May 2016 |
Transition-e-news Volume 3 Issue 118 |
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USA Today Veterans Affairs - Special Edition Magazine
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Who, What, When, Where, Why & How?© Tom Wolfe, author; all rights reserved; excerpts from Out of Uniform: Your Guide to a Successful Military-to-Civilian Career Transition; used with the permission of the author and publisher, www.potomacbooksinc.com. While rummaging through some old boxes in my attic the other day, I ran across a pile of notebooks from my college days. Among them was one labeled Journalism 101. Leafing through the notebook I noticed the letters WWWWWH at the top of a page. Curious, I read my notes and was reminded of the basics of writing a good news story, particularly the importance of covering the facts surrounding the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the event. I was immediately struck by the realization that these five W’s and one H are just as important to Career Transition 101 as they are to that basic journalism course. Who? Specifically, who are you and what makes you tick? A high level of knowledge is critical to job search success. Before interviewing you must have knowledge of the company, the industry, and the position, but do not stop there. Self-knowledge is as important as those three combined. In order to interview successfully, you must present yourself in such a way that the interviewer will visualize you in the job, doing it well, and with a smile on your face. Strong self-knowledge allows you to do this and without it you are doomed to fail the interview. What? What are you looking for? What kind of work do you want to do? You do not necessarily need a targeted job title, although that helps, as long as it is specific. Whereas titles like Manager or Technician or Engineer or Analyst are too vague or general to be of much use, Inventory Control Manager or Communications Technician or Operating Engineer or Systems Analyst just might do the trick. Absent a specific job title or objective, at least be able to describe the attributes of the best job for you. For example, personal interaction, teamwork, analytical, problem solving, process improvement, fast-paced, hands-on, creativity, leadership, out-and-about, customer service, variety, and any others that apply to you. Also, in addition to coming up with these descriptors, make sure you have real examples that prove each of them are true and/or show how they impact your effectiveness. These illustrations enhance both your credibility and also your likelihood of being remembered—in a positive way—by the interviewer. When? There are two categories of reasons why people fail interviews: things beyond their control and things they can control. In the case of the former, that’s called life. In the latter, that’s called stupid. Imagine how you will feel if you are rejected because of something you could have controlled? Although when you can start work might be out of your control, how far in advance of that day you begin to interview is definitely controllable. When answering the What is your availability? question, make sure your answer causes the interviewer to smile. A lead time of 99 days or less is best for most employers. If they are interviewing for the job, they want to fill the job. If you are the best candidate, they will wait, but for only so long. No matter how well you interview, minimize the chances that they have also interviewed an equally likeable and qualified candidate who can start sooner than you can. Where? On your list of priorities, how important is the location of the job? Maybe you are wide open for a great opportunity regardless of what town it’s in. Maybe your personal situation restricts you to a set location. Maybe, like most people, your geographic needs fall somewhere in between those extremes. Regardless, figure it out before you begin to interview. Location is a great filter, for both you and the employer. Why should they interview you if you do not want to live in their town or would prefer to live someplace else? Why should you waste time interviewing for a job in a location where you and/or your family would not be happy? Here’s an exercise for you. Take a look at a map of the USA. Go state by state (or portions of states if that is more appropriate) and put each in one of three columns. Use Column A for places you would love to live. Column C is for locations that are completely off the list—erase them from your map. Everything else goes in Column B—places you would live if the opportunity was good enough to offset the fact that it’s not your first choice. Use this ABC list as a geographic template for your search. Why? This one would be better positioned at the top of this piece. People change jobs and/or careers for a reason or reasons. How about you? Why are you leaving the military? Why is your current situation changing? Why is your current position no longer good enough for you? Have you identified your motivators and are you prepared to discuss them in an interview? You have skills—things you do well, correct? Well, why are you good at these things? What are the keys for your success? Understanding the reasons behind your transition will maximize the odds that the new job will fix what was broken or missing in the last one. How? So you have answers to the five W’s—now what? How do you go about generating the interest and interviews that will lead to that new career? Welcome to your job search! You need a plan that includes both big picture strategy and implementation tactics. Preparation, execution, decision, and launch. Self-knowledge, research, networking, and leads. Personal skills inventory, resumes, wardrobe, and references. Looking at all of that as a whole can be daunting. Breaking it up into steps and phases makes it easier to handle. How to get started? Three recommendations: 1. Participate in the DOL/OPM/ED/VA/SBA joint venture called Transition GPS (www.dodtap.mil). 2. Two, print out and use this combination timeline and checklist: 70 Steps to Transition Success . 3. Read Out Of Uniform: Your Guide to a Successful Military-to-Civilian Career Transition (www.out-of-uniform.com), where all of the guidance in this column is covered in detail. In summary, knowing your who, what, when, where, why, and how will lead to a news story written by you titled My Successful Career Transition. In the interim, thanks for your service and good hunting! © 2016; Tom Wolfe, is an author, columnist, career coach, veteran, and an expert in the field of military-to-civilian career transition. During his career he assisted thousands of service members in their searches for employment, placing more than 3000 in their new jobs. Prior to civilian life, he graduated from the U. S. Naval Academy and served as a surface warfare officer. He teaches transition courses, gives seminars on career and job change, writes about the career transition process, and continues to counsel current and former military personnel. His book, Out of Uniform: Your Guide to a Successful Military-to-Civilian Career Transition, was published by Potomac Books in 2011. Tom lives on the North Carolina coast with his wife, Julie, and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Maggie. |
Best for Your Job Search: LinkedIn Posts or a Blog?© Copyright, 2016, Susan P. Joyce. All rights reserved. I’ve read several articles recommending that all job seekers start blogging to land their next jobs. While it may be a good idea for some people, I disagree that it is a good idea for all — or even for most — job seekers. According to recent research, good communications skills are highly valued in both employees and job candidates. A blog can be a good venue for demonstrating those skills. However, carefully consider your options before you start as well as the amount of time and money you can commit to the project. Be careful! Writing well with good grammar and spelling in coherent and well-organized posts is necessary to impress potential employers. Grammatical, factual, logical, or other flaws can disqualify you from consideration for jobs. How well you communicate and what opinions and information you share will be seen and evaluated. There is a better (free!) option available! And it’s on LinkedIn! The Hazards of Writing Your Own BlogUnless you enjoy writing and also write well, doing your own blog may be a bad idea for you. Speaking from personal experience, regularly writing good blog posts isn’t easy. To be visible, blogs need good SEO. That means focus on a single theme, attention to the important and relevant keywords for each post, plus inbound links from other blogs sending traffic to your blog and promotion on social media. Google needs to find your blog, and show it in search results relevant for you, to have your blog effectively support your job search or career. Good, clean SEO is critical, but not necessarily easy. In addition, if you are employed, your boss may wonder what that blog is all about. Are you blogging to find a new job? Are you writing your blog when you are supposed to be earning your paycheck? Blogs Are Hard WorkConsistently producing good, on-topic content every week — or more often — is necessary but not easy. I am passionate about the topic of helping people have a smart and safe job search and a great career, but that doesn’t always mean that I can easily write a brilliant post every week. Stopping after a few months or writing only a few posts in a year will probably not impress a potential employer with your work ethic. While hundreds of millions of blogs exist, most blogs are abandoned within the first year. Will Your Blog Impress Employers?Writing well with good grammar and spelling in coherent and well-organized posts is required. Your writing demonstrates your communications skills and your reasoning and logic. How well you communicate and what opinions and information you share will be seen and evaluated. Which Blog Platform Is Best for You?In addition to the effort of writing good posts, a blog is a website with all of the associated issues (domain name, monthly hosting fee, software updates, SEO, responsive design, hackers, malware, etc.). You can also blog on a free platform like Blogger.com (owned by Google), Tumblr, WordPress.com, Weebly, and many others which eliminates many of the costs. You also lose much control and identity. In addition, with a “free” blog, someone else owns that platform, and they can shut down or change it whenever they wish. Better: Write LinkedIn Long-Form PostsIf you want to demonstrate your writing and communications skills publicly, leverage LinkedIn rather than starting your own blog. Write on-topic for your career on LinkedIn via LinkedIn Long-Form Posts (find the link on your LinkedIn Profile’s home page). Excellent Visibility Where Recruiters “Shop” for Job CandidatesAssuming you can write well, LinkedIn offers you an excellent platform. Today, LinkedIn is where you want professional visibility. Long-Form Posts are much more visible within LinkedIn than posts on your own blog would likely be, particularly a new blog. The benefits of good LinkedIn Posts:
Like other free blog platforms, LinkedIn could disappear or, more likely, change the rules or requirements for participation. So, save copies of your posts on your own computer, too. The Hazards of LinkedIn Long-Form PostsAnyone can write a LinkedIn Post, and thousands of people do every day, making it difficult to stand out in that crowd. Fortunately, since you are writing on LinkedIn, a big audience is not necessary. The good news is that the readers will be people who are relatively active on LinkedIn, probably the most appropriate group of readers you could find regardless of platform. So, more a quality vs. quantity situation. Like with any blog post or article you write, be sure to write well — good, solid articles that are on-topic for you. In fact, the quality bar is probably somewhat higher on LinkedIn, making it important to take care. More About LinkedIn for Job Search and Careers5 Essential Components of a Successful LinkedIn Profile 3 Bad Assumptions About LinkedIn The LinkedIn Professional Headline Mistakes that Ruin Opportunities About the Author… Online job search expert Susan P. Joyce Online job search expert Susan P. Joyce has been observing the online job search world and teaching online job search skills since 1995. Susan is a two-time layoff “graduate” who has worked in human resources at Harvard University and in a compensation consulting firm. In 2011, NETability purchased WorkCoachCafe.com, and Susan has been editor and publisher of WorkCoach since then. Susan also edits and publishes Job-Hunt.org, is a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a columnist on HuffingtonPost. Follow Susan on Twitter at @jobhuntorg and on Google+ |
Why is it so hard to get a federal job? Here's one reason© Copyright, 2016 Stars and Stripes, reprinted with permission, written by By Lisa Rein The Washington Post Every federal agency has two groups of employees that hold the key to who gets hired: Those in the personnel office and those who carry out the agency's mission. For the most part, these staffs don't collaborate as they should, and their broken relationship is a big reason that government has a lot of trouble identifying and hiring the most talented people. Top Obama administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that the disconnect between hiring managers and human resources staff is so big, and has been for years, that experts are traveling to federal offices across the country in a campaign to get the groups to work together. "Our priority is this: How do we compete for the top talent in the country?" Beth Cobert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management said in a meeting with reporters to discuss a campaign called "Connecting with Top Talent," part of a broader effort to improve what many experience as a broken hiring process. OPM officials said they are traveling to federal offices in 33 cities across 19 states to bring hiring officials and the subject experts they are tasked with helping into the same room for a day. The problem is widely known by those inside and outside of government. Federal government job seekers feel like their resumes go into a black hole. Hiring can take months. The most talented people don't make the cut. But now officials are acknowledging that the staffs that control the process get in each others' way, because of distrust and occasional power struggles over who is in control of hiring. Former Homeland Security personnel chief Jeffrey Neal, now a senior vice president for ICF International, took on the issue last week in his column on ChiefHRO.com, "Federal Hiring is Mission Critical. Is it Mission Capable?" Here's an excerpt: "From the making of laws to the writing of regulations and on down to the structures and processes of operating offices around the government, federal HR is struggling and often failing. Agencies have more tools than they think to recruit and hire for an increasing number of jobs without going through USAJobs, the government's main job board, officials said. The USAJobs site itself is going through its own gradual reinvention, with tweaks to smooth out the navigation and application process for the job seeker and a pilot program to make resumes and candidate profiles easily searchable for hiring staffs, who in turn can invite candidates to apply for openings. The government also is reaching back to the days before the Internet to revive online testing as a tool to screen applicants for some jobs and to promote employees. "We want to make sure hiring managers know that there is not just one way to fill a position," Kim Holden, OPM's deputy associate director for employee services, said. Asked about the hiring preference given to veterans, a policy that is causing confusion and resentment among some former service members and non-veterans who apply as well as among hiring staff, Cobert said the problem is not the policy itself but a lack of coordination between hiring managers and human resources staff. "The problem is the hiring manager-HR relationship," she said. "They need to find a better way to assess people, to say, 'What does it really take to do this job, and how do I make sure the person understands those qualifications?"
Raymond Limon, hiring chief at the Interior Department, said hiring and personnel staffs have the same goals. But they face different pressures. "The HR person speaks in acronyms and worries about following the rules, for example" he said, while subject matter experts think about the specific skills they need for the job. |
Scrutinizing social media accounts may become regular part of federal security checks
By Eric Yoder
The Washington Post WASHINGTON — Federal employees may want to be more prudent when posting to social media and more selective about selfies, as the government eyes their online activities to gauge their trustworthiness. Two subcommittees of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing Friday on whether scrutinizing their social media accounts should become a regular part of security investigations of federal employees and if so, under what conditions. The hearing comes as the Obama administration is preparing to announce a policy that officials have hinted will open the door to more searches of social media during those background checks . The administration last month announced plans to test how the government could use such searches in those investigations, which determine eligibility to get — and keep — the security clearances that are required for many federal jobs. Congress meanwhile is considering a bill to require that type of scrutiny during background checks of intelligence agency employees. The issue of whether to snoop on social media postings of federal employees is surfacing near the one-year anniversary of disclosures that personal information on some 22 million people was stolen from two Office of Personnel Management databases. One involved personnel records on current and former federal employees and the other files of background investigations into federal employees and others who applied for security clearances or who sought access to certain government facilities. Those breaches triggered an internal review of background investigation procedures and a decision to create a new semi-independent entity within the OPM to oversee those probes and to shift control of the information gathered to the Defense Department. There is a range of potential approaches--with increasing privacy considerations at each step. Options include examining only information readily available through a standard online search; further requiring employees to disclose all their online identifications; further requiring them to disclose information such as social media "friends" whose names are otherwise hidden; and further requiring them to provide passwords to their sites. "Useful information is already publicly available and can be accessed while respecting a reasonable expectation of privacy," committee spokeswoman M.J. Henshaw said in an email. "Traditional evaluation standards currently in use for clearance investigations can easily be applied to social media and publicly available information," she added. For example, a selfie taken in front of the Kremlin might be treated the same as a written or verbal disclosure of such a visit. In addition, individuals could be guaranteed similar rights to explain potential red flags. The hearing follows one in February where Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, pressed officials from OPM and other agencies to add scrutiny of social media to background checks. "We're going to grant them a security clearance to access the information of the United States of America, information that can't be shared with the public, and they won't share their information with you?" he asked. "It should be on your form — show us all your online identities. When you're doing a background investigation how can you not look at their Facebook page or their Twitter posts? Or any of the other ones?" Officials made no commitment at the time, saying they were continuing to review issues including privacy concerns. "In looking at social media, we want to make sure that we are looking at it in a way that is effective, that brings insight to the process, that reflects what is in that information and it's done in an appropriate and systematic way," OPM Acting Director Beth Cobert said then. Officials have since said that a policy will be announced soon, although they have not specified timing or details. Cobert is scheduled to testify again Friday along with officials from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also involved in crafting the policy. OPM recently moved toward launching a pilot program to incorporate into background investigations automated searches of information pertinent to an individual that is publicly accessible through social media sites, blogs, forums, picture and video sharing sites, and others. OPM also said it is looking for capability to search "parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard search engines." It made that announcement in an April "request for information" — a research step before crafting a contract to put up for bidding. It has not specified a target date for starting such a test or its potential size. The government already has conducted several tests of searching social media and other online activity of those with security clearances. In one involving nearly 3,400 Army personnel, information "relevant" to eligibility for a clearance was found on a fifth, although "none of the issues identified were disqualifying by themselves," said a report that cited those findings as supporting wider use. The report was an independent review commissioned by the Pentagon on the 2013 shootings at the Washington Navy Yard that made recommendations on clearance reviews and other security practices. Separately, a review of some 350 intelligence community employees found "security-relevant" information on two-thirds, but "information judged to be adverse" for just 12 percent. "The nature of this information, however, may be of potential value, either as a tool to confirm information obtained using other strategies or to provide investigative leads," said an Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on that test. Meanwhile, a House-passed bill that is pending in the Senate would require intelligence agencies to include social media monitoring as part of a beefed-up security clearance policy for employees of those agencies. The bill would require that agencies look for "information that may suggest ill intent, vulnerability to blackmail, compulsive behavior, allegiance to another country, change in ideology, or that the covered individual lacks good judgment, reliability, or trustworthiness." Background investigations are just one area where the government has been examining how federal workplace policies — some of which date back many decades — apply in the online environment. Late in 2015 the Office of Government Ethics issued guidance on the implications for policies called the Standards of Conduct that govern seeking outside employment, use of an employee's title, charitable fundraising, disclosing nonpublic information, and more.
Around the same time, the Office of Special Counsel released updated guidance on how the Hatch Act, a law that restricts partisan political activities of federal employees, applies in the social media context. |
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