Employment and Career Observations and Opinion

A long standing concern involving employment transitions is mitigating the harmful effects of any red flags on your resume. Of course, we want to accentuate positives about ourselves as potential employees on our resumes, but sometimes risky content cannot be avoided. Such possible liabilities need to be managed instead. There are three significant red flags that often have to be managed effectively by the job seeker. These are long gaps of being unemployed, job hopping, and unplanned departures, especially from the most recent jobs. Potential employers rightly have concerns about all three of these situations and to assuage their worries ...

We often hear about the virtue of agility as both a requirement to achieve business success and as a needed worker trait when navigating a career during a time of flux. Knowing how to advantageously manage change is considered smart and profitable. Many however, may wonder how exactly agility is to be practiced. Is it just a matter of adopting a new mindset or are there specific actions that need to be taken? What follows are my thoughts on agility in the context of career development for the individual worker. Yes, mentally shifting away from habitual rigidity and unchallenged assumptions ...

So here you are putting the best you have into a job you have had for several years. The compensation is decent, but not great. However, other of your work preferences are in place such as hybrid work settings, respectable collogues, manageable work volume, and most importantly you are largely able to exercise your strengths with minimal time spent on dealing with your weak areas. On balance, it is a good job, which is why you have stuck with it this long. But as time has gone on you find yourself wondering if your bosses really care about you. You ...

Workplace culture unfolds to be what it is due to interactions of several influences. Included among these affects are how leadership and managerial styles project specific decision-making approaches, the modes of communication present, and guidance behaviors displayed by management and mentors. In addition, organizations may attempt to adhere to mission statements or other codified value declarations to drive operations, policies, and procedures. Workspace design can also matter when assessing the safety, comfort, and efficiency of the workplace. Further, diversity and inclusion, learning and development, and work-life balance initiatives can make a difference in employee attitudes. All of these factors are ...

Harvard Business Review recently released a 2023 talent management piece by Richard Florida from the University of Toronto and Vladislav Boutenko, Antoine Vetrano, and Sara Saloo, all with Boston Consulting Group, entitled The Rise of the Meta City. Their thesis reveals an emerging development in the evolving work-from-home (WFH) paradigm that is novel and worth considering as we envision the future of both our careers and where to become a resident. It is no secret that mobility-enhancing technologies combined with the face to face limitations wrought by the Pandemic resulted in a rapid expansion of remote work. From approximately 6% ...

It is common for a worker to know at different times throughout their working years that they have hit a rut. Their energy is leaking, enthusiasm is waning, anxieties are building, and performance is suffering. Questions arise in the self-dialogue pointing to serious doubts about their job. Eventually, the feelings of dissatisfaction mount and the worker becomes faced with a dualistic and existential choice concerning their job — should they stay or should they go. In this piece I would like to review the signs and the nature of employment discontent in hopes that an analysis of the topic may ...

As I write this piece the calendar is about to flip to the year 2024. Therefore, my thinking is that this is a good time for careerists to revisit the perennial topic of how to communicate one's strengths and weaknesses in the context of their professionalism. How one self-perceives their strengths and weaknesses factors significantly into the impressions left upon others whose opinions of you may matter in how well you achieve success on the job. Typically, we think of the strengths and weaknesses question as one that comes up in job interviews and to be sure it still does ...

First to the good news for women in the workforce. Women in America are enrolled in greater numbers in higher education than men. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the fall of 2021 female students comprised 61% of the higher ed student body with men at 39%. A year earlier the stats were 58% female and 42% male. Projections for 2030 indicate that there will be 2.37 million more women in postsecondary institutions than men. The trend is clear. Women are more drawn to improving their levels of education compared to men. This was not always the ...

I recently attended a high school reunion. This was not the typical high school reunion, which is attended only by alumni from your graduating year. I attended a private all-male boarding school in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, which operated from 1926 until 1971, after which time it closed. So, reunions for this school include any surviving alumni from any year during the time the school was open. This most recent 2023 reunion included alumni ranging from the graduating year of 1948 until 1971. As you can imagine, nearly all of the attendees are now retired from their careers. But ...