Find | Top Rated | Categories | Recent | Enter XML | More Guides | Help
Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch
Category: Talk - Technology
Helping to Build the Career You Deserve!
Previews of Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch
(All Active Shows)
What you need: Business Skills with finance, sales and people — from the Career Opportunities Podcast
Tue, 21 May 2013 18:44:59 +0000 (8.0 Mb)
When we talk about careers, we often talk about your knowledge, your skills, your deep understanding of the work you do. While this is certainly important, there can be another aspect of career that is lacking in many of us. No matter how well we know our work, if we don’t also have some basic business skills it can make our career much more difficult.
Listen to this Podcast Books by Douglas E. Welch
Finances
What business skills do you need to succeed? First and more importantly, you need to understand money, cash flow and budgeting. If you can’t understand and manage how much cash is coming in and how much cash is going out, you will forever struggle in both your life and career. While there are times in all our lives when you will carry some debt, crushing levels of debt can stunt your career before it ever gets started. Heavy debt can often cause you to make the wrong decisions about your careers at the wrong times. I often see people who remain in bad jobs far too long mainly because they don’t think they can afford to go anywhere else. Even a short break in earning and their debt threatens to consume them. Debt shouldn’t be the deciding ...
Mon, 13 May 2013 22:25:48 +0000 (6.9 Mb)
Part of any great career, regardless of industry, focus or technology, is the ability to remember what it was like to not know something. As we gain knowledge and skills in our work, we can come to think of others as ignorant and clueless, if not outright stupid. This is a danger zone for any careerist as it leads to arrogance, hubris and — in many cases — obnoxious behavior. We can begin to think we are the smartest folks in the room and everyone else is an idiot. Of course, it only takes one bad day, one bad project, one bad result to bring us crashing back to reality.
Listen to this Podcast One-To-One Career Consulting with Douglas E. Welch Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners. Click for more information and pricing
It is always important to remember that our co-workers, managers and freelance clients are rarely ever stupid. Rather, they are simply unacquainted and unfamiliar with the work they hired you to do. They know they need it done, but they also know they lack the skills to make it happen. This is a point in their favor. They are practicing the great rule of knowing what they don’t know and seeking...
Sat, 11 May 2013 19:45:40 +0000 (6.3 Mb)
There is a wealth of career advice and information available today via books, television and the Internet. Most is given in the sincere hope of improving the lives of others. It is important to draw on this advice to improve your life and career whenever possible. I am constantly reading reams of material every week, looking for ideas to keep my career on track. Despite all that, there can be a dark side to career advice if you don’t think deeply and clearly about the advice you decide to implement.
The truth is, when faced with an expert, a guru, a respected member of our industry, we run the danger of accepting every thought, every rule, every idea as fact. Self-growth isn’t about accepting every idea unconditionally, though. It is much more important to find ideas that hold a resonance for us, personally. Even with the most knowledgeable experts, not every concept will be a gem. It is up to you to sort the wheat from the chaff, whether expert advice comes from a renowned speaker, a book or the Internet.
Listen to this Podcast Books by Douglas E. Welch
The Rules
Of all the advice given by experts, including yours truly, I first tur...
Fri, 03 May 2013 19:29:38 +0000 (6.2 Mb)
Over my years as a freelance computer consultant, I’ve heard many stories of workers who have difficulty getting paid for their work. There can be disagreements about whether a project has been completed, claims of cash-flow problems or even, at the worst, simple fraud. Sometimes companies or individuals can be slow to pay invoices or, when they grudging pay, complain about the quality of your services. There are, it seems, a myriad ways to not get paid for your work.
After talking with my peers about payment problems, it seems I have had it easy. Where they might have experienced several issues with payment, I might have had one. It seems that, often, payment issues have more to do with how we do business, rather than any particular type of client.
Listen to this Podcast Books by Douglas E. Welch
Over the years, I have found that part of the secret of getting paid is to act like you expect to be paid. This might sound a bit odd, but I have seen workers who are not confident in their work and offer a host of apologies and excuses, even when they are completing the assigned task in a better than average fashion. They don’t have respect fo...
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:06:17 +0000 (6.5 Mb)
Many people like to think that there is work and there is play and there is never any crossover between them. We do “work” to earn money to pay for our food, our clothing, our houses. We “play” to escape our work and have fun. I was reminded this week, though, that playing can also result in more creative and fulfilling work, often in entirely new areas. In today’s work world, where everyone is an entrepreneur regardless of where they work, we all need to be looking for those new, unique ways, to expand our work and build a career that is both lucrative and fulfilling. Often, this means engaging in new ideas and projects simply for the sheer fun of it. I can tell you from personal experience that you never know where it might lead.
Listen to this Podcast One-To-One Career Consulting with Douglas E. Welch Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners. Click for more information and pricing
My most recent story of turning play into paying work started a few months ago. I was working in my computer consultant role for a friend of a friend. It was some typical Windows-related software issues that I fixed in about an hour. Thi...
Sun, 28 Apr 2013 02:19:12 +0000 (6.1 Mb)
How often do you know everything about a job or project before you walk through the door? How often do you know everything about a piece of hardware or software before you have to install it or, even more likely, teach it to someone else? The world moves too quickly these days to possibly learn everything we need to know, before we need it. In today’s world, we are often deeply engaged in more “just-in-time” learning than ever before. So, how does one survive in a world where we are learning and teaching at the same time? Oddly enough, to be successful at just-in-time learning, you actually have to make many preparations.
Listen to this Podcast Books by Douglas E. Welch
Traditional and more
One way of preparing for the “just-in-time” world is to learn as much as possible about as much as possible. If you have taken classes in Cisco router management, project management or accounting, you may have 70%-80% of the knowledge you need to be productive. Training, classes, apprenticeships all fill the well you will draw on in later work. You need to choose wisely, though. Overly-specific training or classes that have limited app...
Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:44:36 +0000 (7.7 Mb)
Our lives and our careers are deeply affected by our surroundings. We can try to ignore the noise, trash, overcrowding and other issues, but it really isn’t completely possible. They can effect us at a subconscious level and add burdens to our sometimes overburdened lives. When you are trying to build the career you deserve, you need a physical environment that helps and soothes you, not one that is constantly confronting you and taking energy away from your more important work.
Listen to this Podcast One-To-One Career Consulting with Douglas E. Welch Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners. Click for more information and pricing
The Place
What makes for a “decent place to live?” It is different for everyone. Let’s start with the physical constraints. Is it overly noisy? Is it too noisy for your constitution? Some people thrive on “the voice of city” — that constant cacophony of cars and people and sirens and trains. It gives them energy and helps them feel connected to the world. Others, like myself, get annoyed by constant, repetitive noises and need quiet. As I write today, the air is filled with the ...
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:51:27 +0000 (6.5 Mb)
I have written in the past about the immense power that action brings to your career. The act of taking action brings power to any situation and no more so than when you suffer a career setback. Perhaps you didn’t get the job or the promotion or you’ve been laid off. Let those setbacks drive you on to new — and different — action that can lead the way to the next step in your career.
Listen to this Podcast One-To-One Career Consulting with Douglas E. Welch Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners. Click for more information and pricing
If you have been pushing for some sort of career change, and find yourself thwarted, it can lead to depression, inaction and even more self-destructive behaviors. How do I know this? I have seen it in myself over the years of my career. In fact, I think it is something that we all have in common as human beings. When we suffer a failure, we often turn inward and attack ourselves with anger and self-doubt. Rather than do this, I challenge you to direct your energies outward. More importantly, though, I also challenge you to do something new, something different instead of repeatin...
Fri, 05 Apr 2013 02:04:21 +0000 (7.1 Mb)
You can’t know which career you want unless you know about a lot of careers. You can’t have a great career unless you know what one looks like. This is why it is so important for children to be introduced to careers and career concepts as early as possible. This doesn’t mean sitting them down and lecturing them about various careers. Rather it means being aware of their interests and desires, finding the “teachable” career moments that happen every day and making the most of them. Help your child find a career that suits them — a career that they will enjoy — a career they deserve.
Listen to this Podcast One-To-One Career Consulting with Douglas E. Welch Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners. Click for more information and pricing
With a 15 year old boy in the house, talk of college and career is becoming more frequent and I find it is helping me think more deeply about how a career is built these days. One of the first issues I noticed is that everyone needs to be thinking about their career long before they leave high school. In some cases, they might even need to be investigating careers more deeply...
Suggest improvements to this Guide listing
Discover how Easy it is with Replay A/V.
Download a Free Trial Today!
Click Here to learn more.
