rapidly obsolete no longer represent a way forward for many....
If your career is a car, are you driving down a straight road? Or, do you picture yourself going around a rotary, seeing a number of exits, and then selecting one? In other words, is your career path more like a straightaway or a rotary? This is an important question to understand as you go about your personal branding, executive resume writing, and career management.Let's imagine you are a VP of IT. Did you get there by st...
It's been a long time since anything's been simple about executive resumes. People ask questions such as: should my resume be two pages or one, can you have three or more pages, how should it look, can I have a functional resume? And people ask: why I am not getting called back, why aren't recruiters contacting me, why have I been looking for months with no luck?Well, the simple answer to all these questions is, drum roll h...
Traditionally – pre-2008 meltdown but definitely before the dot-com boom – having too many jobs in short period of time on a candidate's resume was clearly an issue for hiring authorities. They assumed the person would be a short-term employee and reduce the ROI from recruiting, onboarding, and training them.Recruiters believed that short stints at several companies showed that the applicant wasn't committed, got easily bor...
LinkedIn is a wonderful resource for career-minded professionals. Here are three things to know as you use LinkedIn:Forget the personal website – LI now has the functionality to richly communicate your personal brand, and it is highly searchable by recruiters and hiring managers. Your LinkedIn profile gives you options for branding yourself across the written word, audio, video, photos, PowerPoint presentations and other do...
The other day I was in the zone! I was laser focused on writing a high-impact, succinct, and ATS-friendly resume for a client with a very high-powered career in a fast-changing, highly complex industry. My mind was bearing down to understand deeply and then put into a very few words the value and power of what he brings to the table.Then, cut to next scene! My iPhone rings. Usually I have the sense to not answer my work pho...
LinkedIn profile writing is a challenge. And there are ways in which the LinkedIn profile summary section is still the Wild West. The LI summary is a blank page only restricted by the 2000 character limit. There are no requirements for anything in particular, such as listing your jobs and dates. So why is it important to worry about this? And what should you do?People know that LI is the premier business networking site. It...
The other day I was in the zone! I was laser focused on writing a high-impact, succinct, and ATS-friendly resume for a client with a very high-powered career in a fast-changing, highly complex industry. My mind was bearing down to understand deeply and then put into a very few words the value and power of what he brings to the table. Then, cut to next scene! My iPhone rings. Usually I have the sense to not answer my work ph...
OK, in my previous blog post I noted that employee referrals are the #1 source of hire in corporate America. This statistic comes out of CareerXroads Source of Hire Study for 2014. That means leveraging employee referrals is better than depending on recruiters to find your a job, applying to jobs on big job boards, or using specialty services like Execunet or Netshare.Everyone knows that “networking” has always been the bes...