Interviews
27 Motivational Career Podcasts for 2021
Whether youâre currently in the process of looking for a job, transitioning into a new career field, or starting your own business to achieve financial freedom, you can gain inspiration from listening to motivational career podcasts. One major perk of…
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How to Re-Enter the Workforce After a Pause
Throughout the course of 2020, millions of people left – or were forced to leave – the workforce. Corporate layoffs, ailing relatives, and the need to homeschool children combined to drive unemployment to record highs.
And now, millions are ready to find their way back to work. But jumping back in – finding and landing just the right job – can be challenging after a pause. Uncertainty, anxiety, and overwhelm are present for many.
But if you’ve decided your moment for re-entry is now, then here are some tips to support you on your journey:
Tip #1: Assess your needs
Don’t assume that jumping back in exactly where you left off is the right move for you. Time has passed and things have changed. You may have changed. And what you need or want (or what you are ready for) may have evolved.
When you’re in the flow of work, autopilot often takes over, leaving us going through the motions without really pausing to reflect on the experience.
Now that you’ve had a break, you have this beautiful opportunity do be reflective. So don’t squander it – be thoughtful about the last role you held and consider how much you want your next role to be similar or different.
Ask yourself a few questions about your last job:
- Do I want to return to the content of that job – was it engaging, challenging, and meaningful to me?
- How well had I defined and protected my boundaries – was that job working with my lifestyle?
- What have I learned about the culture of a company I want to work for?
- What do I miss most and least about my previous job?
Let your responses guide you in selecting possible next roles or career paths.
How to Craft a Job You Love
Tip #2: Revise history
Now it’s time to begin updating your resume, your LinkedIn profile, or whatever assets you’ll be sharing with prospective employers. Honesty is, of course, non-negotiable. But a story can be told a million different ways, all of them versions of the truth.
Your goal here is to define what from your past you want to highlight in order to position you for your ideal future. In looking at your resume, are the right accomplishments featured at the top? Have you focused on the skills, metrics, and experiences you want to call a new employer’s attention to?
You are absolutely entitled to tell a different but equally authentic story about yourself.
How to Explain a Gap in Your Résumé
Perhaps your last role was an analytic one, and your current resume highlights budgets you managed or campaigns you advised on. But in your reflection, you’ve decided you’d like to move into leadership – and so your new resume should focus on group projects you led, or clients whose decisions you persuaded using your analytic capability.
They’re all facts. You’re just choosing to bring specific ones to the forefront, designed to position you as the person – the expert – you’d like prospective employers to be excited about.
Maybe you were a detail-oriented and insightful data analyst before the pandemic. And now you’ve spent the past many months homeschooling your children.
Tip #3: Craft your hero story
It’s time now to tell a story. And you are the protagonist. This is the story of you – before, during, and after the pause. It’s the story from which you’ll pull examples and conversation points as you begin reaching out to your network and prospective employers.
It’s your opportunity to control your own narrative – to demonstrate all the skills and experiences you collected before the pause, combined with your resilience, perseverance, and insightful reflection gained during.
Maybe you were that detail-oriented and insightful data analyst before the pandemic. And now you’ve spent the past many months homeschooling your children. I bet that took tremendous planning, self-education, and creativity on your part.
So weave these pieces into a narrative that speaks of attention to detail, an ability to draw insight from data, and now the capacity to learn new things quickly, to change and plan a course of action, and to communicate simply and plainly so that even a child could understand you.
You have the opportunity here to craft a unique and compelling narrative of who you are and how your next employer will benefit from all of your experiences. This story elevates you from a data analyst who’s been unemployed for a while into a whole, crafty, never-stopped-for-a-minute candidate. Position yourself like you mean it.
You have the opportunity here to craft a unique and compelling narrative of who you are and how your next employer will benefit from all of your experiences.
Tip #4: Set action goals
Now you’re armed and ready. It’s time to get moving. You’ll need to start researching companies, reaching out to your network, scheduling coffee chats and all the fun things that are involved in job searching. The truth is, you may get lucky and land something in a week. But for many the process will take months. And it can be discouraging if you let it.
The best way to keep momentum high and disappointment at bay is to focus on what you can control versus what you can’t. You can control whether you do research, how many emails or inquiries you send out, how often you put yourself out there. You can not control the results.
Therefore, setting goals like “I will land five interviews per week” or “I will find a new job within two months” is unproductive. Instead set goals whose outcomes you can control, like:
- I will research 100 companies over the next six weeks.
- I will send five new LinkedIn requests each day for a month.
- I will start a blog and post one article per week to showcase my expertise.
- I will take one online class every two weeks on a relevant topic.
Action goals provide – and allow you to celebrate – momentum. And momentum is the fuel that will carry you to success.
Tip #5: Work your plan
Your action goals offer you a roadmap. Turn them into a plan – start adding that research time, those calls, that blog-writing time into your calendar. And then honor your commitments.
Find support where you need it. Treat yourself to rewards when you do the thing you said you’d do. Trust that enough action will ultimately lead to a positive outcome. And give yourself some grace. This past year hasn’t been smooth sailing for anyone. Just remember you’re the only one who can keep you in the hero role in your own story. So keep on keeping on.
FlexJobs Review – Features & Pricing for Remote Job Seekers
Money Talk: Sara Fujimura on the Importance of Talking About Money
Money Girl Laura Adams: When did you decide that you wanted to become an author (or other career)?
Sara Fujimura: Not until after college where I earned a B.S. in Public Health Education. My favorite class in college was Epidemiology, and deadly diseases used to be my jam…that is until March 2020. I am infinitely fascinated by the Spanish Flu and did several articles about it, including one for Perspectives in Health, published by an arm of the World Health Organization. While doing research, I came across all kinds of captivating stories in diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and even some video interviews (much later on) from survivors. I took these true stories and wove them into my young adult historical fiction novel Breathe, which came out in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the pandemic. Who knew that only two years later, everybody would suddenly become an expert on the Spanish Flu and pandemics in general? While I was doing research (so much research!) for Breathe, I decided to keep going with my storytelling, slowly moving from magazine articles to young adult books full-time.
MG: Do you write full-time?
SF: I do, but I am also blessed to have a spouse with a stable job and health insurance. I didn’t start writing full-time until after my children finished high school. Before then, I wrote part-time and donated a lot of time to my children’s schools/activities. I don’t regret this at all. It was a time of story-collecting and educating myself on writing craft.
Writing tends to be a feast-or-famine occupation, and the pandemic hit our profession just as hard as everybody else’s. COVID19 has been the great equalizer. Whether you were the Big Fish or the tiny minnow in your publishing house, NOBODY went out on book tour. This is where being an indie-pubbed author first saved my bacon. Tor Teen (publisher for my third and fourth books) can definitely do things that I can’t, like getting my book reviewed on NPR. But I can also do things that they can’t, like tapping into my local networks and keeping my books alive even when all of my in-person events went *poof* in 2020. Yeah, releasing a new book two weeks before the country goes into lockdown…1 out of 10 stars. Highly would NOT recommend it. With America slowly opening back up, I hope to combine my entrepreneurial spirit with Tor Teen’s fantastic marketing team to make an exponential jump in sales with my latest book, Faking Reality (July 13).
MG: Did you study writing (or something else) or has it always come naturally to you?
SF: People are often surprised to hear that I do NOT have an English degree. It was my Public Health degree that led me to write. My senior year, one of my professors asked me to be his intern because he knew I could take complex topics and boil them down into accessible information for the general public. Fast-forward to the early 2000s when I received a call from an editor of a homeland security magazine who had seen my articles on the Spanish Flu. He wanted me to take cutting-edge scientific information and boil it down so that first responders could implement it into their jobs. Though I stopped doing magazine work so I could concentrate on book projects, in a way, I am still using this skill. You can enjoy my books as funny, sweet romances. Or, if you want to dig deeper, there is a lot of fact behind the fiction woven into them. I do Behind the Book posts on Instagram frequently to show readers how I brought my books to life.
MG: When you first started writing (or something else), were there any financial challenges? How did you manage them?
SF: Definitely! For most of my twenty years of writing, money has flowed more out than in. Granted, that was a choice. I could write on staff at a newspaper or edit for other authors to create some kind of financial stability in my business, but I don’t.
I reinvest my paychecks into my LLC and update my equipment, attend conferences, and pay for marketing. My first two books were independently published. To ensure that the final product was of the same quality as something found on a Barnes & Noble shelf, I had to spend money. A lot of money.
I hired content editors, copyeditors, experts, historians, and graphic designers. I also needed a large chunk of money for the business side of my book-making. That included everything from purchasing tax licenses, a tent and tables, bookmarks, KDP ads, travel to events, and more. It adds up very quickly, but it paid off. I’ve finally started turning a profit. If Netflix wants to make one of my books into a movie or series, that would definitely help my bottom line.
MG: What advice would you give someone who's creative or wants to change their lifestyle about balancing passion for their art and earning an income?
SF: Start small and build. I had the safety net of my husband’s job and healthcare underneath me so I could experiment more than maybe some can. Keep reinvesting any income into your business and education. Take the time to build your community and lift up other creatives in your circles.
Talking about money always feels squidgy, but we need to do it!
MG: What productivity tips have helped you achieve success?
SP: My productivity hacks continue to evolve as I listen to a lot of productivity and entrepreneurial podcasts. I agree with the experts that success *doesn’t* come from time management but instead focus management. Not only do I have the usual distractions (social media, snacks, a toddler cat who will eat the couch if she’s feeling ignored), but I also have new ideas pinging around my brain all the time.
Success doesn’t come from time management but instead focus management.
I often sing to my cat the line from the great contemporary poets/songwriters LMFAO…“Every day I’m shufflin’. Shufflin’. Shufflin’.” If I’ve been burning the midnight oil too much, Tiger Lily might even get some interpretative dance along with it. (For the record, she is not impressed by either.) Seriously though, I’ve yet to turn into the type of author who keeps the same strict writing schedule. I’m always out of balance, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can write a complete (crappy) novel in two months, but it tears up my body, and I become a hermit. With a new book coming out on July 13th (Faking Reality with Tor Teen), launch prep and promo for the new book is my primary focus this month. This fall, I’m planning a long vacation to the East Coast to see my family and probably won’t work at all while I’m there. To help me decide where to put my time, focus, and energy, I use a couple of tools.
- I use Brian Moran’s 12-Week Year philosophy (https://12weekyear.com/) to help me cull the ideas and decide where to put my focus each “year.” That way, I don’t have a big freak out every December. The system helps me go deeper on fewer things, and that’s how progress realistically happens.
- I use Todoist (https://todoist.com/) to park all the tasks. Granted there are days when I have 25 things on my list, but at least I know they are all captured somewhere, even if it isn’t that project’s “year” yet.
- I take my sometimes (okay, often) unrealistic To-Do list and pull a few of the highest-value tasks into a much more manageable list in my bullet journal. There are utilitarian bullet journals and ones that are mini art masterpieces. Mine is somewhere in between. My bujo contains To-Do lists done in colored pens in nice handwriting and decorated with washi tape. I will not be taking questions on the amount of washi tape I own. *cough*
MG: What do you like to spend money on that some people might consider a splurge or luxury?
Travel. I would rather live a modest retirement with thousands of stories to reminisce about than retire with a billion dollars after working non-stop until retirement age. Though I would be okay with having a billion dollars *and* going on multiple vacations around the globe each year. Netflix, call me!
Also, cute washi tape. Moving on.
SF: What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last few months?
Renting an Air B&B up in Sedona for a long weekend with my husband and two grown kids. Being outside and hiking around the gorgeous red rocks recharged my spirit more than any expensive purse or shoes could have.
MG: What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve ever made?
Early in my writing career, I didn’t always write with a contract. I got burned so many times. Yes, it was for only a few hundred dollars each time, but the bigger issue was that I didn’t feel confident enough to insist on a contract.
SF: Tell me a financial rule that you never break.
Errr…how about I tell you the rule that has continued to plague me? It is the same problem as the previous answer, only in a different form: Undervaluing my work and giving away too much of my time, energy, and expertise. Yes, I want to be generous and helpful to others, but when a male counterpart is paid more than you for the same work (or worse, subpar work but done with chutzpah), you need to reevaluate your fee schedule. I get on my female friends regularly about undercharging for their products/services. I have lost count of the number of times I have overtipped or refused a discount because a businesswoman was undervaluing herself. This is where having a community is paramount.
You need to know what the going rate is in your area. If you have a mastermind group with other women in your field, then I challenge your group to set an agreed-upon amount so that your price becomes the area’s norm, not the exception.
My author mastermind group recently had a frank discussion about school visit fees, where I realized that my rates were way too low. Talking about money always feels squidgy, but we need to do it!
What To Put for Desired Salary on a Job Application + Interview Tips
When answering desired salary or expected salary questions on an application, the best approach is to write in ânegotiableâ or keep the field blank. If a numerical response is required, enter â000â and in a notes section, mention that salary…
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Inflation Defined (What Is the Inflation Rate?)
Growing up, you may have heard your parents reminisce about how gas was only a quarter per gallon or that spending a night at the movie theaters only cost a nickel. This may leave you wondering why gas is now…
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Top 25 Highest Paying Jobs Without a Degree
Although college is a great way to invest in yourself, itâs not always for everyone. A college degree may be a stepping stone to overall success, but 43.2 million Americans have also left college with an average of $39,351 in…
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The Ultimate College Senior Checklist
Earning a college degree is no easy feat. Think countless late-night cram sessions, tedious loan applications, heavy textbooks to haul around. For some college seniors, June cannot come fast enough, and itâs understandable why senioritis kicks in. That said, thereâs still a lot of important work to do before crossing that graduation stage. From jumping […]
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How To Get Into A Tech Career Successfully
It is no secret that the technology sector offers high-paying, lucrative, and flexible career opportunities. After all, these positions offer an enticing work-life balance, career growth, and professional development. For tech enthusiasts such as yourself, this allows you to discover new aptitude, challenge yourself with a continuous learning curve, and be your unique, creative self. However, effectively finding and securing a job in tech can be awfully intimidating. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to make the transition less overwhelming and nerve-wracking.
Build up your soft skills
First off, it is important to hone the soft skills that are essential for a career in tech. Prospective employers can teach you hard skills, such as coding languages, programming algorithms or data structures. However, you are expected to already be proficient in soft skills, which emphasize your personal qualities and character. For a high-paying tech role, you need to be expert in information synthesizing and troubleshooting. Similarly, it is fundamental to be well-versed in project management, analytics, and perseverance. In fact, you should be extremely seasoned in key principles of effective communication. Other important skills to focus on include resourcefulness and organization.
Master advanced tech & programming tools
Next, you should master advanced tech and software development tools. Modern information technology (IT) teams rely on several powerful solutions to revamp efficiency, productivity, and project management. For example, you can optimize your pipeline with a Docker registry by JFrog, which will help to automate development, manage distribution, and perform secure vulnerability analyses. Adopting these solutions, you can maximize resource utilization, reliably deploy containers, and better team collaboration. Naturally, these tools help your secure images and gain deeper insights into issues, which will promote operating system stability.
Attend tech conferences, workshops, & seminars
Now, you are ready to attend some technology conferences, workshops, and seminars. In fact, you may even want to check out some local IT expositions, trade shows, or career fairs. Most jobs are obtained through professional networking, and technology is no exception. Attending local meetups is a great way to integrate yourself into your municipality’s IT community. At each gathering, professionals in tech will collaborate to share relevant work subjects, advertise open roles, and mingle with prospective candidates. This will provide you with first hand, expert knowledge, as well as entrance into new professional circles.
Get active on social media
At this point, you should try to get and remain active on social media. Social media has become a major hub for making connections, sharing information, and recruiting top talent in the tech world. You can take advantage of this rapidly-growing network by starting tech conversations and interactions all over social media. Follow along with basic conversations, or dive into deeper, niche areas of interest. This way, you can become an active member of the community, which will help you gain new contacts and boost career opportunities. In fact, bolstering your social engagement will even help you to garner attention from industry-leaders in tech. Since you may be speaking with prospective employers, it is important to additionally work on your social media etiquette as well.
Brush up on your interviewing skills
Of course, it helps to brush up on your interviewing skills to get a job in tech. Tech interviews are often much different than your typical job screening. Be prepared to answer questions that are directly related to your hard skills, experience, or proficiency in technology. Simultaneously, you should be ready to discuss any recent tech projects, such as software, mobile apps, or website. At the same time, you may want to brush up on some notoriously tricky interview questions to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Moreover, there are several simple job interview tips that you should certainly follow in preparation for your job examination.
There are plenty of important steps to help you secure a tech career. First off, build up your soft skills portfolio. Next, master some popular IT and programming tools, such as Docker registries. You should attend some local tech expos, workshops, and other informative gatherings, and get active on social media. It is additionally important to brush up on your interview skills. Follow the steps highlighted above to learn about how to get into a tech career.