Empowering career search and enrichment

With the limited resources of the recession, more and more employers are turning to phone interviews to save time and money. When I graduated about three years ago, I had no idea that phone interviews would become the norm in the interview process. I had learned how to prepare for a live interview just fine: rehearse beforehand, always arrive 15 minutes early, be well groomed, bring a copy of your resume along with other necessary documentation, use body language to show interest, etc. So when I had my first phone interview, I really didn’t know what to expect! How could I make a good first impression by using direct eye contact or using a firm handshake with my prospective employer, while their first impression of me would literally be my voice?

I found an article online called “Don’t Wear Pajamas to a Phone Interview” where Anne Fisher helps people become comfortable with this impersonal style of communication. This article gives 15 helpful pointers on how to nail a phone interview. Share these with your students and learn some new tips for yourself as well!

How much history do you know about the Myers-Briggs® assessment? How has the use of the MBTI® instrument reflected cultural trends over the years? How has it transcended into cultures and nationalities?

Tune in next week on March 30th (1pm PDT/ 9pm UK) for the live airing of BBC’s radio story on “How MBTI Conquered the Office” as Mariella Frostrup (who has taken the assessment and received an interpretation of her results) touches on these key topics. We will be tweeting live, so make sure to follow our discussions and join us! @MBTI, @cppeducation.

Check out the story here.

So what does stress have to do with MBTI® type? Plenty. Learning about your MBTI type and how you can leverage your personality traits into different aspects of your life can be very useful. For example, my ENFJ tendency is that I try to take care of others more than myself. In college, when I needed to study for an exam and had limited time to do it, that in itself was cause for stress. Yet if I had a friend who was struggling with something, I always felt the need to help them first, thus reducing the time I had to work on my own studying. This would cause me much more stress.

College is a stressful time and students aren’t yet equipped with knowing how to handle stress. Here I list some possible causes of stress as well as some tips for dealing with it which I pulled up from our Introduction to Type® In College booklet. These are specifically for ENFJ’s, but the booklet references all MBTI types:

Possible Causes of Stress:

-May try to take care of others more than themselves
-May overidealize others
-May be oversensitive to indifference and personalize it
-Their need to socialize may interfere with work
-May try to live by others’ “shoulds”

Some Ways for ENFJs to Alleviate Stress:

-Like going to movies with friends to relieve tension
-Naturally rely on friends for support
-Naturally give their personal best to any task
-Learn to identify and take care of own needs
-Must make time for studies in busy social schedule

Teaching your students how to deal with stress while in college, will help them develop these skills for when they graduate. They can learn to apply these in the workplace and in their personal lives.

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!