If you haven’t yet, you must see George Clooney’s movie “Up in the Air” – the story about a charming corporate road-warrior hired by spineless managers to fire their employees.
I saw it last weekend and as someone who spent 18 years witnessing thousands of people lose their jobs it was very hard to watch and [...]

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When looking for a job we like and a successful career we usually think about skills, knowledge and motivation. I guess this makes sense. After all, jobs are about what we do. Work is the application of skills and knowledge.
The reasoning therefore, is to find organizations, that need your knowledge and skills and you will be [...]

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I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday week.  As for me, I’m spending much of it doing my all-time favorite thing. No, not eating – which does happen to come in at a close second. I’ve been reading.  And I spent much of Christmas Day reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Nothing Was the Same. And [...]

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My college roommate and I have known each other for over three decades – which is an astounding fact because neither of us has aged one minute. And we pretty much have nothing in common. Except for two things: We love to tell each other amazing stories about other people’s bad behavior (especially around customer [...]

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A few weeks ago, Duncan and I published an article called “How to Network Without Sounding Phony, Lame or Desperate” on the AOL/Careerbuilder site.  At last count, there were 73 responses, most of them angry, resentful, hopeless and raging. One commentator simply wrote, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”  How’s that for effectively moving the conversation forward [...]

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(This post is based on some of the principles included in the new book, Unlock the Hidden Job Market: 6 Steps to a Successful Job Search When Times Are Tough which I wrote with Duncan Mathison. For a free sample chapter, click here )
If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know that I’ve been writing [...]

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In recent weeks I’ve been watching events unfold in Sedona  — that whole James Arthur Ray thing and how people died in an ersatz sweat lodge.  I suppose for many people, a terrible event such as this (where people paid $9,000 for the privilege of dying a horrible death, surrounded in the gloom by their [...]

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My friend Patricia Varley is probably the only person I would call a natural networker. Her worldly possessions have been in storage for most of the last 10 years as she goes where her heart tells her to (always beautiful places: Hawaii; Aspen; Naples, FL;  San Diego; hey! Why not?). Jobs and projects fall into [...]

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If you’ve been between jobs for, like, an hour, you already know that wishing will get you only so far.   In fact, you might have been wishing that you weren’t on the list of people to get laid off.  So you know better than just about anyone that wishing has its limitations.
Now. Luck. That could [...]

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There are plenty of sad ironies around this current era of layoffs and job losses. It’s hard to just focus on one without feeling woefully inadequate about not covering all the bases. But for the purposes of this article, this is the irony of the day: Being without work gives you an awful lot of [...]

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