Archive for January, 2008
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
You been working as a barista at Starbucks for the past three years and figure it’s just not the career you’d dreamed of. Yeah, the fancy title and the pleasant looking apron are nice, but there must be employment with better perks. So what career choices should you consider? Architect, engineer, or maybe something in medical research?
Whatever your choice, be realistic. If you hate math and don’t want to spend years in college, then the previously mentioned careers are not for you. You need to find something that fits your interest, your lifestyle and your aptitude.
In a Gallup poll of teenagers’ top career choices in 2005, teens overwhelming reported interest in careers with expected high salaries. Doctor, lawyer, architect and engineer were high on the list. Only jobs like teacher and military were not in high paying categories. Too often career choices are based almost entirely on what pays the best.
And even then, we are often wrong about the typical wages for a job. For example, the average pay for an architect is just over $56,000 a year. While the average high school teacher’s wages are nearly $50,000 a year, often with summers off. So there is not a lot of difference between the average wages of an architect and a high school teacher. Of course, wages outside the U.S. will vary.
Being realistic means understanding that the high paying jobs almost always require more education, specialized skills and are often highly competitive. It usually means working long hours, having more responsibility and, therefore, more stress. When considering a career choice, all of these factors must be taken into account.
But probably the most important issues when considering a career change is how well it matches your aptitude. Do you have the temperament, the skills, and the interest to do the job well. Do the job requirements match who you are, what you enjoy, and what satisfies you? It seems that later in life, often during midlife career changes, we begin to look more at how well a job fits our lifestyle rather than how much money we can make.
Is your current career a good match? What factors do you find important in making a career change?
Posted in Career Planning, Employment, Midlife | No Comments »
Friday, January 11th, 2008
If you’re considering starting your own business and need some advice, just ask the next person you see. Everyone has advice on how to start a business. “You can start a business by just using your credit cards.” “You need at least $500,000 to start a successful business.” The advice is as varied and the individuals giving it.
So, what does it really take to start a business? And how do we tell what is myth and what really works? In his guest post on How To Change The World, author and professor Scott Shane offers the Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship. In he article, he corrects myths such as:
- It takes a lot of money to finance a new business.
- Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money.
- Banks don’t lend money to start-ups.
I believe one of the most important myths that Shane addresses is the myth that “most entrepreneurs start businesses in attractive industries.” In his post he points out that many new business startups are in industries with a high percentage of failure. Selecting the right industry is critical to success. And Shane also makes the point that starting a business is difficult and often not very profitable. He claims that “the typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year.” To read the entire article, click here>>>
To get trustworthy information about starting a business, without the myths and speculation, talk to real business owners or organizations that work with new businesses. Two great FREE sources of information are SBA and SCORE. The SBA, or U.S. Small Business Administration, is a branch of the U.S. federal government established to help small businesses succeed. The SBA website is a great source of information. SCORE, actually started by the SBA, is an organization of volunteer business owners and retired executives who provide counseling and advice for those starting a business. Similar resources exist in Australia at business.gov.au and in the U.K. at BusinessLink.
Posted in Jobreprenuer, Self-Employment | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Considering a career change means spending time thinking about the future. What are the possibilities? Which career fits me best? How do I make the change? All this forward thinking can lead to forgetting the past, and those things vital to our success.
Well, there are a few things that we must remember during our midlife change:
Remember the ones you love. During this challenging time for you, don’t forget your family. There is a tendency for us to focus on our own needs and frustrations during midlife. It is all too easy to take family for granted or even ignore that part of our lives. So including the spouse, and even the children is important to how you cope with midlife. They need to know what is happening, so they can be a positive part of your change.
Keep in mind that your spouse may be trying to cope with some of the same feelings. So talk about it. Share your concerns and your desires. Talk to your spouse about how you are dealing with things. My own wife was the first person I talked to, and to my surprise, she was an amazing source of support. I expected to hear concerns about our security and worry about the future. Instead, she supported my desire to change my career and encouraged me to do what was necessary. So, don’t forget family. They are your fans, your support team, and your partners in this venture.
Remember the connections you’ve made. I am referring to all those folks you now know. They can be key to your career change success. Wesley from LifeTwo.com spoke about this in his post, “Book Tip: Never Eat Alone“. He gives a brief review of the book Never Eat Alone which promotes active networking as key to career success. Wesley states, “The fact is that the stronger one’s network of contacts are the easier it will be to transform careers as well as perform in your new field.”
Remember the skills you have. Finally, while looking for a new career, start with what you already know. Consider what you have learned in the first several decades of life and how those talents may lead to a new occupation.
Don’t just focus on your current job skills. What abilities do you have in other areas? What about your hobbies? Could your passion and knowledge of photography lead to a possible career? Sure it could. So take some time to explore the talents you have acquired through the years and research related career possibilities. Don’t consider an entirely new field of work until you have explored all of the interest and talents you already have.
So, have fun considering the future and all its possibilities, but don’t forget where you are. Remember family, friends, and the talents you have. You’ve invested years in these relationships and learning. Now you can use these resources in making your change. So, don’t forget what got you here…it could be just the thing to move you forward.
Posted in Career Planning, Midlife | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
It’s been a while since I updated you on my personal career change efforts. As regular readers know, I’ve chosen the jobrepreneur path; I will keep my current employment while starting a business. A large part of my strategy is to create opportunities for career change through the active development of several different websites. U-Turn Ahead was the first of those websites that I started last November.
In past updates I spoke about the website Listonga.com. I’ve actually stopped development of that site for a couple reasons. First, I am considering changing the platform from a self-designed website created in Dreamweaver to using WordPress. The effort to design a quality website with the minimal skills I have was proving to be too much.
The second reason for delaying work on Listonga is that I wanted to launch another blog that I had been developing. On January 1st I made my first post at SevenActions.com. Seven Actions is a blog about setting goals and taking action to change your life. It, like this blog, is the direct result of things that are occuring in my own life.
So, I now have two blogs in place, another in development, and two websites on the drawing board. I am considering this time a learning experience for me. It is also a test of my commitment and interest in web-based businesses. So far, my interest is not waining.
Posted in Coryan Updates, Jobreprenuer, News | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2008
If you’ve not been a fan of The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, you might be after reading their advice for “Making a Midlife Career Change“. In typical Onion fashion, they peel back the layers of a complicated matter and boil it down to its humorous essentials. Here are my favorite tips from this classic 2001 article:
• If you are married and have children, it may prove difficult to change careers while maintaining financial stability. Consider moving across the country in the middle of the night and assuming a new identity.
• Why not sink your life savings into self-publishing a book of essays about your reflections on aging? There’s a gold mine for ya.
• Know what you would be good at? Writing movies. After all, you watch a ton of them, and it’s just thinking up stuff for people to say.
For more, uh, career advice, read the rest of the article at TheOnion.com.
Posted in Humor | No Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
On Friday, Monster.com, the online employment company announced the purchase of Affinity Labs. Based in San Francisco, Affinity Labs began less than two years ago operating industry specific websites. Each website provides an online community for social and professional networking, job searching, information and resources. The purchase will cost Monster $61 million.
Monster’s chairman and CEO, Sal Iannuzzi stated,
“Our investment in Affinity provides Monster with an efficient vehicle for developing future revenue streams in vibrant career fields while permitting us to actively invest in product, technology, and brand support in our core business. We believe Affinity’s model complements the core Monster business and significantly enhances our presence in key verticals within the online vocational and networking market.”
This move by Monster into the social networking arena follows a trend in Internet development. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Konnects provide online connections, but each Affinity Labs site narrowed the industry focus and expanded the services and resources.
Here is a list of the existing Affinity Labs communities. They are worth checking out:
PoliceLink - law enforcement
NursingLink - nursing
TheApple - education
FireLink - fire and rescue
ArtBistro - artist community
GovCentral - public sector
TechCommunity - IT professionals
IndiaOn - Indian professionals working in US
WomenCo - Professional women
I believe this is a trend from the traditional employment website with top-down information sharing to a more horizontal resource for career development. I suspect we will see Monster develop similar sites for other communities in the near future.
Posted in Career Planning, News, Professional Development | No Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Good news! I’ve found nearly all of the posts from 2007 that were lost is the Great Database Debacle. I was searching the Internet for any sources that might have copies of my old posts, and I remembered that Google will often cache websites that they crawl. Sure enough, I checked Google and found nearly all of my webpages cached. With a little cut and paste, I was able to recover nearly all of my original posts. There are probably only a half dozen I could not find.
So, over the next day or two I will be entering in all of the old posts. However, I may not be able to recover all of the comments. Thanks Google, you made one blogger really happy!
[Editor’s Note: All of the recovered posts have been added to the site. However, nearly a dozen previous posts were not found. I believe I will be able to recovered some additional comments that were salvaged from my database backup. Those should be added in the next couple days.]
[Update (Jan. 21, 2008): All posts have been fully recovered from a backup that I did not even remember having. Life is grand!]
Posted in U-Turn Ahead News | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
If you are considering a career change, what are your best options? Given the ever-changing job market, it is important to know what careers are hot, and which are not. Will the job you are considering be needed in ten years? Are there too many qualified applicants vying for two few positions?
It’s important to do your research and know the potential for the career you are considering. A couple weeks ago, U.S. News and World Report published it’s second annual list of Best Careers. Criteria for making the list of 31 included job satisfaction, training difficulty, pay, prestige and job market outlook. The only job to score top marks in each of these categories was fundraiser. The five highest paying jobs with an “A” in satisfaction were:
- Higher Education Administrator ($103,000 national annual median)
- Optometrist ($99,700)
- Usability/User Experience Specialist ($98,800)
- Systems Analyst ($91,000)
- Professor ($85,300)
Last year when U.S. News first published the list of Best Careers, the emphasis was on jobs that required a college degree. However, Marty Nemko of U.S. News reports that this years list includes four entries that do not require a college education. In fact, Marty’s accompanying article, Best Careers for a Changing Job Landscape suggests that college grads may want to consider one of these blue-collar careers. These careers include firefighter, locksmith and hairstylist.
While preparing their report, U.S. News identified a dozen exciting careers that show great promise, but are too new to predict the long term outlook. The “Ahead of the Curve” article includes interesting careers in health care such as wellness coach and patient advocates. The emerging careers are also influenced by current events with positions in emergency planning and green-collar consulting resulting from issues of terrorism and the environment. U.S. News included a list of the 13 most overrated careers that included chefs, architects, and small business-owners.
If you are researching a possible career choice, be sure to visit U.S. News today. Each top career has a link to a well researched description that includes median pay, training requirements, smart specialties, and links to other resources. Click here for access to all of the mentioned lists and articles.
Posted in Career Planning, Employment, Self-Employment | 3 Comments »
Friday, January 4th, 2008
[Editor’s Note: This post has been edited from the original. The names have been changed (or deleted) to protect the guilty.]
Okay, the blog was down for nearly 48 hours. So Coryan, what happened? In a nutshell, hosting problems (with a sprinkle of database errors and other challenges). So, after a very frustrating 30+ hours of work to get the site back up, I thought it would be good to present the unheralded benefits of blogging:
1. Learning how to use redial on your phone…to call tech support 30 times in one day. (You think I’m joking?) Tech support, a job for individuals who failed the waterboarding exam at Interrogation School.
2. Adding to the already useless acroynms you toss into conversations to sound important (php, html, pop3 and my new favorite SQL). OMG, like Internet users don’t know how to spell out an entire word, IMHO.
3. Learning financial lessons like - the “low cost” provider is rarely the best provider. “What do you mean a $150 to reinstall a 71 kb database? BlueHost.com does it for FREE.”
4. Finding new friends on support forums who are willing to help you solve a problem, even if it means an hour or two of work on their part (a real thanks to CptCANUCK and Moderator Thur at BloggerForum.com).
5. Discovering the Internet ghost towns - forums where you can post a question, get visits from ghosts, but never get a response (except a know-it-all teen who tells you that you posted in the wrong forum, WHICH I DIDN’T you voice-cracking pubescent fool.) Here’s an idea, if you want your forum to work, try to see that everyone gets a response, even if it’s, “Sorry, no one on this forum is intelligent enough to answer that question, or offer suggestions, or even say how sorry we are that you are having a problem.”
6. Saving yourself a trip to the therapist. Just writing this post provided me more relieve than a visit to the therapist (who only charges $100 an hour, not $150 for 10-minute task like some hosting providers).
So, what do you find as unexpected benefits of blogging? Leave us a comment.
Posted in U-Turn Ahead News | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
It seems that every blogger I know is posting their blogging goals for 2008. Well, I’m not one to break tradition. But before I give you the goals for 2008, I want to give you a brief history of the blog and the final numbers for 2007. BTW, if you are not a numbers person (like me), you can stop reading after the history:
History of U-Turn Ahead:
- October 21, 2007 - I decide to start work on some Internet projects as a second source of income. One idea is for a blog about making a career change.
- November 11, 2007 - I purchase the domains uturnahead.com and u-turnahead.com.
- November 12 ,2007 - I register for a Blogger account, create a blog in about an hour and publish my first post at uturnahead.blogspot.com.
- November 13, 2007 - I placed Google Ads on the U-Turn blog.
- November 14, 2007 - I made my first penny (29 cents to be exact) from the blog. Okay, it was a mis-click that I made, but an honest mistake. Sorry Google.
- December 5-7, 2007 - After averaging only 3 visitors a day (and those still include my own visits!), I have an unexpected three day spike of 22, 65 and 36 daily visitors. Nearly all were referred from Google Blogger, so I think my site was in the rotation of random site visits. Oh, on December 5th I finally got Google Analytics to stop counting the visits I made to the blog.
- December 18, 2007 - I begin work on moving the blog over to the UTurnAhead.com domain. I complete the “five minute install” of WordPress in just under three hours due to multiple problems with my GoDaddy hosting setup.
- December 23, 2007 - I begin posting U-Turn content on the Blogger page and the new domain. I expect to do this for a couple weeks.
- December 25, 2007 - A couple weeks, a couple days, what’s the difference? I make my last post on Blogger and inform the readers (average of 4 a day) that the blog has officially moved to UTurnAhead.com.
- December 29, 2007 - I begin submitting my blogs to several online social networks and I see a tremendous increase in readership! I finish the last three days of 2007 with daily visits of 150, 55 and 185. I am now averaging 60 unique visitors a day since moving to my own domain. That’s a 1500% increase in one week.
Final Stats for 2007 (with 2008 goals in parenthesis):
Visitors: 638 (60,000)
Subscribers: 7 (900)
Revenue: $3.28 ($2,500.00)
Technorati Authorities: 2 (200)
Technorati Rank: 2,910,025 (<20,000)
Google PageRank: N/A (5/10 or better)
Google Search Rank for “midlife career change”: >200 (<20)
% Visitors Subscribing: 1.10% (1.50%)
Average Post Per Day: .65 (1 a day)
FINAL GOAL: Improve quality of career change content!
So, what do you think? Any comments on the Technorati and Google goals? Those were hard to determine. Well, as you can see, I have my work cut out for me. Of course, I only had the blog up for seven weeks in 2007, so don’t let the huge increases fool you. I will let you know how I am doing throughout the year.
Posted in U-Turn Ahead News | 2 Comments »
