The High-Tech Career Handbook: The Best of Career Opportunities 1998-2003

30,000 Words

Navigating the special difficulties of a high-tech career can be troublesome for workers, young and old. Career Opportunities, a weekly column for ComputorEdge Magazine in San Diego, California and Colorado Springs, Colorado, has addressed these issues for almost 13 years.

While simultaneously developing his own high-tech career, author Douglas E. Welch has shared his insights, trials, setbacks and successes with his readers. The High-Tech Career Handbook collects the best columns from 1997-2003 into a book for all high-tech careerists, whether they are just starting out, building their career or looking for a new career in the high-tech world. Topics covered in the columns include getting your career started, ethics, fairness and the benefits of doing honest business, personal development, professional development, and the tips and tricks for transitioning into a mature career.

Cultivating Your Career Reputations

11,000 Words

While we often talk about one, monolithic, Reputation – with a capital R — I believe that there are a series of reputations that make up the whole. This book will focus on the combination of reputations that make up your one, overarching, Reputation. By examining each of these reputations in detail, I hope you will find specific areas where you can improve your work, your actions and your thoughts so that your overall professional reputation grows.

Why break your Reputation down into its constituent parts? It is often said that you can’t “do” projects, you can only do the individual tasks that make up the project and achieve the desired result. The same can be said for reputation. You don’t build your reputation as a whole, you cultivate the smaller reputations that create it. Each individual action builds your reputation in unique ways and each requires some thought as to how they relate to the whole.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Reputations
• A Reputation for Fairness
• A Reputation for Honesty
• A Reputation for Trustworthiness
• A Reputation for Decision-making
• A Reputation for Empathy
• A Reputation for Helpfulness
• A Reputation for Compromise
• A Reputation for Clarity
• A Reputation for the Big Picture…and the small
• A Reputation for Balancing Work and Self
• A Reputation for Creativity and Innovation
• Conclusion
• About the Author

Career Compass: Finding Your Career North

5,100 Words

Imagine if when you were born you were given a magical compass to lead you through your life. It would always show you the way. It would show you the right answers on tests, lead you to the right college and to the right course of study at that college. It would lead to your first job, your first (and maybe last) love and always show the path ahead. This isn’t some idle fantasy. We each have a compass to show us the way, if only we would take it out of our pocket and use it. This compass, of course, is our desire. Instead of a needle, it is a feeling, a pull, a tension — in some cases, an overwhelming flood of feeling that says “Yes, this is the way — this is the one — this is where you need to go!”

“I am deeply convinced of the importance and effectiveness of social media. Like the Internet itself, which made social media possible, social media allows you to expose your talents, your products, your creativity to a huge number of people all over the world. The “loose contacts” we make online are the beginning of what I call our own global family. This isn’t one unwieldy global online community, but rather our own personalized family made up of those that bring value into our lives. Our communities might overlap in some ways, but they will never be the same. They can’t be. We are all unique individuals so therefore our communities will reflect this uniqueness In fact, when our communities are too alike, we might be just following the crowd instead of building our own community.”

Social Media Self Preservation is now available in the Amazon Kindle Bookstore.

*Amazon Prime members can “borrow” the book for free.

An Audio Book version of Social Media Self Preservation is also available

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