Peter's Career Tools & Tips: May 2006

Need to Practice Interviewing?

Monster.com has published a list of 100 interview questions you can practice with - click here for details.

This is no substitute for practice interviewing that is sector specific, but it is a good place to start when trying to hone general interviewing skills.

Interested in Careers in the Renewable Energy Sector?

Check out an interesting article on Monster by clicking here.

Looking for a Job When You're Past 40

I saw a bulletin board post today by two people who have been struggling to find work. Both are past 40 and feel that their age is working against them. I wrote an answer and thought I'd share it with you here:

Where recruiters are concerned, unless you are a cookie cutter fit for the position (including, unofficially, target demographic), they are going to be reticent to present you to the hiring company. Your best bet is to emphasize your proactive job search (networking, cold calling, warm calling, etc.) and use applications through recruiters and to posted job ads as your backup.

Have you considered looking at other kinds of work in different industries? The top five industries that are financially healthy, hiring, and age diverse (and forecasted to remain that way) are Healthcare, Education, Residential Services, Products and Services for the Aging Population, and Business to Business Services.

The best way to find work quickly is to offer a sought-after service that you’re good at in a growing, age-diverse industry. I recommend you take a look at a book called "Over-40 Job Search Guide." (Note: I didn't write it and don't get a commission if you buy it). It is the source of the information above about the 5 industries, which is consistent with what I’ve read elsewhere.

I also recently wrote a brief article about the Dept. of Labor's projections for the next 10 years regarding job function growth, which you can find in the archives of this Blog.

Brainstorming Meetings

Went to a brainstorming meeting this evening with 5 other people who own small service businesses. Each person had 5 minutes to talk about a current issue in their business and get feedback and ideas from other participants.

I came away with a number of great ideas and food for thought for my own business.

"Idea parties" (a term coined by Barbara Sher) and brainstorming groups can be a great way to put some fire into any kind of marketing effort, whether for an individual service business or in the context of a job search.

As I am constantly re-learning, there is nothing to gain and a lot to lose from trying to "go it alone."

Help Dave Change Lives

A fellow toastmaster of mine, a 40 year old silicon valley high tech professional working in Corporate Development and Mergers & Acquisitions for Intuit, has taken 3 months off from work (with the support of his senior management) to change lives by giving back to the world community.

His goal, under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity, is to build 25 permanent houses and a counseling center in Colombia for victims of violence in order to take as many as 150 displaced people off the street for the rest of their lives and keep an untold number of kids out of a life of prostitution and sexual exploitation.

To learn more about Dave and his efforts, check out his blog at http://www.helpdavechangelives.org/.

Cold Calling - for Sales and Job/Career Search

I attended a workshop last night at the SBA in San Francisco about cold calling, presented by Tony Wilkins, a local small business development consultant (reachable at awil267487@aol.com). Tony has written a book about cold calling available from Amazon.com and Ex Libris.

He shared a tip that I felt was as relevant for a job search as for small-business selling.

When you send a "cold call" e-mail, fax or cover letter to a hiring manager or other contact and subsequently phone (say in a week's time) to follow up, the first three questions to ask on the call (after introducing yourself and saying why you are calling) are:

Did you receive it?
Have you read it?
What do you think about it?

Of course, if the answer to question 1 or 2 is no, be prepared to quickly explain what's in the communication.

For people who are running their own business, he also gave sage advice when contacting any organization to explore making an in-person sales call. Namely, make sure that:

The business has a need for your services.
The business has a budget for your services.
The potential customer is looking to do business in the next 1-3 months.

If the answer to any of these questions is "No," a personal visit will likely be a waste of your time. Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't send literature (with their permission) and put a tickler in your contact management system to remind you to touch base again in a few months time, if appropriate.

The same advice does not necessarily apply in a job search, where you may want to meet the person to conduct an informational interview, establish rapport, and/or begin building a relationship over the longer term. Job and career-search related calls are not automatically "sales calls"; it all depends on your purpose for making contact in the first place.

Finally, he suggested that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were the best day for "sales calls" as people are neither getting back up to speed after the last weekend nor trying to wrap things up in anticipation of the coming weekend. This makes sense to me; and I would offer the same advice with regard to follow-up calls on cover letters and other correspondence.

Micro-Lending On the Web

Came across an interesting article in this weekend's Wall Street Journal about lenders and borrowers hooking up over the web. The article's author has been using a web platform called Prosper.com to build a portfolio of loans to a variety of people, including money for a grad student's foreign travel, funds to cover a woman's adoption costs, and cash for home repairs - all at varying rates of interest.

Apparently there are several sites thorugh which potential borrowers and lenders can meet one another "virtually" and arrange a loan; however, Prosper is represented as being the most popular. For those needing a small loan, such sites can represent an alternative to credit cards or credit unions.

Prosper provides an "eBay like forum" where lenders can evaluate hundreds of prospective borrowers, each seeking a loan of $1,000 up to $25,000, repayable over three years. The borrower indicates the maximum interest rate he/she is willing to pay; Prosper.com provides a credit rating, along with information on homeownership, credit history, and debt-to-income ratio; and the loan is put up for bid at the highest interest rate the borrower is willing to pay. Lenders can bid in increments as small as $50 (i.e., loans are usually syndicated amongst a number of lenders) and can set the interest rate at which they are willing to lend. The ultimate return on the loan is equal to the interest rate, less modest fees charged by Prosper.com, adjusted for ultimate default rate.

For people interested in the world of micro-lending, looking for a new investment vehicle, or needing extra cash themselves or their small business, prosper.com looks like a site worth checking out.

Blogging for a Career Change

Ever thought about blogging your way to a new career? Check out this article on Vault.com about somebody who actually did!

The Working Mother's Balancing Act - on Monster.com

There's a great article on Monster.com about things to think about (career and job-search wise) for working mothers. Click here to check it out!

What happens if the employer asks up front what you earned in your last job?

I have a client who, in an initial phone interview, was asked what he earned in his last job. He countered with the question about expected salary for the position. The interviewer (the hiring manager) replied with "I asked you first" followed by silence.

In the 2001 edition of his book "Negotiating Your Salary - How to Make $1000 a Minute," Jack Chapman proposes 3 ways to handle early (pre-offer) questions about past remuneration or future salary expectations:

Least Effective: Cave in and reveal your salary history or requirements.
If, you take this approach, he recommends you discuss your salary expectations and not your history. In order to do this, you will have to have done your homework on salary range in advance (which should always be the case anyway).

Better: Answer with "fair market value" and probe for their budgeted range.

Best: Stick to your principles and attempt to postpone the discussion.
Jack offers a number of suggestions on how you might go about doing this.

I highly recommend the book as another great resource for preparing for compensation and other job-related negotiations.

Humor and Public Speaking

A few weeks ago, I attended an event sponsored by the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers' Association, where I had the opportunity to hear from two gifted public speakers, David Glickman and Brad Montgomery.

Each had reams of good advice for creating humor, customizing it, and milking your "material" for more humor.

As somebody who loves to laugh, I had a ball. If you want to share in the laughter, visit their web sites - both for a view of both men at work and some great material (I read a joke on Brad's site that had me in stitches - literally - I fell of my chair while laughing, hit my head and had to get stitches!

Really! I'm just kidding!)

I thought I'd share 5 pieces of advice from each presenter that I found particularly useful:

From David:

Have the tools with you to capture your funny ideas at all times (recorder, pen, paper, friend with the memory of an elephant, whatever).
Brand names are funnier than just saying something generic.
Odd numbers are funnier than even numbers; and planned mispronunciations (and other mistakes) are funnier than...not using them? (OK - so I squeezed two into one line item - so sue me! On second thought, please, please don't!)
Use the "Rule of Three" - the first two statements are 'normal', the last one is funny.
Try a new laugh at least three times before dropping it.

From Brad:

Impromptu humor doesn't have to be as funny as prepared humor; therefore, make everything look impromptu and spontaneous.
The audience doesn't know what you have planned. Therefore, they will not know if your joke bombed...or if you planned it that way. Ack like you planned it that way.
Humor doesn't always mean punch lines and stand-up comedy. Therefore, even non-funny people can use humor to lighten up the program and to connect with the audience.
Blue or dirty humor almost always offends at least one person in the audience - so, don't do it in a professional setting or context!
Comedy ain't easy; so give yourself time to study it, try it out, succeed, fail, and most importantly, learn.

Both of these gents provide Customized Corporate Comedy; so if you're in the market for that service, I'd give them both a close look. David provides clean, clever, customized comedy entertainment for your convention, meeting, sales rally or banquet. Brad does motivational humor, serves as an MC/Master of Ceremonies, provides executive humor coaching, and delivers corporate entertainment.

Vocation Vacations

A recent article in Business Week ("Test Drive Your Dream Job", 26 April 2006, found on-line) profiles a company called "Vocation Vacations" that offers people the opportunity to "test drive" their dream jobs through temporary (usually 2-3 day), intense mentorship experiences between vacationers exploring a potential new career area and professionals from a variety of fields. The article gives the example of an international banker at HSBC for whom the charm of his two-decade long career was fading. After two and a half days working with a doggie day-care provider in Massachusetts followed by a 3-day stint with a dog trainer in Oregon, the banker decided to launch his own dog-training business - and has since done so.

The idea behind this business is that, for a fee of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (not including transportation and lodging), you can experience life from a 360-degree perspective in one of a number of other - often "exotic" - careers, without the risk of quitting your current job or investing heavily in a new career before gaining a visceral knowledge of what you, the vacationer, might be getting yourself into (the good, the bad, and the ugly included).

Categories in which you can vocation vacation include Acting, Bootmaking, Choreography, Dude Rancher, Events, Fine Arts, Hospitality, Meteorology, Perfumery, Restauranteur, Sword Making, TV & Film, Wine, and Yoga - among many others. For a complete list, visit http://www.vocationvacations.com/search/listCategories.php?country=4.

Apparently the idea has some cachet - and a pretty solid track record behind it, judging by the testimonials on the company web site, the examples in the business week article, and the fact that the Travel Channel recently debuted a new series based on the company's "vocationers" called "This Job's a Trip," chronicling the vacationing adventures of Vocation Vacation clients.

Many - if not most - of the vacations, unfortunately, are not an option for the cash-strapped or people on tight budgets. A two-day stint as a golf instructor in Denver, CO, for example, costs $899 plus airfare, plus hotel, plus rental car, plus food. If, for example, you were coming from New York, total cost for the 2-day experience - including travel - could run somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,800 (based on research done today using Orbitz & Expedia.com). Of course, it helps a lot if you can commute to your vacation from home, have a free place to stay, use frequent flyer miles, etc.

Neverless, it's a great concept for the banker, lawyer, or lion tamer who has never dared to seriously consider a career he or she has often dreamed about but would love to try on for size.

For a view of the Business Week article referenced above, visit http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2006/sb20060412_289938.htm.

Interesting Web Site for Job Postings

Recently discovered an interesting and useful web site called Indeed.com, which purports to index all the job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages.

Users can save their searches and have jobs delivered to to them by email alert, their personalized Google home page, MyYahoo, or other RSS feed readers. I recently used their RSS service to get a regular stream of new postings for "credit analyst" positions on my own Google Home page.

Well worth a look as both a potential source of leads in the visible job market and for the sake of saving time!

Latest Employment Projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published its employment projections through 2014.

According to the survey published in the Winter 2005-06 Edition of Occupational Outlook Quarterly, the greatest numeric growth in employment will be in the professional and service sectors – with over 11 million additional jobs. Both areas, along with management, business, and financial positions, will experience above average growth (greater than 13%).

The fastest growing occupations in numerical terms will be healthcare practitioners and technical professionals, education training and library professionals, and in computer and mathematical science.

The 10 occupations expected to have the greatest net increase in jobs (in absolute terms) in the highest paying fields that require a Bachelor’s or Graduate Degree include:

Post-secondary teachers (524,000 jobs)
General and operations managers (308,000 jobs)
Elementary school teachers except special education (265,000 jobs)
Accountants and auditors (264,000 jobs)
Computer software engineers, applications (222,000 jobs)
Computer systems analysts (153,000 jobs)
Secondary school teachers (except vocational and special education) (148,000 jobs)
Physicians and surgeons (136,000 jobs)
Networking systems and data communications analysts (126,000 jobs)
Management Analysts (122,000 jobs)

The 10 occupations requiring a bachelor’s or graduate degree plus experience expected to add the most jobs from between 2005 and 2014 include: