It’s Your Data on LinkedIn. Don’t Lose It.

You have spent a long time perfecting your LinkedIn profile and building your online network, and you expect (but cannot guarantee) that you will always have access to it). Here are some key steps to mitigating an interruption to access or loss of your profile, contacts and other critical information on LinkedIn.

We have all heard about the measures large corporations take to protect their data. What about yours? For example, what would happen if tomorrow, for any reason, you no longer had access to your data on LinkedIn? What would you lose?

Netzwerk

You have spent a long time perfecting your LinkedIn profile and building your online network, and you expect (but cannot guarantee) that you will always have access to it). Here are some key steps to mitigating an interruption to access or loss of your profile, contacts and other critical information on LinkedIn. A longer version of the article below was published as “Are You the Boss of Your LinkedIn Account? How to Own Your Data.” 

If you have been following the news about LinkedIn’s acquisition by Microsoft and changes that may be afoot, you may be wondering if there’s anything you can do to make sure that your data is protected, especially during any time that you may not have full or the same access to your profile if parts of the system are revamped, etc.

For most users (including my clients), here are some basic steps that are advisable:

1) Print your profile. 

2) Request a profile data dump. 

3) Export your LinkedIn connections. 

4) Update your email address. 

5) Print others’ profiles, especially if critical to access on a timely basis. 

For details on how to take these steps and why they are important, please visit the original post on LinkedIn Pulse.

Anne Marie Segal is a coach, strategist and writer who guides attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs to and through career change, growth, advancement and satisfaction. In 2015, she founded Segal Coaching, serving local, national and international clients out of Stamford, Connecticut.

Prior to executive coaching, Anne Marie was a practicing attorney for 15 years with White & Case LLP, Wexford Capital LP and other firms. She has recently published a comprehensive workbook and reference guide on job interviews, Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals.

Career Coaching for Military-to-Civilian Transitions: Thank You Veterans

military dog tag thank you on wood

Veterans Day, Friday, November 11, 2016  – FREE CAREER COACHING FOR VETERANS

In honor of Veterans Day and the sacrifices military members make for our country and security every day, Segal Coaching will offer free career coaching for U.S. active or retired military members – and their spouses – who wish to seek out roles in the private sector following their military service and/or position their military career with an eye to such future roles.

Coaching will be available in 30-minute sessions between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm EST on Friday, November 11, 2016, and is on a first-come, first-served basis. Appointments should be set up in advance and will be by phone or Skype, so veterans living in any jurisdiction are eligible. 

This is an amazing opportunity for veterans to gain access to a top career coach to help them troubleshoot and guide their transition.

Please contact Segal Coaching for details through this form or by email at asegalATsegalcoaching.com.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach and resume writer to attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs, including current and former members of the military and their spouses. She volunteers with American Corporate Partners, a veteran mentoring program, and was elected “Mentor of the Month” for September 2016.

Election Day 2016: Bring Your Excitement, Not Your Venom

Election Day 2014 - Republicans and Democrats in the campaign
Adobe Stock/Elio Gutzemberg.

On this Election Day 2016, most of us have clients, vendors, suppliers, employees, supervisors, colleagues, family and/or friends on both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican. And some independents, too.

Professional development tip:

If someone’s giving you a hard time about the election today or acting over the top, there’s a simple response:

Bring your excitement, not your venom.

(In some cases, you may need to say it more than once.)

Be a leader for the greater cause. Tomorrow, we are all one nation again.

 

Breaking Out of a Suffocating Job Search

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Halloween friendly ghost costumes aside, let’s talk about facing some very real fears.

Prospective clients sometimes ask if I can help them break out of a suffocating job search. They tell me that “everything they try” is not working.

Nothing is working.

I can’t think. I can’t breathe.

How can I move forward?

When we talk a bit more, I often hear the following:

  1. They have not settled on a target audience for their job search (or even a small set of audiences) but are sending out applications all over the place.
  2. They are not tailoring their applications to specific opportunities.
  3. They are relying mainly on sending their resumes into the “black hole” of online applications rather than leveraging networking contacts who may have or know about opportunities.
  4. They are relying on work experience rather than seeking out additional outlets to grow their skills.

These and other limits on their job search have been holding them in their tracks. 

The problem with such limits is two-fold. First, while you can get lucky and get a “hit” on a great job – if you are a convincing candidate during the interview process – it rarely works to have a scattershot approach to your job search. Second, it wears you out, so you feel suffocated by the job search rather than energized by it.

Here is the better approach:

  1. Get very clear on your long-term and short-term goals. Figure out which audiences you are targeting, so you can refine your pitch and make each application count.
  2. Tailor your cover letter and resume to the field and type of role, with specific tweaks that relate to the specific job to which you are applying.
  3. Build and work your network. Keep online applications to a minimum, e.g., 10% of your overall job search. Get out there and create a pipeline of contacts through calls and face-to-face meetings, including informational interviews.
  4. Find coursework, individualized study or volunteer opportunities, or look for ways to grow or supplement your current job, to increase your relevant skills and get you closer to your end goals. 

No one wants to hire a candidate who is visibly floundering or suffocating from an ineffective job search, and it often shows when you are stretched thin.

Break out of the cycle and make the best use of your precious time invested in your search. Not only will you have more interest from employers – which can raise your confidence level and fuel your energy – but you will perform better in the vetting process to achieve greater career-search success.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her book on job interviews, Master the Interview, includes a chapter devoted to building one’s job search network.

Image above from Shutterstock.

 

 

 

How Can You Be Pro-Active in a Reactive Job?

If you spend all day putting out so-called fires at your job – in a very reactive environment – how can you possibly plan or address your career pro-actively?

Fire alarm push botton

A client recently asked:

If you spend all day putting out so-called fires at your job – in a very reactive environment – how can you possibly plan or address your career pro-actively?

Preliminaries:

First, let’s define some terms:

  1. Pro-active: creating a situation or causing something to happen
  2. Reactive: responding to a situation (rather than creating or controlling it)
  3. Fire alarm: a colloquial way to describe a frantic and urgent situation or deadline in a corporate environment, often one that is a “false alarm” created by lack of planning rather than a true emergency

As Randy Pauch said, in the last few months of his life, “time is the only commodity that matters.” We need to manage our time just as we manage our money, and in fact the time management piece is even more important. In addition, as you may realize already, most leadership roles are only achieved by individuals who have learned to address matters pro-actively, yet most environments today are full of fire alarms that require us to react rather than plan our time.

Answer:

Here are some ways to manage your time, even in a pro-active environment:

  1. Stop the bleeding, then take care of the patient. Sometimes an emergency has pieces that need to be addressed immediately and other parts that can wait. Can you schedule your day so that you can still get the important things done while addressing what is urgent? Are there portions you can delegate?
  2. Block your calendar, and then block it again. In order to plan, you need to block out uninterrupted time on your calendar. If an emergency (real or otherwise) creeps up on you, the first thing to do is to move the blocked time on your calendar a few days out, so it stays scheduled and is not forgotten.
  3. Break things into small steps. While you may not be able to plan the next few months and what you would like to achieve, you can start to plan individual pieces of it. If you only have 10 minutes, you can empower yourself to do one thing that really matters.
  4. “Do the right things, rather than ‘doing things right.'” I owe this quote to Randy Pausch and the lecture I link above. As he said, “You don’t need to clean the underside of the bannister.” In other words, put your efforts where they pack a punch. For more about that generally, see my posts on the 80/20 rule and high profile/high need tasks.
  5. Know and remember the goal(s). Ask why. Start by asking yourself, and then (if appropriate) politely and directly ask the person who created the task. What are the intended benefits of the work you are doing? Don’t just do something because you are told to do it; think about what results you are individually and collectively trying to achieve. This will save you time if you can find more efficient ways to get to a solution – and avoid unnecessary iterations – rather than just following steps assigned (which may not have been well thought out in the first place). It will also keep you focused on the point in #4 above.
  6. Stop wasting time during your day. Be more organized and match your workload to meet your peak energy levels. Also, eliminate distractions. I’ll talk about all of this more in a future post.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her first book, Master the Interview, is available on Amazon.com

Image above from Adobe Images.

 

Working On (vs. In) Your Career

Woman working at home

Working On Your Career vs. In Your Career – What is the Difference?

If you have ever spent time in an entrepreneurial role, you have likely heard the phrase “working on your business” (versus “working in your business”). Working on your business means investing time in activities that will build the business over the long term,  such as marketing, streamlining of activities and professional development. While these activities may serve your immediate clients, they also are critical to assure that your business is headed in the direction that you determine will best position you for growth. In fact, a crucial part of working on your business is figuring out where the future growth lies, aside from how to achieve it.

Employees at companies, as well as new graduates, often do not have the lens of working on their careers as well as in them. In fact, a large part of my work with my own clients is helping them understand the importance of also lifting their heads up, rather than always keeping their heads down. To rise to the higher-level (and more interesting) roles, you need to lift your head above the fray of everyday life and activities to see the bigger picture. We know this intuitively, but we are often too busy to stop and do it.

In addition, it is only the fortunate few who are encouraged to think beyond the box. In a minority of workplaces (and sometimes only for a minority of employees in them), leadership is expected and part of one’s contributions is to develop that presence and state of mind, which can only be achieved when there is time and space to work on developing that goal rather than letting the days go by consumed by urgent deadlines and ill-defined projects whose benefits have not been fully vetted.

Instead, we are often taught in school and tacitly (or openly) encouraged in jobs to keep plugging along, rather than being strategic about where to place our efforts. We move from academia where assignments are determined by a professor or instructor to the workplace where tasks are doled out by bosses or leadership teams.

Due to this constant source of new projects from above, it is not hard to understand why many people go through their careers expecting the decisions to be made for them, rather than seeking out leadership and decision-making opportunities themselves. I often call this “gotta make the donuts” after a commercial by Dunkin’ Donuts in which an beleaguered store employee kept running back to the store every few hours so that his customers (you and me) could have fresh donuts to eat. How different are many of us in our jobs, running from task to task, so harried and hurried that we almost forget why we are doing what we are doing?

Beautiful young woman working in her office.

A large part of my work with clients is helping them lift their heads up, rather than always keeping them down.

In yesterday’s post, I shared that there are 10 weeks until year end. I encourage you to spend a meaningful amount of uninterrupted time – and at least one or two hours – this week or next thinking about how you will spend them.

In the rush of holiday parties and vacations, it is tempting to go on autopilot, with the chief goal of just getting there, making it to year end, rather than actually achieving something meaningful in the time until the calendar turns over to the next January 1. You may have a rush of New Year’s resolutions, but don’t let this time be lost time. There’s a lot you can achieve even before January 1. Here are some ideas:

  • Set up 3-4 networking events or activities in the months of November and December
  • Write an article on a current topic in your field
  • Line up a public speaking event or, better yet, give one
  • Finish ONE project that has been nagging you all year
  • Start ONE project that you can (and will) complete by year end
  • Take the first step in a project that can complete by mid-year
  • Attend a conference that is meaningful to your future
  • Learn a new skill that you need now or to grow in the future
  • Update your resume
  • Find a new mentor or sponsor who can help propel your career
  • Strengthen an existing relationship by a few acts of giving and kindness
  • Help mentor a younger person in whom you see great potential

When working on your career, it is not enough to just do something. Choose the best idea based on what will bring the most benefits to your career. If you don’t know what that would be, you have just identified your greatest area of need – figuring out what will benefit you based on where you want to take your career next (and, possibly, determine where exactly that is). Can you do that, or make significant progress toward that goal, by year end? Yes, but only if you work on it!

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her book on job interviews, Master the Interview, is available on Amazon.com. Her website is at www.annemariesegal.com.

Images above from Adobe Images.

 

What Your Interviewer Really Wants to Know

mature business man on a desk, isolated on white

Do you know the underlying interview questions?
Image Credit: Adobe Images

A smart interviewer is not chiefly concerned that you “walk him/her through your resume” or the exact answer to “what are your weaknesses?” or other questions that are commonly asked in the interview process. For many jobs, your interviewer really wants to know the following (or some version of it):

  • Can you do the job?
  • Are you a good fit?
  • Will you make my life easier?
  • Will you solve the problems I really need solved?
  • Will you make or save the company “real money?”
  • Can you extrapolate and analogize, or will you waste time and resources (mine and others) because you don’t know how to think for yourself?
  • Will you anticipate issues before they arise and figure out how to fix them?
  • Will you know how to communicate in a way that people understand (especially me) and on a timely basis?
  • Can I put you in front of my SVP, EVP, CEO, Board of Directors and/or clients, if and when the time comes?
  • Can you grow over time if/when our needs progress?
  • Will you have the resilience to charge through the inevitable setbacks that arise in any job and specifically in the environment in which we operate?
  • Are you able to manage stress (your own and others) in a positive way?
  • Will you make me regret hiring you one day?
  • Will you quit in three months?
  • Will you bail when there’s a crucial deadline?
  • Will you understand and care about what we are trying to achieve?
  • Will you get things done?
  • Can I afford you?
  • Why should I (take a risk and) hire you?

 Of course, most of the questions above are not standard interview fare in most (if not all) roles. Imagine an interviewer saying:

“I have just one question:

Will you make my life easier and by how much?
$150,000 a year easier? Sold! When can you start?”

Skilled interviewers have a dilemma, in other words. They know that if they asked the above questions directly, the answer to most of them would be an emphatic yes or no, as applicable. Easy peasy, as the phrase goes. Any job seeker could give the right answers to sail through an interview like that, so there is no point in asking. So interviewers ask other questions – such as “what is your ideal job?” – that approximate what they want to discover about the candidate, knowing that many of these questions are poor proxies for what they really want to know yet hoping that the questions they do ask get them there.

As a job candidate, the above questions (i.e., the ones a skilled interview would ask, if he/she could) are helpful to keep front of mind. Why? Because these underlying concerns, will help you recognize what you must demonstrate and address to be hired.

When interviewers ask “how you overcame a setback in your professional career,” for example, they are asking for about problem-solving skills and resilience. Any details that you give about the situation should demonstrate those two factors. At the same time, you should be careful that your answer does not demonstrate a propensity to blame others or reveal company or individual confidences, both of which are potential red flags that will peak the ears of an interviewer and damage your candidacy.

The last question from the above list is really the deciding one in any job interview: why should I hire you? I tell my interview preparation clients that every answer they give in an interview should answer this underlying question:

Why should I hire you?

If you know and can internalize that “why should I hire you?” is the underlying question behind all other interview questions, you have a huge advantage in the interview process. You won’t be tempted to go off on a tangent or give the “wrong” response, because you will always gear your answer to what the interviewer really wants to know: the benefits you can bring to the target company.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, writer and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. The above is an excerpt from her new book, Master the Interview, which is forthcoming on Amazon.com in mid-October 2016. For more information about Anne Marie’s coaching and resume writing work, please visit www.segalcoaching.com.