Entries Tagged 'career' ↓

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Some interesting links to feed your Sunday surfing habit:

• Brazen Careerist: Book excerpt: How to turn a bad boss into a good one:
  

  Want to deal with a bad boss? First, stop complaining. Unless your boss breaks the law, you don’t have a bad boss, you have a boss you are managing poorly. Pick on your boss all you want, but if you were taking responsibility for your career, you wouldn’t let your boss’s problems bring you down.

• Seth Godin: Who should you hire?:
  

  There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown, and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)

• Micro Persuasion: The Most Essential Career Skill You Need to Succeed:
  

  So as I thought about it, the most important “tool” you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you’re dead.

• Web Worker Daily: The Dangerous Myth of The Dream Job (by Timothy Ferris): I am not quite sure I fully agree with the main thesis of this article, but it is nevertheless a thought-provoking read.
  

  Converting passions into “work” is the fastest way to kill those passions. Surfing two hours on a Saturday to decompress from a hard week might be heaven, but waking up at 6 am every morning to do it 40 hours per week with difficult clients is a very different animal. Mixing business and pleasure can be a psychologically toxic cocktail.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

In the comments on the post about common resume mistakes, Paco was asking for a good example for a coherent skill list. For a good way to ’sell’ your skills, let’s look at the public resume of one of my colleagues, Sascha, available at http://www.brawer.ch/cv/.

Here is the skills section:

Programming Skills

Programming Languages — Extensive experience in Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, Prolog, Lisp, Object Pascal, Assembler (PowerPC, 680×0, 6301). Knowledge of Objective C, Forth, AppleScript, TCL, PostScript and Basic.

Operating Systems — System-level programming for MacOS, several Unices (GNU/Linux, Tru64 UNIX, HP-UX, Solaris), Win32. Some exposure to VMS and CP/M.

Libraries — Java J2SE (wrote several packages for GNU Classpath); Java MIDP; GTK+ (helped with the port to Tru64 UNIX); deeply familiar with MacOS InterfaceLib/CarbonLib; many GNU and X libraries; Windows API.

Nice things about this skill list:

• The header says “Programming Skills”, not just “Skills”. Clearly, this person is a programmer and wants to be hired as such.
• There are no irrelevant skills listed (e.g. there is no mention of ‘can use MS Office suite’ or anything like that).
• There is no mention of skills that are ‘taken for granted’, such as HTML.
• The list is not just an enumeration of terms, but also includes some details on the level of expertise. For example, ‘Operating Systems’ doesn’t just list OS names, but includes a note on ’system-level programming’.

Note, however, that this list talks about a specific type of skills. If you want to highlight other kinds of skills (e.g. organizational or leadership skills), you need to have a separate section for them. But all the points above still apply: avoid irrelevant information, include concise details to show the level of expertise.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

These days I am asked to review a few resumes per week, all of them for technical candidates. It is astounding how many people will write things on their resumes that make it hard to support a “let’s interview” recommendation.

Some of these things are mild irritants that prevent the reader from focusing on the important bits of the resume; some are serious ‘red flags’ that practically disqualify the candidate. Many of these annoyances keep coming up again and again. Here are six common ones:

• Distracting the reader with irrelevant personal information, such as a photography, marital status, nationality or age. This information can subtly bias the reader, so it is always wise to leave it out unless explicitly asked for (note that in many countries it is illegal for a potential employer to ask about things such as age and marital status, unless they can prove that this data is directly related to your ability to do your job).
• Lumping together heterogeneous terms in a skill list. For example: “Programming languages: C, C++, HTML, Java”.
• Focusing on irrelevant details in a description of a previous project. For example: “Developed e-commerce site. Technologies used: Eclipse, [...]“.
• Using all possible hype words that you can come up with. For example: “Developed e-commerce site making extensive use of Design Patterns and UML, leveraging modern AJAX technology for Web 2.0 community building while making extensive use of open-source agile bazaar-style software engineering methods.”
• Using all the wrong keywords in a role description. For example: “Cool Company Inc. Position: Senior Engineer. Accomplishments: Organized meetings, coordinated conferences, drafted documentation, did sales presentation for end customers.”
• Claiming “extensive experience” in some area, and not providing any evidence that this is indeed the case. For example: “Experienced Java programmer with detailed JVM knowledge. [And then resume lists 3 previous jobs where the work was done in C++.]“

Given that lately I seem to feel an urge to blog about work and career, I’ve gone ahead and created a separate blog to mace it easy for those interested in this particular topic to follow those posts.

The new blog is called On jobs, work and careers (very original title, isn’t it?), and is hosted right on this site, at http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/. If you are interested in those topics, go subscribe!

Found | Read, one of the GigaNET blogs, is running an article titled Passion spotting, which echoes one of the main points in my recent Stop “fine-tuning” your resume post: in a job candidate, evidence of passion is much more important than any hyped keywords in a resume.

Passion will tell me most of what I need to know about a person’s dedication and drive. In developing a great startup team, these two elements are the most important. Talent and abilities can be developed. The former are what foil, or leverage, the latter.

Not exactly groundbreaking news, but always worth reminding yourself.