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Level Up Your Soft Skills to Grow Your Career

March 5th, 2020

A colleague recently asked about increasing soft skills, including resources and how to go about it. Here is my answer and the link to the article she wrote from it.

Lezlie, thanks for asking about leveling up soft skills.  Blessedly, there are tremendous free and low-cost options for people to obtain professional development online and in-person.  Typically, that in-person training is more at corporate, community college, and community center/library level, whereas online comes from multiple sources, including LinkedIn.  However, individuals must be careful in thinking that any course can transmit into soft skills immediately.  Mentorship is also incredibly valuable.  From interpersonal communication, public speaking, conflict management, and emotional intelligence, to trend awareness, situational awareness, and time management, all of these skills are developed over time and with practice.  This means practicing with others, using it in your daily interactions and approaches in your workplace and personal life, and realizing you can’t work on 10 of these simultaneously.  Just like learning a new language, it is with use that you gain proficiency.  Read about them, take courses in them, and use them.  As a couple of skills start to become more routine to you, add another.  Also, remember that others come equipped with certain skills you don’t have and vice versa, so learn from them.   

https://www.resumelezlie.com/how-to-dominate-your-career-change-with-soft-skills/

Karen Silins is a multi-certified, award winning resume writer, career, business and personal branding coach working with individuals and small businesses. After graduating with degrees in education and vocal performance, she made her own career transition into the Human Resources realm. Karen left Human Resources to become an entrepreneur and help jobseekers, executives and fellow entrepreneurs achieve their goals. She keeps current regarding trends in the resume writing, coaching, HR, small business and marketing industries by working daily with individual clients on resume development and career coaching, executive/career management coaching, consulting for small businesses in business plan development, marketing, blogging, hiring and overall HR processes, and providing 20-50+ seminars and workshops annually to a variety of organizations in the greater Kansas City area. She can be reached via her website at www.careerandresume.com.

Categories Career Coaching, Career Management, Careers, Job Search, Personal Branding
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View Challenges as Opportunities!

November 30th, 2019
View Challenges as Opportunities

Challenges and mistakes are opportunities for learning.  Instead of seeing an issue, error or new software as a pain, see it as learning – an ability to expand your mind, obtain a new skill, or to ensure you don’t make the same mistake a second time.  Your resistance is usually fear of the unknown, or that people will know you were inaccurate or made a misstep.  Welcome to everyone’s life, as we all make mistakes and are called on to learn new things. 

Start small, and chunk your learning into short blocks of time, creating far less stress and far more success.  That seemingly unending maze of difficulty will become shorter and easier to tackle. Embrace anything learning/training as a chance to expand your abilities, career and life, and watch your fear disappear.

Categories Business Coaching, Career Coaching, Career Management, Career Transition, Inspiration, Job Search, Life Coaching
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Communication, Communication, Communication!

November 4th, 2016

Communication, Communication, Communication

In real estate it’s all about one thing:  location, location, location.  In the ever changing business environment however, the mantra should be:  communication, communication, communication.  Those frequent business changes also necessitate flexibility in how we communicate to customers, peers, management, suppliers, and especially to our own workforce.

For those of you who are closer to the Gen-X, Baby Boomer, and Depression Era generations, we remember when communication essentially came in only three ways – written/print, phone, or in-person.  Now we have mobile/digital devices, texting and texting language, increased job jargon (just think of IT), faxes (yes, those are still used), email, IM, social media, blogs, online forums, and of course, traditional written/print, phone, or in-person.

Communication, Communication, Communication

Excellence in communication skills is a must at all levels.  We can no longer accept change-paralysis in the exposure and mastery of new devices, communication methods, and sometimes the new words and acronyms that come with a job.  Our employees should feel comfortable, and knowledgeable in their business interactions, and that means providing more training to our staff.

Every organization should either hold classes internally or send management and employees to external training to ensure their workforce has instruction in, and builds confidence in business communication skills.  Training should include courses in business writing, digital device utilization, how to write an effective email, job-related lingo, business-related text language and abbreviations, and how to maintain professionalism in business and personal social media and online forum postings.

 

Communication, Communication, Communication

Yes, I said personal and professional.  Having the discernment as to the suitability of language used in both professional and personal postings has led to many an excellent personal brand and career advancement.  When that judgment has been absent, many a career and brand have been seriously injured or destroyed.

Communication, Communication, Communication

Unfortunately many schools aren’t really teaching the difference between casual language and the more formal business language utilized in corporate America.  Awareness and appropriateness of communication can also be lacking, particularly when it comes to abbreviated messaging in texts, IM’s and social media posts.  With so much potential for misunderstanding and broken internal and external business relationships, it is up to companies to ensure their workforce recognizes the difference and uses the language of work, in all of their professional interactions.

From problem solving and conflict management to traversing everyday business dealings, good communication skills are vital for every employee.  Let’s make sure our employees and management are trained properly for both organizational and personal benefit!

 

Karen Silins is a multi-certified, award winning resume writer, career, business and personal branding coach working with individuals and small businesses.  After graduating with degrees in education and vocal performance, she made her own career transition into the Human Resources realm.  Karen left Human Resources to become an entrepreneur and help jobseekers and fellow entrepreneurs achieve their goals.  She keeps current regarding trends in the resume writing, coaching, HR, small business and marketing industries by working daily with individual clients on resume development and career coaching, consulting for small businesses in business plan development, marketing, blogging, hiring and overall HR processes, and providing 50-70+ seminars and workshops annually to a variety of organizations in the greater Kansas City area.  She can be reached via her website at www.careerandresume.com.

Categories Business Coaching, Career Management, Human Resources, Personal Branding
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Sites You Should Be Using

December 17th, 2012

Sites You Should Be Using

Find a Job

I am often asked by clients, seminar and workshop attendees and colleagues to recommend websites to bolster professional development, career and networking/business opportunities.  With the myriad of sites available on the Internet, culling the herd can be exhausting and time consuming.  My recommendations will come in blog posts over the upcoming months in three subject areas:  professional development sites for clients/jobseekers and colleagues, informational sites to keep up on the industry (more colleague focused), and social networking sites-why you need to be on them!  Today I start with two great sites for professional development, particularly for those that are unemployed, underemployed, or lack professional development opportunities in their current career.

Professional Development Sites

www.amanet.org

The American Management Association has wonderful free training for both jobseekers and industry professionals.  AMA may have determined that the paid memberships, while practical, left out segments of the population they felt were important:  the unemployed, underemployed and underpaid.  With large scale, multi-day training programs and memberships often unfeasible for these target groups, what could they do to help?  Offer a free membership and free and low-cost training options.  AMA creates brand ambassadors who, when gainfully employed or in a better financial situation, most likely take advantage of their paid training opportunities.  Furthermore, these individuals would share AMA programs with their new employers – extending the organizations influence, and filling training and development niches and gaps for these companies.

You can join by going to the MYAMA tab on the far right hand side of the page.  Once you are a member go to the INDIVIDUALS tab and click on WEB EVENTS, PODCASTS or ARTICLES AND WHITE PAPERS.  You can then take advantage of the free Webcasts, paid Webinars, free Podcasts, and free Articles and White Papers, which they have catalogued for members, and divided into various sections including Business Enhancement Skills, Communication Skills, Human Resources, Finance and Accounting, Sales and Project Management (to name a few).   Each Webcast lasts about an hour, each Podcast lasts approximately one-half hour and both are well worth your time.  Attention:  Webcasts are free, Webinars are NOT – but are worth the price!  Be sure to stay on the Webcasts unless you want to attend paid web events.

AMA also has a job board aimed at management positions, free monthly newsletters, events calendar, a LinkedIn group, and areas of the site devoted to government and enterprise-wide training needs for organizations.  The site is consistently updated with great content and navigation is straightforward.

www.hr.com

This one should be a no-brainer for anyone in the Human Resources, Recruiting or Resume Writing and Career Coaching industry.  You can keep up with HR trends in hiring, recruiting, interviewing, salary negotiation, and any issues jobseekers and employees/employers face.  One caveat – the site seems to want a company email address and not a Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., personal email account, I am hoping this changes (or has recently changed).  My colleagues HR, Management and Training and Development clients will find this site useful as well.

Free webcasts are the attraction, and although they have paid levels of membership I have had a free membership for over six years with no issues.  Not only will jobseekers and industry professionals have access to new webcasts for free, there is a catalog of 1,500+ archived webcasts that you can access by going to the Webcasts and Events tab, then clicking on the drop down menu where it says Webcasts and the sub-menu on Archived Webcasts and Podcasts.  You have access to recent and upcoming webcasts (upcoming webcasts are also featured on the Home Page), often PowerPoint slides or accompanying presentations, and the recordings of the all the older webcasts.  Bonus:  Each one-hour webcast or archived webcast can be submitted to qualify for HR Certification Institute recertification credits.

Additional benefits include Virtual Conferences, a variety of HR Communities to join with topical blogs, free compliance forms, an HR Wiki, a LinkedIn group, and certification opportunities.  The site is well-maintained, and easily navigated.

 

Categories Job Search
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