Empowering career search and enrichment

I recently set up my own iGoogle page to keep track of all my favorite blog pages. I soon learned how useful this was and wanted to share this with you. So what exactly is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The point of signing up for RSS feeds is that you save time without having to visit each of your favorite sites individually! If there is a website you visit frequently and want to be informed of any new articles or blogs, or even videos and images, this is the best way to go. When you sign up for an RSS feed, you are immediately informed of when a page is updated through an RSS reader. It is like creating your own personalized newspaper of what you want to read.

First, I do need to stress that if you are using Internet Explorer 6, RSS feeds do not work properly or you are not able to sign up for them at all. Therefore, I suggest for you to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or higher, or use Mozilla Firefox. You will need a reader to view your “newspaper”. Some of the most common free readers (also called “Content Aggregators”) are Google Reader or News Gator Online. You can find plenty of other free readers by doing a simple search online. These allow for you to read all your feeds in one location. You can also receive alerts through email or your phone.

Once you have a reader, start going through your favorite websites to search for their web feeds. You may have for the most part already noticed an orange icon on websites, whereas others may just have a link that says something like ‘subscribe to our feed’. You would then either click on the icon to automatically add it to your reader (Google Reader is common on many sites), or you can right-click on it and select ‘Copy Shortcut’ or ‘Copy Link Location’ to copy the URL of the feed (to add to any feeder). Then you go to your feeder and find and then click on the icon that lets you add feeds. A small window should pop up to let you insert the URL of the feed you’d like to add, so you just paste it there. Once you’ve done that, you have just added a new feed to your reader!

Now that you’ve learned how to subscribe to an RSS feed, sign up for ours to keep yourself updated on any new blogs or materials we post for you! Subscribing is easy! Simply go to the bottom of page and and click on “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)”. You have the following options: 1) Add to iGoogle (this is a free homepage you can create with a Gmail account) 2) Subscribe in Google Reader. Chose one or both of those options and start receiving our updates!

I found a game online called Nail the Interview on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website. I thought this was a neat interactive game for your students to play to prepare for the interview process. You begin by selecting a character. You are then given three resumes to choose from. Depending on your choice, you will either get a rejection letter in the mail or a call from the interviewer. You also have the option to look at some resume tips. As you proceed, you go through the different steps in the interview process.

If you make it to an interview, you are asked a series of interview questions. Even though several of the answers to the questions (you are given multiple answers) seem to be common sense, they provide framework answers for the student to prepare for. Basically, for most of them, the correct answer can be fairly obvious, but the way the answer is written is a great way to get your students to think about their own answers to those similar questions during an interview. The students will also receive several tips along the way. Try it out for yourself to see what it is all about and share it with your students. Click here to access the site. This site is also linked to Yahoo!® Hot Jobs®.

We have received several requests from our customers regarding confusion about what are the ways of scoring and administering the Myers-Briggs® (MBTI®) assessment. I wrote up the following descriptions to give you a better understanding.

We have two forms available for the MBTI assessment:

1. MBTI Form M (Step I™ Assessment): This is the most commonly used version of the assessment. Contains 93 items.


2. MBTI Form Q (Step II™ Assessment): Provides a more detailed analysis of each of the MBTI preference dichotomies. Contains 144 items.

After choosing the Form you would like to take, a Report must then be generated to view the results. You have the following options to choose from for each form, and any of them can be either used on our online assessment delivery system, SkillsOne®, or be pre paid for mail in scoring. I have linked each of the reports to a sample report for you to get a better idea if you are not yet familiar with these:

MBTI® Form M (Step I™):

1. MBTI® Self-Scorable – This is a 93 item booklet which can be used in workshop or classroom settings for on the spot interpretation when computer access is not available. It includes easy-to-understand instructions and comes with an answer sheet and basic interpretive information.


2. MBTI® Profile – Provides reported type, explanations of the preferences, characteristics frequently associated with the type, and an easy-to-read graph displaying the preference clarity index. This is primarily classified as a summary of your student’s or client’s type.


3. MBTI® Interpretive Report – This includes all data from the profile, but with more information about the student’s or client’s type to conduct an interpretation. This includes a summary of their strengths and needs based on personality type, tips for finding best-fit type and it shows how their responses to the instrument relate to scored MBTI type. This is basically a more thorough report than the profile for your students or clients to understand their type.


4. MBTI® Career Report – Helps to assess a student’s or client’s type and how that plays a role in the career exploration process. This report explores preferred work tasks and work environments, as well as popular occupations for those with their same preferred MBTI type.


5. MBTI® Communication Style Report (*New) – This personalized interpretive report is designed to help your students or clients understand their communication strengths based on reported or verified four-letter type results. The report offers tips for communicating with others as well as suggested steps for development.


6. MBTI® Team Report – This report is to be used in a team setting (up to 64 members) to help with teambuilding. Provides a description of a group’s type along with its strengths and weaknesses. This also provides information for each member to learn and understand each others’ similarities and differences so they can effectively work with one another.


7. MBTI® Interpretive Report for Organizations –Describes in depth how a student’s or client's MBTI type may be expressed in the organization as it also relates their preferences to likes and dislikes in work settings. Explains student’s or client's communication and problem-solving styles. Provides personalized suggestions for development. Ideal for organization and management development, as well as for team building applications.


8. MBTI® Work Styles Report – This is a report designed to help any two individuals work together more effectively, especially when there are potentials for conflict to arise between them (if not already). This helps the individuals to not only understand their type, but their counter part’s type as well, in order to create a more positive work environment. Sections in this report include communication style, information gathering, decision making, and project management.


9. MBTI®Complete – Our online edition of the assessment which can be found on http://www.mbticomplete.com/. This can also be purchased through the SkillsOne® site. The advantage to this report is that when you have a student or client take it, they are able to view their results right away along with a summarized explanation of their type.

MBTI® Form Q (Step II™):

1. MBTI®Step II™ Profile – This report gives your students or clients a graphical representation of their results. This presents the student’s or client’s results on the 20 Step II™ facets, along with a short description of each on the graph so they understand their results.


2. MBTI® Step II™Interpretive Report – This report delves deeper into the 20 facets by providing personalized descriptions on each. The results are then applied to four components of professional development such as communication, change management, decision making, and conflict management.

I hope you found this blog helpful. If you have any questions, our Customer Relations staff is always happy to help!

How many times have you spoken with someone about a simple issue and have ended the conversation in a heated argument? Or have you ever had a hard time getting your point across to someone that just doesn’t seem to get it and you end up frustrated instead? In both scenarios, it may not have been the topic at hand, but the way the conversation was handled. We all know that improving our communication skills is crucial. Not only do you need to communicate well at work with your students or clients during counseling sessions or with coworkers, you also need to communicate with family and any other people outside of work. But have you taken the time to really analyze your own communication style and take the necessary steps to improve it?

CPP just launched the new MBTI® Communication Style Report this past week. Download the sample report here while you read on. The report is based on your Myers-Briggs® (MBTI®) personality type preferences. The purpose of the report is to help you understand your natural communication style, and how your four-letter personality type preference can influence this. The report discusses each of your preferences by listing your key strengths, your communication approach and tips for communicating with the opposite preference (i.e. if your preference is for Intuition, your report will show you tips for communicating with Sensing types). As noted on the first page of the report, this report describes your natural preferences, not your learned skills or abilities.

To give you an example, one of the main tips that jumped out at me as an Extravert for improving communication with an Introvert was “Pause and wait for a response; don’t jump in to fill silence, especially with small talk”. I’m guilty of this as silence tends to make me nervous. I assume that when someone doesn’t respond to me right away, I need to keep the conversation going by filling in the silence. Sometimes my talking can be irrelevant to the original topic due to my extraverted nature. Yet I now realize that this can be annoying as I’m not giving the other person time to think, and thus I may receive a negative response for this reason.

After reading the breakdown of your individual type preferences, the report gives you an overview of your four-letter personality type. This includes a section titled “Giving and Receiving Feedback”, which helps you understand just that! One of mine is that I may take criticism personally and become hurt. This was true before I learned about my personality type, as I used to think that if I was criticized, I was failing and that would make me feel upset. Yet since I became aware of that, I have learned to embrace criticism for my own personal development, and this has only helped me to be better in what I do! The last section of the report gives you tips and steps for improving your communication. This section is helpful for developing a personal plan.

By learning how you communicate with others, you will be able to foster and strengthen your relationships to form positive bonds for future interactions. Understanding our communication preferences is key as we need to do all we can to improve ourselves to give us that extra competitive advantage in the workplace or most importantly, just to better ourselves. So don't forget to check out this new report!