Empowering career search and enrichment

Have you joined our LinkedIn group yet?

During these times of uncertainty in the workplace, this is the perfect time to resource with others in your field of work. Our CPP Education Team group is dedicated to career counselors, academic advisors and educational coaches as a place for them to share their thoughts and advice with one another. If you don't have an account yet, I highly recommend registering for one. It's free and there are hundreds of groups that you can join to begin networking. Of course, this is a great resource to share with your students to help them get started on learning how to not only network to find suitable jobs, but to learn how to present themselves to valuable companies. I found a slideshow with some great tips to share with your students to convince them why having a LinkedIn account is valuable. LinkedIn is not as exciting as Facebook, which is understandable, but your students might change their mind when they realize how it will help them in the future. They may also appreciate the fact that there are different ways for them to showcase their school work to help them advertise themselves to potential job recruiters. This might even be a way to get them more excited about doing their homework! Well, that might be wishful thinking. View the "LinkedIn for College Students - 10 Things You Can Do to Brand Yourself as an Expert" slideshow below. Learning these tips does not only apply to your students - these can be helpful to you as well!

To join our CPP Education Team, click here (you'll need to have an account to view the group page).

It goes without saying nowadays that our personal lives can be easily displayed to the world thanks to the Internet. It’s all about being somewhat Internet savvy and using some common sense when posting anything about our lives. Yet I’m sure you know many students who post every detail of their lives on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Tagged, or any of the popular social networking sites. Everything from what they ate for breakfast, to how they can’t stand a certain class to even an exact time and location of where they will be hanging out in the afternoon! Unfortunately, many do not think about or even know of the consequences to pouring such intimate details out to the world. Using social networking sites is quickly becoming the way for companies to be in touch with their customers – and their employees as well. It is essential for students who are preparing for their futures as professionals to be aware of this. Unfortunately, something negative that they post today, may come back to haunt them a few years down the road when a potential employer is conducting a background check.

I wanted to share the following slideshow I found through Marketing Profs: Five Ways Facebook Can Get You Fired. Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services & Social Media at Avaya, put these five stories together to show how seemingly innocent comments can cost one their job. A couple of these made me laugh as they were just outright ridiculous (actually they were all silly), but the unfortunate thing is that they are true. I encourage you to share this with your students!

 Written by Karen Gonzalez
 One of the biggest misconceptions I hear about the Myers-Briggs® (MBTI®) assessment, from those who are not very familiar, is that the tool is a way to point out one’s weaknesses. I’ve had several discussions with friends and acquaintances about this when they ask me where I work. A few have even been scared to take the assessment as they believe that their results will show something negative about their personality type. I’ve even had a friend tell me, “I don’t want it to tell me I’m crazy”. Even though that particular conversation was quite amusing, I had to clear that up with my friend. In no way does the MBTI tool work to make anyone feel as if their type preference is not worthy. This got me thinking that many students may have heard about the MBTI tool (or maybe just about inadequate personality assessments off of the internet) but they may be thinking similar thoughts when asked to take it for career development purposes.

Here is a great resource site from the Washington Post called the Interview Survival Kit. I’m linking you to their first article titled “Prepare for Pitfalls: How to get through tough job interviews”. This article gives students (or anyone going through a job search) great advice from a panel of experts the Washington Post gathered. From this page, you are able to navigate to several other article links that I recommend for you to share with your students. There is another article which offers advice such as sample questions to ask at the end of an interview when an interviewer asks “Do you have any questions for me?” so as not to come empty handed.

When I was in college, I loved reading these types of articles to find advice. I liked it when they didn’t sound so serious and business-focused. These are written with students in mind, as I’ve come across other advice articles with the same intent, but would bore me out of my mind.

You’ll also notice that there is a Nail the Interview game link, which I had shared with you in a past blog. For some reason, this particular link did not work for me. So if you run in to the same issue, click here to view the game from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website.