Career Coaching Blog

Such an innocent sounding question…No! It is a trap, and one that most people fall into. This common opener in interviews is not an invitation to recite your resume. Nor, spend 2 minutes talking about your favorite hobby. This is an opportunity – a predictable opportunity, to craft an engaging, intriguing executive summary of who you are and why you are there in the interview. There is no hard and fast rule as to how long it should be, but let’s say up to a minute.

• Interviewers are known to make …

Heather's "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog posted a really nice piece today on the true nature of networking...profiling the bad networking types, and what true networking really is. (In case you don't read it, the punchline is RELATIONSHIPS folks). I spoke on this subject last week at a presentation, so it was great to see such an insightful piece. Good read. Bad recruiter networking: ""

The recruitment industry has been buzzing recently with CIBC World Markets taking legal action against Genuity Capital Markets for poaching employees.

I was delighted to receive a call on the subject from Canadian Business Magazine to discuss the employee side of the equation. It ended up in the Jan. 31 - Feb. 13 issue of the magazine in a small way. The article isn’t online unfortunately, but the gist of the quote is when you decide to leave, try and resign with some class. Give appropriate noti…

I don’t know about you, but I am certainly guilty from time to time of undermining, or self-sabotaging myself. My latest Monster.com article - Self-Sabotage: Stop Underming Yourself at Work tackles the subject.

“From time to time, you may undermine yourself on the job with your behaviour. This form of self-sabotage not only prevents you from performing at your full potential, but also gives colleagues and customers an opportunity to think less of you as an individual and professional.

With self-…

Leading a Bold Career is about an attitude. It is about taking purposeful action to more closely align who you are with what you do for a living. How that action is manifested can be in a thousand different ways. It may in fact, for SOME PEOPLE, be about pursuing a dream career, or starting their own business. That’s awesome and I support that. However, of equal value and importance are other types of changes that are less “dreamy.”

• Changing occupations because the new one is a better fit with yo…

One of the most common mistakes I see in resumes at the managerial and executive level is the omission of context in professional experiences. Why is context important in your resume?

1. Whenever you make a resume reader work hard to figure out your potential value and fit, you are likely not going to benefit.

2. Resumes are selling documents and context at the company, role, and career path levels can be additional arrows in your quiver.

3. Fit is a subtle but important thing. You are helping high…