life lessons – Crasstalk

How To Ace Your Next Phone Interview

Hidey ho, jobseekers! I’ve been on the prowl for “the perfect job” for the last few years, and I’ve been subjected to dozens of interviews. Phone interviews, that is. Phone interviews make sense from the hiring manager’s perspective, because they can be setup quickly, there’s no need for the candidate to travel to their office, they’re safer (no letting the crazies in the front door, thank you) and because the phone removes the interviewee’s physical presence, the interviewer can get a more accurate assessment of the interviewee’s personality.

Please learn from my mistakes with this list of hints and tips I have compiled. Continue reading →

QOTD: Lessons Learned

You’ve done the home work, the affirmations, the congratulations, the adorations. You’ve stared clear-eyed and clear-headed in the mirror, you’ve told yourself that you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. And yet, you catch yourself telling yourself the same old negative story. What gives?

Today, I noticed an online news article about someone I went to high school with. We were more acquaintances than friends. I think we might have hung out socially once or twice in the four years I knew him. He’s someone who was on “the slow track” when we were in high school. Socially awkward, he sort of hung around the fringe of society. He was not in any honors classes, didn’t take part in any of the “bleeding edge” things our school was doing in the sciences, never stood in front of the student body to receive a varsity letter for his jacket, or any official award or commendation for that matter, and he certainly wasn’t in the “Who’s Who in American High Schools” book. Just a normal guy, did his time and got out. Continue reading →

Life Lessons from a Chinese Food Market

As some of you know, I spent the past summer in Hong Kong. I was there for an internship helping people apply to the UN for refugee status. This will be nothing at all about that experience, although I could write for days about the refugee status determination process and its many faults, especially in Hong Kong. Instead, as I walked through the many food markets, I was reminded of some life lessons that I would like to share. Continue reading →

Oprah’s Advice Is Actually Kind of Good Sometimes

I had some down time between watching World Cup gymnastics and the Bears game, so I did some channel surfing. When I got into the 200’s, I found OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. Now, this is a different network from Oxygen, the “O” network she launched a few years ago. Programming on Oxygen is sort of a rag-tag affair of “Bad Girls” shows, reality / competition shows, and infomercials.

Continue reading →

Life Lessons on Being Laid Off

I started my career on July 1, 1995, with a big multinational company. On July 1, 2009, I was given the old heave-ho. What had started out as a very promising upward trajectory landed with a thud, and the reason I was being shown the door had nothing to do with me or how well I did my work.

The circumstances of my job’s demise were simple: I was only working on one account, and that customer had been sold to a company that in-sourced their IT functions. While my group was in the process of transitioning our work to our customer’s new owner, my employer was in the process of laying off tens of thousands of Americans and shipping their jobs to various Asian countries. Even though my work record had been exemplary, and I had received the highest possible rating on my annual review more than once, there was no room at the inn for me. I tried to find a new position with the company starting in mid 2008 up until my last day, but there were none to be had. Continue reading →