Support Site for The Unemployed » Job Search Skills

Interview with man who changed 10 jobs in 14 years

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:35:32 +0000

Some, rather most organizations reject his CV today because he has changed jobs frequently (10 in 14 years). My friend, the ˜job hopper™ (referred here as Mr. JH), does not mind it. well he does not need to mind it at all. Having worked full-time with 10 employer companies in just 14 years gives Mr. JH the relaxing edge that most of the ˜company loyal™ employees are struggling for today. Today, Mr. JH too is laid off like some other 14-15 year experienced guys “ the difference being the latter have just worked in 2-3 organizations in the same number of years. Here are the excerpts of an interview with Mr. JH:

Q: Why have you changed 10 jobs in 14 years?

A: To get financially sound and stable before getting laid off the second time.

Q: So you knew you would be laid off in the year 2009?

A: Well I was laid off first in the year 2002 due to the first global economic slowdown. I had not got a full-time job before January 2003 when the economy started looking up; so I had struggled for almost a year without job and with compromises.

Q: Which number of job was that?
A: That was my third job.

Q: So from Jan 2003 to Jan 2009, in 6 years, you have changed 8 jobs to make the count as 10 jobs in 14 years?

A: I had no other option. In my first 8 years of professional life, I had worked only for 2 organizations thinking that jobs are deserved after lot of hard work and one should stay with an employer company to justify the saying ˜employer loyalty™. But I was an idiot.

Q: Why do you say so?

A: My salary in the first 8 years went up only marginally. I could not save enough and also, I had thought that I had a ˜permanent™ job, so I need not worry about ˜what will I do if I lose my job™. I could never imagine losing a job because of economic slowdown and not because of my performance. That was January 2002.

Q: Can you brief on what happened between January 2003 and 2009.

A: Well, I had learnt my lessons of being ˜company loyal™ and not ˜money earning and saving loyal™. But then you can save enough only when you earn enough. So I shifted my loyalty towards money making and saving “ I changed 8 jobs in 6 years assuring all my interviewers about my stability.

Q: So you lied to your interviewers; you had already planned to change the job for which you were being interviewed on a particular day?

A: Yes, you can change jobs only when the market is up and companies are hiring. You tell me “ can I get a job now because of the slowdown? No. So one should change jobs for higher salaries only when the market is up because that is the only time when companies hire and can afford the expected salaries.

Q: What have you gained by doing such things?

A: That’s the question I was waiting for. In Jan 2003, I had a fixed salary (without variables) of say Rs. X p.a. In January 2009, my salary was 8X. So assuming my salary was Rs.3 lakh p.a. in Jan 2003, my last drawn salary in Jan 2009 was Rs.24 lakh p.a. (without variable). I never bothered about variable as I had no intention to stay for 1 year and go through the appraisal process to wait for the company to give me a hike.

Q: So you decided on your own hike?

A: Yes, in 2003, I could see the slowdown coming again in future like it had happened in 2001-02. Though I was not sure by when the next slowdown would come, I was pretty sure I wanted a ˜debt-free™ life before being laid off again. So I planned my hike targets on a yearly basis without waiting for the year to complete.

Q: So are you debt-free now?

A: Yes, I earned so much by virtue of job changes for money and spent so little that today I have a loan free 2 BR flat (1200 sq.. feet) plus a loan free big car without bothering about any EMIs. I am laid off too but I do not complain at all. If I have laid off companies for money, it is OK if a company lays me off because of lack of money.

Q: Who is complaining?

A: All those guys who are not getting a job to pay their EMIs off are complaining. They had made fun of me saying I am a job hopper and do not have any company loyalty. Now I ask them what they gained by their company loyalty; they too are laid off like me and pass comments to me “ why will you bother about us, you are already debt-free. They were still in the bracket of 12-14 lakh p.a. when they were laid off.

Q: What is your advice to professionals?

A: Like Narayan Murthy had said “ love your job and not your company because you never know when your company will stop loving you. In the same lines, love yourself and your family needs more than the company’s needs. Companies can keep coming and going; family will always remain the same. Make money for yourself first and simultaneously make money for the company, not the other way around.

Q: What is your biggest pain point with companies?

A: When a company does well, its CEO will address the entire company saying, ˜well done guys, it is YOUR company, keep up the hard work, I am with you. But when the slowdown happens and the company does not do so well, the same CEO will say, It is MY company and to save the company, I have to take tough decisions including asking people to go. So think about your financial stability first; when you get laid off, your kids will complain to you and not your boss.

” One life, Live it !! “

10 Things You Can’t Be Asked at a Job Interview

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:50:36 +0000

Posted: 11 Aug 2010 01:28 PM PDT

Written by Laura Strachan

Applying for a job can be a stressful pursuit as an applicant prepares answers to those predictable questions, and hopes that his research will help him stand out amongst the sea of eager applicants. Whether fresh out of college, or re-entering the workforce after a long hiatus from the nine to five grind, one way to prepare yourself for an interview is to know which questions you don’t have to answer.

Drum roll please …. below are 10 Things You Can’t Be Asked at a Job Interview:

You have a unique look, what race are you? Although there is a fine line between an appropriate and inappropriate interview question, most employers are aware that making race a factor in the decision process is illegal. An employer can, however, inquire as to whether an international applicant is legally authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
So tell me, boyfriend or girlfriend … or both? Simply put, the sexual preference of an applicant should have no bearing on whether he or she can perform the job.
Do you have a bun in the oven, or planning on babies anytime soon? Women are often the target of illegal hiring questions. Questions pertaining to pregnancy, future childbearing plans, unwed motherhood, or child care are all illegal.
Ever been to rehab? Questions relating to drugs or alcohol, although there are often company policies prohibiting these pastimes on the job, are not appropriate for interview questions. An employer can inquire into whether an applicant uses illegal drugs.
Been to the hospital lately? Along the same thread as disability questions, there are privacy implications at play when questions concern medical history.
We all get a little crazy sometimes, do you have any sort of mental illness you should warn me about? Aside from questions relating to mental disabilities being a privacy issue, this line of questioning is inappropriate for employers to ask.
Not too interested in hiring someone with a disability, got any? Disability questions are off-limits, and a conversation concerning disabilities is illegal, unless prompted by the applicant.
What are your thoughts on God? Questions concerning religion are best left at the pulpit, and an applicant is under no obligation to give a response.
We’re trying to keep costs down, have you ever filed a workers’ compensation claim? Employees have the right to file for workers’ compensation for job-related injuries, and this cannot serve to later limit an individual’s ability to seek employment elsewhere.
How old are you? Unless the employer is trying to discern whether you are legally an adult, questions relating to age place the employer in the realm of age discrimination.

Sadly, asking an applicant their greatest weakness is fair game, as are any other clever way to discover if an applicant has the skills and personality to fit with a company’s culture. But, any question aimed at an individual’s personal attributes, orientation, or personal background is not only off-limits, but illegal. As a job-seeker, confronting an illegal interview question can be uncomfortable, if not downright awkward to address; but the bottom line is that you do not have to answer them, and can tell the employer that their line of questioning is illegal or report the company to a local Equal Employment Opportunity office.

Related Resources:

Avoid Disability Discrimination When Hiring New Employees (FindLaw)
Woman Shoplifts Wardrobe, Wears to Interview at Store (FindLaw’s Legally Weird)
Law and the Workplace (FindLaw)
When Pigs Fly: Accommodating Service and (provided by Nelson Law Group)
NASCAR Behind the Scenes: Still Just for the “Good Old Boys”? (provided by McCarthy Weisberg Cummings, P.C.)

Good looks can kill women’s job chances

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:14:00 +0000

Good looks can kill women’s job chances
Posted: 07 August 2010 0724 hrs, Channel News Asia

WASHINGTON: Beauty has an ugly side when it comes to job applications: it prevents attractive women from even being considered for some positions, according to a study published on Friday.

Researchers found that good-looking women were unlikely to be hired when they applied for jobs considered masculine – like construction supervisor, prison guard, car salesperson or tow truck driver – the study published in the Journal of Social Psychology says.

Good-looking women did, however, have an advantage over their less attractive female counterparts in jobs deemed feminine.

Men, on the other hand, face no such beauty-barrier: good-looking men always have an advantage over less good-looking men seeking work, regardless of whether the job they are after is a seen as masculine or feminine.

The study researchers, led by Stefanie Johnson, a management professor at the University of Colorado’s Denver Business School, asked participants to pair jobs ranging from lingerie salesperson to tow truck driver with photos of applicants they considered suitable for the job.

They had a stack of 55 male and 55 female photos, and the list of jobs.

In job categories like director of security, hardware salesperson, prison guard and tow truck driver, attractive women were completely overlooked, even though appearance was considered unimportant for the job.

Even in jobs where appearance was considered important – such as car salesperson – attractive women were ignored. Instead, they were slotted into positions like receptionist or secretary.

In a second study, participants were also given the resumes of the job applicants. But that changed nothing: the good-looking women were still ignored for the manly jobs.

The study’s authors chided employers who let stereotypes and physical appearance influence hiring decisions, urging them to hire on merit.

But even though attractive women tend to miss out on some job opportunities, overall, it’s good to be good-looking, said Johnson.

When they do get hired, beautiful people tend to get higher salaries, better performance evaluations, are more likely to gain admission to university, get better voter ratings when running for public office and more favourable judgments in trials, she said.

How to get good ideas for startups

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:03:53 +0000

How to get good ideas for startups – Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist

The majority of people in the US would like to be self-employed, according to Dartmouth economist, David Blanchflower. This makes sense because people who work for themselves are happier than people who work at someone else’s company, according toresearch from Estaban Calvo at he Harvard School of Public Health. However the majority are not self-employed, and one of the most important reasons for this is that people do not know how to come up with an idea for a business.

1. Read all the time, among broad sources and materials.
In a study spanning sixty years of economically underprivileged Harvard graduates, psychiatrist George Valliant concluded (in a great article in the Atlantic) that the only consistent indicator of who will be happy later in life is who did chores as a child.

This information should make almost everyone happy, since obviously just graduating from Harvard isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. It also gave me a burst of hope for our new life on the farm. The type of farm we live on has big cash flow and little incomes. I’m not sure if this qualifies us for the Harvard study demographic, but just in case, my kids do a lot of chores. They take care of farm animals and get rewarded with computer time. Not quite American Gothic. But still, maybe a path to happiness.

2. Ask a lot of questions about a lot of businesses.
You know you’re an entrepreneur if you can’t stop thinking of business ideas. I started thinking of farm business ideas from the day I discovered the farm. I asked about margins on pigs, cost of goods for eggs, cash flow during a bad harvest. At first the farmer was jarred by my distinctly non-girlfriend date-chat. But once he realized I was thinking of business ideas, he said to me: “I will never go into business with you. Ever. You would be a pain, and I’m already doing enough with you now.”

That’s when we were only seeing each other once a week so you can imagine how much he doesn’t want to go into business with me now that I’m living with him.

Still, I run all my ideas by him, which is another sign of a good entrepreneur. You can’t tell if you have a good idea until you tell people. Let others poke holes in your ideas. All ideas have holes in them. The trick with starting a business is telling enough people the idea so you have gain enough knowledge about the holes in the idea so you can see if these are the types of holes you want to figure out how to plug.

3. Identify an emotional need in the marketplace.
So I told the farmer that I’m thinking of starting a business for kids to learn how to farm. “Chores for the summer, happiness for a lifetime!” That’s my pitch. I tell him it leverages my marketing strengths because I will play to the parents being sick of parenting: They know they should make their kids do chores, but they don’t want to fight about it. I take the fight out of chores.

The farmer says that while marketing is my strength, spending day after day with twenty kids (the number I’d need for profitability) is probably not a strength.

4. No idea is precious. If it’s bad, just move to the next one.
So I keep thinking. Then I meet a guy who wants to invest in a company where I sell cheese online. There are lots of small town cheese makers who don’t market nationally. I’m thinking about that. The farmer likes that idea more than the chores one because he doesn’t know about cheese so I don’t bug him about it. He also likes the cheese model because he sees how Brazen Careerist takes investor money and spends it without making the money back. “We’ll exit on traffic,” I tell him. And he gets scared that he’s living with a member of a financial cult.

Another idea I had is to buy a herd of Waygu cattle. The farmer laughs when I tell him, and he says. “You’re going to be a rancher?”

“No,” I say. “It’s marketing. I think there’s a consumer market for Kobi beef that’s not being addressed. And an investor will buy a herd for me to get started.”

“But you know sales and marketing. You don’t know cattle. How will you run the company?

I say, “I have a core competency in hooking up with good cattle farmers.”

5. Surround yourself with curious, engaged people
Then the investor sends me an article about Chianina cattle and writes that maybe we should buy these instead.

I send the article to the farmer for a second opinion. Saras Sarasavthy LH says that the key to being a good entrepreneur is not a certain skill set, but the ability to get people to fill in where your skills are weak. Which gives me the temerity to bug the farmer: “Did you read the article?”

“Oh. Yeah. Did you see the pictures? Look at the Angus. The best cuts of meat are at the back, and the Angus has much more meat on them than the Chianina.

I look.

6. Mix and match ideas – two old ideas together equal a new idea.
I say, “But the Chianina has more meat in the front. The brisket part, All the cheap meat the Jews eat from years of living in shtetle poverty is bountiful on the Chianina. The Chianina is the cow for the Jews!”

“No, it’s not like that,” he says. “You need fat and marbling to make good meat and the Angus brisket has that.”

“Look,” I say, “If I show these pictures on my website and say I have the best brisket, it makes intuitive sense.”

The farmer shakes his head and laughs. Then he says this type of cattle is really hard to manage. The farmer has bred his herd of Angus cattle to be very calm and easy-going. He says that’s important so he can handle them well. When he says this it always scares me: I hope he’s bored with calm breeding and that’s why he picked me.

7. Stay on the right side of honest, but recognize that there’s big money on the very edge.
The farmer says that in cattle shows (or whatever they’re called – I forget), the farmers often drug their Chianina so they don’t get too wild in the ring.

“How can people tell?” I ask.

“They can’t really. But sometimes one is drugged too much and he lies down in the ring.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes. Of course it’s bad. People don’t want drugs in their meat.”

“Wait. I have an idea. You could do custom meat. Like, if someone wants Xanax, you give the Chianina xanax. Or Valium. We could take special orders. Then we have a calm herd with premium brisket and a market niche that caters to the Jewish fascination with psychiatry.

The farmer says nothing. He is fascinated by the Jewish penchant to do commentary on the Jews. That was what he noticed most at his first Jewish Holiday, Rosh Hashanah. The Jews at the table make Jewish jokes and talk about the politics of Israel like American talk about the politics of abortion: Everyone disagrees with everyone.

It’s the disagreement that fascinates me, though. Paul Graham, founder of the venture firm, Y Combinator, says there are no amazing ideas, there is only amazing commitment to exploring ideas. I agree. So I don’t care if my business ideas are good or not, because entrepreneurship is taking joy in the process of the banter of ideas until you land on a business model.

And I think the farmer likes that, too. I was throwing out some Percocet and he smiled and said, “Hey, wait. Maybe we should give that to the chickens.”

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Why Your Job Search Is Not All About You

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:56:18 +0000

Why Your Job Search Is Not All About You

By Kaitlin Madden, CareerBuilder writer

We all get calls from telemarketers. Their generic, impersonal sales pitches typically yield responses like: “Really? Why would I let you spend 10 minutes telling me about your vacuuming services? I have a vacuum cleaner in the closet.” Click.

Chances are you have received this type of call. And chances are you have hung up before you even know what the caller has to offer.

Were the vacuum company to peek in your window for a few hours (creepy — but go with me here) they’d find out you were a single parent with three kids, two shedding cats and a bad case of seasonal allergies. With this new background information, the call might go something like:

“Hello Ms. Murphy! Since you’re so busy you barely have time to vacuum these days, I’ll send my professional cleaning service to your home. In addition to saving you time, our filter-equipped vacuums will get rid of the pet hair on your furniture and decrease the amount of airborne allergens in your home!” Since the telemarketer just solved three of your most pestering problems, you’re probably more inclined to listen to his or her sales pitch.

Vacuum cleaners and allergies aside, applying to a company without targeting your application to its needs is a lot like making a random courtesy call. Employers aren’t going to pay attention to you unless they know what you can do for them.

Solve a problem, land a job

“You have a job for one reason: to solve a company’s problem,” says Debra Benton, author of “Lions Don’t Need To Roar” and “The $100,000 Club.” “You do not have a job because you need or want one; that is irrelevant to the marketplace.” That means you need to stop focusing on what your strengths are and start focusing on how your strengths can help the company you’d like to work for, Benton suggests.

Putting it all out there — strategically

Rich Dukas, president and CEO of Dukas Public Relations, says that targeting your cover letter to address the needs of each company you apply to is the only way to get noticed. “Specificity rules,” he says. “I am impressed when a candidate spends the time to learn about our firm and tells me in a cover letter and interview how they would directly contribute to our business. Generic cover letters don’t cut it.”

Using employer-centric language when applying to a position can also help, Benton advises. “Every part of your communication should be them-oriented instead of you-oriented, from the first word in your cover letter,” she says. “Instead of writing, ‘Dear Mr. Smith, I’m interested in a job at XYZ …’ your letter should start with ‘Dear Mr. Smith, You have an exciting position at XYZ that I’m interested in …’. Just making the first word ‘you’ versus ‘I’ is the start of a myriad of ways to be company-oriented.”

Tina Chen, director of operations at Carlisle Staffing in Illinois, says today’s tough job competition makes it especially necessary to focus your job search on the needs of employers and how you can make their organization a better one. ”Employers are no longer just looking for ‘qualified candidates’ but rather those who will go above and beyond to justify their seat, so job seekers really need to stay ahead of the curve and lay their best assets on the table,” Chen says.

The bottom line: Employment is a relationship

Although it is important for your communication with a prospective employer to stress how your skills can meet its needs, employment is ultimately a relationship, and you still need to keep your own interests in mind.

“Take a step back, assess the potential employers that you would like to work for, do your homework and decide if there could be a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. Look at it as ‘job dating.’ In order for the relationship to work, both parties have to bring something to the table,” Chen advises.

Kurt Weyerhauser, managing partner at Kensington Stone, an international search firm in California, also compares employment to a long-term relationship. “It’s like a marriage of sorts,” he says. “Most of us who are married realize that we wouldn’t be married if leading up to the wedding it had been all about — ‘me’ or, for that matter, all about my spouse’s interests. The key is to understand that while your primary interest is you, it’s not your sole interest.”

Kaitlin Madden is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, “The Work Buzz.” She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues.

Story Filed Wednesday, July 14, 2010 – 12:53 PM

Lesson from LeBron James: How to decide when to relocate

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:03:37 +0000

Lesson from LeBron James: How to decide when to relocate

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

Lesson from LeBron James: How to decide when to relocate

You don’t need to be a basketball fan to know that LeBron James has been deciding if he should stay with his current team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or move to another, more winning team. ESPN set aside an hour-long special episode for James to announce that he’s going to the Miami Heat.

James is extremely talented and has been called the next Michael Jordan. He is a free agent this year which is the genesis of the hoop-la surrounding his decision, and he has been madly courted by multiple teams.

Many sportswriters have said that the widespread obsession with James’ decision is totally over the top. The New York Times called the ESPN segment an ego-a-thon, which it may well be. But there’s more to our fascination with the decision than just our natural tendency to be drawn to celebrities. James encapsulates the issues each of us faces when we decide if we should relocate.

It’s friends and family vs. opportunity. James grew up in Akron, OH without a father. His basketball coaches played father figure roles to him. The Cavaliers picked him up when he was only 18, and he’s been there for the last seven years. This is his home, his support system, and his roots.

The problem with Cleveland is that the team is not strong enough to win a championship. James has won every individual award but no NBA championships. And he could go to the Knicks, the Nets or the Miami Heat and just adding him would make that team the odds-on favorite for the next championship.

So James is choosing between safety and loyalty vs. ambition and accolades. For most of us, this is what relocation entails.

We know, in our hearts, that happiness does not come from fame, (and this hunch is confirmed in a study from the Univerrsity of Rochester). Happiness comes from close relationships with family and friends. But it’s a hard pill to swallow. USA Today reports that most of Gen Y says they’d like to be famous. That explains a lot of the relocating away from families in small towns.

Also, most of us are not as rich as James, and we relocate with money in mind. Research from Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London shows that to make up for the decrease in happiness that you experience when you leave family and friends, you would need to make $133,000 more than you were earning before the relocation. (So, in fact, money can buy some degree of happiness.)

For James, though, it’s not the money. Certainly he has enough. Which means he is looking for a life that is more interesting. The game is more interesting with top-tier players to pass to. James is a great passer. He’s a great team player, and he doesn’t have anyone on his team that plays as well as he does. The thrill of playing is bigger with better teammates. So James is doing something many of us do—he is choosing a more interesting life instead of a happier life. (Note to non-NBA employers who bitch about loyalty: James is also is making a choice to go somewhere where he can grow his skills. Something that employers need to address if they want to keep any top-tier talent.)

I have written a lot about this dichotomy between happiness and ambition. I think our toughest decisions are actually between contentment and interestingness. James is not content. It is not his nature. He wants the game to be as interesting as possible, and he’s hit a wall in Cleveland. I think for many of us, the relocation bug hits not because it’s going to make us happier, but precisely because we are not searching for happiness. We are searching for something else. It’s scary. It’s scary to chase the interesting life because it means you are not likely to be content—maybe not ever.

And take a lesson from LeBron James: You can’t make everyone happy, and it’s risky to try. So when it comes to tough decisions, make sure you’re doing what’s right for you.

How To Make Money From Your Blog

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:14:05 +0000

How To Make Money From Your Blog

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

May 3rd, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

blog publishing software
HTML/CSS
blog comments (and comment spam)
RSS/syndication
feed aggregators
pings
trackbacks
full vs. partial feeds
blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
search engines
search engine optimization (SEO)
page rank
social bookmarking
tagging
contextual advertising
affiliate programs
traffic statistics
email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.

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Before starting out in career, ask ‘Why am I here?’

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:57:41 +0000

CJ Chan, who became an Honorary Doctor of Laws yesterday, said he had been guided by the ‘golden rule’ of doing no harm. The graduating students yesterday received degrees in disciplines such as business, computing, law and engineering. Yesterday’s commencement ceremony marked the start of a nine-day period during which about 9,000 students will graduate from NUS. — ST PHOTOS: CHEW SENG KIM

Jul 6, 2010

‘WHY am I here?’ was the question Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong urged the more than 440 National University of Singapore (NUS) students who graduated yesterday to ask themselves.

During his speech at the first of 21 NUS commencement ceremonies, CJ Chan said the graduates ought to ask themselves this age-old question before they head out into the workforce.

He reasoned that it requires an examination of one’s purpose in life, and that life goals should be asked at the start of one’s career rather than at the end, as at that point it might be too late to change things for the better.

His personal take: ‘To do good, do no harm, and do no evil to my neighbour.’

The 72-year-old was making an acceptance speech for the Honorary Doctor of Laws, which was conferred upon him by NUS yesterday. President S R Nathan, who is the NUS Chancellor, and Education Minister Ng Eng Hen were also present.

CJ Chan explained that the principle of doing no harm, or the ‘golden rule’, has its roots in many religions and cultures in China, India, Greece and the Middle East.

He said it ‘expresses man’s yearning to overcome his base nature or, rather, his basic nature. It enjoins social beings like us to think before we act, and instructs that before we do anything, we must first consider whether our actions are likely to cause harm to others’.

CJ Chan went on to say his interpretation of a neighbour is someone who needs one’s help or is most likely to be affected by one’s actions.

NUS president Tan Chorh Chuan said in his speech that CJ Chan is a man of many talents and sterling accomplishments, but that he stands out for his deep empathy and concern for the community.

‘Chief Justice Chan firmly believes that a good judge must understand the culture and context of the communities that make up our multiracial society,’ he said.

Yesterday’s commencement ceremony marked the start of a nine-day period during which about 9,000 students will graduate from NUS.

The ceremony saw 442 students receiving degrees in disciplines such as business, computing, engineering and law. Of the 29 degrees, five were new ones, including a Bachelor of Engineering (Engineering Science)

One graduate of the programme, Mr Cai Dingyan, 25, said: ‘Over the four years, I’ve learnt soft skills through the many group projects. I’ve also learnt how to handle stress because I had to work and compete with many intelligent and challenging classmates. I think these skills will help me when I enter the workforce.’

AMELIA TAN

Private bankers – Surviving the selection process

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 10:29:59 +0000

Surviving the selection process

How has the selection of private bankers changed after the global financial crisis?

Fri, Jun 25, 2010
The Business Times

By JOHN KOH

HOW has the selection of private bankers changed after the global financial crisis? In this article, we put ourselves in the shoes of a private banker by giving interview tips on how to do well in the first meeting with a prospective employer.

Related story:
» Private bankers back in demand

Attending a job interview these days is getting trickier for private bankers. After the era of hasty hiring – with little due diligence just a few years ago – banks have become smarter and more cautious.

Private bankers can no longer ace their interviews purely with the promise of potential clients. After the GFC (global financial crisis), firms are only interested in high flyers – experienced bankers who command at least US$120 million – with healthy revenue and a proven track record of managing wealth for several years.

Typical questions

Assuming you meet the above criteria, be prepared to answer more questions, including:

‘How much of your current AUM (assets under management) is inherited?’

‘How much of your current AUM is self accumulated?’

‘How many net new assets are you confident of bringing in the first year?’

‘What has been your return on assets over the past few years?’

‘Are your clients focused on a particular geographic region?’

‘Are these clients in any particular profession or industry?’

‘What types of financial products and services would they likely be buying from you?’

‘What level of duplication (in clients and assets) do you foresee when you cross over to our bank?’

‘How many of your clients are willing to move with you?’

‘Are you planning to join by yourself or with a team? If it is a team move, the above questions would apply to every single team member.’

‘How much AUM would you (and each team member) be able to bring in over the next 12 months, 24 months or 36 months?’

Some of these questions are not easy to answer. You could be your client’s favourite private banker and the star performer in your bank. But suddenly you could feel like a fish out of the water at the interview table, trying to sound as convincing as you can that you are the perfect candidate.

Interview tips

Be prepared. Take some time out to reflect on the above questions. Do plenty of research on the new bank and ask yourself your true motivation for wanting to leave your current place. Is it dissatisfaction with colleagues or management? Is it an issue linked to remuneration? Do you foresee constraints in terms of career advancement? Are you unable to grow your business further in the current set-up?

Conversely, you need to ask yourself: ‘Why the new bank?’ Does the brand name sit well with your top clients? Is the platform easy for you to conduct business? How much potential duplication do you foresee? If the duplication is significant, do you see yourself as the lead banker managing those assets?

On the day of the interview, put yourself in the right frame of mind to meet the interviewer. As much as possible, shut out any unnecessary distraction. Try to do some background research on the interviewer to understand what could be their priorities. LinkedIn and a couple of professional websites could be a good start. Another productive avenue is talking to people who might know the interviewer. The goal is to better connect with the interviewer and to make the meeting interesting and time well-spent.

Be upfront (and accurate) with numbers. A typical interview for a private banker is likely to be intensive on numbers, so try your best to be as realistic and accurate as possible. Prepare responses to the following:

‘How much revenue (over what AUM) were you making last year and the year before?’

‘How many clients are you actively managing?’

‘What is their average net worth?’

‘How much bonus payout did you last receive?’

‘What is your current remuneration package? Provide a breakdown in base salary, allowances, stock options and other benefits.’

Make sure you have documentary evidence for numbers relating to revenue, bonuses and salaries, because the HR manager will definitely request it as you progress deeper into discussions. Rather than springing a surprise in the second or third interview, it is better to be clear about your figures from the start.

Be ready with a business plan. Assuming you have done well in interviews and shared your numbers, getting your business plan ready is the next step.

A business plan for a private banking candidate doesn’t need to be as detailed as an entrepreneur’s plan seeking investor funding. It is a simple document – about three pages that allows the hiring bank to make a quick and reasonable assessment of your suitability and your chance of success.

Spell out your vision and your plans for the next one to three years. If possible, include numerical projections on how much potential business you can do and how you can achieve those numbers. A well-written business plan not only benefits the hiring bank, but also helps you monitor your progress after you join.

Final word

The selection of private bankers is not an easy task after the GFC. Resourcing managers are concerned with bankers who were retrenched during the height of the crisis, as it could signal an underlying issue related to performance. Others have bad experiences with bankers with strong track record and yet failing to deliver in the new job.

A greater level of detail and due diligence is needed in the selection process, even though the industry is still very short of experienced and capable wealth managers. Rather than compromising quality for numbers, and running after short-term numbers versus long-term business viability, it is even more pertinent for private banks now to ensure they hire the right talent to drive their strategies and deliver their promise to clients.

The writer is the managing director of WMRC, or Wealth Management Resource Centre, a key player in the specialist executive search industry

This article was first published in The Business Times.

Are Singaporeans becoming more open to careers in China?

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:36:30 +0000

THE CHINA COLUMN: Are Singaporeans becoming more open to careers in China?

http://news.efinancialcareers.cn/newsandviews_item/newsItemId-24697

8 April 2010

Zhang Xiao Qing

It was a busy December for executives from the Chinese banking industry. They travelled all the way to London, New York and Singapore to look for one special resource: top bankers.

More than 18 financial institutions from China attended this international recruiting drive, including Bank of China, Shanghai Stock Exchange, CITIC Securities, CIC and CICC. In Singapore alone, the event attracted more than 1,000 candidates, competing for 117 jobs. Each position’s annual salary topped S$250,000.

With China’s role in global financial services becoming more and more important, I spoke to several Singaporean bankers recently and asked whether they are keen on careers in China. Here’s what they had to say (full names omitted at their request)…

“I would definitely take up the opportunity to work in China. This would be a good chance to be exposed to a different banking and working culture.” – W.L, OCBC.

“I do want to go to China; the market is huge and has a lot of potential.” – D.P, CIMB.

“China, as a location is not a problem at all. I would consider an opportunity only if the reasons are overwhelming, like a good package and a senior position.” – K, Goldman Sachs.

It’s obvious that Singaporean bankers’ passion for working in China is on the rise, with many believing the experience will be a boon for their future career development. Firms in Shanghai and Beijing, are already employing an increasing number of Singaporean bankers.

“I went to work for a major European bank in Taiwan in 2003, and then decided to take an opening with the same firm in Beijing in 2007. Given the growth differentials, the size of the Chinese economy, and the training for my children in what will be the world’s largest economy in the future, it makes sense.” – K.C.

Mandarin matters

Singaporean bankers potentially have competitive advantages in terms of language and culture over those from Western countries, but many need to brush up on their Mandarin before they can compete for jobs in the mainland.

K.C explains: “I picked up Mandarin in Taiwan after many lost years in Singapore, so that experience helped me a lot when I came to Beijing, where meetings and emails are mostly conducted in Chinese. My advice is to improve Chinese competency, especially reading and speaking. I am still taking classes here in Beijing.”

“My Mandarin is not good enough to conduct business in China. We may be able to speak Mandarin in easy daily conversations, but not in business style,” comments K from Goldman Sachs.

End of the expat package?

As China opens itself up to the world, it is becoming more diversified. This is good news for bankers from different parts of the globe. Today, foreigners in general find it easier to live in Beijing and Shanghai than they did just five years ago, but it is undeniable that their lifestyle there is linked to the package they receive.

“I’m on an expat package, which is now increasingly rare. It covers relocation, housing, tax differential and schooling. If I were to face the same choice without the same package, it could be tough,” says K.C.

It is becoming more and more uncommon to find complete expat deals. Nevertheless, some Singaporean bankers have a very positive outlook on China’s banking industry. More than anything else, they value what the experience and exposure could do to advance their careers.

The connection between a good job and happiness is over-rated

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:49:02 +0000

blog.penelopetrunk.com

One of my favorite topics is the science of happiness, which academia calls positive psychology. I love this topic because most of us think of our careers in terms of happiness. That is, we look for work that makes us happy. Positive psychology turns this hunt into a science. And then tells us to look elsewhere for happiness.

I was talking to Richard Florida, about his current research, which blends positive psychology and economic development, and he summarized what I have read in many other places as well: “Your level of optimism and quality of relationships impact your level of happiness more than your job does.” What this means is that asking a job to solve our unhappiness problems is asking too much of a job.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to focus on optimism and relationships so that we don’t feel so much pressure choosing our jobs. To this end, I was excited to see three different introductions to the psychology of happiness in the last month.

The New York Times magazine ran a long summary of the positive psycholgoy movement, titled Happiness 101 (subscription). For those of you who don’t know much about this movement, the article is a good primer.

Martin Seligman, founder of the movement and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, says, “Postive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.”

This is not small stuff, but it’s the stuff that is scientifically proven to lead to a happy life. So when you think about what job to take, realize that this list of things that affect your sense of well-being is not overwhelmingly connected to the idea of doing what you love at work.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is where Daniel Gilbert, the man whose book on this topic was a bestseller, disses the movement as cultish, “I just wish it didn’t look so much like religion,” he says.

It does look like religion, because positive psychology promotes things religion promotes, like showing gratitude at the end of each day. But really, what this tells us is that the things that make us happy are much more basic than doing interesting work with interesting people.

Sonja Lyubomirsky says being happy comes from the way we think at our very core – and that thinking shapes the work we do. Not the other way around.

The Economist jumps on the positive psychology bandwagon in the article, “Economics Discovers Its Feelings.” This report contains some very practical advice. For example:

The traits of work that makes someone happy:
1. stretches a person without defeating him
2. provides clear goals
3. provides unambiguous feedback
4. provides a sense of control

But don’t panic if you can’t find a job like this, because when these traits do not exist in a job, people will often figure out how to add them back in and give the job meaning in their lives. For example, “hairdressers often see themselves as the confidants of clients they like, and they will fire clients they don’t…And there are janitors at a hospital who held patients’ hands, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms.”

Before you smirk at this rationalizing behavior, realize that Gilbert says it actually does create genuine happiness in a job. Check out this video of Gilbert speaking at the TED Conference (thanks, Dennis). Gilbert’s a fun speaker, so it’s worth watching the whole twenty minutes.

Gilbert also says that even if things are not going well, humans have a deep ability to make ourselves think they’re going well. Which is why Gilbert told me that people should not ask other people if they like their jobs, because almost everyone says they do and it has no bearing on how good the job it is.

However he says that this rejiggered feeling of happiness is just as deep and good a feeling as the happiness when something really is going very well.

One of his pet topics is that what we think will make us happy rarely does. (When I spoke with him he told me this is the reason we should not sit at home and try to guess what career to pick, but instead we should just get off the chair and start trying stuff.)

Gilbert’s research shows that while we think being a paraplegic would be very bad and winning the lottery would be very good, three months after the event, neither really affects your happiness. And this goes back to happiness being a result of how we think at our very core — what Seligman calls our level of optimism. (If you are not buying this, watch the video.)

So you don’t have to make yourself crazy about finding the perfect job. All that stuff about how you need to find a job that you love is overstated. “Some people don’t seek fulfillment through their work and are still happy in life. All options are legitimate and possible,” says Amy Wrzesniewski professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

You need to find a job that meets those four basic standards for a decent job. But our brain is hard-wired to figure out how to enjoy it once you get there. So maybe you can lighten up about choosing your next job. There’s good research to show that a wide range of jobs can accommodate you in a way where you can find happiness. And there’s good research to show that finding “the perfect” job will not be the thing to make you happy.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/16/the-connection-between-a-good-job-and-happiness-is-overrated/

Discovering Your Personality Traits To A Better Job Search – Holland Codes

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:08:56 +0000

Discovering Your Personality Traits To A Better Job – Holland Codes

Written by: Shafie

We all have this niggling feeling, at some point in our working life, when we start to question ourselves at the work place: ‘What the heck am I doing here?’.

Job satisfaction is such a fleeting myth here as people struggle to even get a job nowadays with the huge influx of foreigners in our midst.

Young graduates usually take on any job that pays the best even though it is not their ideal kind of work. Some undergraduates even could not get into their choice faculty in varsity and have to settle for second or third best.

Personally, I have encountered this soul-searching feeling last year at my work place.

I have been in the infocomm technology (ICT) industry for more than a decade and was totally jaded with the industry. I wanted out in order to pursue a career that I love and not doing something just to pay the bills.

However, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted for myself and drifted aimlessly for eight months until I stumbled on the Holland Hexagon – theory of career choice.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not asking everyone here to quit their jobs when they are unhappy at work and start to day dream about their ideal job at home.

However, if you are grossly unhappy with your job and experience massive work-related stress, it may be time to seriously consider throwing in the towel.

Let me now walk you through the personality test that has literally save my corporate life.

John L. Holland – Holland Codes

John L. Holland is an American psychologist and the creator of the best known and widely researched theory of career choice. It includes six personality types that are often abbreviated as RIASEC and are used to create the well known Holland Codes.

Holland theorized that the choice of a vocation is an expression of personality and that the six factor typology he articulated could be used to describe both persons and work environments.

Holland’s theory does not assume that a person is just one type or that there are “only six types of people in the world.” Instead, he assumed that any person could be described as having interests associated with each of the six types in a descending order of preference. This assumption allows the Holland Codes to be used to describe 720 different personality patterns.

Types	Personality	Preferred Work Environment
R ealistic	Strong mechanical, psychomotor, and athletic abilities; honest; loyal; like the outdoors; prefer working with machines, tools, plants, and animals.	Structured; clear goals and lines of authority; work with hands, machines, or tools; casual dress; focus on tangible results; engineering, military, skilled trades
I nvestigative	Strong problem solving and analytical skills; mathematically inclined; like to observe, learn, and evaluate; prefer working alone; reserved; idea generators	Nonstructured; research oriented; intellectual; discover, collect, and analyze ideas/data; science, math, medicine, and computer related; labs, universities, high tech, hospitals.
A rtistic	Creative; complex; emotional; intuitive; idealistic; flair for communicating ideas; prefer working independently; like to sing; write, act, paint, think creatively	Nonstructured; creative; flexible; rewards unconventional and aesthetic values; creation of products and ideas; arts organizations, films/TV, publishing, advertising, museums, theater, galleries
S ocial	Friendly; outgoing; find fulfillment in helping others; strong verbal and personal skills; teaching abilities; impulsive	Harmonious; congenial; work on people-related problems/issues; inform train, develop, cure, or enlighten others; team oriented; human resources; training, education, social service, hospitality, health care, nonprofit
E nterprising	Confident; assertive; sociable; speaking and leadership abilities; like to use influence; strong interpersonal skills; status conscious	True business environment; results oriented; driven; high-quality service and product orientation; entrepreneurial; high prestige; power focused; sales, management, politics, finance, retail, leadership
C onventional	Dependable; disciplined; precise; persistent orderly; efficient; practical; detail oriented; clerical and numerical abilities	Orderly; clear rules and policies; systematized manipulation and organization of data; control and handling of money; high income potential; accounting, business, finance, administration

Note: None of us has only one distinct personality type.

The Holland Hexagon

In presenting his theory, Holland graphically represented the six types as arrayed on a hexagon. This graphic representation serves to describe the empirically determined correlations between the types. The shorter the distance between their corners on the hexagon, the more closely they are related.

Most people’s interests combine several types to some degree. The six types can be arranged around a hexagon. Types that are next to one another on the hexagon are most closely related. Types that are opposite one another on the hexagon are the most dissimilar. For example, the Realistic and Investigative types are similar, while the Realistic and Social types are often dissimilar.

So, a person can be Realistic and Investigative, or Realistic and Conventional but unlikely to be Realistic and Social to a certain degree.

Moreover, if a person’s type is extreme, for example, Realistic and Enterprising; it is likely the person is Conventional too, or if a person’s type is Investigative and Conventional, it is likely the person is Realistic; but of course, to a certain degree.

Case Study

Using the Holland Hexagon, I found my personality type to be Investigative and Social. Thus, it does explain why I was in the ICT industry and my love to teach and train people. Smacked in the middle of my Investigative and Social type was my Artistic nature

I remembered my intense love for Art and Drawing during my younger days.

My original plan was to be an Architect.The dream was however banished forever when I was met with an accident severing the ligaments in my right thumb.

After discovering my personality trends I have now made concrete long terms plan and aspire to take advantage of my Investigative, Social and Artistic types.

So you might ask what kind of profession suits my personality type?

Well, I can start an online publishing firm or work for an online publishing firm as an illustrator once I have honed my skills among others.

Learning About Your Personality And Professions

So using the below simplified Holland Code and the above Holland Hexagon, which professions or mix of professions will suit you best?

Types	Personality	Possible professions
Realistic (Do’er)	Working with your hands, tools, machines, and things; practical, mechanically inclined, and physical	AgricultureArchaeologyArchitectAstronautAthleteChefComputer scienceDriver Electrical engineering Engineer Firefighter Gardener Information technology Instructional technology Martial arts Mechanic/Automobiles Mechanical engineering Paramedic Pharmacy Physical therapy Pilot Police Officer Soldier Veterinarian
Investigative (Thinker)	Working with theory and information, analytical, intellectual, scientific	ActuaryComputer scienceEconomistEngineerFinanceLawyerMathematicsPharmacy Physician/Medical school Professor (all fields) Psychologist Psychiatrist Science Statistics Surgeon
Artistic (Creator)	Non-conforming, original, independent, chaotic, creative	Actor/PerformanceAnimationArt therapyArtistAuthor/ PoetDance therapyExpressive therapyGraphic designer Library and information science[3] Music therapy Musician Painter
Social (Helper)	Cooperative environments, supporting, helping, healing/nurturing	Art therapyAudiologistBabysitterCaretakerCounselorDance therapyEducationInstructional technology Martial arts Music therapy Nurse Nutritionist Physician Professor Psychologist Social Work Teacher Theology Trainer Speech-language pathologist Occupational Therapist
Enterprising (Persuader)	Competitive environments, leading, persuading, selling, dominating, promoting, status	AdministrationAcademic administrationBusiness/MBACommunicationsInsuranceInvestment BankerJournalismLaw / Politics Marketing / Advertising Management Management Consultant Public Health Publishing Public relations Public policy Real Estate Retail Stockbroker Salesmen
Conventional (Organizer)	Precise, perfect attention to detail, orderly, organizing, status	AccountantActuaryAdministrationAcademic administrationBanking/ Investment bankBusiness/MBAClerkCopy Editing Instructional technology Payroll Proofreader Receptionist Retail Secretary Technical writer

Conclusion

If you wish to take an online test you can go to: -http://www.roguecc.edu/Counseling/HollandCodes/test.asp

Just be honest when you’re taking the personality test and you will never go wrong.

The self discovery of doing something that you really like must be worth all the hassle of taking the evaluation test. Good luck!

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Holland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes

A Note From Our Volunteer Career Coach Helen

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 00:53:43 +0000

Good morning Gilbert,

It is always good to be able to lend a helping hand, no matter how small. OK, some brief comments on the candidates. I have seen a few of the clients that you have passed over to me.

I find that all of them are genuine in wanting to seek a job that is reasonable and somewhat meaningful. After establishing rapport, I normally allowed them to talk and express their thoughts, concerns and help them to reflect more. on what they want for their career. Spending a bit of time with them using this approach, I find it is effective to then discuss where their shortcomings are ( some pointers listed below ) and then suggest some ways for them to overcome them. So, by the time I wrap up the discussion, they went off with some action plan and hopefully with their spirits uplifted and a ray of hope!

Some potential areas for candidates’ improvement:-

Layout of resume..some not aligned to what they really want, some too lengthy with irrelevant / confusing details.
Going through what could have gone wrong at their recent interviews ( lack of preparation, focus, confidence, sense of purpose and air of confidence and enthusiasm ). I would suggest to them to jot down learning points after each interview session, regardless of the outcome.
Facilitating discussion on looking at new opportunities, new options, new fields that they did not consider earlier. I try my best to initially listen to what they want and then open their minds and perspectives to consider new options that will align with their dreams and strengths.

In summary, building positive outcome and possibilities to every face to face meeting is key. I read somewhere, once hope is in sight, good things will begin to fall in place.

Cheers in our journey of putting the bounce back in peoples’ lives!

Helen Lim

Visit us at http://www.silverspring.com.sg

NB: Helen is our volunteer career coach and has recently started a non-profit organisation – SilverSpring – to help the silver-haired population fulfills their dreams. She also runs a cafe at Parkview Square named Chatters’ Cafe – opposite the Raffles hospital. Do drop by the cafe for a cuppa and look out for her…she is full of wisdom and optimism!

Employment Agencies – How Effective Are They?

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 00:56:23 +0000

Employment Agencies – how effective are they? (Article published in Today’s Voices – 12 June)

Written By: Gilbert Goh

I have seeked out employment agency’s services for jobs but so far they are disappointing to say the least. Some who bothered to respond always ask you to lower your salary range to ridiculous level or check whether you are willing to do something totally different. Most offered part time clerical work at around $5.00 an hour at that time. Many simply do not respond to you at all after asking you to send your resume. Even if you attend their interviews, many simply do not get back to you unless necessary. To me, employment agencies here all lack the personal touch and professionalism. They merely are interested to get the sales done up oblivious to the feelings of the jobseekers. As employment agencies are all very hung up on sales many employment consultants move on when they could not cope with the sales target and there is also no continuity of service here. One can often get a few consultants serving us over a short period of three to four months.

In Australia, employment agencies all operate very differently. They will email you back if you have any enquiry and will keep you updated on anything that matters to you. They will also call you back if you have left behind a message on their answering machine. Their service is top notch and very personalised. I feel that they have my interest at heart. The same can’t be said of our own agencies.

The recruitment consultants here are mostly in their 20s and could hardly empathisize with those jobless workers who are in their middle-aged. They also could not understand the struggles a middle-aged worker has and could be insensitive when they coerce someone to go for another field of work totally different from his experience. AS their salary is tied to the correct matching of a potential jobseeker to company’s staffing, it is not surprising to see that a jobseeker is being treated as a figure rather than a person. Maybe there are too many jobseekers then and too few jobs available for matching. I am not sure but so far I do not have good impression of recruitment agents.

A majority of them also do not bother to reply or respond to your email and you are often left wondering whether you are being selected or not for any job interview. Messages are also left unanswered on the answering message. There is simply no service or lousy service if any.

It is timely perhaps for employment agencies to provide a more professional service to prospective job seekers out there. For starter, a formatted response should be provided for each email to any job opening. This is only rightful and is pure simple professional courtesy. Most simply do not respond and you wonder whether your email to job openings are received or not. After a few months, I have given up totally on relying on employment agencies for jobs.

Some recruiters who asked me into their office for interviews also were distasteful and unprofessional. They were dressed shabbily and some even in jeans. With the mushrooming of small recruitment agencies in town area, this industry certainly needs a shaking up so that job seekers do not waste time sending emails and going for unfruitful interview.

However there was one positive experience I had with a lady recruiter from a small recruitment company. Not only did she exhibited understanding and provided encouragement to me, she also took time to go through my resume and suggested some changes to it so that it appeared more professional in outlook. Though she did not managed to get me a job, I remembered her after all these years as she is the rare few that stood out from the many recruiters who did their job stoically but bereft of any emotions and compassion.

As I wrote all this based on my personal experience, some people out there may have a more positive experience from recruitment agencies than me. I am also not here to run down all employment agencies. I am sure some are well run and are professional in how they discharge their duties. I urge all job seekers to try all resources before they decide which ones are the more reliable vehicles for them to use when they job search. Remember to spread your resources around so that you can reap from several job search vehicles.

When you look back at the anguish, suffering, and traumas in your life, you will see that these are the periods of biggest growth. Many years later, you will be able to look back and see the positive things – togetherness in your family and faith that came out of your pain. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

My career can’t take off (Today 13 May)

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:25:19 +0000

My career can’t take off

$140,000 spent on pilot’s licence but I can’t land a job with local carriers

05:55 AM May 13, 2010

Letter from James Tan

I AM a cadet pilot who has graduated from the flying college which trains all of Singapore Airline’s pilots, be it for the main fleet, cargo division, or SilkAir. I belong to a group of about 20 Singaporeans who were willing to pay for the training course at the Singapore Flying College (a subsidiary of SIA).

This training course cost me about $140,000 to complete.

Even though no promise of a job was made, I was still willing to go through the course hoping for at least an interview for consideration for an SIA job.

But the carrier seems to prefer to take in foreign nationals (including some from Malaysia, India and Hong Kong) over the current crop of local Singaporeans, who have coughed up a large amount of cash and have graduated with a Commercial Pilot Licence – only to be bypassed by this group of foreign nationals SIA has hired with zero hours of flying experience, and provided with training from scratch.

We Singaporeans are being overlooked by SIA without so much as an interview. Most of us have to look to the low-cost carriers like Jetstar and Tiger for jobs, as these are the only airlines based out of Singapore that can take in pilots like us with few hours of flying time.

However, Jetstar has a policy of taking in retired air force pilots, which means Tiger remains our only hope of employment.

Setting our sights on jobs with overseas airlines is proving to be a major hurdle. I have sent in more than 200 applications to airlines all over the world but I’m usually rejected because I am a low-hour pilot or because the aviation authority in that country has a job protection clause in place for their pilots from their own nations. For example, Malaysian and Indonesian carriers only allow low-hours pilots provided they are citizens of those countries.

This means the majority of the Singaporean pilots who have paid for their own training are hung out to dry, since we have to vie for limited places with the foreigners for cadet pilot positions, and we are not very attractive to airlines outside Singapore due to our low hours or the jobs policies put in place by other countries’ aviation authorities.

So, why does our national carrier prefer to take in foreign cadet pilots with zero hours of flying time over their own local pilots, who have paid their dues in the local pilot training school?

Aspiring pilots in Singapore who want to pay their own way through their training should think twice. Career opportunities are very limited and the cost of training is extremely high. Could SIA comment on why local pilots who were trained at their subsidiary training school aren’t given so much as a job interview?

URL http://www.todayonline.com/Voices/EDC100513-0000071/My-career-cant-take-off

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