Did you know you can set up your day to have a quick opportunity to improve yourself? One of the nicest things about the internet is the opportunity to learn, and improving your language is going to make a difference in your career.
Here’s why language is important: the things you write online stay there. The impression you make with your speech and writing doesn’t fade too fast, either. If you are consistently using language the way that “everybody” uses language online, then you are automatically closing the street to opportunity.
Learn A Little Every Day
I like Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips because they are funny, memorable, and short. You may prefer another source, and there are certainly plenty out there. I also use the Gregg’s Reference Manual. It’s the bible for grammar geeks. What you need is a regular reminder of common mistakes and how to avoid those mistakes that you will enjoy reading. I’m always surprised at the things I learn. Something new every day!
That small, daily dose of language skills is a regular reminder of the importance of language. It might not seem like much, but the proper use of language moves you past barriers that keep your career from flourishing. It might be true that a top executive dictates letters to a secretary instead of writing them personally, but it’s also true that the executive still has to use language competently.
Learning a little every day is part of being a leader. Looking for life-long learning opportunities keeps your brain active and your attitude flexible for the challenges of being an influence both today and in the future. If your language skills are inadequate, you may have the greatest ideas in the world, but you can’t communicate those ideas very well.
Adding something like a daily grammar feature takes less than five minutes to read and enables a lifetime of opportunity.
Did you know that introverts can be great networkers? They just go about networking in a different mode than the extrovert, and since a lot of the advice you see on networking for your career seems to be geared toward those extroverts, the combination of introvert/networking has to be redefined.
Search Engine Journal usually is a site visited by marketers and webmasters, those interested in tech-savvy networking of the internet kind. But a recent article by Mindy Weinstein looks at 5 Networking Tips for the Tech-Savvy and Introverted, because even internet gurus have to do interpersonal networking for their career.
Use Your Strengths To Advantage
Many in the tech industries are introverted because the strengths of the introvert work well in this innovative, complex, problem-solving field. The problems most introverts have with standard networking advice is that it goes against their natural tendency to take things at a slower pace and process what is happening. It’s like being at a crowded all-you-can-eat buffet when you want to savor each bite in a quieter setting.
Once you understand your strengths, it’s a lot easier to prioritize the way you will do the networking that is so necessary in your career. These tips are a compilation of the advice given by successfully tech-savvy introverts to the rest of us:
Pick and choose your networking events. Plan on only attending a select few and maximize your efforts by inviting those you connect with to a follow-up meeting.
Be one of the first to arrive. This allows you to meet people at a slower pace and you know that the people who choose to sit by you are friendly, right?
Don’t work the room. Your goal is to meet a few people instead of everybody there. Success is connecting, not touching.
Ask questions to uncover someone’s story. Have an idea of the questions you want to ask, and share about yourself since this isn’t an interrogation. Introverts are great listeners, so use this strength to your advantage.
Find out more about attendees before you go to the event. This helps in a couple of ways; you can think about what you’d like to ask, and you can connect before the event on social media if it’s appropriate. Then the networking event is a chance to meet someone you have already interacted with online.
Stretch Yourself
Some of us are more natural at networking than others, but we all need to be part of a supportive network. The idea of networking is really that of support. If networking isn’t working for you, then maybe you need to change the way you do networking. Is networking working for you? If it is, your career is being cultivated and it will grow.
Are you one of the people they were talking about on NPR recently?Please Do Not Leave A Message: Why Millennials Hate Voice Mail is taking a look at the way that leaving a message is fast falling out of favor as a communication mode. You don’t have to be part of the Millennials to hate voice mail because it can be a sudden challenge you don’t do well. But there’s a problem with refusing to deal with voice mail because it is used in business all the time.
If you are searching for a job, there’s a good chance you will need to leave a voice message. If you are contacting your manager or a client, there’s an equally good chance that voicemail will be involved. The game of Phone Tag came about because of the way busy people can’t always pick up the phone and being able to text doesn’t exactly replace it.
Deal With It & Do It Right
If you know you struggle with sounding professional at the sound of the recording beep, you can learn how to deal with it and do it right. Think about the goal of your call and have a message prepared if you have to leave a voice mail. If you have to write it down before you make the call, that’s practice for the next time you need to use the skill.
The same basic rules that apply to a phone interview apply to a business call, and therefore also apply to a business voice mail.
Don’t make a call from a noisy environment. Go to a spot that is quiet and allows your voice to be heard.
It should be obvious that nothing is in your mouth, right?
Be prepared to state your name, phone number, the reason for the call, and repeat the name & number. Keep it short.
Speak clearly and don’t try to cram too much into the message. You can tell them more when they call you back.
Whether you are leaving a message for business or as part of your job search, this is one business skill that you really do need to make sure you can do even if you hate voice mail.
One of the things that a resume is used for is getting a quick idea of what all your assets are and what you can contribute to the position you are applying for. This is good; you want your resume to be an introduction that leads to a longer relationship. But resumes should not show your age, because it is far too easy to assume certain ages have certain characteristics. This is one reason that “age discrimination” is one of the unlawful practices in the job market.
Even though age discrimination is unlawful, it still happens. People naturally do make assumptions about others based on initial information. But the resume that is professional, appealing, and updated gets past attitudes and showcases what you can do. That’s a good argument for making sure your resume does not show your age.
Avoid These Signals Of Age & Resumes
It’s true that age discrimination can be against the “too young” as well as the “too old”, and I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t happen. But, most of the time, the older job searcher is using a resume from years ago, or has updated their resume according to what they needed the last time they went job hunting. Age and your resume can be as obvious as listing your birth date or as subtle as putting a double space behind the period like they taught when typewriters were the latest technology. It’s hard to stop doing something like the double space because it’s habitual and you may not realize it’s not used in this setting. Some college professors insist on a double space, so younger resume writers actually get caught here, too, but if the double space is accompanied by other signals, it’s a count against you.
Those other signals can be things like listing your jobs from the earliest on with dates included instead of the last ten years with all your skills. Skill-wise, it’s a good idea to keep it contemporary unless you are applying for a job that needs that particular ability. Being able to cut galley pages apart and do paste-up on a page spread isn’t needed any more in printing, but being able to lay out a page with a computer program is.
If you aren’t sure that your resume is age-neutral, get a critique from someone who looks at resumes all the time. You could try asking why the last company you applied to turned your application down, but it’s hard to get someone to admit they discriminated against you because of your age. By this time in your life, you have so much to offer that it’s worth taking the time to make sure your resume reflects that fact.
Networking is one of those activities that gets shelved because you are busy. Unfortunately, it’s also one of those activities that needs to be consistent in order to do any good to your career. This is because the nature of networking is relationships, and if you only connect with people when you need them, you are viewed in a negative light. You also miss out on a lot of positive things when you don’t connect, so it’s a good idea to put it on your schedule.
If LinkedIn Is A Garden, It Has Weeds
One of the most productive professional networking sites available today is LinkedIn, but that success means that there’s spam — the weeds of the web. It gets overwhelming if you don’t do a little maintenance every day. Since the average professional on the site gets far more stuff sent to them than they want, your contact attempts can get lost in the spam weeds.
Use the tools available to you and start with your profile. How do you rank? Who’s looking at your profile? Do you share any interests other than a career category? Think hobbies, non-profits you support, and anything that you share with those names and reach out on a personal level to turn the name into a person for both of you. This connection keeps you from being seen as one more weedy spam item choking their inbox.
Cultivate Connections For Growth
People are living things; they grow and change and need regular maintenance. Since networking is all about people, it makes sense that there’s a need for regular maintenance in this area. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on this, but even 10 or 15 minutes a day checking your LinkedIn page and deliberately reaching out to one person in your network on a personal level will keep that connection healthier.
As you develop these professional relationships by becoming acquainted personally, you lay the groundwork for a mutually beneficial networking experience.
New Survey Shows Executives Need Social Media Skills
There are many CEOs who are not interested in social media because they are incredibly busy. Let’s face it though, we are all busy. However, BRANDfog’s 2014 survey on The Global, Social CEO indicates that C-level executives who ignore social media are losing the ability to influence brand reputation and company leadership. The global conversations are happening on social media, and not being part of the conversation means others are controlling the topics.
How The Survey Was Conducted
A diverse selection of companies, ranging from small startups to Fortune 1000 companies in several industries, was represented. BRANDfog surveyed 1000 UK and US employees in these companies asking 15 basic questions about social media for executive and C-Suite communication. This is an annual survey and shows a definite shift in perception regarding social media and industry leaders.
Highlights and Conclusions
There were three observations of recent trends made in this year’s survey results. These are:
Social CEOs make better leaders.
Social CEO engagement leads to brand trust.
Social media is modern PR.
It’s clear that anyone interested in being an effective upper level executive is going to need to come to terms with social media. To quote from this survey:
“C-suite executives who embrace social media gain a competitive edge. They use social channels to provide context for business decisions, address brand issues, showcase company culture and most importantly, demonstrate thought leadership.”
What This Means For You
Anyone interested in moving into the upper executive levels of a company should be working right now to be a competent, professional social media expert. Careful monitoring of your social media use now, in areas like LinkedIn profile development, is going to pay off in the future. Developing social media competency keeps your personal brand clean, your professional brand impressive, and becomes a habitual discipline.
As you move higher in the corporate world, a habitual discipline is going to make adding new responsibilities much easier because you already do the basics. It’s also going to make you more attractive to those looking to fill leadership positions. A social media-savvy candidate will be preferred in tomorrow’s business world.
The Top Reason Professional Resume Distribution Works
Is anybody in your family interested in your family history? My mom is our family historian. She has our family tree going back to the 1600’s! It’s pretty amazing what she’s found out and who she has met along the way. One thing most genealogists will tell you is that researching a family tree is a lot like networking. Many families will have one person in the generation who is willing to keep all the photos and letters and information, and finding that person is like finding a treasure trove. Instead of laboriously working on finding one branch, suddenly you discover that they’ve got the connections to a whole bunch of branches and they know the people who are the keepers of the photos and letters and information for all of them.
If you are interested in finding the connections in your ancestry, you need to find the people who are already doing the research. They have already made connections you have no access to until you contact them. For example, if you never meet Great Aunt Irma, then you won’t get to see all the letters your grandma sent to her dad with the pictures of your dad as a baby.
Networking
Companies use recruiters to fill executive positions and many other types of openings. A professional resume distribution service has carefully maintained connections with many professional recruiters so that a resume goes to the right recruiters for that job seeker. The connections have already been made: These are professionals who rely on networking for their career and carefully maintain the connections between them. Instead of Great Aunt Irma keeping your dad’s baby pictures, they’ve got first knowledge of job openings, and you won’t find out about it unless you connect to the right one.
This networking is the reason professional resume distribution works so much better than a blind email blast to every company in the phone book or a hopeful query out of nowhere. If your resume is presented by a reputable distribution service, that reputation enhances your resume by association. Recruiters get untold numbers of resumes all the time. It makes sense to filter them for efficiency. The fact you recognized quality and respected professional standards weights your submission with authority.
Did you know that anybody can enhance their life, and thus their career, by improving some simple, basic skills? Once you have a handle on these skills, there’s no telling what can happen but you have to apply them consistently: everybody needs to learn how to learn and learn how to teach.
Learn How To Learn
Learning is essentially acknowledging that you don’t know everything and being open to expanding your horizons.
If you are always reading a novel, try reading some non-fiction regularly.
If you never do fiction, start with some short stories and work up.
Take a class in something that appeals and intimidates you.
Play games on your phone or computer that are not in your comfort zone, like words for a math whiz and numbers for the linguist.
Learn how to use your hands or your body a different way, like dancing or knitting or soccer or anything fun.
I bet you thought I’d be telling you to work on a career skill, and that certainly is a good idea. But for many of us, we need to start developing the ability to learn first. When you start with what you like and stretch your mind a little bit, you are learning how to learn.
Learn How To Teach
Teaching is not being a windbag standing in front of suffering students and talking to hear themselves. Good teachers listen to their students and try to understand how they perceive things so the facts being communicated get through to the brain. A teacher needs to have a good grasp of the subject in order to explain it effectively.
Offer to explain something you are good at to a friend who wants to know how.
Show a newbie some tips about a skill you have.
Write instructions just to see if they make sense when you follow them.
Improve your writing skills so you can communicate better.
Rewrite things that are confusing to make the meaning clearer.
Research the styles of learning and figure out how to explain to each style.
The truth is that we all teach, whether we realize it or not. The goal is to be a teacher of good, helpful things who passes on all you have learned. When a person continually is learning, and is also continually sharing their knowledge, it completes the circle of intelligent growth. It also keeps you in a positive stance for whatever your career is doing and enhances any job.
