Career Doldrums at Year-End? Don’t Coast; Use the Slow Period to Your Advantage!

The week between Christmas and New Years…depending on what you do for a living, this can be the slowest time of the year and you might be looking forward to catching up with your Facebook games or taking longer lunches for a more enjoyable workout.   It also is a time when those seeking a new job take time off from their search figuring that recruiters and decision-makers are doing the same.  But there are those who realize that this is a unique time to stand out from the crowd and use it as an opportunity for some career-climbing and to help shape your personal brand for a productive new year.  Let’s take a look at some things you should be doing over the next week.

How to Disable Facebook Facial Recognition

Lot’s of concerns about Facebook’s recent enabling of technology offering facial recognition for automatically tagging photos.  Considering Facebook could easily build a database of its more than 600 million users based on facial  characteristics, you might want to opt-out of this feature that was quietly rolled out.  Here are the steps (they might differ slightly based on your current settings):

Problem Solved: How to Easily Follow Your LinkedIn Connections on Twitter

It seems natural that you would want to follow any of your LinkedIn connections who also happen to use Twitter.  The challenge is how to easily identify them without individually checking each LinkedIn profile. That’s where the LinkedIn add-on application called Tweets comes in handy…you can now easily see a list of all your connections who use Twitter and from there easily follow them. 

 

Be True to Your B-School – Explore Their Amazing Resources

As the featured commencement speaker, Rick Goings, Chairman and CEO of Tupperware Brands Corporation inspired the graduating class to live their life and careers beyond borders.  Though I received my MBA several years ago from Rollins College, I was again on campus on a recent Saturday morning to watch and honor the graduating class of 2011.

Each day I find that in some way I am receiving a benefit from maintaining a close relationship with my B-school and the alumni organization.  If you haven’t checked in with your school, you might be missing out on some amazing personal and professional resources.  Let’s take a look at some of the obvious, and maybe not-so-obvious, ones that you should explore.

Explorations – Salman Khan and Khan Academy

There has been a lot of press recently highlighting the story of Salman Khan and the explosion of KhanAcademy.  Giving up a lucrative career as a hedge fund manager, Khan instead is setting out to reinvent the education process through a growing library of YouTube videos (2,100 so far) , a website with exercises, and a process for managing one’s progress.  Imagine his shock when he first learned that Bill Gates was using the videos for his own kids!

This is my first posting that I’m categorizing as Explorations.  These are simply what I consider amazing stories, startups, individuals, inspirations…anything that cause me to step back and say “WOW!” 

Getting Sales Reps to Use Social Media

While marketing people have been all over social media for quite a while now, sales professionals still seem to be lagging when it comes to adopting the medium.  Rather than try to understand why this is, let’s explore ways a sales person can achieve some immediate returns by investing just a few minutes a day with tools like Twitter.

Are You On the Right Path Towards the C-Suite?

For those managing their careers towards a position in the C-suite, it’s going to take way more than just traditional functional and technical expertise.

“The New Path to the C-suite” is an engaging research piece published in the March 2011 Harvard Business Review that explores the ever-evolving competencies required for success on the executive team.  Rather than simply list the required competencies, the article provides a great narrative describing the key drivers of change for the 7 key positions on the executive team.

I strongly recommend spending a few minutes with the article, not just to learn about changes impacting your own career path, but also for understanding all of the dynamics impacting organizations today.  I got a chuckle out of the evolution of the CIO position….we were way too rigid back in the early 90s.  Click here to download.

(Note: Since this blog was originally published, the full text of the HBR article has been removed.  You must register with HBR to see the full article.)

LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Reid Hoffman – 10 Rules for Entrepreneurs

As a fan of LinkedIn and the way they continually look for ways to leverage the data within their database, I was happy to see co-founder Reid Hoffman’s Ten Rules for Entrepreneurs as part of a recent posting by Fast Company.  Understanding Reid’s background as an angel investor and his product management roles Apple, PayPal and Fujitsu, the list does show his encouragement for entrepreneurs to “understand the nuances of data in the information age.”

The Not-So-Obvious Questions to Ask Before Starting a Business

As you consider starting a business, you probably did a self-assessment to understand your tolerance to risk, the financial soundness of your business plan, and your passion for your product / service that you are creating.  But when you talk to some entrepreneurs, some who are the most brilliant and dedicated people you’ll ever meet, you find that there are some harsh realities that caught them completely off-guard. Let’s look at some and what you might be able to do to avoid them. 

Search Companies Based On Your LinkedIn Network

Using a recent enhancement to the Company Search feature on LinkedIn, users can now create results based on their relationships within the targets of the search.  This is actually a great resource for the job seeker or anyone needing to put their network to work….you just need to actually find the search panel first.  This piece will help you get there and provide some suggestions on how to put it to work for you.