A planted seed cannot grow without the nurturing power of sunlight and water. In the same way, employees cannot grow without the support of their organization. In our previous article, we explored a study conducted by the Federal Managers Association that had an alarming message: managers are perceived as ill equipped to foster a work environment where employees with disabilities can develop into valuable professionals.

Unemployment for individuals with disabilities has risen, despite the strong legislative push to abolish discriminatory hiring practices.[i] A clear reason for this contradictory outcome is a general lack of the proper disability education and advocacy among managers, an argument advanced by the Federal Manager Association’s Unnecessary Boundaries study.

Fortunately, the hardest hurdles have been cleared. The Federal government has led by example through the 1990s, starting with the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. President Clinton furthered efforts with his Executive Order 13163, a commitment to award 100,000 Federal jobs to persons with disabilities by 2005. Organizations are now responsible to follow suit, not only by equitable hiring practices, but also by establishing inclusive work environments where persons with disabilities receive the supports necessary to advance and grow.

The first and most essential step in providing support for an employee with a mental or physical impairment is to evaluate their level of competency. The mysterious and complex nature of mental illness coupled with a personalized manifestation per individual places extreme importance on the ability of management to assess employees and their varying abilities before attempting to create environmental supports to encourage their growth. A multitude of tools are available for gauging competency and can be classified by how they measure the abilities of an employee. Self-report instruments, for example, rely on the ability of the employee to display aptitude through written questionnaires or workplace simulations. Observer rating instruments, on the other hand, rely on an observer to rate the aptitude of an employee based on how well he or she displays an ability to perform specific tasks, either through written questionnaires or simulated work situations.

Self-report instruments are most useful when a mental health professional is helping a person develop social skills across a variety of social contexts. While a work environment is considered a social context, self-report instruments are not ideal as they require the involvement of a trained mental health professional. Observer rating instruments, by contrast, work well in the business context. The observer need not be a professional counselor or psychologist. They must, however, have a substantial opportunity to observe and learn about the employee and his or her condition prior to administering an assessment. Managers and other Human Resources personnel are ideal candidates for the role of an observer as they have ample opportunity to get to know new hires before administering an observer-rating assessment.

Once the competency of an employee with a disability is ascertained, management can begin to tailor the company culture in a way that maximizes everyones ability to participate, communicate, learn, and develop. Disability job and career development tools are available to help organizations assess the competency of their workers, and they represent vital tools in creating an inclusive work environment. Other disability training and education resources can be utilized to spread awareness in a diverse organization, a necessary complement to helping persons with disabilities develop as professionals among their peers.

Most of us never gets to realize career management is essential during our college years. We are encouraged to think of the future by our parents, but most of our peers think otherwise. In fact, career management related topics is a much loved topics on public speaking or debate classes. Who won won’t matter then. After all, it was a mere mind brawl and the career choice will always rely on each one. Some institutions offers seminars and lectures on making the sound career choice before or after graduation.

Career thinking should start in middle school or way before.

What would I be after finishing college? Should I need to take a master or a doctorate to achieve the career I want to have? What you want to be and to have is a choice. These questions never escaped the minds of the successful career men and women. Individuals who were successful in their career.

Most of these successful individuals started on asking friends, seeking advices and suggestions. They researched on the background on the things they want to become and the essential steps of getting in the right track.

Some of us failed to foresee positive result in managing our careers. Most of these factors are the following:

Dependence on the existing boss reputation.This may work to your advantage as long as your boss is an asset to the company. However, should he fail you should have a back-up plan.
Passive employment. Some employees tend to wait for opportunities to knock, rather them finding the right opportunity.
Lack of knowledge and information on what career they would be taking. Every career person has a silent and imaginary SWOT Analysis in their mind. they should be able to see their ideal work, the the essential steps on how to get there.
Low self-esteem. Most often, this feeling and composure allow us to miss opportunity. After a failure in the previous employment, we feel sorry for ourselves. This should not be the case. We should be focusing on what we have to learn from it and make resolution on how to improve ourselves for the better.
Any career encounters – fortunate or not, one must push forward. That s the only way you can achieve the career growth you want to have. Consider yourself a “Trainee”. With this mindset, you become an absorbent of learning, always ready to invest on training that can hone your skills to achieve the improvement you want to have in your career. And, as an old adage reminds us: Correct practice, correct practice, correct practice. That is the only way you can master your craft. Remember, “Life is what we made it”.

If we want our life to be successful someday then we must have to make it right now. This call to action can be accomplished by enhancing our knowledge by reading; attend seminars related to our careers, workshops and anything that has to do with our career.

FairWindsWeb-Com Next Interview By Rick H McKnight.

In today’s economy job interviews are fewer and farther between so when you have one, is there a way to guarantee an offer or at least getting the next interview? The answer is yes and I have proved it. I have had offers on each of my last 5 job interviews. All of those involved multiple interviews for fairly senior positions. I learned that after one set of interviews that turned into a job offer that I was the first interviewee of 32. This article is about how to use some of the concepts that I have used in your own interview process. There are really only three.

People hire people they like. The fact that you have an interview means that your resume opened the door or that you networked into the situation or the recruiter put you in the mix for the position. The chances are very high that you have the skills and experience that they are looking for since you were called in for the interview. Now it is a question of do you fit in to their culture. Do you have similar characteristics as the people interviewing you? Do they like you?

So the question is how do you get people who do not know you to like you when you may have only half an hour to an hour? The answer is that you have to genuinely care about the person that is interviewing you. This gives you the perspective that you are there to help them make a very important decision-who to hire. If the person who is interviewing you gets the sense that you are more interested in helping them make the right decision than you are of getting an offer it helps them accept that you are not just selling them on you. Interviewing is about sales and sales is about having people understand that you are not selling them. The difference is subtle. Yet profound. If you really care about the person would you have them hire you even if you were the wrong person for the job?

How do you actually do this? Number one is that you have to lose the self-concern, nervousness, and anxiety about how you answer their questions. How do you do this? Preparation. This means you have to know what is important to them so you can anticipate their questions. Read the job description carefully, use your network to find out what the company is like, who the hiring manager is and what is her perspective. What does the website tell you about the company. Talk to customers of the company. So doing all of this makes you better prepared for the interview and it gives you confidence. Confidence allows you to calmly listen to the question, respond to the question with your own question when needed and to show some enthusiasm. I was in an interview for a career consulting position and at the end the hiring manager said to me, “I don’t know much about you, but you are my number one candidate”. Hearing that helped me go through the next 4 interviews, do a public workshop and group coaching session before, finally the job offer came through.

The other element of preparation that many people miss is the mental preparation. This is vital. What this involves is taking some minutes to visualize the outcome that you desire. Close your eyes, breathe deeply and see yourself calmly chatting with the interviewer. See the interviewer warming up to you. See her smiling and the rapport build. At the end watch her shake your hand and invite you to the next stage. Involved all of the senses that you can in this visualization as they make it more real. You can do this the night before the interview and right before it as well. If you calmly say to yourself that you are going to get an offer and know this to be the case, this is what will happen. The interview that I mentioned where they were interviewing 32 others, I told myself that I was going to land this position and I saw if happening in my mind clearly before the interview. I was asked to prepare with a role play for the interview and before that started, I asked the interviewers (a panel) if they were prepared to make a decision today. When they said that they weren’t, I stood up and suggested that we do this another time. They immediately said that they were prepared to make a decision. It takes a lot of confidence to threaten to walk out of an interview but it also can create a lot of desire on the part of the interviewer to keep you there. Shortly thereafter I was asked to come for a lunch and was given an offer.

Confidence, preparation and caring are the cornerstones of having a great interview.

Plan Your Career Path Smartly

When I was still in high school, my friends and I often talked about what jobs we would like to have in the future. Obviously, most of us answered wanting to have those works that seemed to be easy, fun and will give us our dream houses or cars. What we didn’t know that time is that all of our wishes will never come true if we don’t have a career development planning that will guide us in reaching our goals. It’s just easy to say that I want to be like this or earn that big and yet not wanting to carry any responsibilities involved in them. If you have that kind of mind set, then you will no doubt fail and never experience development in your chosen career.

Whatever career path you have chosen, you cannot expect it to be smooth sailing all the time because any endeavor leading to a huge triumph in the end will always include some challenges along the road. This is why you need to plan wisely if you want your career to soar high.
The Importance of Formulating Your Career Plan

Some are still doubtful on the significance of making a plan regarding their career choices. They don’t even understand the fact that it such a valuable guide they can use to improve in their present jobs or career.

The primary reason why career planning is considered helpful is because it lets you set specific objectives that you have to work hard to attain. Having an aim is a really important in development planning as you can opt to have either short or long-term objectives that will contribute in your professional improvement. Your aims will let you devote your efforts into doing those things that really matter in your job. Once you have formulated a career plan, you’ll be able to display an enthusiastic attitude when it comes to enhancing your skills and knowledge. Your want for higher learning and self development will bring a positive message to target employers or companies as they viewed people who aspire to improve as a key asset to their organization.

With career development planning, you can uphold a competitive edge upon yourself. For example, while you are boosting your capabilities and educational credentials, your latest abilities and extra learning can assist you in staying positively aggressive in the office. Having a career plan will also help you be prepared with career changes, probable transfers and even in instant resignations. You become more flexible, which is vital in your profession since it aids your chances of remaining in your job at the same time having your normal salary, instead of leaving your work because you are not ready to face these career changes.

Secure Your Job with Career Development Planning

Actually, career development planning is just an easy and realistic guide utilized by almost all successful people into moving forward with their jobs. It aims in helping you check if you are in the state of going higher with your career or learn those hindrances that are stopping you from doing it. If you are uncertain about your current job situation, then you really need to formulate your own career planning so you can push yourself towards the banner of victory.

Considering the times we live in-what with a declining economy and job-related woes proliferating across the globe-these days the topic of career management could not be more important. Career management, of course, is not something only to be recurred to in times of crisis; it’s a process (and a skill) which needs to be implemented throughout every stage of our adult lives, both when things are looking up and when they are looking down. At the moment, however, in the midst of the growing unemployment rates that are sweeping the developed and developing worlds, many people are looking with great hope and expectation to the potential benefits which effective career management may have for them.

Considering the widespread sensation of panic or nervousness that has come over the job market, it’s important to come to have a clear vision of precisely what career management is, and how to carry it out effectively and comprehensively. Not only is it important to remember to keep career management in mind when the going’s good, but furthermore it’s important to remember all the pertinent areas of career management-not to overlook crucial aspects, during good times or bad. So, to start, let’s take a look at the three fundamental aspects of career management:

Long-term goals and strategies. In career management, it is absolutely fundamental that you have a goal in mind for the long haul and that you have a notion of how you intend to get there. There’s really not much to “manage” if these two elements are lacking, after all! As far as setting a long-term goal is concerned, you will need to first of all consider where you stand in the course of your career at the moment, on the one hand, and what the probabilities of your service/product still being marketable in the long-term look like, on the other hand. With regards to the former point, remember that the earlier on in your career the more difficult it will be to think for the long-term and to set goals for the long-term that feel realistic or achievable. With regards to the latter point, remember to try to factor in advances in technology and possible issues of redundancy when determining how marketable your particular service or product will be way down the line. This is a hard bet, and doubtlessly several unknown variables will come into the mix at one point or another; nonetheless, in pursuing a career, it’s a bet that either has to be made, or the person in question needs to seriously consider switching to another line of work.
Networking. Managing a career is all about having personal and professional contacts-without (a lot of) them, you will not have the sources of support necessary to help you advance professionally. Working adults with a career in the works need to remember that it is wise to work on or elaborate absolutely every potential contact (if only to have the person on a list of names you’ll never end up calling), and furthermore that burning bridges will never help you get anywhere. Many contacts may not yield anything all that significant in terms of your career advancement, yet every once in a while there is that one-and you need to be able to open a dialogue there at the right moment, which is why networking is so important in the first place. Within the realm of networking, there are three areas of interest that need to be pursues separately yet with equal energy: the place where you currently work (both among colleagues and superiors); the professional associations which represent your activity; and the major recruiters and/or companies where you hope to perhaps work in the future. Lavish these three areas with loads of networking, and you will do your career an enormous solid.
Résumé polishing and updating. How marketable can you possibly be when your résumé is representative of your professional standing from over a year ago?! Maintaining an updated résumé on at least a yearly basis shows people (recruiters in particular) that you take the process of career management seriously and that you’re not just counting on luck and/or a good first impression. Remember that when you reach crucial turns in the road during your professional career, you may have to reinterpret the importance of previous work experiences and present them in a new light to justify your current direction. In this sense, remember to update your personal statement when appropriate to reflect any developments in terms of goals and principal strengths. Keep in mind that an updated résumé is a brilliant tool no matter what career path you are pursuing, as it enables you to seize opportunities as they arise without the need to stall (in order to bring your image up to speed). If you feel that your résumé is a little stale, you should think about enlisting the help of a career coach, as this is just one of the specialist services that they offer.

Career management has become a topic of widespread discussion these days. The nature of work has changed quite dramatically in recent years, and also have the nature of careers. There is a wide choice offered for anyone looking to make it big in a profession these days. Proper planning and then implementation of the same has become vitally important for anyone looking for professional growth nowadays. With the competition getting tougher by the day, it is imperative that you do a thorough analysis about your strengths and weakness before you go along your chosen career path.

Career management demands that you have an entrepreneurial spirit and treat your career, just as you would treat a business. Accordingly, you should do a thorough analysis of your strengths and find out what is that you bring to the table. You should make an honest analysis of your knowledge, expertise and your skill sets. You should think of yourself as a brand that is on offer in an extremely competitive market. Once you have assessed yourself you can then go about promoting yourself as a brand.

Career management is all about promoting yourself in the right manner. Once you have identified and created your own niche, then you need to go about devising a campaign targeting potential employers, just as in the case of a brand. You should meet potential employers and tell them as to how you differ from others when it comes to experience, values, skills and knowledge. You must make a conscious effort to differentiate yourself from others.

Networking is the key to career management. It goes without saying that you need to constantly look for building relationships. You should go about connecting with people who can be of help to you in reaching your career goals. It is therefore important that you develop good interpersonal communication skills in order to do so. Once you take care of these key aspects, you are literally bound to go places in your career.

So there stands before all of us a terrific opportunity here surely! If the majority of people are reactive about managing their careers, both generally and within the organization that they themselves work for, then if can we learn to be more proactive about the development and management of our own career, thus moving closer to the 5 per cent proactive category, then we will achieve competitive advantage and ultimately more success with our career achievements? The answer to this question of course is YES.

So how is this done? Well just the same as if we are to stand any chance of being successful with our exercise, diet and leisure time over a sustainable period of time, we need to initiate disciplines that empower us to achieve these goals. Finding the right exercise plan, dietary guide, or leisure schedule is an important part of identifying this discipline because we need to empathise with it, believe in it and trust it. Consider therefore the following mechanisms that would need to be in place in order for us to become more proactive about developing and implementing a successful career plan:

PERSONAL OBJECTIVE To research and develop a clear personal career objective which is SMART and which is based upon your own core skills, experience and interests.

PERSONAL ANALYSIS The ancient Greeks thought self-knowledge so crucial that they had the phrase “Know Yourself” carved above their temple entrances.

JOB PROFILING To research and develop your ideal job profile so that there is a clear and detailed outline plan for the job which you should ideally be targeting in the short-term (1 year) the medium-term (2-5 years) and the long-term (6-10 years).

COMPANY ANALYSIS To research and develop a detailed company analysis based either upon your current employer or a proposed future employer. You need to understand more about your employer’s organization and how it works.

CORPORATE POLITICS To understand more about the politics within your employer’s organization and how to use this knowledge to your career advantage by being a more proactive political player.

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS To research and develop a detailed industry analysis based upon either the current industry you are working in, or a proposed future industry. You need to understand more about your target industry and how it works.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT All proactive employees should allocate at least 10 per cent of their time towards ongoing personal self-development. The objective here is to enable you to ensure that your personal development objectives are clearly aligned with your career strategy.

IMAGE MANAGEMENT How we perceive ourselves is not necessarily how others perceive us. The objective here is to enable you to ensure that your image is clearly aligned with your career strategy.

EMPLOYEE RELATIONS To you to be more proactive about the way in which you develop and manage both the corporate and personal relationships which you have with your peers, superiors and subordinates.

INTEGRITY MANAGEMENT Integrity takes a long time to establish. However it can be lost in just a few minutes. The objective here is to enable you to have more control over the way in which you develop and manage your integrity.

SUCCESS MANAGEMENT Success is measured in different ways by different people. The objective here is to enable you to establish clear critical career success factors (CCSF) and to ensure that you achieve these career successes.

PARALLEL CAREERS All successful people plan parallel careers regardless of their vocation. There is no exception to this rule unless we are depending upon luck. The objective here is to enable you to become a proficient and successful parallel career planner.

You will not only need processes which enable you to develop each of the above career mechanisms, but you will also need ongoing support and guidance from qualified and experienced career counselling tutors or mentors to ensure that your motivation, dedication and commitment are not compromised at any stage. There also needs to be a quality standard to adhere to so that you can be confident that you are doing all that you can. For example, if there was not a recognized football league, how would teams possibly know whether they were progressing forward or falling backwards in terms of performance?

If this all seems like a lot of hard work to you, or of it seems like too much effort will be required, then the Post-Graduate Certificate in Career Management Strategy (CCMS) is probably not for you. In reality it only requires 10 per cent of your time in terms of commitment on an ongoing basis. Indeed all students are engaged in full-time employment while studying. If you are excited by the prospect of having more control over the development of your career then the Post-Graduate Certificate in Career Management Strategy (CCMS) is likely to constitute the best self-development financial investment that you are ever likely to make.

“Managing up” could sound something akin to maneuver, and be a sycophant to the higher ups, and something which is to be abhorred.

Not really. Managing up is an important aspect of a successful career, the art by which one is clear about what makes his boss succeed in his role, which has a direct impact of his own goal accomplished. It is vital for one’s career growth, if looked from the background that unless the boss’s goals are contributed to, there is little that can be accomplished in the team.

To manage up is not about being cozy or a yes-man to the boss. It is about being genuinely concerned about the boss getting to his goals and winning post. To that extent, it means a lot about understanding his mind, knowing his challenges and pressures, how is he working or planning to get his team to win and every thing which has to do with the departmental goals.

An individual who is not concerned about his immediate boss will be working in isolation; Consider the fact that every task of yours, is on one way or other aligned to your higher ups goals, and in turn the company goals, then, there will be a clear appreciation of Managing up.

Devoid of management jargon, managing up is the right way to contribute to the boss’s success and in turn for you to move up the organization’s hierarchy.

If you are reporting to a new boss, spend considerable amount of time knowing him from the workplace perspective. Some pointers to this understanding will be

What is he set to achieve? What are his goals? Getting this insight by formal or informal discussions with his is the only way that you gain a ‘boss perspective’. This is important, and many a times, his world will be so different from your world of work.

Is he an introvert or extrovert? If he is a man of few words, then he may be tremendously focused on tasks to be done, and subsequent discussions. An extrovert may be verbose and would like to hear a lot of views on how things are and how things can be

What is his communication style? If he is a reader, then he will like detailed reports on work, and then he will proffer his views. If he is a listener, then he will call you and team for a discussion, which will be a periodical review of sorts.

Discuss and set mutual expectations time and again. What is his expectation from you – for the year, for the quarter, for the month? And in turn translate that to the micro level expectations from your team. It will help knowing the expectations threadbare, so that you look good with a winning team. And this winning is not by your measure or your bosses, your company’s measure.

For all the time we spend at work, we ought to be able to find a career that not only satisfies the pocketbook, but one that satisfies the mind. This is where career counseling could be of tremendous help.

When you go for career counseling, you can get a wealth of information that will steer you toward the career that best fits your wants and needs. But what should you expect from career counseling, and how does it work? The first step is to meet with a professional employment counselor whose job it is to get to know you more as a person.

This is usually done through conducting a test or series of tests like a career assessment test, a Kiersey temperament scale test, or the typical career placement examination. These tests are specifically designed to help you discover the right career according to personality, talent and ability.

Upon completion of the test or tests, you should then have a list of possible career options. Once this is done, the career counselor can give you more information about the specific jobs in which you may be interested, and about any possible specific training or education you may want to get.

They can help you find and register for whatever classes you need, and they can even provide you with support services as you wend your way toward a new career. You will also learn a lot about job-hunting strategies like how to compile a really decent resume and how best to conduct an in personam interview. After all, you won’t get that dream job without creating just the right impression, will you?

And career counselors are a great resource because they already know just what to do in the first place. Since career counseling is a business, don’t expect that you will walk away from a counseling session scot free. But whenever a few is charged, it will probably be a pretty nominal one, and you might be able to pay it in installments if need be.

But if you’re stuck in a rut when it comes to finding a career, this money may be a very good investment indeed. Why? Because it can make the difference in being stuck in a nowhere job that you can’t stand and finding that golden opportunity you’ve always dreamed of.

One aspect of personal growth is career development hence it is important as an individual to approach this issue carefully and tactfully. A number of people are known to make mistakes that eventually delay their career development or cost them all together. It is also good to realize that having college certificates does not necessarily guarantee you success in your career.

There is an adage that says, do not put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you get verbal job offers from very reliable and trusted employers, do not entirely count on their word. Some people are known to even resign from their present employment on the basis of having being offered a job by another employer. It is always prudent to get a commitment letter before writing that resignation letter.

Sometimes the offers could be genuine but there are always unpredictable events that may arise in between and persuade your prospective employer otherwise. I do not need to inform you that you can end up without any job in the first place. The lack or absence of a commitment letter makes it easy for an employer to overturn an offer.

Nowadays, getting employment is not easy, since many are entering the job market and hence the competition for the limited vacancies is quiet high. The economic recession has not made things any better with many experienced and skilled individuals losing their employment through retrenchments. These same people are entering the job market and may have an edge over you hence think twice before you leave your current employment in the name of having gotten an offer from a trusted and reliable employer.