Grab Your Calendar Before It's Too Late

Career & Workplace

grab your calendar before it's too late
That trade show or seminar might not be for a few months, but if you know it is coming, then you can put it in your calendar with the deadline for registry. Your career depends on being current, right? So plan for it. Very often, the notification for registry gets lost in the shuffle of daily tasks or the dates get filled with other things that could have been scheduled differently. January is a good time to pencil things in and make sure you allow time for them.
It’s a good idea to look over all the possible events in your field and evaluate them in the light of your career plans. When the time comes to move into another position, the fact that you have taken the initiative to seek out pertinent knowledge is in your favor. Trade shows, seminars, and the like are excellent ways to do this:

  • see what the industry is trending toward
  • network with others in your professional sphere
  • evaluate your skills
  • get ideas for improving those skills

Maybe your field has so many trade shows and seminars you’d be spending half your time attending. That just gives you a broader range of choices, doesn’t it? If you attended one last year that didn’t impress you, look for an alternative that has more promise. It’s too late to have many choices if you wait for registry deadlines because the good ones fill up fast.
Events like these are a help in defining your career objective. Your job is usually a small slice of a very big possible career, and attending these events can give you a much larger perspective on the possibilities available to you. But you have to get them on your calendar first.

Removing the Bloat From Your Resume

Resume Writing

checkup
The usual advice about the length of a resume is that it should be no more than two pages. However, in a recession, people are desperate to find jobs. One of the ways people try to make themselves look more impressive as a candidate is to add a lot of extraneous or irrelevant material to their resumes. The results are usually a two-page resume with a bloated header, tiny margins, small fonts, long run-on job titles and a lot of repetition, which a recruiter will not read. If this is what your resume is beginning to look like, then it is time for a resume check-up and a resume update. While a resume update will add more information to your resume, there are other areas in which you can begin to cut out extraneous information.
Start with the header. Unless you really do live in two places, you do not need more than one contact address. Choose two main ways to contact you directly, perhaps a cell phone number and an email. Remove that long, run-on career objective. Your resume should speak for itself as to what your career objective really is, unless you are trying to use your current skill sets to switch into a new field. If this is so, keep your objective to one or two sentences at the most.
Use your actual job titles on your resume. Do not add words or change the titles to make them look more impressive. If your actual job title is 10 words long, then so be it. Be brief in your job duties, leaving out phrases such as “I did the books…” or “I am a go-getter who facilitated…” In general, you do not use the word “I” on a resume.
Keep other sections such as Education, Awards, Associations and Professional Development to just the facts. While it is important to show that you are a life-long learner, you do not need to list every workshop you’ve ever participated in, especially if it does not relate to the position for which you are applying.