4 Tips You Can Use to Write Better Building Your Future Now

4 Tips You Can Use to Write Better Building Your Future Now A majority of jobs these days require a decent level of communication skills which includes writing. At many jobs you dont have to write reports or memos, yet writing can help you elevate your opportunities in the work place. Writing better also means writing a better resume and coverletter and increasing your chances of landing quality interviews! How do you get better at writing? Here are 4 tips you can apply and see immediate results. 1.Read Daily It really doesnt matter what you read as long as its published! If you read a book or magazine chances are it has been reviewed and edited which means cutting down on reading online forums for learning how to write effectively. If you tend to stick to one author or a subject thats fine, but diversifying your reading material can help expand your vocabulary and expose you to different writing styles. 2.Keep a Journal This has been already written about throughout this blog: keeping personal or career journals. However, if you keep a journal, write poems or storiesthey all are essential to allowing you to write and express yourself. 3.Imitate a Style Sometimes we love a writers style so much we try to imitate him or her. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that! In fact, thats a healthy thing to do. If you really like Stephen King for example, you can try to mimic him. Doing this will help you eventually find your own voice and style. 4.Get the Elements of Style This is perhaps one of the most important books on grammar, syntex and style published on the English language. It is an invaluable book that you can put to use immediately and see instant results. This book should definitely be on your bookselve. Image: Pexels

How To Get A Job In Another State Tips, Tricks, Full Guide - Algrim.co

How To Get A Job In Another State Tips, Tricks, Full Guide - Algrim.co Getting a job out of state might not be as hard as you would think. We’re going to cover the steps to starting this job search process, what you can do to ensure you communicate your location to your future employer clearly, and ways that will make it easier. Firstly, if you are a high profile candidate for the open position, asking for relocation might not be as challenging as you would think. Most employers will offer it up front. In the technology sector, especially cities like New York and San Francisco, relocation is a common occurrence. Those cities have grown by nearly 80% just in the past few years due to the face that more employees are moving to those cities for work. That includes those who are from other cities and are getting relocated for new positions. How Attractive Of A Prospect Are You This is what’s really important to consider before you start thinking about applying for jobs out of state, how much experience do you have? If you have a considerable amount of experience in a particular job function, you're out of state application will be treated just like an in-state application. Be honest with yourself about your experience level and your desirability. If you feel you are in this special class of professionals, asking for relocation is a simple task. All you have to do is ask the hiring manager, “Is it possible to get relocation assistance for this position?” That’s it! If You Aren’t Experienced And Want To Relocate This is where it’s important to be honest with yourself about your desirability to future employers. Because if you don’t have enough experience, there are a few tricks that will help you start the conversation about relocation. And a few prerequisites that are required in order for your application to be seriously considered. Here’s what we need to go over regarding your application process: What needs to be inside your cover letter. What the interviewer might ask you. What address to put on your resume. What phone number to put on your application. When it comes to what needs to go inside your cover letter, it is advised that you place the reason for your desire to relocate. It’s important to understand that companies, HR departments and hiring managers need this information because they are often asked to relocate a potential candidate but have to terminate them very quickly due to the fact that the opportunity didn’t work out. And this causes damage to the business because they may have either compensated the employee for the relocation or considered the relocation an expense. Because they want to minimize the risk of hiring a candidate that might not work, they are more strict in the interview process. As well as wanting to know the details regarding your desire to move. When you put together your cover letter, be sure to include your reason for the relocation request. It can be as simple as, “My family is located in San Francisco, I’m moving back in June.” or it could be, “I’ve decided San Francisco is home. And I’m searching for my next opportunity.” You don’t have to go through a long explanation. Keep it short. Keep it direct. During The Interview Process The interviewer is going to ask you why you are deciding to relocate. And they are going to want a little more information than what you included in your cover letter. Be prepared to have an answer to this question. The simpler you keep your answer, the more impactful it will be. Remember, relocation isn’t an uncommon request. You aren’t asking for the moon. When you keep your answer brief, it will sound more honest and genuine. Which is all the employer cares about. What Address To Put On Your Resume When you are thinking about what address you need to include on your resume or application, you might not want to include your current address. Though most correspondence happens by email or phone, you may want to reinforce the fact that you are moving. To do this all you have to do is make sure you include your current address and then the address that you are relocating to. Related: Best Relocation Cover Letter Example Here’s an example of what that would look like: John Doe 123 North Street New York, NY 11211 Relocating to: John Doe 23 South Street San Francisco, CA 94114 It’s a simple technique and can save you some headache as well as reinforce the fact that you are making the relocation regardless of the employers choice to proceed with your employment. What About Your Phone Number While other resources will tell you that employers are looking at your area code to try and decipher if you are local or not, this isn’t the case. Too many phone numbers have been created by cell phone carriers to keep track of this. Employers aren’t necessarily spending time looking up the area code and trying to do detective work to see if you are in-state. Use your normal phone number and you’ll be fine. I’ve never once heard of questioning regarding an area code on a cell phone. The only thing you should be cautious of is temporary phone numbers or ones that have unique numbers like a Google Phone number. Don’t use those. Are You Going To Be Able to Attend The Interview This is the most important part of applying for jobs out of state, the fact that when you are asked to interview on-site, are you going to be able to attend? The phone interview stage will be quick and easy. But if you are invited to meet with the team, this usually means that you’ll have to pay for your travel. That would include the flight, hotel, and meals that go along with your stay. Consider this similar to business travel, though this is not an expense that the employer pays for. Be sure that you have enough capital reserves or savings to fit this bill before you start applying for jobs out of state. You won’t be offered employment until you complete the on-site interviews. Unfortunately, there’s no way around that. So be absolutely sure you are okay spending this money for the job opportunity. Is There Any Different In Applying If you are applying to multiple jobs, there’s no difference in the way that you go about doing it. You’ll still be trying to apply to as many targeted jobs that you can. And hoping that you get responses from them to start the interview process. By being out of state, there’s nothing that you should be doing differently with regard to your technique for getting interviews. Be Prepared For More Questioning It’s important to reiterate this part. Your interview process is going to be more strict than other candidates. It’s because you are out of state and looking for relocation. It will be imperative that you plan for your interview questioning to be more intensive than you might think. They will have more questions that relate to your knowledge of the company or your desire for wanting to be in the position and state itself. You’ll need to practice as much as you can on your delivery. Afterwards, if those who spoke with you feel confident about your potential employment, the hiring manager will work with you on the relocation. They often give a budget for which they spend on moving companies and airline travel for you to get to the state. You’ll need to speak with them and work out what their relocation compensation is and factor that into your move.

The pursuit of happiness makes life shallow

The pursuit of happiness makes life shallow I told Matthew its time to take the kids apple picking. Do you want to come with us? I said. Were going to a place in Illinois. What? Whats wrong with the apple trees here? We have apple trees? So the kids and I got in the back of the truck, and Matthew drove over hills and through gates to a pasture full of apple trees. He pulled the truck under the tree like a ladder. When youre picking someone elses trees, you are careful, looking for the best apples, respectful to not mess it all up for the next people who pay $35 a bushel. On your own farm, you shake the apple tree, and apples fall into the back of the truck. Each trees apples taste different and each is an unfamiliar taste. They are cross-pollinated and random, so you never know what youll get until you bite.  We put soft baking apples in one pile and hard eating apples in the other, and the boys became philosophers about what a particular type of apple would be good for. Each time we shook a tree, the cows jogged over to eat apples that fell. Their calves came with. They are too young to eat apples, but they watched. Between the trees, Matthew noticed a cow who seemed to be looking for something. We drove closer and there was a calf lying in a gulch. Matthew said the mom didnt have any milk. So he jumped out of the truck, and put the calf in the back, with us. The calf could barely stand. Apple picking was over. We were in crisis mode. The calf was too scared to sit, but we couldnt let him fall in the truck, so we held him. Then we had to get milk replacer formula from a neighbor, and we set up a system to force feed the calf, through a tube, if he didnt drink from a bottle. Youd think that picking apples was the fun part of the day, interrupted by a farm emergency. But in fact, the best part of the day was saving the calf. We look for moments of happiness, but there is not much lasting happiness from a few bucolic moments in a field of apple trees. What lasts is having meaning. The kids felt important bringing the calf to safety. When someone needed to stay by the calf while we went to get milk replacer, one of the boys stayed. My oldest son takes care of the calf now. He feeds him twice a day and walks with him in the barnyard because the calf is still too scared to walk alone. Roy Baumeister writes about happiness as something that gets in the way of a meaningful life. Happiness is about decreasing stress and conflict and taking rather than giving. In a forthcoming paper about the difference between a happy life and a meaningful life, the authors write,  Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided. Emily Esfahani Smith writes in The Atlantic about how current research shows happiness and meaning are competing forces in life. We live a deeper, more fulfilled life if we actively seek meaning. Viktor Frankl writes that stress and hardship are actually more meaningful than happiness because they cause you to be focused on others rather than yourself. Dan Gilbert writes that this is why so many people choose to have kids even though kids dont make people happy. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  writes that working hard at something to the point that it pushes your life off-kilter is much more emotionally rewarding than doing something conflict-free and fun. For kids, the difference is picking apples or saving a calf. For adults, its more complicatedâ€"aiming for an easy, conflict-free, peaceful life, or heading straight into something difficult that shakes up your life so you can be part of something larger than you. Each of us has a different capacity to give to others without losing ourselves. Some of us can give only a bit, some of us give so much there is nothing of us left. Your real jobâ€"not necessarily the one you get paid forâ€"is to find the opportunity to infuse meaning into your life by challenging yourself to give in a way that jeopardizes your happiness. Look around for where you can make a big difference. It is likely a place that will shake you up. And remember that if my husband werent looking around for a big problem, all we would have done is pick apples and driven home.

What Does Your Blogging Platform Say About Your Personal Brand - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

What Does Your Blogging Platform Say About Your Personal Brand - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career What does your blogging platform say about you? Are you sending a message just by having the blog platform you have? Are there certain types of people who choose one platform over the other? See what your chosen blog platform could be saying about you. Select your weapon Blogger.com: Im new to blogging and technology. Ive been on Facebook for three years, and I kick butt at Farmville, Pirate Clan, and Words With Friends. My grandkids call me Memaw. I want to share stories about my cat and two dogs that I take on car trips. WordPress.com: A friend told me I should start blogging, and he set this up for me. I havent posted anything since 2009, when I wrote This is my first blog post. Hopefully I can figure out how to use this. Ill be talking about stuff I enjoy, interesting ideas, and my philosophy of life. I hope to start making money from my blog, if I can just find my password. WordPress.org/self-hosted: Geek, nerd, techie, dweeb, guru, egghead. Call me what you want, but Ive got the technical chops to get this bad boy up and running, with up-to-the minute plugin solutions for every problem an advanced blogger could ever want. I should, since Im always free on the weekends. Posterous: I root for the underdog, the little guy, the Chicago Cubs, and I still get excited when The Little Engine That Could makes it over the hill. I wanted a blog platform that most people had never heard of, let alone know how to pronounce correctly. I also believe that my mobile phone should be my one and only method of communication, so I prefer to submit my blog posts and photos via email. Tumblr: Email? What the hell is email? I like posting awesome pictures of my feet, the awesome food Im eating for dinner, and me and my besties having a really awesome time. Im 24 and wear jeggings and giant knit hats the Rastafarians wear to hold their dreadlocks, even though I have short hair. I use my $500 phone to make my high-res photos look really old. Typepad: I was in AP English and Math in high school. I scored 1600 on my SATs and graduated valedictorian. In college, I double majored in actuarial science and contemporary design. And yet, Im more than happy to spend $9 a month on something I could get for absolutely free anywhere else on the Internet. LiveJournal: Im living in 2003, and this is the perfect platform to let me share my Red Dwarf and Star Trek: Enterprise fan fiction. I also post Harry Potter cosplay photos. Im also waiting for shoulder pads and poofy bangs to come back into fashion. Joomla: I hate the world and everyone in it. Twitter: Dont have any deep thots that cn b expressed in 140 characters. Believe Twitterspeak shld be taut n schools as 2nd language. (1/2) Twitter: Any deeper wrld-vu cn b summed in 2nd twt, if need be. (2/2) Author: Erik Deckers has a blog on WordPress.com, Posterous, Tumblr, a self-hosted WordPress site, and is still rocking his very first blog on Blogger (loud and proud since 2003!). He is a newspaper humor columnist, the owner of Professional Blog Service, and the co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, and No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. He also doesnt really believe any of what he wrote about your favorite blogging platform, because youre awesome.

What kitchen appliance would you be and how to answer other bizarre interview questions

What kitchen appliance would you be and how to answer other bizarre interview questions You’ve done it!  It may have taken days, but with an immaculately tailored CV and an intricately designed cover letter, you’ve earned that first interview. Your browser tabs bulge with googled titbits of the company’s history and ethos, and you’ve scoured the forums for tips and tricks to prove your dynamism and individuality in your newfound favourite workplace. But there’s one part of the interview you can’t prepare for: the bizarre question.  We’ve all heard of this wild, untameable beast. It’s the question designed to evade rehearsal: the one to throw you off your stride and prove that you can improvise like the Miles Davis of obscure employability. Interviewers love it. Interviewees dread it. But how can you handle it?  â€œSo, if you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?”  Uh oh.  â€œI suppose I would be a cheese grater. Because I’m cheesy… And I’m great”.  And just like that, I’ve failed my interview.  Although these questions are designed with ‘no right answers’, I’ve still managed to find a wrong one. My potential employer looks dismayed at my inability to identify more appropriate skill sets by means of kitchen appliance. The interview ends on a frosty note: I am not Miles Davis. I am the jobseeker equivalent of a Lil Wayne guitar solo.  So how can you master the bizarre interview question? How can you prepare for the perils of being attacked by a hundred duck-sized horses, or approach the problem of filling an airplane with basketballs, or take your exquisitely crafted personal identity and apply it to your favourite character from  Friends? It’s a bit of a conundrum.  But there are a couple of work-arounds that can help you tackle the wayward interviewer and express your problem-solving, personality and practicality. Here are three different ways you can prepare for the unpreparable, and face the unusual questions that might arise in your first steps onto the career ladder. Work Backwards Even though it’s unfeasible to prepare for every potential question, you can still prepare a few routine answers. Pick out some qualities that you want to highlight and have a go at applying them to different scenarios. Want to express your team-building and networking skills? Start there and work backwards until you find your kitchen appliance, farm animal, or whatever else a whimsical employer may throw at you. It’ll give you a something to base a response on, rather than scrabbling for an answer and trying to back it up afterwards. Thinking Out Loud Many of the most bizarre questions are used to assess your practical problem-solving skills.   In these situations, employers will be less concerned with the answer you give, and more interested in your thought process in getting there. So if you’re suddenly faced with deciphering how many piano tuners are living in London, the logistics of packing serrano ham into the Houses of Parliament, or which way to bet on a fight between Batman and Superman, make sure to show your working and emphasise the logical and pragmatic ways you reached your answer. Don’t be afraid to slow the interview down to give a calm, considered and professional view, even towards the strangest requests.  Practice Of course, the dreaded word. Practice, practice, practice. Grab a friend and try not to fall into the old habits of day drinking and halcyon dreams of University. Get them to drill you on the questions that you expect, and the ones you don’t. The aim here isn’t to memorise all of your responses, but to build confidence in facing fast-and-loose interview situations; to get into the habit of thinking on your feet and approaching problems proactively. So don’t fear the obscure interview question. More often than not, it can provide a platform to demonstrate your logic, creativity and humour. In the worst cases, you may be left floundering for a few seconds (or dropping cringeworthy puns), but in the best you’ll prove yourself as a valuable contender in the dynamic world of work.  Connect with Debut on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more careers insights.

New Career and New Outlook - Pathfinder Careers

New Career and New Outlook - Pathfinder Careers New Career and New Outlook A new career? This is often a question clients ask who seek to make a pivot. Yes! A new career and new outlook are what the doctor ordered. Oftentimes, and even now more than ever, people search out greener pastures via a new career and new outlook. It could be to escape boredom. Or to escape Bosszilla. Or gain new skills in a new career. But the scariest part, I can assure you, is to take that leap of faith despite feeling like you are about to leave planet Earth. Planting the seeds for growth Change is scary. But it can also invigorate by activating your intellect. As a result, this means absorbing details and intricacies of the new job and new career. The best part is drawing from previous experience or knowledge and translating it into your new job. Ultimately, the end result is a brand-new outlook. This is an opportunity to learn things, stretch your envelope, and get exposed to new situations or new ideas. This has a profound impact on your psyche. Its ok to be scared in a new career But know that it is perfectly fine to feel apprehensive when first starting a new career. This means having little or no contacts as well as a whole slew of new things to take in, which can be frustrating at first. Oftentimes, we enjoy knowledge mastery but that only comes with time spent on the job getting the work done. OTJ Training, as my dad used to call it on the job training. Wherever your direction may take you, have a sense of awe, excitement, trepidation, and joy. Become a student and this facilitates your learning approach. The greater you open the door to new ideas and practices, the more you will grow. As a result, you will be successful building a new career and new outlook.

How to Use Resume Writing Listing Extra Skills Programs

How to Use Resume Writing Listing Extra Skills ProgramsResume writing listing extra skills programs can really help you get ahead in the job market. You may be surprised to find out that these programs are actually very common. Many companies know that being a part of a professional networking group is going to open doors for them. These groups are very common but with a few ideas, they can provide a person with a great way to meet people, find jobs and connect to various business groups.With so many people looking for a job today, resume writing listing extra skills programs are becoming more popular each day. This type of marketing has helped many people to get ahead of their competition. It's a way to show an employer that you are well informed on a certain job. They will also see that you have a career ladder leading to that particular job. You just need to make sure that you keep track of all of your job search efforts as well.So, what is involved with resume writing listing ext ra skills programs? These programs can get you noticed by employers. They will see that you are networking for your business. You want to make sure that your resume contains a strong and complete resume with the proper formatting that tells your potential employer all of the correct information about you. So, how do you go about learning how to do this?The easiest way to learn is by doing. Make sure that you try to remember every step that you take in order to make sure that you are prepared. If you find that you are still having difficulty, make sure that you schedule an appointment with a resume writing program in order to help you master this.So, if you have been looking for resume writing listing extra skills programs, then you are probably not alone. Many people look for ways to improve their skills in order to get ahead in the business world. Many people are afraid to take the first step because they worry that they will embarrass themselves. The truth is that you don't have t o take that first step. By being prepared, you will find that you are a lot more confident and you will be able to move ahead in the business world with confidence.It is important to remember that there are many resume writing listing extra skills programs that are offered by many different companies. You just need to make sure that you choose the right one. You don't want to get caught up in advertising that you were asked to participate in. A resume writing listing extra skills program should be professional, a good idea to contact a program, and professional.Make sure that you learn everything that you can on the Internet, and also talk to professionals in the field. Some of the things online that you can learn include how to put together a resume, how to write an introduction, how to introduce yourself, how to cover your entire experience and how to list your skills. You can also learn how to contact companies or industries and how to market yourself effectively in the face of a dversity. Nowadays, a lot of people are using these tools to their advantage and can now be considered experts. So, don't let that happen to you.Resume writing listing extra skills programs are very common and they are one of the best ways to get ahead in the job market. They will allow you to make connections that may bring you closer to the companies that you are interested in working for.