Reflections of a Square Peg

Winter sports? - I am NOT Canadian!

When I came to Canada over 12 years ago amongst the many pieces of advice I received was "If you are going to live in Canada then you need to get in to winter sports"

The closest I ever got to Canada and winter sports in the UK was watching Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards compete on the ski hill at the Calgary Olympics.

Amazingly for an Englishman who had hardly ever skied he did not come last - a Frenchman broke his leg on the first day and was placed last - Eddie came in 2nd last. Out of adversity comes triumph!

I tried skiing a few years ago in Banff, but never made it off the nursery slopes and carpet ride!

With children who are Canadian and likely will be living here for many more winters than me the need to do winter sports is perhaps more acute. So we recently signed my two up for an introductory program.

Well there are obviously no English genes in them at all!

They have both taken to it as if it was a natural thing to do and my son after just 3 weeks is already taking on the black diamond runs (it is Chicopee in Kitchener - but the map still says black runs!).

We are now spending upwards of 5 hours there every Sunday and I am just loving watching them try something new, without pre-conceived ideas or the thought of failure - it's much more about where will this take me next week.

Some lessons for us all. 

You're so Thain, you probably think this post is about you

You get called to your new bosses office for a chat - things might appear a little ominous

You agree that things have not gone as well as you expected, but then it is the economy after all, but since you have been in the job you have had made some significant changes for the good, saved the 

company so money and set it on a better track. There are some losses but it's not that bad. 

Of course you did ask for a $10 million bonus last month!

You boss kindly points out that........

The company you did run he bought last fall at a heavily discounted price 

Thousands of your former employees have been laid off

The losses you mentioned last year are actually $27 billion

Oh yes and then there was the little case that you had your office refurbished last year and spent over $800,000

Including a $1400 waste paper basket and $35,000 commode!

Don't let the door hit you on the way out - and enjoy trying to explain that one at your next interview!

I want to be online - should I tweet, blog or friend?

There seems to be a constant blur between what some people say is personal branding and what others think it is, it is naturally going to happen as it's importance rises and a number of articles have been written on the subject recently and I am sure we will continue to see a grwoth in the for and against camps. 

One such area of confusion is in social media and social networking. 

There was post by Drew McLellan over at his blog Drews Marketing Minute - How do you tell if your social media consultant is the real deal? - that got me thinking - this was prompted by two more extensive joint posts by Geoff Livingston and Beth Harte - who had written and generated a lot of comments on their posts -Top 25 Ways to tell if your social media expert is a carpet bagger and 25 Signs You've Got A Strong SM Consultant or Agency. 

Drew's list is a good place to start and adapt for the individual if you are thinking of using social media and networking as part of your job search (and you certainly should be) and are looking to employ the services of an expert. 

How do you tell if the social media / networking expert you are talking to should be helping you with your job search? 

1. Does not believe that everyone should blog (or can). Nor do they believe a blog is the b-all and end all. A well put together on line portfolio can be just as good and may be more suited to someone who does not want to blog or are not comfortable writing. 

2. Constantly reminds you that social media and networking is just a tool. You still need to understand your personal brand and have something of value to an employer. If you do not have a clear value proposition then you are going to fall in to the 'maybe' or 'no' pile much sooner.

3. Have a successful social media strategy themselves and have a presence in the key social networking areas. Very quickly check them out by putting their name in Google - put in the quote marks - e.g. "Joe Smith" - that way you get a cleaner search to find them. Are they there? Are they there for the right reasons!

4. Helps you weave your social marketing strategy in to the rest of your job search strategy. So you are on LinkedIn - now what - how does that help you get in the door, start a conversation or find someone or something out about a company you are interested in?

5. Does not promise that their social media efforts are so incredible that they are going to protect you from the recession, land you a job or make you the next CEO of ............ (enter dream employer). You can certainly build an online presence quite quickly and effectively, but it needs to be working for you beyond having a good Google ranking (to check out what it is now go to the Online ID Calculator)As my Dad always says - "But how do you cash it?" - what are the rewards of doing all this - ask them. 

Time to update the resume? - Extra special time sensitive offer!

  Fellow Personal Brand Strategist and Career Coach, Marshall Brown, is making a very special offer to kick off the new year with his book - High Level Resumes. He has partnered with a number of other people to make an offer package that is really packed with extra FREE value. 

Check out this time sensitive offer - only good until midnight next Tuesday 13th - CLICK HERE 

Help in uncertain times

Quoted in the Wall Street Journal today in an article about career coaches;

• MANAGING YOUR CAREER
• JANUARY 5, 2009, 11:35 P.M. ET

High-End Help for Job Hunters: Does It Pay?

• By JOANN S. LUBLIN

In this crowded job market, it's getting harder to stand out from the crowd.

That's why job hunters increasingly tap professional marketers to improve their prospects. Experts such as executive-marketing firms, executive agents and certified personal-branding strategists claim to provide more tailor-made guidance than conventional coaches.

Business is booming. About 100 Wall Street executives requested assistance during 2008 from David Werner International Corp., a New York executive-marketing firm that serves just four individuals a month. Neal Lenarsky, a Los Angeles executive agent, receives three times more calls from potential clients than several months ago. Paul Copcutt, a branding strategist in Dundas, Ontario, reports a similar recent pickup in demand.

But you could spend plenty for such services with scant results. In the past, state agencies cracked down on numerous career-marketing concerns for charging hefty upfront fees without fulfilling their promises. "A lot of people would like to make money off job seekers," cautions Joseph Daniel McCool, a management-succession consultant in Amherst, N.H. "Not all will bring you the ideal job at the end of the rainbow."

Here's a guide so you can weigh the pluses and minuses before buying "expert" advice about peddling the brand called You Inc.:

Executive-marketing firms

David Werner International aids executives earning at least $300,000 annually. The firm revamps each client's résumé and sends letters touting his or her qualifications to as many as 3,000 companies, says David Werner, its president. Because most prospects are employed, the letters usually omit their identities. Clients typically pay $26,000 plus a $13,000 "success fee" if they land positions through the company.

Craig Schmeizer, a senior credit-card executive for Washington Mutual Inc., became a Werner client shortly before he left WaMu last spring. Mr. Werner initially dispatched about 315 letters to officials and board members at 114 insurance and financial-services companies, according to Mr. Schmeizer. As a result, the executive says he interviewed for attractive spots at five corporate giants, remains in the running at one and obtained a temporary consulting gig with a $200 million Internet concern.

Mr. Schmeizer believes the $30,000 he has given Mr. Werner was money well spent -- despite his lack of permanent employment. "I'm happy to pay David a bigger success fee if his work helps me take on an even more meaningful assignment than the last."

Certain Werner clients are unhappy, however. Steven L'Heureux, a California broadcast-technology executive, says Mr. Werner contacted 962 concerns on his behalf without naming him. The letters "didn't produce a single interview," the executive recalls. "A blind mailing campaign is not the best way to get a job."

Mr. Werner disagrees. He says Mr. L'Heureux's name was disclosed in certain letters and the former client "did get interviews" because he paid $5,500 after obtaining at least one interview. Mr. L'Heureux says he used Mr. Werner because "he promised his approach would generate results." He says he paid Mr. Werner a total of $22,000, but didn't pay the $11,000 success fee due if he had gotten a job through Mr. Werner's efforts. On his own, the executive got a new job last month as chief operating officer of a California technology concern.

Executive agents

Executive agents are personal talent scouts, similar to their sports counterparts. They arrange introductions at selected employers, coach during offer negotiations -- and continue counseling clients once they find jobs.

In exchange, agents charge plenty. Mr. Lenarsky usually collects a $25,000 retainer plus 6% of a client's total annual compensation if the agent continues to counsel the client after a hire. Matt Pillar, co-founder of an investment firm in Santa Monica, Calif., says the agent opened doors for him in summer 2007 by calling officials at a major entertainment and media company where Mr. Lenarsky once worked.

Mr. Pillar landed a vice presidency there weeks later. He retained the agent for on-the-job coaching until he quit last fall. Job hunting again, Mr. Pillar gleans leads from Mr. Lenarsky. He represents "another tool in my toolbox," Mr. Pillar explains.

The downside? Only a handful of executive agents operate in the U.S. "It's really hard to make a living out of this," says Joe Meissner, a Portland, Ore., agent since 1993. He now solely represents "bankable" chief executives interested in buying a business.

Certified personal branding strategists

Branding specialists are more plentiful -- and cheaper. Nearly 300 people, mainly career coaches, have completed a 12-week certification program run by Reach, a New York personal-branding company. They charge clients between $2,000 and $20,000, according to William Arruda, Reach's founder.

Strategists help job seekers recognize their unique strengths, determine their target audience, craft a "personal brand statement" and improve their online identities. The approach paid off for a London, Ontario, client of Mr. Copcutt's, Julie Chen, who practices naturopathic medicine, which uses natural remedies such as herbs.

In February 2008, Ms. Chen persuaded a Canadian maker and distributor of nutritional products to pick her as its new product-development manager despite her limited experience. She touted her related skills and attributes. Without personal brand coaching, she says, "I would have had a very tough time getting this job."

But the branding process can take months, discouraging applicants eager to find employment fast. To reduce anxiety among layoff victims, Reach recently launched a free "Career Bailout" program -- in which 13 certified strategists provide services such as a résumé review and online identity evaluation. Yet few victims are using the limited assistance. "We have not spent enough time making the program visible," Mr. Arruda says.

 

Is going back to work so bad?

 

Is today your first day back after the holidays? Perhaps you were not looking forward to it - but then some people had a worse time at work in 2008;

DOUGLAS MCARTHUR

From Friday's Globe and Mail

January 2, 2009 at 8:55 AM EST

Layoffs and hiring freezes may be the order of the day as economic woes clobber the workplace. But why waste your time worrying about it? Just hold your head up high, whistle a little tune and have a snigger at those with bigger career headaches than you. Here are some of 2008's zaniest examples of wonkiness in the workplace:

Firing offences

A senior London police officer was fired for having sex at the Gatwick Airport railway station while on duty and in uniform. He said he left his earpiece in so he could be contacted in an emergency.

A museum curator in China was dismissed for gluing a 2,000-year-old turtle dove carving back together instead of reporting the damage.

A South Korean financial researcher lost his job for telling a TV talk show that people make unwise investments because they are too greedy.

A Florida police officer was let go for routinely butting in line at a Starbucks, demanding free coffee and threatening slow emergency response times if employees refused.

A Chinese official was sacked from his Communist Party post for staging a lavish funeral for his mother. Local residents complained that he erected a stage, hired a band and hosted a banquet with more than 100 tables.

A pilot for Turkey's AnadoluJet was terminated for allowing a 15-year-old to sit in his seat during a flight while he went to the bathroom.

Swedish clergyman Gunnar Svensson was asked to resign after crashing his church's computer system with a virus downloaded as he surfed a hardcore porn website.

Inappropriate behaviour

A Chicago public school teacher was pulled from the classroom after she taped a nine-year-old special education student to his chair because he wouldn't sit down.

A senior British civil servant was fined for leaving secret intelligence files relating to Iraq and al-Qaeda on a train.

A German policewoman forgot her gun in a courthouse washroom during a high-security murder trial involving rival biker gangs.

A German law professor was jailed for raising students' marks in exchange for sex and money.

A Romanian school teacher was suspended for allegedly shooting a misbehaving student in the hand with a rubber bullet during class.

A German woman, working as a teacher in Hungary, stripped to her underwear as part of a game while supervising a class party.

An Israeli soldier was jailed for three weeks for yawning without covering his mouth while his base commander was speaking at a memorial event.

A teenage Polish firefighter set a series of barn fires in hopes of earning enough overtime to buy his girlfriend a birthday present.

A Scottish postman working in Germany hoarded at least 20,000 letters at his home because he felt he was "overtaxed" and couldn't catch up.

Career opportunities

The ad on Craigslist.com was for a "freelance" position, but Anne Marie Linscott, the Michigan woman who placed it, was looking for a hit man to kill her lover's wife.

A man advertised in an English post office for someone to accompany his 88-year-old father from a nursing home to a pub. He was bombarded with applicants.

When actress Cate Blanchett told Prince Philip at a reception that she worked in the film industry, he assumed she was a technician and asked her to fix his DVD player.

Not in the job description

A woman from the Philippines who moved to Toronto to work as a live-in nanny was sent to a country inn where she was ordered to change beds, clean toilets and paint decks.

A Chinese airport called 30 workers away from their duties and ordered them to push a stalled 20-tonne plane off a runway. It took two hours to move it less than a kilometre.

Battling stereotypes

An Italian priest organized an online beauty contest for nuns in an effort to dispel the perception that they were all old, sad and dowdy. His bishop nixed the project.

A church in Gloucestershire, England, hired a young woman who wears hot pants, biker boots and a dog collar as its curate. "I think it makes me more approachable," she said.

Grievances

Police unions in the Netherlands protested that their members weren't being treated as "normal" citizens after they were ordered to stop using soft drugs in their spare time.

A Nova Scotia employees' union filed a grievance over polygraph tests that asked job applicants embarrassing questions, such as whether they had had sex with animals.

Hiring requirements

The head of a German telesales company fired three non-smokers and announced he would hire only smokers in the future. Non-smokers, he said, are grumblers who don't socialize with their co-workers.

A Maine man lost 140 pounds over 11 months to meet the weight requirement to join the U.S. Marines.

Hazards of the job

Two German police officers were mistaken for male strippers when they investigated a complaint about a noisy party. They were mobbed by drunken women urging them to rip their clothes off.

A farmhand in Northern Australia was freed from the jaws of a crocodile when a co-worker shot it. Unfortunately, a second shot hit the farmhand's right arm. The injuries were not life-threatening.

Don't expect a reference

A New Jersey police officer spent his last day on the job giving tickets to 14 patrol cars because their safety inspection stickers were not up to date.

Believing, mistakenly, that her boss planned to replace her, Florida architect Marie Lupe Cooley went to her office on a Sunday night and erased $2.5-million (U.S.) worth of drawings and blueprints.

Research shows ...

The average British commuter faces a three-hour round trip each day, according to a report by the Automobile Association and Work Wise UK. The groups say that equates to 18 years over a working career.

When a consumer group known as Which? swabbed 33 computer keyboards at a London office, it found four with enough bacteria to be potential health hazards, and one with five times more germs than an office toilet seat.

In a survey of 1,000 employees at English companies conducted for Norwich Union Healthcare, one in three admitted going to work with a hangover, and more than one in 10 said they had been drunk at their desk.

In an Internet survey of 2,337 American workers by staffing giant Randstad, almost half of respondents said they did not respect their boss, and just half believed their boss was competent.

You can be replaced

A Japanese restaurant employs two trained macaque monkeys to deliver drinks and hand out hot towels. Customers tip them with boiled soybeans.

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in Japan by 2025, according to a prediction by the think tank Machine Industry Memorial Foundation. Robots, it said, could help look after children and seniors.

Dress code

German federal policewomen are being outfitted with bullet-proof bras designed to offer additional protection under their bullet-proof vests.

The United Nations urged its New York staff to trade business suits for light attire this summer in an effort to slash air-conditioning costs by $100,000.

In an effort to curb prostitution, a local government in Indonesia asked masseuses to wear a padlock on their pants.

Cab drivers in Salzburg, Austria, were barred from wearing track suits because they don't suit the city's upscale image.

Secrets of success

Tina Fey glued her ears down to get the right look for her impressions of U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

Travel writer Thomas Kohnstamm admitted he plagiarized and made up information included in Lonely Planet guidebooks. He wrote about Colombia without visiting it.

Above and beyond

A police chief in southwestern China arrested 25 close relatives for various crimes over a 10-year period. They included a brother, cousins and members of his wife's family.

A New Zealand policeman jumped from his bed in the nude and gave chase to a would-be criminal after hearing a car theft in progress.

An electrical blackout left an English brain surgeon in the dark halfway through an operation in Ukraine. He successfully completed his work with a cordless drill.

Sources: Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Asbury Park Press, Ananova, The Canadian Press, CBS, Daily Telegraph, Online Travel Review, Reuters, Sunday Telegraph, Winnipeg Free Press, Yahoo News

12 Days of Personal Branding - Day 12

 

On the twelfth day of Christmas my brand strategist advised to me;

 

Continue to brand,

Network, network, network,

Make your brand mark,

Dump the resume,

Build a communications plan,

Have a clear PBS,

Know your key strengths,

Make.. it… u-n-i-q-u-e.

Decide on a niche,

Conduct a 360,

Set measurable goals,

and have very clear and focused VP’s.

 

Now that you have clearly defined what your personal brand is, who and how you are communicating it and ensuring all you do is on brand – make sure that you are regularly measuring its effectiveness and if it is still relevant to you and your audience. If not then take time to tweak and change as needed – this is an ongoing process.

12 Days of Personal Branding - Day 11

 

On the eleventh day of Christmas my brand strategist advised to me;

 

Network, network, network,

Make your brand mark,

Dump the resume,

Build a communications plan,

Have a clear PBS,

Know your key strengths,

Make.. it… u-n-i-q-u-e.

Decide on a niche,

Conduct a 360,

Set measurable goals,

and have very clear and focused VP’s.

 

Too many times we come to reply on our network when we want something, how do you think that makes your connections and contacts feel? Make sure you are regularly reaching out to your network to ask how you can help them. Or be even more proactive and find ways to help them before they even ask.

12 Days of Personal Branding - Day 10

 

On the tenth day of Christmas my brand strategist advised to me;

 

Make your brand mark,

Dump the resume,

Build a communications plan,

Have a clear PBS,

Know your key strengths,

Make.. it… u-n-i-q-u-e.

Decide on a niche,

Conduct a 360,

Set measurable goals,

and have very clear and focused VP’s.

 

Everything that you do or use are also a reflection of your brand and they communicate if you are on or off brand. Consider the mark you are leaving – be it on paper, on line or even the environment that surrounds you and ensure that it says what you want it to say about your personal brand.

12 Days of Personal Branding - Day 9

 

On the ninth day of Christmas my brand strategist advised to me;

 

Dump the resume,

Build a communications plan,

Have a clear PBS,

Know your key strengths,

Make.. it… u-n-i-q-u-e.

Decide on a niche,

Conduct a 360,

Set measurable goals,

and have very clear and focused VP’s.

 

The resume may not be dead, but as a first point marketing tool it should be! If you have spent all your time defining your personal brand, why then take the same route in showcasing yourself by producing a resume – everyone else is doing that.

 

Consider alternatives to the resume as career marketing pieces – make your uniqueness and skills shine and make it more personal.