Author: Staff (Page 50 of 62)

Handling tough questions at a job interview

July 28, 2011 / Staff

If you’re preparing for a job interview, it’s impossible to anticipate all the questions, so on some level it’s more important to be relaxed and be comfortable about discussing your career goals, the potential job and your previous experience. That said, it’s important to prepare. Part of that involves doing research on the company and the prospective job, but you also need to be prepared for the tough interview questions that pop up often in interviews.

Forbes has an article about how to answer the 10 toughest interview questions. They don’t go very in-depth into the answers, but the advice is solid and it’s a good list.

Your Career, Your Compensation

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How to Work Smarter Not Harder

July 27, 2011 / Staff

A lot of people have developed the silly philosophy that to get ahead a person has to work as hard as they can. Now there’s nothing at all wrong with working hard, but working with some intelligence and a plan can do wonders for your success. You can do less physical work, less repetitive work and take up less of your day while you make more money if you plan effectively. You can also make use of systems that will make your work easier, and some systems will even do much of your repetitive work for you.

Making it Smarter

The first step in working smarter is to figure out the point of your work. What are you going to do with a particular day? A lot of people are so stuck on the dogma of doing a bunch of rote tasks in a particular order that they forget why they’re doing them. If you can’t figure out why you do something, try cutting it out entirely for awhile. The important tasks will show their importance if they’re absent for awhile because your work will be hurt without them. Useless tasks and busy work are expendable, and you won’t miss them after awhile.

Using Your Time Well

When you plan, you tend to get more done. Even a simple to do list scribbled on a piece of paper is a great way to put proverbial rockets on your day. The more organized you are the better prepared you’ll be to get your day’s work done faster and easier. While it might be easy to fire up a game of Angry Birds, setting up the latest MetroFax app for the iPhone is a far more effective way to use your time. The new app just released, and will be a big help in working smarter. Considering how many apps are out there you can do a lot without even having to move. Even rush hour traffic can be time productively spent with nothing more than your smart phone.

Use Systems to Your Advantage

Smart phones are great for systematizing almost everything in your day. However, computers are even better about it. You can automate everything from your business expense payments all the way up to your to do list, and you can even automate ordering dinner for those long nights of working. As well, you can make sure your cash flow figures are correct through a site like Mint.com. By that point, you’re working a whole lot smarter and probably not as hard.

Proactive thought and the use of systems can do a lot to make your work day a lot easier. Naturally, these require some thinking, so you have to work smarter. When systems begin to do a lot of the rote work for you it becomes a lot easier to get through your important work. When you know what your important work is you can do it a lot more effectively. The less busy work that clutters your day the more effectively you can accomplish your to do list. It all comes down to doing what you’ve got to do by the end of the day.

Uncategorized

4 Ways to Keep Your Job and Your Sanity

July 23, 2011 / Staff

Losing your job is one of the most traumatic financial events you can go through. While it isn’t as bad as a serious illness, the amount of stress losing your job could cause could become a serious health concern. So while you continue struggling to keep your job along with everybody else, here are some great tips for keeping cool and staying in the saddle.

Stick to the Fundamentals

Your boss wants to make sure your business’s core operations remain intact. This is a time when you want to be very careful where and when you rock the boat. If you rock it too much, your boss may decide you’re more of a liability than an asset.

Be Seen and Appreciated

There are two things you need to ask yourself before you do anything work-related:
1. Will it be noticed?
2. Will it be immediately appreciated?
While business is all about toiling away on the inglorious preparatory work, you need to do plenty of sexy work as well. The more obviously useful what you’re doing is, the more likely you’ll be kept around and rewarded when rewards are possible. Make sure you are always as visible as possible when you’re doing something constructive.

Be Proactive

If your boss isn’t handing out assignments, find useful work to do. Make sure it will obviously help the company and make sure everyone knows you’re doing it. The more obviously you benefit the company, the more likely you’ll get praise and profit for your activities. The more effectively you plan and manage for yourself, the more likely you’ll get the next promotion to come down the pike.

Keep Hope Alive no Matter What

Sometimes every effort you put forward won’t be enough to keep your job. In a case like that you need to rely on your wits. First things first, keep your expenses on track. If you need quick cash to hold you over, visit plaingreenloans.com. Drop your unnecessary expenses and keep your necessary ones as tightly in check as you can. Secondly, use your proactivity to secure your next source of employment as soon as you can.

This isn’t the best environment for staying employed or staying sane. However, this is a great time to test your mettle and give it everything you’ve got. If you struggle to be seen and use every ounce of your creativity beneficially, you may be able to keep your job and avoid going insane.

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3 Ways to Assess the True Worth of your Degree

July 12, 2011 / Staff

The job market has always been competitive in one way or another. No matter what the job, you as a potential employee need to somehow stand out from the rest of the applicants.

These days, employers are turning their sights towards potential candidates who possess more than just a standard college education. Those on the job hunt who possess advanced degrees often look more appealing than other candidates.

Check the Accreditation of the School

If you are going to pursue advanced education, check to make sure the school offers accredited programs. It would be a terrible feeling to get to the end of a course in higher education and find out you have an unaccredited masters.

Employers will generally tend to only acknowledge advanced education degrees from accredited schools. You want to be fully recognized for all of your hard work in your advanced degree. Researching each school thoroughly will help to avoid heartache in the future.

Know the Outcome of Your Chosen Degree

While many people choose to undertake an advanced degree to benefit their current career, there are many others who choose to pursue the degree to start a new career.

If you are one of the latter, it’s a smart idea to fully research the types of jobs and potential careers that will be available to you upon completion of your course. A course may sound appealing, but it’s no good if you can’t get the kind of job you want out of it.

Ask Those in the Know

There’s no better way to find out the true worth of a degree than directly asking someone who has the same one.

Also, if you know of anyone currently working in the field you want to get into, have a talk with them and ask them what kind of advanced degree they have. There may be a better option out there that you have not yet researched.

It might also be a good idea to ring around to various companies that you could see yourself working for, and asking the human resources department exactly what type of advanced degree they would be looking for in a potential applicant.

Ringing around to businesses is also a great way to network and make some employment contacts for the future. It never hurts to get started early!

Any degree is a lot of hard work for anyone. Make sure you will be fully recognized for all of the work you have put in, and employers will then start to recognize you!

What kind of advanced degree are you thinking about pursuing? How do you know it is accredited?

Your Education

college education

New Rules are out for for-profit colleges

June 2, 2011 / Staff

We’ve been highlighting some of the troubling news stories about for-profit college scams, and we’ve welcomed the notion of new rules governing the industry.

The new rules from the Obama administration are out, but they’ve been scaled back a bit from the initial proposed rules.

The Obama administration on Thursday issued a series of highly anticipated regulations aimed at cracking down on for-profit colleges and other career training programs that leave students saddled with unmanageable debts and contribute to an unequal share of federal student loan defaults.
The final rules issued by the Department of Education, however, are significantly less stringent than a draft version released last year, giving college programs an additional three years to come in line before possibly losing access to lucrative federal student aid dollars. The changes come after an unprecedented lobbying and campaign finance offensive over the past year by the for-profit college industry, which derives a vast majority of revenues from federal student loan and grant programs and has sought to protect that income by gaining influence in Washington.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the changes came after discussion with “lots and lots of different folks,” not just the industry, and he pointed out that the colleges were not unanimous in their suggestions for changes.
“What we really wanted to do was give people a chance to reform … this was not about ‘gotcha,'” Duncan said. “We tried to be very thoughtful, very reasonable and give people every opportunity to succeed, but be very clear where we wouldn’t permit ongoing failure.”

The intense lobbying campaign helped the industry, as the rules are weaker. You can check the article for the details. Lobbyist hacks like Lanny Davis did their job.

That said, this is a decent first step. It’s appropriate that the schools have a time frame to remedy problems, and this should help weed out the worst abuses.

Meanwhile, 10 states have opened a joint probe to look into the marketing practices of for-profit colleges, so we might yet see some interesting developments in this area.

The key here is you have to do your research before enrolling in one of these schools and taking on a mound of student debt.