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My yoga instructor is always reminding us to practice with intention.

She also reminds us to practice yoga on and off the mat.

Today I’m making my first application of the principles of yoga to real life. More specifically, to careers, job satisfaction and generally being in a good place.

I just finished reading Job Jenny’s new ebook, To Whom it May Concern or how to stop sucking at your job search. In her book Jenny asks, “What do you want your life to look like?” and “What are you aiming for with your next career move?”

In my mind these questions immediately translated to “What is your intention?”

Intention (n.)
1. a determination to act in a certain way
2. what one intends* to do or bring about (source)

What I want my life to look like: Fulfilling career in marketing; large, supportive professional and personal networks; health insurance; higher education; comfortable, yet modest living and twice yearly vacations.

What I am aiming for in my next career move Challenging projects; an experienced (and talented) team that I can learn from; a healthy, supportive work environment. Inspiration.

There are the changes that I intend to bring about. In order to make my intentions a reality, I need to be determined to learn more; to step outside my comfort zone, to have a great attitude and to hold out for the right job.

The best part of intention is that as long as you’re trying, it counts.  Maybe you only lift one toe today (yoga metaphor),  you can still reap the benefits of lifting that one toe and with each practice, you’ll get a little further into the pose process.

What is your intention?

*I love it when a word is used to define itself. Actually, no I don’t. Not at all.

20somethings today are experiencing a different type of quarter life crisis and not in a good way. While it may make us stronger in the long run, it’s currently turning our 20-years-young hair a not-so-charming shade of gray.

As I write this, I have a ball in my throat and a knot in my stomach. I have big motivation and no outlet for it. I just read this article forecasting sunshine for recent grads.  $50,000+  average salaries right out of school I seriously thought I was going to vomit. I have a job that is keeping me afloat but it’s not going to give me my career wings.  Where are the jobs with decent salaries and benefits that this article speaks of?

This economy has shattered the post-graduation dreams of more college graduates than I care to research. I feel like my hands are tied and I’m stuck on a sinking ship.  I know I’m not the only one! My peers are moving back into their parents’ houses 7 or 8 years after they moved out. They are paying for their necessities on credit cards and hoping that they’ll be able to pay it (along with their student loans) back one day.

I want so badly to tell you what the bright side is, but even the bright side seems to have its major obstacles and colossal drawbacks.

Do you have words of wisdom or big solutions? Gen Y would greatly appreciate your feedback.

In an effort to continue to grow and learn, I spend hours a week reading marketing blogs, books and trying to engage in conversation with the social media gurus of Twitter. (Most of them are a little too busy to talk to me, but I am so grateful for people like Scott Stratten and CC Chapman who can take time to tweet to those of us who are eager to learn the tricks of the trade.) While talking about this struggle, Patti suggested that I find a mentor. Brilliant! Patti served as a mentor to my dearest friend and co-blogger when she started out in the advertising industry. It was a little easier for them, as they were part of a team. Regardless, the whole mentor idea was brilliant. Seriously, brilliant!

I have big dreams of living, eating and breathing social media marketing and branding. I want to learn how great marketers get great results. I was given this incredible idea of connecting with someone – a mentor- who has lots of knowledge and is interested in sharing it. Now that I have all of this straight in my head, there’s just one problem.

I can already tell that this search for a mentor is going to be more than I bargained for. With as many tools as there are now to connect with complete strangers, it’s sad that it’s still so hard to find someone who wants to share their knowledge with you.

Do you have a mentor? How did you connect with him or her?

I may need a mentor to mentor me on how to find a mentor – leave your advice in the comments!

I have personal goals for both my mind and body, I have career goals and I have academic goals. It would be entirely too long (and entirely too time consuming) to post all of these in one post so let me focus on just one set of goals today.

Career Goals

I feel like I should already have an amazing career. Like I should already be a quarter of the way up the proverbial corporate ladder.  Unfortunately the economy has had it’s ups and downs (mostly downs) and that hasn’t quite happened for me yet.

However, I have found that I love marketing– more specifically new media– and I love the services industry. I am fortunate to have found a job that combines both of these things. Job: check.

Goal:

To create and grow the company’s web presence and to demonstrate this growth with measurable results. I aim to be an asset to my company and to add to my portfolio so that future employers can see what I am capable of.

What I have to do to get there:

Develop a social media strategy for my company and for my personal brands. This is SO hard for me, because I am the type to jump right in. I want to send that first tweet and use every new media outlet as soon as it is available. This year I will take time to study the work of successful social media marketers. I will read about developing social media strategies and I will embrace every aspect of social media marketing– even the boring stuff.

I will have an actual plan on paper (read: digital eco-friendly plan) and I will track my progress.

When am I going to do this?

Inquiring minds want to know.  I’ll keep you posted on this one.

Academic goals coming soon. Stay tuned.

At my new job we meet every Monday morning to discuss our goals for the week. We write them down and we share them with our supervisors and peers. We also review our goals from the previous week. We discuss which goals we met and which goals we didn’t and what prevented us from reaching our goals. The reasoning behind this is that statistically people are more likely to achieve their goals when they are written down and even more likely to reach them when they share those goals with other people. I am entirely too busy to provide empirical evidence for this, but for those of you who have time, please post any literature related to this in the comments.

With this being the case, I thought maybe this blog would be a great place to write down my professional, academic and the occasional personal goal. I have been so busy lately trying to adapt to working long weeks at work and in school that I am exhausted and I am having trouble finding the balance between what I love and what I am responsible for.

Unfortunately, tonight I am on my way out the door to an event for my other little blog (that I am quite proud of, if I may say so) so I am not in a position to sit and think and write carefully about my goals. But maybe if I promise you that I will be back to do just that before the end of next week, it will actually happen.

Until next time….

- L

Clearly, there is a lot of change and a lot of adapting in my future. Hopefully this change involved regularly updating my lonely (yet still lovely) blog.

I will start by promising you this: by the end of this week I will post about goals. I have a lot to say about goals…my goals…your goals…reaching goals. If I promise that I will share it with you, it will increase the chances that I actually will. So here’s to accomplishing that this week.

Job fairs make me so frustrated!

It has come to my attention that Career/Job fairs are a gargantuan waste of time. This is not a conclusion drawn solely on personal experience. I actually interviewed an HR Manager for a very well respected hospitality company* and she said that company’s are going to job fair to recruit. However, it’s very one sided. (Please note that the following information is based on my personal conclusions drawn from the interview and they are not the exact words of the interviewee.) They figure if they show up on a college campus they have access to better educated candidates. While this may be true, the approach doesn’t benefit the job seeker.

Allow me demonstrate how the approach doesn’t benefit the job seeker…

Un/Underemployed graduate student puts on her business attire and drives all the way across town to a Career fair at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management. She enters the room with 15 copies of her resume and leaves with 15 copies of her resume, because every time she asks a company representative, “could I please leave a copy of my resume with you?” the response is “oh we’re not taking resumes, because we only accept online applications.” And so, as she leaves campus, she begins to wonder how these company representatives are going to remember her name and her charming personality if they didn’t take a business card or a resume from her.

The answer is, they won’t remember!

If you’re a serious job seeker who spends time looking and applying for jobs on a regular basis, you probably shouldn’t waste your time going to a career fair. If an employer who you really want to connect with is attending a local career fair, call their HR department and find out if they will be accepting resumes on site. If they say no, either show up ready to put on a memorable performance or save yourself the gas and send the HR representative you spoke with a nice e-mail with your resume attached.

*I’ve elected to keep the HR Manager and the company anonymous, as the interview was for an HR project I am working on and I don’t have permission to publish it here!

Photo from Kozinets.net

At the beginning of the semester I watched this video for my HR class. While the SEIU Head, Andy Stern, is discussing unions (which is totally unrelated to this post), he makes a few very interesting comments at the beginning of this address to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He encourages young people to pursue what they love. He tells us that we are going through the single most profound economic revolution in world history. He also mentions that by this year (the video is from April of 2009), 25% of the American workforce will be contingent or free agents.

I’ve been thinking about Stern’s words since I first watched the video. With college graduates (and graduate students) struggling to find full time employment, entrepreneurs are springing up all over the place. I never imagined that I would be approached by anyone and asked to help them create a social media strategy. While I would love the security of a full time job with benefits, I welcome the freedom to set my own schedule and work as I see fit.

Social media is such a new and ever-changing marketing medium that a company can’t require that you have 8 or 10 years of experience before they consider you capable of consulting.  However, before you start marketing yourself as a social media consultant (which I haven’t started doing), start experimenting so that you have demonstrable experience. I am still learning and I welcome advise from social media gurus on twitter and in print!

My current favorite resources for Social Media Marketers are…

• The New Rules of Marketing and PR
• Inbound Marketing
• ProBlogger (Especially 31 days to a better blog)
• Made to Stick (not about social media, but about sticky messages– a must for any marketer!)
• Marketing Artfully

Check out these resources and if you’re interested, join me in my quest to be a free agent in the social media marketing world!

Job hunting doesn't have to be all work– add some play!

Job hunting in a recession/times of economic turbulence/crisis is stressful. If I had a solution to finding a job, I probably wouldn’t be writing this in the middle of the day on a Thursday. However, I have found a few ways to ease the pain of the job hunting process.

There are millions of jobless college graduates and/or graduate students and I’m sure you know a few. Instead of stressing and sulking and basking in the misery that is the job market on your own, get together and make the job hunt a party. Even better– set up a job hunt night. Bring some snacks, but lay off the adult beverages. No matter what you think, you don’t write a better cover letter after a few glasses of sangria.

Lately I’ve been discovering some job search methods that, when added to the job hunting party with friends, can really reduce the stress associated with trying to launch your career in these jobless times.

1. Set up alerts. Tell Indeed.com (if you have a website that’s better than indeed, please share it in the comments, because I need to know) to send you alerts when new jobs are listed that fit your career keywords and that are, of course, in your area. Even if you only look for a job once a week, having those emails in your inbox is always a great starting point!

2. Proof read. I am guiltier than guilty could ever be of speeding to get those applications out. I have forgotten to change dates on cover letters and I’ve made even more tragic mistakes on job applications, because I’m a big picture person. I like to see the final product and then go back and fix the mistakes. This is where having a friend who pays attention to detail comes in handy!

3. Sharing is caring. When you come across a job posting that a jobless friend might qualify for, share the love! When you meet someone who works in an industry that’s of interest (to you or to a friend!) make friends with that person. If you are thinking of ways to make other people’s job searches easier, other people will think of you when they come across jobs and people in your industry. Work that karma!

4. Be innovative. to take away from the stress of every day life (and job hunting) a good friend of mine and I started a blog where we write about the finer things in life. You never know when your distractions could turn into an experiment in entrepreneurship.

5. Optimism, my dear friend. Surround yourself not only with friends who are looking for jobs, but with friends who make you feel good (and make sure that you’re making them feel good)! The job hunt only gets more stressful as it continues, so making sure that you’re in optimistic company will definitely help you survive.

Cons of going back to school during a recession/economic crisis/whatever you’d like to call it

• It’s more difficult to get a loan, especially if you will have to take out private loans
• Interest rates are out of control
• If you’re collecting unemployment, the government has a great deal of control over how many classes you can take and what time you can go to class…if you don’t tell them about it, you might end with without your unemployment compensation benefits

Pros of going back to school

• Economic crisis is temporary…your education is not (EduDegree)
• It will give you a competitive edge when the job market does bounce back
• It may be the only time that you will have the time and/or motivation to pursue higher education

My Take

If you wouldn’t go back to school under normal circumstances, you shouldn’t do it now. Once you have your undergraduate degree, higher education should be something your pursue because you enjoy it, because you’re passionate about it and because you have a genuine desire to learn. It’s a waste of your time and money if you’re only there to try and advance your career. Having a competitive edge means more than just having a degree, it means having an understanding of an industry and a passion for it. Sooner or later the employer who hired you for your graduate degree will catch on.

In the end, the pros and the cons don’t matter. If you are passionate about an industry and excited about learning, then graduate school is for you, regardless of the economic situation. It’s a personal decision before it’s an economic decision.

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