How To Match Your Personality To Your Career

How To Match Your Personality To Your Career Expert Advice > How to make your skills and experience work for you How To Match Your Personality To Your Career * Matching up our personality with a suitable role is vital to a successful career change. Here, Nisa Chitakasem tries out online personality tests to see what insights they offer. I don’t know about you, but my personality has so many facets, I still don’t know how to break it down into separate traits. And even if you do have a finely-tuned awareness of your characteristics, how do you know which jobs they’re suited to? I mean, how do you know which career is appropriate for which personality type if you only have knowledge of one or two careers? With this in mind, I’ve been trying out a few free, online psychometric personality tests specifically targeted towards career changers. Here the links to some of my favourites. Jung Typology Test http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp You take the test by answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a series of statements in order to determine the combination of characteristics you possess. You’re then identified as a particular personality type based on these results. Finally, they feed back a list of suitable career options and also some educational institutions where you can receive the relevant skills training for the specific career areas. Finding Potential: ‘Individuals’ Personality Questionnaire’ http://www.findingpotential.com/PERSONALITY/ This test takes around 15 minutes to complete and gives you a 15 page report that shows you to what extent you possess certain personality traits; gives you a detailed breakdown of these traits; and then matches work preferences and possible jobs to you in accordance with which personality traits you strongly possess and which ones you don’t. SimilarMinds.com: ‘What Career Suits Me’? http://similarminds.com/career.html This one is slightly different. First, itasks what your ‘current or desired’ career is before the test begins properly. The test itself gives you a list of statements and you indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each one. Based on the results, you’re identified as a certain type of person (I am an ‘Idealist’) and given a list of possible professions. Of course, we career changers don’t base decisions solely on the results of an internet career test. But they can offer useful suggestions we hadn’t thought of, or confirm the suitability of options we were already considering. Plus, the tests themselves can be quite fun to do! Let us know how you get on with them and if there are any other ‘Idealists’ out there! Have you ever been surprised by your results after taking a personality or psychometric test? Leave a comment below.

Why Workplace Etiquette Matters - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Why Workplace Etiquette Matters - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Our 24/7 instant-access virtual world has taken the “person” out of “personal,” especially in the workplace. Until we all turn into robots with hard drives, I suggest we take a breath and slow down long enough to remember that we are all living, breathing people with feelings who get passionate, tired, burned out, excited, worried, and overwhelmed. That is why it matters when someone calls us on the phone â€" one-on-one â€" to say, “Carol, I was thinking about you. What’s going on?” It doesn’t get any more personal than hearing your own name by someone who genuinely cares. Human beings have a driving need to feel important and special, and yet, despite all the public electronic chatter that purports to be personal, it is very easy to feel faceless and like a number. We yearn for connection. The danger is that the same devices that are seeking to connect us can also separate us. Take a look around at any restaurant to see how many people are engaging with their devices and not the people at the table. Or how about when you are at a party and the person you are speaking with is looking over your shoulder to see who else is at the event? Or feel the difference between someone who periodically checks his phone during a meeting versus the same person who intentionally powers it down in order to give her undivided attention. Keeping it personal and practicing good workplace etiquette is respectful and gets noticed. Here are 10 ways to make people a priority in the workplace, which translates into success, loyalty, and trust. Make an unexpected phone call. Leave a sincere message if you get the person’s voicemail. Send a hand-written thank you note. Choose a small but thoughtful gift based on a conversation. (Favorite flower, cookie, candy, music, etc.) Remember birthdays. Bonus touch: Homemade cupcakes. Intentionally power down your phone for a meeting (and watch the reaction). Have tech-free meals and offer undivided attention. Follow-up with someone who you know had a bad day yesterday. Remember names of people who are important to your employer, colleague, client, etc. Be an undistracted listener. True story: Heather could have sent an email to her colleague but chose to pick up the phone instead. They chatted about weekend plans and then Heather clarified the business reason for her call, which had to do with scheduling a hard-to-book meeting between their executives. The call resulted in an easy exchange and lasted five minutes. Even though it would have been shorter to write and send an email, Heather knows that it was totally worth it to make the call. Why? These kinds of calls, made selectively, build and strengthen relationships and “emotional capital.” Heather knows that she and her colleague need to depend on one another and it helps if they “like” each other. In our virtual world, email can be toneless and impersonal and in certain situations, not the most effective form of communication. An hour after that phone conversation, Heather received an email from her colleague who thanked her for the call. Heather knows the power of the “personal touch.” The unspoken message is: You made time for me. I feel special. Special feels good, doesn’t it? This is precisely why Starbucks is so popular. Your name gets written on a cup and spoken out loud at least twice. And your beverage is made to your exact specifications and if it is not up to your standards, the drink gets made again. That’s personal. Making it personal with the people in your world will make you stand out and will help you to succeed.   The personal touch will be valued, appreciated, and rewarded. Author: Best-selling author of Be the Ultimate Assistant, A celebrity assistant’s secrets to working with any high-powered employer, Bonnie Low-Kramen worked for 25 years as the personal assistant to Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis. Her passion is about improving the American workplace through the training of assistants in workshops and presentations in major U.S. cities, Toronto, and London. Bonnie is a co-founder of New York Celebrity Assistants and is a contributing writer to Executive Secretary Magazine. Through the Glassdoor blog, Bonnie raises relevant and timely workplace issues written to inspire positive change in the relationships between assistants, employers, and co-workers.

Three Keys to Success in Your Career and Your Life

Three Keys to Success in Your Career and Your Life Todays post is by Lydia Whitney. Yes, Virginia, you can have it all: a successful career doing something you love and a life outside of that career. The key is to find balance. And it’s not as hard as you may think â€" especially if you understand the three keys to life success: Academic Readiness, Emotional Readiness and Logistical Readiness. We all know that basic academic skills are necessary for school and college success. What many people overlook is the fact that these and related cognitive and study skills are ALSO essential to life-long learning and success in everyday living. In today’s world, just working the credit card reader at a new store may well involve applying multiple cognitive skills. And it’s hard to think of a job these days that doesn’t involve some type of ongoing continuing education or updated on-the-job training on a regular basis. Our world is run by technology, and technology is continually changing â€" requiring us to learn new skills in order to use it. For this reason, it’s important to make certain that you have and continually strengthen your overall Academic Readiness skills. But there is far more to managing both your career and personal life than just being able to keep up with emerging technology and continual learning. Emotional and social intelligence have recently come into the spotlight. Research has shown that the skills and knowledge related to understanding and handling emotions and social interactions are actually far more important to career and life success than the more familiar academic skills. This is why Emotional Readiness skills are essential to success in any career, as well as in your personal life. Finally, there are practical everyday skills and abilities that we all need to have in order to take control of our lives. Dealing with credit, learning to budget, understanding leases and mortgages… there is an endless list of everyday knowledge and skills that we are expected to understand, but are often not taught. These Logistical Readiness skills are the third key to successfully living an independent life and balancing that life with a busy career. Luckily, the Internet provides us with a wide range of tools and resources that we can use to help us in understanding, assessing and improving our Academic, Emotional and Logistical Readiness. Online training skills providers are also a great help in achieving these goals and easily get certified with an organization like  Rose Training.  Sometimes, we  simply need to know where to find them. Winning-STEP.com makes it easy with the free STEP Resource Guide, an online reference text featuring an organized Table of Contents with a multitude of hot links to websites that can assist you in all three of these readiness areas. By strengthening your readiness skills, you will find it easier to manage your personal and professional relationships while taking care of practical issues â€" and living your life with far less stress.

How This Celebrity Is Keeping The Gender Pay Gap At The Forefront - Classy Career Girl

How This Celebrity Is Keeping The Gender Pay Gap At The Forefront It’s funny, sad and true. I’m talking about the latest video starring Kristen Bell that hilariously tackles the hot topic of the gigantic pay gap between men and women in the U.S. In a new video by the Huffington Post, “Pinksourcing,” Bell walks into an office full of women wearing a business suit with a bright pink shirt and a rose lapel pin, and poses this question: “Is your company looking to maximize their output while cutting back on cost? Why outsource all your production to far away countries like India, China and Narnia when we have the cheapest and best workforce right here in the good old U.S. of A. Women! That’s right, with Pinksourcing, women are a bargain at the workplace since you only have to pay them 77 cents on the dollar.” she said. Comedians and actors have a brilliant way of making serious topics funny and relevant. Writers and journalists will keep writing about unequal pay. Women will keep fighting the good fight. Someday it’s said 100 years the pay may even be equal. While the difference in pay in the U.S. is smaller than it’s ever been in history, it’s still 2.5 times the size of those in other industrialized countries. How do we close that pay gap even more? Apparently, there’s no easy answer, but here are 6 ideas to address the wage gap between men and women: 6 Ideas To Address The Gender Pay Gap 1. Raise Salaries in  Lower-Paying Jobs Give women in lower-paying jobs more money. It’s damn tough work to be a maid at a hotel. Try to imagine, if you can’t, what that would be like. Those ladies (and men) are not making nearly what they deserve. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women in jobs traditionally held by women such as cleaning, care-taking, and catering, according to the Fawcett Society. These types of jobs are “undervalued and paid less than jobs traditionally done by men, such as construction and skilled labor meaning ‘men’s work’ is given a higher value both socially economically.” Raising the minimum wage is a good place to start. 2.  Produce More STEM Graduates Strides are being made to encourage women to enter careers that are typically dominated by men, such as jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math. Granted, not every woman wants to major in or pursue a career in these types of fields, but why not at least introduce the concept at an early age to girls? By 2018, there will be 8 million STEM-related jobs in the US, jobs that we will not be able to fill domestically unless we can produce more STEM graduates. Forty percent of today’s jobs require STEM competencies and almost all of the 30 fastest-growing jobs over the next decade will require these skills, but presently only a quarter of women are represented in these fields. The next generation of scientists and engineers need to include a wider range of talent, including more women and minorities. 3. Credit and Amplify Other Women   Women were long excluded from the boardroom and once they started making their way into the boardroom, they often found themselves ignored. Some female White House staffers talked about the phenomenon and a process they introduced during Obama’s meetings, according to this recent article in the Washington Post. Female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called amplification: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution â€" and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own. The women made a purpose of doing this every day and Obama took notice and started calling on them more. 4. Improve Negotiation Skills   A new study shows that women do in fact ask for raises as often as men do, but they get raises less often. It was thought that the pay gap is in part because women don’t ask for raises. But, this new study doesn’t support that theory. Women are being discriminated against. In an effort to create a culture shift and help women earn the pay they deserve, salary negotiation workshops were created in Boston. For a lot of women, the thought of asking for a raise causes anxiety and stress. The women in the workshop said they don’t want to come across as greedy and entitled. The idea of the workshop for women is to empower them to ask for more money and teach them how to advocate for themselves and become more comfortable at negotiating. [RELATED: 3 Ways to Knock Out Negotiating With Men] 5.  Take Negotiation Out While it’s definitely smart to know how to advocate on your own behalf successfully, what if the job you’re in doesn’t require negotiation skills? What if employers took pay negotiation out of the process? What if men and women just had equal pay? Could it really be that simple? I think so. 6.  Keep The Gender Pay Gap In the Spotlight Keep making funny videos about the ridiculous gender wage gap. We aren’t going away. The good news is that millennials are changing the workplace in a lot of different ways, especially millennial women. The study I mentioned earlier interviewed 4,600 Australian workers and showed that women under 40 were more successful at negotiating their pay and working conditions compared to older women. One reason could be because younger women are more likely to consider themselves the breadwinner. Let’s hope this trend continues and the next generations of women narrow the gender pay gap even more.

Biomedical, Biomechanical, Biotech Whats the Difference, and Which is Right for You

Biomedical, Biomechanical, Biotech What’s the Difference, and Which is Right for You The field of engineering is wide ranging and encompasses many subspecialties.In fact, it’s become so diverse that simply calling someone an “engineer” is usually a major oversimplification. They could be a structural engineer, chemical engineer, train engineer One area to consider is the realm of bioengineering.Not to be confused with biotechnology, which is the application of biological principles to the development of new technology, i.e., the development of biofuels or genetically modified organisms, bioengineering is divided into two subspecialties, biomedical engineering and biomechanical engineering.You are likely to find either type of engineer in a biotech environment, especially given that the industry as a whole is experiencing unprecedented growth.In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that the field of bioengineering will grow faster than almost any other, with a cumulative 60 percent increase in job opportunities by 2020.That being said, while they both fall under the umbrella of bioengineering, biomedical and biomechanical engineering are actually quite different. Choosing the right path requires considering your own interests and strengths, and the type of work you want to do.Biomedical EngineeringevalBiomedical engineering is a broader field than biomechanical engineering, and involves the development and improvement of engineering solutions for biological and clinical applications.Some view it as a bridge or connection between medicine and engineering, as it uses the concepts and problem-solving skills germane to engineering to improve the delivery of healthcare and medicine.evalBiomedical engineers may work on projects designed to improve healthcare at all stages, from diagnosis through treatment and post-treatment monitoring. More specifically, some of the most common types of projects include research and development in tissue engineering, medical imaging, kinetic modeling, and neural implants.A biomedical engineer migh t work on the development of new medical devices, or improve existing devices with a focus on the biological aspects of the design.Becoming a biomedical engineer typically requires earning a master’s degree in engineering, with a concentration in biomedical engineering. However, many biomedical engineers also go on to earn additional degrees relevant to their area of focus.For example, many who work on projects with direct applications to clinical care also study medicine for greater insights into how the technologies will be used. Others study law in order to move into the world of patents, or earn an MBA to take on managerial roles.In any case, biomedical engineers earn much more than average, with median salaries closing in on $90,000 per year.evalBiomechanical EngineeringTypically viewed as a subspecialty of biomedical engineering, biomechanical engineering is largely a research-based field in which the principles of physical sciences are used to better understand biological s ystems.In other words, a biomechanical engineer applies his or her understanding of engineering principles to living things, to develop better solutions for healthcare and life sciences. This might include using such principles as mass, kinetics, catalysts, and polymer science to create new products that will imitate or control biological systems â€" like advanced prosthetics.Other specialties within this field include the study of balance and movement, hearing, speech, and soft tissue mechanics.One growing specialty within this field is robotics, specifically the development of robotics technology for minimally invasive surgery and advanced prosthetics. Sports medicine is also benefitting from biomechanical engineering, as engineers are developing solutions for improved performance as well as improved equipment to reduce and avoid injuries.Becoming a biomedical engineer usually requires earning a master’s degree, either in person or by taking online engineering courses. In most c ases, biomedical engineering is a concentration within an overall engineering program.With median salaries around $86,000 annually, this is a satisfying and potentially rewarding field.The differences between biomedical and biomechanical engineering are subtle, but important. In either case, you can apply your knowledge and skills to improving lives and advancing medical treatments.evalAs we move into exciting new frontiers of technology and changing expectations for healthcare, either type of bioengineering career promises to be an exciting and challenging one.

How to ask for a promotion at work - Margaret Buj - Interview Coach

How to ask for a promotion at work Youve got your eye on a promotion. Maybe its the next job in your career path, or maybe its in another part of the company. Now what? A CEO tells me what managers are looking for A few years ago, I had a chance opportunity to talk with the CEO of a large public utility company. We met in his office on the top floor of a tall building, and we talked for 90 minutes. This was extremely generous of him think how much his time must be worth and I wanted to make the most of it. Our conversation covered a lot of ground, but theres one question and answer combo that really stands out to me, even now. I asked, How do you find the people that you promote to be your VPs and SVPs? I wanted to know the secret sauce for finding untapped potential, for identifying future superstars so that I could get promoted myself, and so that I would know how to find talent too. His answer: I look for people that are already working in and exploring areas outside their own, and I promote them. In other words, he was looking for people already doing the jobs he needed to fill. I expected him to use words like potential and future, but instead he used the word already. I learned that business managers dont generally promote people based on potential, they promote them based on results. Theyre looking for people who have already demonstrated that they can do the job. They may have to train them on the specific details or operational duties of the new role, but the major pieces are often in place before the promotion. In hindsight, this is obvious. Managers are very, very busy people. They dont have much time to teach people how to do new jobs. They barely have enough time to delegate and manage the business theyre responsible for running. So theyre not looking for potential, theyre looking for value right now. My two-step process From this perspective, a promotion looks a little different. Instead of something thats granted to you by managers when they think youre ready, its something you do and then ask to make it official. 1. Do the job Determine the differences in responsibility between your current job and your target job, and start doing those things. You can usually find job descriptions on your company intranet, or on the companys Jobs page. If you cant find the job description for the job youre targeting, find someone doing that job and ask them to tell you about it. If the new job youre targeting is outside your current group, run it by your manager first. You may need to explain that youre interested in a new role, and you want to get experience with it to see if it might be a good option for you in the future. Be as transparent as possible so your manager doesnt feel that youre being sneaky, and so you can avoid any political landmines that may be lurking. Sometimes, you cant just start doing that new job, so youll need to think of other ways to get some exposure to it. For example, maybe youre aiming for a promotion from Consultant to Senior Consultant, and the difference between those two roles is that a Senior Consultant mentors other Consultants. Mentoring probably isnt something you can just do, so youll ask your manager if there are any good mentoring opportunities where you can be useful. Im really comfortable with the Consultant role, and am already documenting processes and creating training for new Consultants. If there are any Junior Consultants that need a mentor, I would love to work with them. 2. Ask to make it official Once youre pretty comfortable with the responsibilities for the job youre targeting, then you can make a compelling case that your manager should promote you and make it official. I want to show that Im ready to be a Senior Consultant, so I created new training material and have been mentoring a Junior Consultant for the past couple of months. Can we talk about moving me up to Senior Consultant? Wrapping up Instead of waiting for a promotion to come to you, go get it with this two-step process: Do the job  Determine the differences between what youre doing now and what the new job requires, and find a way to start doing those things. Ask to make it official  Once youre comfortable with the new jobs responsibilities, talk to your manager to determine whether you have more work to do, or if shes ready to make it official. This article was originally published by Josh Doody at fearlesssalarynegotiation.com.

A Good Technical Resume Writing Service Can Help You Get the Job You Want

A Good Technical Resume Writing Service Can Help You Get the Job You WantWhen you are looking for a reputable IT technical resume writing service, make sure that they are not just saying this because they want your business. They need to be certified professionals so you know they can help you get the job you want.Your first step in finding a good company is to look at what they have to offer you. Look at their website and look at what other people say about them.One thing to consider is that your technical resume writer may not be a trained professional. If they do not have many clients or referrals, you may want to pass on hiring them. You have to spend time looking for a quality one, and you may find yourself wasting your time.A technical resume writer who really cares about helping you out has to put effort into getting the job done right. The services they offer should be used to help you advance in your career. You will need to make sure that you get some great referrals to mak e sure that they do not turn you down.You need to keep in mind that a technical resume writer can charge by the hour and do the job well. This means that if you need a lot of content, then you may have to pay more. If you think that you can do the job yourself and save some money, then go ahead.Find a good quality service and show them your resume. Make sure that it is not just thrown together. Ask around and ask for referrals to see what they say.Make sure that you look for references in this process as well. Have someone read your technical resume for you and then take the recommendations you got from that person into consideration when you are looking for the best of the best.It can help you get the job you are looking for when you hire a good technical resume writing service. Keep this advice in mind and you will have a smoother career ahead.