Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch

Take responsibility for your own education from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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I have been advising you to take control of your career for over 12 years here on Career Opportunities. I continue to believe that it is of the utmost importance that you manage your career instead of letting it manage you. Today, I am extending that advice beyond your work and your career. Starting today you must also take direct responsibility for your own education.

Through budget cuts and legislation, our American system of higher education is being priced beyond reach or destroyed entirely. While I will rue the day it occurs, there may come a time when many of you, or more likely, your children,  will find it difficult, if not impossible, to gain a college degree. In such a world, you may need to look to other, perhaps older, methods to gain the education you need to succeed.

Read this entire article – Take responsibility for your own education from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Are you learning with every project, task, opportunity? Are you “Hitting the Bullseye”? from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Over the last several months my son and I have been increasingly active in archery at our local range with our local SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) group. We enjoy being outdoors and the camaraderie of archery, as well as challenging ourselves to improve our skills over time. During our hours at the range, comparisons between archery and your career have been coming to mind quite a bit. There is one analogy that I haven’t been able to shake so I felt it deserved presenting here.

When you are on the archery range your goal is typically to become better and better at your aim. The archery target presents a clear goal and clear feedback after each shot. If only our career was so forthcoming with feedback. Archery is a challenge of constant correction and adaptation. If you want to improve, you carefully evaluate each shot, what you did, and the results it produced. After some time you will find that your muscle memory will begin to kick in and it becomes easier and easier to hit the bulls eye consistently.

Read this entire article – Are you learning with every project, task, opportunity? Are you “Hitting the Bullseye”? from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Your career is about YOU! from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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You may have noticed over the years that I don’t write about typical career-related topics here on Career Opportunities. Where other columns might focus on resumes or interview skills, I prefer to talk about how your career relates to you, your needs and your goals. Too often I think we forget the a career is a very personal thing. It isn’t some academic process that happens to someone else. It happens to you. You have to live with your career, day after day, so shouldn’t you be building the career you deserve?

When we talk about careers we tend to focus on the external factors. How can I perfectly answer that tough interview question? How can I mold myself into someone this company will want to hire? How will our boss feel about this action? Will the company have issues with that? To my eye, we spend entirely too much time trying to satisfy external forces and factors and too little looking out for ourselves. The true success of your career is how much you gain from it, not how much others gain from you. Sure there should be a balance, but in most career situations we err on the side of pleasing our employer instead of pleasing ourselves.

Read this entire article – Your career is about YOU! from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

The Care And Feeding of Your Career from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Your career isn’t just something you set on autopilot and forget. Sure, you might be engaged in a great job at the moment and enjoying your work, but even then you need to be constantly monitoring and adjusting your career. Times change and along with them the economy, the stability of your company and your own wants, needs and desires. Be happy, sure, but don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. You need to keep building your career, even when you seem on the right path.

Read this entire article – The Care And Feeding of Your Career from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

The Art of Communication and Your Career from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Communicating well with those around you may be one of the most important parts of any career. Whether you are communicating with your family, your co-workers, your managers or the world, whenever you fail to communicate effectively, the consequences are swift and painful. If you are having issues in your career, take some time to think about how you are communicating. I can guarantee you will find something lacking in your approach that might have prevented a lot of workplace angst.

I was reminded about the importance of communication through a recent event in my own life. It involved a school announcement that the archdiocese (my son attends Catholic grade school) would be adding 20 days to school year, starting with the Fall 2011 calendar. While I personally had no real issues with this, the outcry from other parents was swift and loud. There were a variety of arguments against adding these days, but I believe at the heart of the argument was the presentation of this new policy as a fait accompli (a thing accomplished and presumably irreversible, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

Read this entire article – The Art of Communication and Your Career from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Ask anyone you know and I am sure you will hear the same thing, “What day is it? How did it get to be 2011 already? The year is moving so fast!” It seems a simple truth that the older you get the faster the days, months and years seem to pass. We go to sleep in one month and wake up in another, not really recalling what happened in between. This year, though, I am going to try and pay more attention to the passing of time and the things I accomplish along the way. Call it mindfullness. Call it paying attention. Call it “Getting Things Done.” No matter what you call it, let’s commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress.

Looking at the calendar I see that this is the 14th day and 2nd week of the new year. Both weeks have been very busy for me, but looking back over my calendar (a shared Google Calendar, in my case) I see that I had 11 client calls and 2 user group meetings and 1 night of archery practice with my son. We usually think of calendars as forward-looking devices, but they can be just as useful as a tool to remind us of everything we have accomplished. I even have a service that adds my Twitter messages to my calendar so I can see what I was talking about last week or last month.

Read this entire article – Commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress from the Career Opportunities Podcast

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!