practice

How to Improve Your Soft Skills?

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NEW SOFT SKILLS GUIDE + NEWSLETTER

How to improve your soft skills is an important question to answer for your career success.  It is also a tough question to answer in general as soft skills encompass many different skills in two general categories.

  • self management skills– those we use to manage our emotions, self-perception, and reactions to unexpected situations. Examples of these soft skills include stress management, self-confidence, emotion control, etc…
  • people skills – those we use to influence how others perceive / receive us, our work, our ideas. Examples of these soft skills include communication skills, leadership skills, teamwork skills, ability to deal with difficult personalities.

Any one of these soft skills will take time to improve. At a high level, here are five tips I recommend to start improving your soft skills today. ...  read more

5 Business Networking Tips Anyone can Follow

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Learning how to network well is essential to job search and career success.  It doesn’t matter what level of business networking skills you have.  These 5 business networking tips can either help you get started or serve as a good reminder.   Use these 5 business networking tips at any event and see results. ...  read more

Five Most Common Interview Mistakes

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most common interview mistake

Most of you know that you must arrive early for an interview.  But do you know what are the most common interview mistakes that even smart professionals make?

Today, US News posted on Yahoo finance an interesting article called 50 worst of the worst interview mistakes.  While most of the listed are pretty obvious and funny, I want to comment on five mistakes that are commonly made even by people who have fairly good interviewing skills. ...  read more

Interview tip – practice makes perfect

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It’s amazing how much children (like my 21 months old) can repeatedly do things so they can learn a new skill, like how to build a puzzle. There is no hesitation or judgment – just pure focus on repeating an action until she gets it right and sheer drive to learn more everyday.

Developing your job search skills (e.g. interviewing skills) also need this kind of practice, focus and drive, but often times as an adult, we judge too quickly on how we are doing while we learn. A simple concept of practice makes perfect is often not executed because of  constant self-criticism. To build your interviewing skills, for example, there are many ways you can practice. How many of these are you doing? ...  read more

Job Search is like “Dating”

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It’s a numbers game. Just like dating where it may take quite a few “bad” dates before you have a good one, job search is like professional “dating.” It can take awhile to find a company that is a good fit for you and vice versa.

So don’t worry about it if a company does not reply to your application or if an interview does not go well. It’s all part of the journey of effective job search. What’s important is going out there and “date” as much as you can – apply to and interview with as many jobs that fits your job search criteria. ...  read more