"If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there!"-Anonymous

A recent global survey of 16,000 professionals by a well-known consulting firm revealed that only about 14% of those employed are "in" their jobs; a vast majority, 86%, are "on" their jobs!

"A positive attitude may not get what you want, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."-Anonymous

Whenever I mention to my clients, who are going after open jobs, to write cover letters in their response I get incredulous looks and an insinuation that I am hopelessly out of date and impractical. Why? They have heard from many recruiters that cover letters are a waste of time because no one reads them!

Wrong!

As a career coach I have well-placed clients who are in executive positions at prominent companies in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I also have an extensive network on LinkedIn carefully cultivated over the years, which is my stock-in-trade.  So, when a client is looking for an opportunity at a company where I have some inside connection(s) I am always happy to introduce them to each other and let them take it from there.

As the layoffs mount and as the job market gets tighter I often hear voices of frustration from my audiences when I speak before them. Most of my audiences consist of those working and looking for a change, those out of work looking to get back in, and often, those who are afraid that they are already on the chopping block, next in line for a round of layoffs!

“You don’t know how far you can go until you go too far”-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most professionals believe that their manager has the responsibility for advancing their career! In fact, some are under the illusion that their managers often lie awake at night wondering about how to promote their employees’ careers and how to make worth their while!

Nothing could be further from the truth!

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than to lie awake about them
afterwards. -Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (1601-1658)

As a career coach I routinely work with clients to make their resumes more presentable. In the process I am often surprised by the number of clients who want to misstate facts or who want to present an outright lie.

As a career and life coach many of my clients come to me complaining about their mundane and exploited work life and how they would like to make it big as an entrepreneur!

When I probe a little more, I find that their motivation to be an entrepreneur stems not from a business idea that they have or from their desire to better the humanity in some way, but, rather, from their desire to just make it big or from doing it for spite.

Spite?

A senior software engineer, who had been a high-level architect for several years and with nearly 20 years’ experience, came to me the other day with a frustrated look and an angry tone. He was complaining about how upstart engineers at prospect employer companies put him through a demeaning mill of interviews asking questions about syntax propriety and errors in a line Java code.