Strategies for Efficient Career Planning

Selecting the right course of career is one of the most important decisions of your life. This is why you should give significant amount of time before choosing your career track. Unfortunately, several people make few common mistakes while choosing the right career for themselves. This wrong decision is usually made due to the lack of career advice, lack of awareness or due to certain unavoidable circumstances.

In order to make a right career decision, it is important to plan your career path considering all the important factors. Choosing a career path is extremely important and can well be a life changing step. Therefore, it needs a thorough brainstorming. Good thing is that you can turn your dreams into a reality by following a systematic yet flexible approach.

Following are few guidelines that can help you in bringing your career on the right track:

- Career planning should start at a very initial stage, i.e. during the school-level education. It's the duty of parents to educate their children about the importance of education and career. This will help the children being mentally prepared to handle the job related pressure at later stages. Children need to be matured enough to explore their options and proactively learn about the career paths aligned with their interests.

- You can take career guidance from a well qualified career planner. The career planners inform you about all the available career options as per your educational qualifications. They also consider your ability as well as interests while short-listing the career options suitable for you. They also analyze the market and emerging trends, and can provide you with details about all the prospective career options, which can help you frame a rewarding career for yourself.

- You should not completely rely on anyone's advice regardless of how close they might be to you. They might be your well-wishers but chances are they aren't aware of the possible career options you can opt. It's always better to keep yourself updated with the latest trends and career options available as suitable for your line of education.

- Performing sufficient study and research about the company and your work profile before you join a company. You should learn about your prospective roles and responsibilities before you join the organization.

- Relying on any placement agency that guarantees a job and asks you to pay for it is simply worthless. Reputed placement agencies are paid for their efforts by the employers.

- It is also important to remain employed with one employer for a long duration. Most of the reputed companies avoid employing people who have switched their jobs very frequently without good reasons.

As mentioned earlier, a systematic career planning considering all the possible options and opportunities definitely pays off. It will not only educate you about the ongoing trends in the market, but also will help you to increase your marketability in the line of career you've chosen for yourself.

This is Diarmuid Haughian, writing articles, blog and exploring on new interesting topics such as job, education, career etc. You can find more details about Career Planning and new career.

3 Proven Career Makeover Strategies to Achieve Greater Success and Satisfaction

Ever daydreamed about transforming your career into something new, better, and more rewarding? Yet the process of actually making a career change can seem overwhelming, and as a result, most people never succeed with their career change goals.

In my role as a career counselor, helping thousands of talented, motivated professionals realize their career dreams, I've seen the following three powerful strategies produce successful, lasting career-change results.

-- Career Reinvention Strategy #1: Experiment before going "live". Many people fantasize about what a new career specialty would be like, yet the reality is almost always different. Increase your chances for true career-reinvention success (as well as the likelihood of your long-term satisfaction) by taking a class, shadowing an expert, and executing practice projects that expose you to your new specialty. Bonus: the experience you gain builds credibility and skills in your new line of work.

-- Career Reinvention Strategy #2: View career reinvention as a process, rather than as a prest-o, change-o switchover. It took years for you to create a success in your current career. Create a transition plan with reasonable timelines to research your new plan, gain needed skills, and land a position. Six months to two years is typical. If this timeline seems too long or frustrating to you, keep in mind that as soon as you begin your career-change process, you'll be making progress...and that not only feels great, but you'll realize that every step you take is getting you closer to your goal.

-- Career Reinvention Strategy #3: Be open to the unexpected. The saying, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans" is especially true when it comes to career reinvention. As you begin to move forward, new ideas and opportunities will present themselves...and they may be an even better solution than the career makeover idea you'd first imagined.

- Katy Piotrowski, M.Ed. is a career counselor with Career Solutions Group and author of, "The Career Coward's Guide to Changing Careers", "The Career Coward's Guide to Resumes", "The Career Coward's Guide to Job Searching", "The Career Coward's Guide to Interviewing", and "The Career Coward's Guide to Career Advancement". She has been recognized nationally for her outstanding career counseling achievements.

Online Recruitment - State-Of-The-Art Job Search Strategies

History of Job Search

Online recruitment started almost the same time in the USA and in England in the early 90's with providers like Monster.com in the USA, Jobserve.com in the UK and Allstarjobs.ca (started in 1997). A job bank at that time merely had a few thousand of open job positions and the chance of putting employers in touch with jobseekers was quite remote.

Since those early days, we have seen an explosion of job search sites and the technology has improved a lot for the benefit of both, recruiters and jobseekers. Nowadays, typing "Job Search" in search fields of Google or Yahoo, you get millions of pages dealing with this subject.

Now we have a new problem: how not to get lost in this jungle of ultimate Career and Job Search Services (of which many require an inscription fee). What do we really want? Using the Internet in first place has the advantage of speed and the possibility to look in any geographical area for the required job that the candidate is qualified for, or aspires to. With the Internet installed at home, it is possible to investigate the potential employers, ask questions and apply for the position, without even taking off your pajamas.

How do we explain the recent evolution in online recruitment technology? Even if you feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of top job search engines like Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com or Hotjobs.com, there are still many doors open for improvements and a lot of research is going on in the field of vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more.

All-in-One Job Search Engines

A recent trend in job search engines is the emergence of all-in-one or metasearch engines (sometimes also referred as vertical job search engines), allowing jobseekers to search across multiple websites. Among the most popular engines are Indeed (in the USA), Wowjobs (in Canada) and Trovit (in the UK).

Probably the most powerful of all is Indeed, which was founded by Paul Forster and his partner Rony Kahan in the year 2004 to cover the US job market. According to Hitwise data, Indeed saw its market share increase by 302% in the year 2006 and this was only the beginning. The success of Indeed and other metasearch or all-in-one search engines is the fact that job seekers can go to one place to find all jobs, overcoming the limitation of the job boards, which have a finite number of listings. A simple comparison of mayor job search engines reveals that there is no need any more to look in all the individual engines to find the best fits for the job you are looking for. There are more job sites than you can count, ranging from the top job sites like Monster and CareerBuilder to small, niche sites in just about every career field you can imagine. Meta job search engines like Indeed or Wowjobs are searching in more than 1200 engines at a time and brings you the result in seconds on your screen. With a couple of clicks of your mouse, you search the major job sites, company sites, associations, and other online job sites by keyword and location to get job listings that match the criteria you selected. With it's high-tech search strategy, Indeed clearly leaves behind other so-called meta-job search engines like Jobster and SimpyHired. With Wowjobs and Trovit, metasearch engines focused on the Canadian and UK job market respectively, the situation is very similar.

Posting your resume in Recruitment Services



A developing trend with both jobs search engines and jobs boards is that many now encourage users to post their resume or CV together with contact details. The fact is, it`s proven that posting your resume in a proactive way in the mayor resume distribution systems will put it on the desk of hundreds of recruiters and can more than double the chance of getting a job!

The advantages of Resume Posting are:

- You more than double your chance of getting "discovered" by a recruiter who is looking for a person with exactly your experience and abilities.

- You put your resume in the hands of hundreds of recruiters, almost instantly!

- You are sending your resume only to recruiters focusing on your specific industry or job categories.

- You save a lot of time and money and you get an instant edge - with only little effort from your part!

- Your resume is passing a pre-selection system and when it comes on the desk of hiring managers they will read it very carefully.

Resume posting has become an attractive business for the recruitment companies as they sell the access to their resume bank to headhunters and recruiting managers. Anyhow, jobseekers should be aware of the risks of uploading personal information to the Internet since they have no control over what will happen with their data and their resume might be seen by their current employer or even by "identity thefts".

Take a breath and slow down

The question is still if all the improvements in search technology also improved the overall performance of recruitment efforts. Finding a job still is hard work. It is very helpful to slow down, take time, and analyze if you are happy with your current situation and what career is really right for you. In our modern world, the best job success is earning good money with work that gives you a sense of purpose, expresses your talents and passions, and is consistent with your values. A lack of many Job Search Sites is that they do not assist the jobseekers in finding their best career fit and even confusing people in trying to evaluate their current situation. Job searching is a short-term pursuit of a position that matches your financial and career goals. Career planning is a long, progressive process of choosing education, training, and jobs that fit your interests and skills. This planning process also includes the evaluation of career change or self-employment opportunities. Deciding what type of work you want to pursue requires knowledge and understanding of your interests, your values, your motivation, and the skills you enjoy using the most. This is helpful whether you are choosing a career for the first time or changing careers for the twenty-first time.

One aspect that even the most powerful Job Search engine cannot cover is the fact that probably the majority of job vacancies are never posted in journals, newspapers or on-line and you only find them using the right contacts or your Network.

This "hidden job market" only can be exploited by keeping focus on people who have experiences, and contacts that might be interesting for you.

Good possibilities to build up your Network, are for example job fairs or similar events where you meet hiring managers, job lead sources and other valuable contacts.

Conclusions

Using state-of-the art job search engines, online recruitment has become a powerful tool for a fast, efficient and economical job search and the performance is improving constantly. But every jobseeker should be aware of the fact that even the most powerful job search engine should be considered only as a single tool in the Job Search Strategy and that still most jobs are found using personal Networks. Finding a job is all about people, the people you know, and people you meet who have the job information and who will inevitably help you get a job. Online Job Search using all-in-one or metasearch engines definitely makes life much easier but should not be overestimated.

Resources

1) Two-Approach Job Search Guide - 2ajobguide.com

2) David Hurst,Chairman - ORMC, 2004

3) Joel Cheesman's Blog, "Craigslist puts smackdown on verticals", October 19, 2006.

4) INTERNET Inc, "Job Search Verticals - The List", October 5, 2006.

5) Read/WriteWeb, "Search 2.0 - What's Next?", December 13, 2006.

About the Author

Oswald J. Eppers, PhD is manager of the consulting firm E&R InterConsult and founder of the Two-Approach Guide for easy and effective Job Searching and Career Assessment. He has more than 10 years experience as freelance consultant in the field of outsourcing, environmental and quality management.