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A job interview is usually the time when an employer gets to know the job candidate’s personality to see if he’s the right fit for the job. But what if you could choose a job that’s the right fit for your personality? Are you an introvert or extrovert?
To find out, take this test: http://funtestiq.com/personality/personalitytest39.shtml
Now that you know who you are (based on taking a 20 question test) you see that extroverts tend to be enthusiastic, talkative, assertive and gregarious, introverts tend to be more reserved and less outspoken in groups. Though these characteristics aren’t the only factors in choosing a job, it can help to know what kind of role you could be best suited for.
When it comes to salary, the two personality types are on equal footing: Both extroverts and introverts were almost equally likely to earn six figures.
Want to know what job may be right for you? If you’re outgoing or social, consider the types of roles to which extroverts are drawn. Or, if you tend to be more withdrawn or reserved, check out the positions that introverts tend to choose.
READ MORE
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/chi-introvert-extrovert-jobs-20120920,0,1493727.story
“Pay that $17.65 you owe us or GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” Debt collectors and district attorneys are teaming up to bully bad-check writers into paying their debt.
In a practice that has spread to more than 300 prosecutors’ offices, collection companies are sending signed letters on D.A. letterhead that threaten jail time unless the check writers settle up and pay for a “financial accountability” class, reported the New York Times.
In the arrangement between debt collectors and district attorneys, the agencies secure their share plus the class fee and the district attorneys get paid by the agencies or receive a share of the money collected, reported the Times.
Above the Law pointed out the potential conundrum of threatening someone with imprisonment on prosecutor letterhead before a lawyer has even considered the case. District attorneys explained to the Times that the letters reduce their caseload, and that only those who ignore merchant warnings are contacted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/17/debt-collectors-threaten-_n_1891030.html?utm_hp_ref=business#slide=1520323
What’s new in the hiring-and-firing world? Dr. John Sullivan has discovered interesting answers in articles appearing on ERE.net, the top online hangout for recruiting professionals.
Dr. Sullivan, well known in the human resource career field, is a management professor at San Francisco State University. Here are some creative ways companies are going about recruiting talent and weeding out the bad ones.
TECH SIMULATIONS. How a candidate would handle a real problem at work can be evaluated through simulations of the problem. Accounting giant KPMG has developed an electronic management simulation that allows the company to assess second-round candidates on their ability to solve real problems they would face if hired.
UNLIMITED VACATION POLICIES. Netflix and several startups have begun to offer employees unlimited amounts of vacation and sick leave. The bold approach treats employees like mature adults who know how to manage how much time they spend away from work. Management’s rationale: By offering compelling work and performance-based pay, the positive incentives may actually drive employees to work more hours.
LIMITED-TERM EMPLOYEE CONTRACTS. In Atlantic City, N.J., Revel casino and hotel required many new hires who were to interact with customers to sign employment contracts with a limit of four to five years. After the contract expires, an employee must formally reapply to be hired again. The rationale: Employees dealing with the public are more likely to remain productive and customer-friendly without a guarantee of job security.
Be prepared for anything while searching for a job. You just may encounter one of these practices in the company you aspire to join.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/sns-201208291530–tms–careersntp–h-a20120902-20120902,0,456706.column
Ever evolving, our world and how we earn money to live in it constantly changes, as does technology. This constant movement of ideas and inventions opens the door for us to create new ways to gather cash and stay ahead of the game.
Here are some fresh potential jobs that may be in demand in the next 10 years. The one common thread with them all is “technological know-how”. Along with the new, predictions of what related jobs might be replaced also are given.
Market researcher > Predictive data analyst
Every minute YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, and Google receives 2 million search queries, according to the business analytics company Domo. As Big Data gets even bigger, fewer people will be needed to collect information, and more people will be needed to analyze and discover the value stored within these billions of terabytes.
Construction foreman > Smart engineer
Bricks and mortar aren’t what they used to be. Construction represents more than $7 trillion of the world’s economic output, and it’s expected to grow to $12 trillion by 2020, as emerging markets bulge in China, India, Latin America and the Middle East. And new transportation systems — from driverless cars to maglev trains — require infrastructure to be updated and reinvented. In developed countries, creaking urban centers will be retrofitted — or replaced — with new, sustainable technologies and materials.
As of today, nobody has developed a way to time travel, so I wouldn’t hold out hopes of being on hand to maintain or repair those machines. In OUR lifetime, perhaps not…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/chi-jobs-future-20120828,0,6641069.story
Peter Griffin doesn’t have such a bad gig being a toy designer. In fact, the average salary for one of these jobs is around $53,000. Not bad, not bad at all.
Huffington Post headed to their favorite salary-searching websites (like Glassdoor.com) in search of unusual jobs with fat paychecks. Yep, they exist. And there are many more than you may think.
Some of these don’t require a college degree. Curious? Ready for a career change?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/high-paying-jobs-that-will-surprise-you_n_1818374.html?ir=Small+Business#slide=more245986
You don’t have to be a celebrity to consider yourself a brand. In fact, no matter how low-profile your job, say career experts, it’s increasingly essential to assume the role of CEO not just of your career, but of your life. You can call this enterprise “Me, Inc.”
“In today’s job market, being CEO of your own career is a necessity,” says Jay Scherer, managing partner at BPI Group, a Chicago-based human resources and management consulting management firm. “Just as a startup would do, every professional should begin to build their brand by identifying their goals and defining what makes them unique in the market. Once you define what you want to achieve, you can build a path with specific steps to succeed.”
There are a couple of “bottom lines” to keep in mind. The first bottom line for everyone’s career is job security and financial stability. The second bottom line is how you make a difference in people’s lives. “Get crystal clear on who you are and what game you are here to play. What do you stand for? Once you know that, create strategies and systems as to how can you put that stance into action in the world and use it to attract and create the opportunities you want,” Powers advises. “And then, just like any other brand, walk that talk. Make sure it is clear who you are and what you stand for at every touch point in your life.”
When you shift mentally and emotionally into being the CEO of your life, you consciously take control.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/chi-personal-brand-20120818,0,7320619.story
Tuition has been paid. The first installment at least. All items to ensure a successful semester have been acquired. But wait, that nasty expense of TEXTBOOKS has yet to dealt with.
The average full-time student at a private four-year college spent $1,213 on textbooks and course materials for the 2011-12 academic year, a 3% increase from the previous year, according to The College Board, a nonprofit that tracks college costs.
But experts say college students can snap up all their required reading without sapping their Friday night funds. It may just take some planning and hustle. Less-expensive rental and e-book options have broadened. Apple, for example, launched its new e-textbooks platform in January, and the National Association of College Stores says all of its 3,000 member stores will have their own rental programs this semester, up from 1,500 in 2010. Either renting a title or getting it as an e-book could cut each textbook price in half — or better — as booksellers compete.
Kelli B. Grant of Smartmoney.com has several money saving tips for getting the best deals on your educational materials. If you don’t have excessive money to burn, READ HERE for how to save anywhere from 5% to 80% on your learning materials.
http://www.smartmoney.com/spend/deal-of-the-day/subtracting-college-textbook-costs-1344293184259/
In a perfect world, we’d all put away 15 percent of our salaries annually for retirement as soon as we hit our early 20s. Saving that much so early would put us in good shape financially by the time we turn 65, experts say.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. So what is a struggling 20-something supposed to do in a tough job market and growing student-loan balances, among other hurdles, in order to save money? Maria Bruno, a senior investment analyst in Vanguard’s investment counseling and research group offered these insights:
Save something, anything
Even if you get a full-time job out of school, saving for retirement can be a challenge because you have demands on your paycheck, from building up an emergency savings fund to paying rent.
“We talk about saving 15 percent as a good solid benchmark,” Bruno said. “But if you can’t afford to do that right away, the next best thing is to put together a plan for how you can increase your savings rate.” Save ANYTHING, and increase that percentage by one point each year. So, if you can afford to put aside 5 percent now, you’d save 6 percent to 7 percent next year, 8 percent to 9 percent the following year, and so on.
Get help from tax credits
If putting away 5 percent of your income is a stretch, you might be able to take advantage of certain tax breaks to make contributions more affordable.
Contributions to a 401(k) plan or other employer-provided retirement plan are made before tax. So, if you earn $35,000 per year and save 5 percent, you would contribute $67 per paycheck (if you’re paid every other week), but because you save on taxes, take-home pay is reduced by only $57. (If you pay state income taxes, the benefit would be even greater.)
You can also open your own Individual Retirement Account (IRA). There are options out there, the important thing to remember is to put away something, anything. Retirement will be here before you know it.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/sc-cons-0726-started-20120727,0,6321353.story
Have you ever been asked that vague question on a job interview, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
You know most of the reasons why the question is so bad: It begs a lame joke (“When, Ms. Manager, do you think you will be moving on?”), or brown-nosing (“I hope to be well along my career within this fine company”) and it assumes that you are going to indeed like working at “this fine company” and that they are going to enjoy having you.
The answer to that question might be relevant if the world were static and things were guaranteed not to change.
If five years ago you asked people who worked in mortgage banking, real estate, or journalism or at Blockbuster what they were expecting to be doing in 2012, we guarantee you the answer isn’t what they are doing now.
So is career planning is waste of time? Yes, much of the time it is, at least as it is typically taught.
Let’s deal with the exceptions first. If you want to work in an industry which is fairly predictable—say nursing — then plan away. The courses you need to take to gain an entry position are well known and so is the career path and the things you need to do to advance. So, simply figure out where you actually want to be in five years, and work backwards, just like all the career planning manuals tell you.
But increasingly, the world is not this predictable. And it is in settings of high uncertainty where traditional career planning is both a waste of time and potentially dangerous as all those Blockbuster managers learned the hard way. A career plan can lead you into a false sense of confidence, where you fail to see opportunities as they arise and or miss (or discount) major changes in the industry where you planning to succeed.
So then, what to do. What to do. Try this:
Instead of envisioning the perfect job and planning out the perfect path to get there, begin with a direction, based on a real desire, and complement that with a strategy to discover and create opportunities consistent with what you want you want to do.
In an uncertain world you can’t even come close to saying what a specific job might be, but you can say what’s valuable and important to you. Is it working in a specific industry?Managing people or not? Work-life balance? The answers will point you in productive directions.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/plus/chi-forbes-why-career-plans-are-dangerous-20120720,0,3940199.story
Chances are good that you own at least one piece of Under Armour. That is, if you move off the couch once in awhile to get the endorphins flowing. Under Armour’s success has been reliant on the ability to constantly innovate and differentiate itself from the bigger boys in the industry.
So, it keeps the place where it develops new products — dubbed the Under Armour “Innovation Lab” — fortified.
It is located “somewhere” in Baltimore. The unmarked high security lab sits in the midst of a rather gritty headquarters campus whose next door neighbor is a steam-spewing Domino sugar refinery.
The lab isn’t just the heart of the athletic performance wear maker. It’s also the soul. This super-secret lab is where shirts, shorts and running shoes go from concept to must-have item. Only 20 of the 5,000 employees are allowed into the lab, which is protected by a “vault-like” door, according to USA Today.
Knowing how top secret this lab is REALLY makes me want to see it for myself. If I dressed incognito in all pink Under Armour, including gloves and sunglasses, minded my own business and behaved as if I belonged there, would I be able to sneak into the lair, I mean lab, behind one of the chosen 20?
http://www.businessinsider.com/under-armour-has-a-super-secret-lab-with-a-scanner-that-reads-the-veins-on-your-hand-2012-7
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