Career Center Blog | How to transition from co-worker to manager

One of the more difficult career situations I've coached people through -- and been through myself -- is being promoted from within a department to become the manager of that group. As one client found out, going from a peer

Career Center Blog | Coming home whole: PTSD doesn't have to end a career

A few weeks ago, President Obama mentioned in his State of the Union speech that, through the course of this year, 34,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan will be brought back home as part of an overall strategy to remove all

Career Center Blog | Dreaming of being a writer? Here's how to get started

Are you sitting at work thinking about your childhood dream of becoming a writer? Learn how to transition from working 9 to 5 to becoming a published author with these tips from award-winning author Pam Binder. Pam is a Seattleite

Career Center Blog | When life gives you lemons, squeeze them into your resume

The current employment climate can create many unlikely scenarios on the job market. As candidates vie for a shrinking number of positions, they get increasingly creative in their tactics with hiring managers. For instance, there's the story of Greg Drevenstedt,

Career Center Blog | First be good at what you do and the passion will follow

Follow your dreams? Just child's play. Discover your true calling? An impossible fantasy. Work your way up the company ladder? Sucker! While never stated quite this bluntly, these are some of the harsh admonitions that author Cal Newport aims at

Career Center Blog | Perennial 'Parachute' still guides job seekers at 42

Few mass-produced books have shorter lifespans than guidebooks. Whether the subject is world travel, local restaurants or advice on how to find a good job, most of these manuals can help you immediately, but they become obsolete within months of

Career Center Blog | Pivoting your way to career change

If you're like most job seekers, chances are you're looking for positions similar to those you've held within companies and industries you're already highly familiar with. If you're contemplating a career change, however, it might require some significantly different thinking

Career Center Blog | Will the long-term unemployed soon get a rescue platform?

Earlier this year, while going about their usual business of investigating the nation's power brokers and exposing corruption wherever they find it, the journalists on the CBS TV news magazine "60 Minutes" told one of the more uplifting stories to

Career Center Blog | Avoiding the pitfalls of merging freelance and full-time work

During your search for a new job, have you ever had the urge to drop it all and just start your own business? After filling out endless applications, micromanaging your ever-changing resume and practicing your elevator speech into the wee

Career Center Blog | Preparing vets for the bumpy transition to civilian job search

If the roaring hydroplanes and the screaming F/A-18 Hornets overhead weren't enough to remind you, we just enjoyed another Seattle Seafair this weekend. While strolling on the waterfront past the mighty U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships, I couldn't help

Career Center Blog | Informational interviewing: how, and what, to ask

For years, colleges and career counselors have suggested to job seekers (especially those changing careers and/or just entering the workforce) that a key step in their efforts should be to reach out to a handful of appropriate local professionals and

Career Center Blog | 'Not Working' reflects the adaptability of today's workforce

A woman finds out she is being laid off from her bank job via email attachment after 22 years of service. A man shows up one morning at his office to find a padlock on the front door and all

Career Center Blog | Personal brand plus consulting: a recipe for flex success

The buzz on the parenting and work/life balance front over the past couple weeks has been about whether working women can "have it all." A provocative essay in the most recent issue of The Atlantic magazine written by former State

Career Center Blog | Moving on: How to bounce back from career setbacks

Getting laid off is a sad fact of life, especially in the last five years following the global financial meltdown. Most of us manage to bounce back by redefining our goals, establishing a networking strategy and settling into a job

Career Center Blog | Start me up: 5 tips for budding entrepreneurs

For those with an entrepreneurial spirit who are nevertheless stuck in the job-search loop for extended periods, the urge to strike out on their own has been stoked in recent weeks by anecdotal reports of a resurgent venture capital market.

Career Center Blog | Advantage employee: Worker confidence on the rise

Seattle's current run of consecutive outstandingly beautiful weekends is not the only sunny news to hit the Puget Sound region in recent weeks. As the afternoons grow longer and the temperatures get warmer, there appears to be a gradual and

Career Center Blog | Is 2012 your year to become an entrepreneur?

Tired of the 9-to-5 slog? Want to be your own boss and pursue only what you are most passionate about? This could be your year. 2012 will be the year of the entrepreneur, predicted Time magazine. With technology offering low-overhead

Career Center Blog | When it comes to career options, choices abound

Data steward. Customer advocate. Personalization specialist. Testimonial specialist. Lifecycle solutions business analyst. Incentive design analyst. Suitability review associate. Enterprise talent acquisition coordinator. Before the turn of the millennium, it seemed as if most professionals could be classified in terms of

Career Center Blog | Brainstorming new career options: my favorite trick

In the old days -- I mean the REALLY old days -- it probably wasn't all that complicated to figure out what to be when you grew up. You were likely either born into a family profession, such as farming,

Career Center Blog | Social media boot camp: Help for your digital self

Last week I wrote about the necessity of face-to-face networking, and about how there's a methodical way to go about making connections that could land you a job without being annoying or pushy. We can sing the praises of in-person

Career Center Blog | Making the 'leap' to a career that you love

As calendar events go, Leap Day has always been a bit of an afterthought. It was tacked on to our calendar by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. to make up for lost time when it was noted that a year

Career Center Blog | When not in Rome: Long-distance job search tips

A little more than 15 years ago, I moved out of my Washington, D.C., apartment, packed most of my worldly possessions into an overloaded Nissan and drove off like Tom Joad to my new future in Seattle. Fortunately, I had

Career Center Blog | Time running out on ESD's entrepreneurial training program?

For many of the long-time unemployed, the idea of starting and running their own business is a tantalizing dream of self-reliance. (Wouldn't you love to be your own boss this week and declare your own snow days?) Some of these

Career Center Blog | The one-word key to rapid career change

It should come as no secret that many Americans are actively thinking about changing careers -- either because they've fallen out of love with their current career path after many years, or for the more practical reason of trying

Career Center Blog | Who should pay to update your skills? You or your employer?

Last week, NWjobs blogger Matt Youngquist wrote about the skills gap -- the increasing divide between the qualifications companies seek and those job hunters actually possess. According to a new study from global management consulting company Accenture, 55 percent of

Career Center Blog | Blazing a more flexible career path for women

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a report from LinkedIn declaring that only about 19 percent of 1,000 professional women surveyed in the United States said they had been "mentored" in their careers. To me, the tone of the

Career Center Blog | Free job-skills training program extended

In this era of draconian budget cuts and endless belt-tightening, it's good to finally see that reason has prevailed. One of the Employment Security Department's (ESD) best bargains -- the free Microsoft e-learning courses offered through WorkSource -- has been

Career Center Blog | How professional envy can help your career

  We're told not to get hung up coveting the careers of those more successful than us, to stop getting bogged down by what we don't have and focus on building up what we do. However, new research on envy shows

Career Center Blog | New vacancies often require new training

Last week, a small ray of hope shined down on the bleak local job landscape, like a Seattle sunbreak on a cloudy spring day. The Employment Security Department's twice-yearly Job-Vacancy Survey was released, showing that spring 2011 job vacancies were

Career Center Blog | Declaring your independence via freelancing

This holiday weekend, while we celebrate our nation's 235th birthday, I thought it would be an appropriate time to discuss other forms of independence -- namely the severing of ties with an employer and the launch of a new career

Career Center Blog | Taking your new career for a 'test drive'

One of the many repercussions of the Great Recession in the overall job market has been a rapid reshuffling of workers in newly defined roles. For instance, the recent slow thaw of the job market is giving a glimmer of

Career Center Blog | Networking events to heat up Seattle's frozen spring

In case you haven't noticed it while you were poring over your weekly job-search to-do lists, it's been bloody cold outside this month. (Saturday was a nice little mirage, yes, but we're back in the usual April soup for the

Career Center Blog | Knowing when to shift gears in your job search

As the economy continues to stagnate, it has become an almost too-convenient excuse for people to give up on their job searches. Employment experts often say that unemployment rates don't reflect the true number of people who have been searching

Career Center Blog | Exploring new paths at the 2011 career crossroads

The new year is still new enough that almost anything seems possible. After a dreary few years, there seems to be hope that the local job market may soon begin to show sustainable growth. Some economists are saying that 2011

Career Center Blog | Jump start your career search in 2011

Are you ready to take advantage of New Year's energy to find rewarding employment? Read the tips below to get a jump-start on the competition and find meaningful work. Look inside first. You don't want just any job, do you?

Career Center Blog | Setting your course for a jobs recovery in 2011

With the midterm election looming, there has been a disproportionate amount of focus on the past in recent weeks. The relentless and misleading campaign ads both for and against Patty Murray and Dino Rossi have saturated the airwaves with endless

Career Center Blog | These October networking events are a 'fall classic'

Hey job seekers! I'm away this weekend celebrating my wedding anniversary down on the Oregon Coast. But I'm not one to leave my readers hanging as the fall networking seasons gets into full swing. The first half of October is

Career Center Blog | A headhunter's advice on changing, advancing careers

Since well before the Obama campaign co-opted it in 2008, "change" has been the watchword in the employment arena. Most workers will change not only their jobs several times over their lifetimes but also their careers, either by choice or

Career Center Blog | Plugging into demand for health care IT jobs

It's no secret that health care is one of the few growth areas for job seekers, both locally and nationwide. For decades, the health care industry has gone through chronic and well-documented shortages in nursing and in physical therapy personnel.

Career Center Blog | Who's Hiring? MicroGreen Polymers

Over the last few weeks, I've written about economic indicators pointing toward a coming surge in high-tech jobs and growth in the construction and manufacturing sectors. While most of these reports talked about statewide job increases, they were light on

Career Center Blog | How your resume can help you change careers

One of the trickier aspects of our current Great Recession economy is that it has forced many people to consider changing careers to find better job prospects. For some, this can be exhilarating, for others, it's terrifying; most experience a