Knock 'em Dead Secrets & Strategies

For Success in an Uncertain World

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780983973423
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

This is the guide to living life on your terms. It's tough landing that first job out of school and starting your climb up the professional ladder in such an uncertain world. In Knock 'em Dead Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers, you will learn how to climb the ladder of success and get what you want out of life. You'll learn how to: -Develop social networks that deliver results for the new professional you -Build a resume that gets you interviews -Complete your job search in record time with a killer plan of attack -Turn job interviews into job offers and paychecks -Build a professional brand that delivers credibility -Bring your entrepreneurial dreams to life. Working your way through the proven job search and interview strategies from the inimitable Martin Yate, you'll gradually discover a blueprint for professional success. You'll immediately begin to make sense of the world of work, start your career on the right foot, and gain access to the corporate inner circle and win promotions way ahead of your college peers. You can get what you want out of life, and live a meaningful life on your terms — you just have to learn how to do it. In Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers, you'll develop a practical career plan that puts you in control, with commonsense strategies that really can bring your dreams to life. You need never be unemployed, never be without income streams. In short, you can score the job you want and learn to survive and prosper over the long haul with a brand new approach to professional success that always put you first. How will you guide your professional destiny?

CHAPTER 1

WAKE UP, STAND UP,
LIVELY UP YOUR LIFE

You may have come to these pages fully employed and ready for that next step, or you may have been laid off. If the latter, your overwhelming emotion right now is probably panic. Your brain whispers, “Maybe this is it; maybe I’ll never find another job; maybe my career is in ruins.”

Some of this is a natural reaction to losing a job—grieving mixed with anger manifests itself as an anxiety crisis. It’s understandable because today’s world is completely different from five or ten years ago, and the pace of change is accelerating. Your panic also reflects the fact that, like most people, you probably hadn’t planned for this: You had your sweet blond curls stuck in the sand.

If you are going to survive and prosper over the long haul, you have to pull your head out of the sand—or wherever else you had it stuck— and start getting actively involved in the management of your life. This is your life, and what you make of it is up to you, because no one else gives a damn. I’ll show you how to get your professional life under control and onto the right track, and I’ll give you many of the tools to do it, but bottom line: It’s your life, and what you make of it is up to you.

There is no promise of a future reward unless you make it happen.

Rick Kean, Consultant Emeritus, A. M. Hamilton, Inc. Staffing and training. 30+ years’ experience.

I’m going to share a plan with you that will help you achieve a complete career management makeover as you organize and execute your job search and get a fresh start with a good new job. You are going to learn a reasoned approach to building a killer resume; a plan of attack for your job search that integrates networking into every strategy; how to turn job interviews into job offers; and how to negotiate salary.

You will also learn how to get off on the right foot in your new job; how to make your job more secure and how to pursue and win promotions; how to plan and execute career changes on your timetable; and how to simultaneously pursue those alternate entrepreneurial and dream careers you barely dare dream about. You haven’t read a book like this before, so relax and go with the program; I won’t waste your time.

Think about Your Goals

What do I want out of life? The more clearly you can envision life goals, including those dreams everyone told you not to waste your time with, and see a real path to achieving some of them, the more effort you will put into the work that has to be done today and every day along the path that brings them to reality.

Evaluate your career to date. Be honest with yourself about where you stand today and why. It isn’t someone else’s fault—like it or not, you are largely responsible for where you are. Honestly accepting this is the first step along a path that takes you to greater financial security and professional success. What should you have done differently? What can you learn from your mistakes so that you can move forward, rather than live condemned to repeating them?

Now look at where you want to be ten or twenty years from now. And those interests and dreams that give meaning to your life? Stop cramming them under the bed: Haul them out and re-examine them as you read and learn—you might find they don’t belong there. Bring all these long-term goals and dreams into focus; own them, don’t be scared by what others might think and don’t give up before you’ve started.

This is not an either/or world. You can have multiple career goals and multiple career paths: for climbing the corporate ladder, for starting your own business, for writing that book or becoming a painter; other people have made it happen, and you can too. But like many others, you have been told: “Find one thing you like, make it your career and settle down to it for a lifetime.” But most of what you have been told doesn’t make sense; life isn’t that simple and you are too complex a being. I like to write; but all day, every day for fifty years? Sweet baby Jesus, I’m ready, take me now.

Broaden the sources of your income. Do not rely on one source of income but rather a portfolio of options.

Lisa Chenofsky Singer, Chenofsky Singer and Associates. Communications and Human Resources Consulting. 20+ years’ experience.

You might have dreams for career paths that seem impossible or that common sense tells you are hare-brained; yet all of them hold value and could well be achievable. Whatever those dreams might be, they are going to fall into one of three categories:

1.Core career: I’ll show you how best to land that next job and how to make it as secure as it can possibly be; how to land the plum assignments, win raises and promotions; how to navigate strategic career moves within your industry; even how to decide on new career paths including when and how to make the migration and become successful in your new field.

2.Dream career: Your dream might be to become a writer, painter, singer in the band, or a landscape gardener. I’ll show you the key strategies that can bring your dreams to life.

3.Entrepreneurial career: You’ll learn how to seamlessly integrate plans for an entrepreneurial career into the continuing pursuit of success in your core career. You’ll recognize that they aren’t mutually exclusive: They are attainable and can even be complementary.

We’ll develop the means for achieving them throughout the book and bring them together in Chapter 16. But don’t jump ahead: There’s a plan, a methodology, and a new way of looking at your professional life that you need to soak up before it will all make sense and enable you to pursue multiple parallel career paths.

Understand the rules of the workplace as they are today. Stay one step ahead instead of two steps behind the changes.

Perry Newman, CPC/CSMS. Executive Resume Writer/Career Coach. 25 years’ experience.

Start Toward Your Goals Now

Your successful career is a marathon, not a sprint, so whatever your goals, the sooner you start toward them the better. Start imagining what you want your life to be like, not just for this job search and that next job, but a detailed picture of what a fulfilling life would look like for you.

With achievable goals, you will be re-energized and your life will be enriched by their pursuit, knowing you have a real chance of making them come true. Every day, when you wake up on the right side of the grass you are ahead of the game: You are alive, and you have a plan to make your dreams come true, one that takes you step-by-step from where you stand today to where you want to stand tomorrow.

All these things are possible, but it starts with getting your priorities straight, and your priority right now is getting back to work or out of that hell-hole cubicle in the high-rise salt mine that you inhabit today.

A long time ago, President Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” You might not agree, but it’s certainly true that business is at the heart of American prosperity. Even in times when unemployment has soared and banks have crumbled, across the country the wheels continue to turn, stuff continues to get made, and people continue to get jobs.

Even during an economic downturn—remember, they’re cyclical and will occur regularly throughout your work life—there are jobs. We have a huge economy; there are always jobs. Even in the worst months of the current recession, at least four million new jobs were posted every month on Internet job sites. But companies won’t always show up on your doorstep, begging you to accept generous offers. Finding a job and advancing your career is work. It takes concentrated effort, and begins with understanding why jobs exist.

How Business Works

Companies exist to make money for the owners, as quickly, efficiently, and reliably as possible. They make money by selling a product or service, and they prosper by becoming better and more efficient at it. When a company saves time, it saves money, and then has more time to make more money; this is called productivity.

If a company can make money without employees, it will do so, because that means more money for the owners. Unfortunately for the owners, a company requires a complex machinery to deliver those products and services that bring in revenue. Every job is a small but important cog in this complex moneymaking machine, and every cog has to be oiled and maintained. That costs money. If the company can redesign the machinery to do without that cog (automation) or can find a cheaper cog (outsourcing that job to Mumbai), of course it is going to do so.

You are responsible for your own job security. Watch for the “writing on the wall” at work, for signs of reorganizations or downsizing.

Christine Wunderlin, aka Coach Christine on the Career Czar. Wunderlin Consulting. 30+ years’ experience.

There are two reasons job exist. First, as I’ve said, every job is a small but important cog in the corporation’s complex moneymaking machine. Second, the company hasn’t been able to automate that job out of existence because in your area of technical expertise, problems arise.

Consequently, the company hires someone who has the technical skills to solve these problems when they occur and who knows the territory well enough to predict and prevent many of these problems from arising in the first place. It doesn’t matter what your job title is, you are always hired to be a problem-solver with a specific area of expertise.

Think about the nuts and bolts of a job you’ve held. Whatever the job, it always comes down to anticipating, preventing, and solving problems. This enables the company to make money for the owners as quickly, efficiently, and reliably as possible.

These aren’t the only factors that are critical to your success and that all jobs have in common. In the next chapter you’ll learn about a specific set of transferable skills and professional values that all employers are anxious to find in candidates, whom they then hire just as quickly as they can find them. The skills and values that you’ll learn in this book have applications far beyond your core career.

CHAPTER 2

WE ARE ALL PROFESSIONAL
SCHIZOPHRENICS

Over the years I’ve read a lot of books about finding jobs, winning promotions, and managing your career. A few were insightful and many were innocuous, but one theme that runs through them all is plain harmful: Just be yourself.

“Who you are is just fine. Be yourself and you’ll do fine.” Wrong. Remember that first day on your first job, when you went to get your first cup of coffee? You found the coffee machine, and there, stuck on the wall behind it, was a handwritten sign reading:

YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T WORK HERE
PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF

You thought, “Pick up after myself? Gee, that means I can’t behave like I do at home and get away with it.” And so you started to observe and emulate the more successful professionals around you. You behaved in a way that was appropriate to the environment, and in doing so demonstrated emotional intelligence. Over time you developed many new ways of conducting yourself at work in order to be accepted as a professional in your field. You weren’t born this way. You developed a behavioral profile, a professional persona that enabled you to survive in the professional world.

Success? Turn off the TV—and invest in improving your value to the marketplace. You can’t afford to go to bed as stupid as you woke up. If you do not learn something new every day to become more valuable to the marketplace tomorrow, you will become worth less (worthless).

Jay Block, President, The Jay Block Companies. Employment and workplace strategist. Author, The Proteus Solution. 20+ years’ experience.

Some people are just bette...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• This Is Your Life
• The Panel of Experts
• Chapter 1: Wake Up, Stand Up, Lively Up Your Life
• Chapter 2: We Are All Professional Schizophrenics
• Chapter 3: Your Resume Has to Be a Killer for You to Survive
• Chapter 4: The Network-Integrated Plan of Attack
• Chapter 5: How to Build Networks for Today and Tomorrow
• Chapter 6: Job Sites, Resume Banks, Headhunters, and Direct Research
• Chapter 7: Reach Out and Touch Someone
• Chapter 8: Prepare to Win
• Chapter 9: The Five Secrets of the Hire
• Chapter 10: Meet Your Interviewers: Why They Do the Things they Do
• Chapter 11: Knock ’em Dead at the Interview
• Chapter 12: Out of Sight Can Mean Out of Mind
• Chapter 13: Job Offer Negotiation
• Chapter 14: Starting on the Right Foot
• Chapter 15: Climbing the Ladder of Success
• Chapter 16: Lifetime Career Management—Issues and Strategies
• Appendix: The Expert Database
• Index