Special Feature: Plotting the Story of Your Ideal Career
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Web Site of this Issue
Career Kick! A column by Teena Rose
Latest Additions: What's New on Quintessential Careers
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search
Notes from the Editor: About this Issue...
In just about every year of QuintZine's existence (and we are 7 years old
as of March 2007), we've published an issue about exploring your ideal career --
trying to find the career that fits best for you.
The wonderful feature article of this issue, by Publisher Dr. Randall S. Hansen, has been
brewing in his head for a long time and is the culmination of advice he gives his students and
others. It's a valuable addition to the literature on figuring out the best career for you.
Passion may seem an odd word choice when paired with career, but rest assured that one
of the most important elements of personal happiness is being passionate about your career
and your job. You do not want to be one of those people who live for the weekends and dread
Sunday evenings. Life is too short to not love the work you do.
Will you love your work and your career as much as your passion for other things and people?
Why not? It is completely possible to not only find the career that is a perfect match for your skills
and interests, but one that also inspires you and fuels your desire to perform better, work harder.
Do you think you’re too old, too entrenched in your current career? Or maybe too young and filled
with too many ideas (or doubts) about what you want to do with your life? Or maybe a recent college
grad who now realizes you chose the wrong major and career path?
Regardless of where you are in life -- where you are in your career -- there is always time to
discover -- or rediscover -- what you’re truly passionate about and turn that interest and passion
into a new career.
Finding a career that you have a passion for is all about obtaining fulfillment. Some of these jobs may
also not be the highest-paying jobs in the world, but career passion is not about the money; it's about how
the job makes you feel inside. Loving your job and career will go a long way to loving your life -- so, take the time to
find your career passion. The ideal scenario is one where you find a career that combines what you love to do with
you're great at doing.
One of the best tools for clarifying your underlying interests, passions, and possible career paths is to sit down and reflect
on a series of questions about how you have lived your life thus far. These questions are designed to really make you think and reflect on who
you are as a person and what you want to become. Read
the full article and discover your career passion.
Special Feature: Plotting Your Story
Plotting the Story of Your Ideal Career
by Katharine Hansen
If you're confused about what to do with your career -- or what to do NEXT with your career -- and you haven't
gained insight from taking assessments, there is another way. You can learn more about yourself, gain insight into the best career for you,
and plot out how to get there through creating stories.
A small but growing collection of research, for example, has looked at using story and narrative in career counseling.
"Psychotherapy is based on the premise that we each create our own life story from the time we are born,"
wrote Jack Maguire in The Power of Personal Storytelling. Career counselors are increasingly using narrative approaches
to encourage clients to build their career stories.
Authors Christensen and Johnston suggested in the Journal of Career Development that developing
narratives can significantly help individuals to know what to emphasize in their career planning. They proposed
that counselors perceive clients as both authors and central characters in their career stories, which they are "concurrently
constructing and enacting." Constructing their career story, the authors said, enables clients to discover connections and
meaning in their careers that they might not have otherwise. When individuals imagine their desired future stories, they
facilitate their belief that their storied, envisioned future will play out in reality. The authors' research indicated
that, indeed, clients who could tell these future stories tended to be "more effective in bringing those plans to
fruition," while Maguire characterized the narrative-therapy process as revising or replacing negative stories with positive ones.
Instead of answering the question traditionally explored in career counseling, "Who am I?" by listing traits such as interests,
skills, aptitudes, and values, narrative approaches articulate the job-seeker's preferred future. Larry Cochran, who has devoted
an entire book to the use of narrative in career counseling, notes that the narrative approach emphasizes "emplotment," which refers
to how a person can cast himself or herself as the main character in a career narrative that is meaningful, productive, and fulfilling.
Plotting out a career story can also help a person conceptualize the steps needed to attain his or her desired career, remind the
narrator of career goals, and enable him or her to stay on track in achieving the envisioned career.
One frequent step along the path to career discovery is choosing a college
major, and MyMajors.com is a nice tool for high school and college students trying to identify
potential disciplines in which to major in college.
This site asks you about your interests and experiences, analyzes the information, and then suggests five college majors
for you to think about. While the site should not be your only source for deciding on a major, it's a neat tool that
can help jump-start your planning process.
MyMajors gives you lots of information about what these majors are, what types of courses you would
take to get a degree, what jobs are available to graduates with this major and about the wonderful institutions
that offer these majors.
The site will provide an advisement report to review with your parents or counselor.
Thoughts change? Return to MyMajors and change your information to get new results.
QUINTESSENTIAL RESUMES AND COVER LETTERS has been re-launched!
Are you thinking about engaging the services of a professional writer for your resume, CV, cover letter,
thank-you letter, or other career-marketing correspondence? Before you take this step,
consider how a professional resume writer could benefit you.
Hotel Travel Jobs --
a job site for job-seekers searching for employment in the hospitality industry,
where you can search job listings in the hospitality industry (including hotels, catering, restaurants,
clubs, cruise ships, travel agencies, and more) -- from entry level positions to hotel
management jobs -- as well as post your resume. No cost to job-seekers.
Intern Zoo --
an internship site for college students, where you can search for
internships (by location, company, industry) and apply directly to
them, as well as find some basic job-hunting and internship tips.
No cost to job-seekers.
MyWorkster.com --
a great business-networking site, connecting business professionals and college students, where you
can build and expand your network of contacts, begin networking for job opportunities and job leads,
join groups, and post your resume. No cost to job-seekers.
nPost.com
-- a great resource for learning about entrepreneurs and finding jobs at startups, where
job-seekers can browse job listings (and apply to openings directly), read in-depth interviews
with entrepreneurs (CEOs and founders of small and startup businesses) from a wide variety of fields,
and learn of networking events. No cost to job-seekers.
Find even more career and job site additions to Quintessential Careers by visiting our
Latest Additions section.
CAREER KICK!
Sex and Drugs are Undermining Your Job Search -- Literally!
A column by Teena Rose
This morning, I read one of the most comprehensive and well-informed advice pieces on job searching that I'd read
in quite some time. The Internet has opened the world for us, broadening our eyes to new topics. Unfortunately, it has
also opened the floodgates to bad advice and tips that miss the mark on what we're trying to achieve. Online advice seems
to linger, as well, so what might have been good wisdom to follow just a year or two back is no longer true for today. It's the nature
of the beast, I suppose. With good comes some bad.
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
Marge Watters of The Society of Management Accountants of Canada
suggests working through these questions to discover what you want to do in your career:
What social, environmental, cultural, religious, judicial, or political issues do you find the most compelling?
On the job, when you choose a course or read an article in a trade or professional journal, what topics
attract your attention because you are truly curious?
What magazines, books, TV shows, movies or Internet sites interest you?
Who are your role models and heroes?
How do you like to spend your time outside the workplace?
At social events, what topics of conversation do you welcome?
If you were to return to school, what would you study even if it had no obvious practical application?
If money were not an issue, how would you spend your time?
The CareerXroads Annual Sources of Hire Study reveals the following about how employers fill their open positions:
33.9 percent of all open positions were filled by internal transfers and promotions.
Referrals (25.6 percent) are arguably the No. 1 external source.
Employee referrals make up 95 percent of all the hires attributed to this category.
The impact of the Internet is so pervasive that it is reasonable to imagine that every
source of hire has an Internet component. It may be the research done to find
candidates or the impetus that moved the candidate was moved to apply.
The Internet is also the means to apply and communicate no matter what the original source that triggered interest.
Hires attributed to the "Company Website" are suspect (CareerXroads maintains
that the company website is a destination not a source). Respondents report that their
company website represents 20.7 percent of all external hires (13.7 percent of all positions filled).
Hires attributed to specific job boards (such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder and
HotJobs) and all other "niche" boards represent 12.3 percent of external hires (8.1 percent of all positions filled).
The largest trends in 2006 were the growth of re-hires as a source of hire
and the emergence of search-engine advertising as a measurable source of hire.
Don't give up on that childhood career dream! From The (Toronto) Globe and Mail:
From the time he watched a Boeing 747 fly overhead when he was 10, Robert Milton knew
what he wanted to be when he grew up. "Not be a cowboy or a fireman, not an astronaut or an athlete
. . . it was the idea of running an airline that appealed to me," the current chairman and former chief executive officer and
president of Air Canada says in his autobiography, Straight from the Top.
Clearly, Mr. Milton is one executive who saw his dream job come true. But that makes him a rare bird, a survey of 2,160
senior executives worldwide has found.
The majority of those polled said they regretted abandoning their childhood dreams of becoming astronauts, pro athletes,
or film stars to become executives.
And they would choose a different career if they knew then what they know now, according to the survey by
Korn/Ferry International, which included 100 executives in Canada.
In fact, just 18 percent of the senior executives said they aspired as children to become business leaders. Among the
other 82 percent, 15 percent dreamed of being professional athletes and 11 percent had their hearts set on becoming astronauts.
Another 10 percent wanted to be doctors or nurses.
Law, police, firefighting, the military and teaching were each the childhood aspirations of about 5 percent of the executives polled.
And 4 percent each dreamed of careers in music, acting or politics. No one, it seems, yearned to be an actuary or a tax auditor, and no
other profession got more than 1 percent of votes.
For a majority of the executives polled, abandoning their dream has created lasting regrets. A full 51 percent said that, if they
could start their career over again, they would most likely do something completely different that more closely matched their long-held aspirations.
And career pros say there is more opportunity than ever to do just that.
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Web site, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
Need a career expert for a story or article you're working on? Searching for college,
career, and job news? Interested in learning more about Quintessential Careers?
Our Press Room
is your one-stop location for getting the information and resources you need.
QuintZine: Topics in Upcoming Issues
WATCH FOR feature articles on these topics in upcoming
issues of QuintZine:
* Office Politics
* Women and Men at Work
* Gossiping at the Office
* Defending Yourself at Work
* How to Transition Back to Work: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Parents
* Women as Breadwinners
* Maternity Leave
* 10 Job-hunting Mistakes to Avoid
* Your Job Search IQ
* Jobs on the Cutting Edge
* Should You Make a Lateral Career Move?
* Volunteer Your Way into a New Job
* First Impressions Quiz
* Be Ready for an Unexpected Job Interview
* Your Blog as a Resume?
* Font Facts: Resume Typography
* Resume Bullet Points: Before and After
* Social/Online Networking from the Recruiter's Perspective
* Salary Negotiation Mistakes to Avoid
* Use Your Resume to Negotiate a Higher Salary
* GLBT Job-search Issues
* The Value of Internships Abroad and Study Abroad
* Top 10 Fears of Job-seekers
* For Job-hunting Success, Develop a Detailed Job-Search Plan
* Keep Your Career Dreams Alive
* MBA Career Portfolios
* Pre-Hire Background/Credit Checks
* Financial Aid/Scholarship Timetable
* Build Confidence and Avoid Insecurity in Job Interviews
* Empty Nest Job-seekers
* Are You Sabotaging Your Job-Search/Career?
* Lifelong Networking
* Networking for the Shy
* Working Night Shifts/Odd Hours
* College Grad Hiring from the Recruiter's Perspective
* Quintessential Career Profiles of YOU, our readers
* Q&As with well-known career experts
* Book reviews
. . . and much, much more...
