Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
In addition to writing from my own experience, I also want to share career advice from experts in the field. Last week, I spent 90 minutes chatting with one such expert – Steve Meyers, a senior recruiter in executive searches. I met Steve a few years ago at a Wharton MBA alumni networking lunch. ...
An interview can be the gateway to a great job. The key to acing an interview lies in interview preparation. No one is naturally ready for an interview, even if you know all your experiences by heart. You need to prepare for every interview so that you can show:
With that said, here is a checklist of interview preparation tips you should follow: ...
Another great question from my friend’s job search networking group. Even after all the preparation and practice for interviews, there still bound to be some questions you don’t expect and may not be prepared to answer in an interview. There are two types of questions that can fall in this category – behavioral questions and case questions. Behavioral questions usually start with “tell me a time when you …..” and there is no right or wrong answer. Case questions could be “Please estimate the size of the iPhone marketing in CA” and interviewers who give case questions usually are looking for specific things in your answer. ...
“Cold Calling” anyone is never easy. I had to learn it early in my career. A year after college, while working for McKinsey, I had to “cold call” competitors of our client to find out about their expansion plans in China. I was shocked when I first got the assignment. I remember thinking “how am I going to pull this off? I have to call complete strangers. I can’t tell them the name of my client, but I have to be honest and tell them that my client is their competitor.” ...
How to makes your resume outstanding? First, I think a resume must have the basics to just stay in the competition. See my post on top 10 effective resume tips first. Assuming you have done that already on your resume, then an outstanding resume is one that is TAILORED t to the job you are applying. Yes, to stand out, you have to tailor your rsume for every type of job you are applying for and preferrably every single position if time permits. ...
My daughter is 1 year old and just started walking. I am amazed how relentless she is at learning how to walk. Every day she would fall down many times and then get right back up again to try again. Her face is full of excitement as she takes more steps and now only after a few weeks, she has gone from only walking a few ginger steps slowly to practically running down the corridor. ...
I came across a great article on Yahoo Finance called Seven Career Killers. I highly recommend it. #2, 3, and 4 are especially good points.
Many MBAs from top name schools experience #2, a sense of entitlement. Just because you have experience and have a good MBA doesn’t mean you have a right to be arrogant about not doing certain tasks. Many times the entitlement attitude kills opportunities. I know I have steered away from putting MBAs on my teams that have “attitude issues” even when they are super smart. Their sense of entitlement unfortunately makes them high maintenance team members and would require a lot of management time. That’s not what a manager need on their team. ...