The LinkedIn Profile Checklist Every Job Seeker Needs Don Goodman November 12, 2015

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Job searching has taken a new direction. It’s not about going to the job boards, finding the job opening you like, and then applying to it. That method will only have you waiting by the phone for a call that’s likely not going to happen. Today’s job seekers need to take a more proactive and interactive approach called job networking – and LinkedIn is a resource to help you do it.

Related: 6 Things Recruiters Want To See On Your LinkedIn Profile

When you’ve created an effective LinkedIn profile, it’ll help you get in front of the right contacts (recruiters, hiring managers, professionals in the field, etc.) who can lead you to the path of the next job opportunity. However, in order for it all to happen you do need a LinkedIn profile that communicates and displays the right information. Take a run through the LinkedIn Profile checklist below:

Present a Headline that talks to your target audience. Read more….

12 Choices to Help You Step Back From Burnout by Vicki Davis

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Author Vicki Davis surrounds herself with sayings and thoughts to help her stay positive. Photo credit: Vicki Davis

“Our very lives are fashioned by choice. First we make choices. Then our choices make us.” – Anne Frank

A tired teacher is a powder keg waiting for a match. In my bouts with burnout, I’ve learned that stepping back from the brink is about choice. These 12 choices have helped me recover and be a better teacher for my students.

Choice #1: Choose to Be Happy

First, happiness is a choice. Choose to be the first one to smile at everybody you meet. Choose to greet your students by name.

Use happy triggers to boost your mood when you get upset. I have a Pinterest Board called Happy Thoughts and another called Things That Make Me Laugh. The “Atta Girl” folder in my desk holds nice notes.

Choice #2: Choose to Disconnect

We are making a dumb use of our smartphones. Instead of freeing us up to go anywhere anytime, they’ve tethered us to a hamster wheel. Usually, I check email twice a day. I deleted my school email off my smartphone after several evenings because of an angry email. (We all get them.) Unplug once a week. Be a human being, not a human doing.

Read more…

7 Things That Make Great Bosses Unforgettable

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Unforgettable bosses change us for the better. They see more in us than we see in ourselves, and they help us learn to see it too.
BY TRAVIS BRADBERRY

Author, ‘Emotional Intelligence 2.0’

IMAGE: Getty Images

Once again, Google has topped Fortune magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” This marks Google’s second year in a row at the top of the list, and their sixth victory overall.

Most people assume that Google tops the list because of their great benefits and all of the fun and perks that they pack into the Googleplex. But that’s just part of the equation.

Google knows that people don’t leave companies; they leave bosses. But unlike most companies, which wait around hoping for the right bosses to come along, Google builds each Googler the boss of their dreams.

Their people analytics team starts by researching the qualities that make managers great at Google. They’re the managers everyone wants to work for. Next, Google built a training program that teaches every manager how to embrace these qualities. Once managers complete the program, Google measures their behavior to ensure that they’re making improvements and morphing into managers that Googlers want to work for……

1. Great bosses are passionate. Few things are more demotivating than a boss who is bored with his or her life and job. If the boss doesn’t care, why should anybody else? Unforgettable bosses are passionate about what they do. They believe in what they’re trying to accomplish, and they have fun doing it. This makes everyone else want to join the ride.

2. They stand in front of the bus. Some bosses will throw their people under the bus without a second thought; great bosses pull their people from the bus’s path before they’re in danger. They coach, and they move obstacles out of the way, even if their people put those obstacles there in the first place. Sometimes, they clean up messes their people never even knew they made. And if they can’t stop the bus, they’ll jump out in front of it and take the hit themselves.

3. They play chess, not checkers. Think about the difference. In checkers, all the pieces are basically the same. That’s a poor model for leadership because nobody wants to feel like a faceless cog in the proverbial wheel. In chess, on the other hand, each piece has a unique role, unique abilities, and unique limitations. Unforgettable bosses are like great chess masters. They recognize what’s unique about each member of their team. They know their strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes, and they use these insights to draw the very best from each individual.

Read more….http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/7-things-that-make-great-bosses-unforgettable.html

Can We Create a National Digital Library? Robert Darnton

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October 28, 2010 Issue

The following talk was given at the opening of a conference at Harvard on October 1 to discuss the possibility of creating a National Digital Library.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

The ambition behind this project goes back to the founding of this country. Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: “Knowledge is the common property of mankind.” He was right—in principle. But in practice, most of humanity has been cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In Jefferson’s day, only a tiny elite had access to the world of learning. Today, thanks to the Internet, we can open up that world to all of our fellow citizens. We have the technical means to make Jefferson’s dream come true, but do we have the will? Read more…http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library/

What Libraries Can (Still) Do James Gleick

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Deutsches Historiches Museum/Arne Psille/Art Resource Heinrich Lukas Arnold: The Reading Room, circa 1840

Of the many institutions suffering through the world’s metamorphosis from analog to digital (real to virtual, offline to online), few are as beleaguered as that bedrock of our culture, the public library. Budgets are being slashed by state and local governments. Even the best libraries are cutting staff and hours. Their information desks are seemingly superseded by Google, their encyclopedias are gathering dust. And their defining product, the one that lines their shelves, now arrives in the form of a weightless doppelgänger that doesn’t require shelves.

In the technocracy, all the world’s information comes to us on screens—desk, pocket, wrist, goggles—and no one trudges through wind and rain with library card in hand to find a single worn object. After all, when you want the text of Magna Carta, you don’t track down the original. Same with books? “Libraries are screwed,” said Eli Neiburger, a Michigan library director, in a much-quoted presentation at a Library Journalconference in 2010. “Libraries are screwed because we are invested in the codex, and the codex has become outmoded.”

So is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.

Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.

Read more:http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/oct/26/what-libraries-can-still-do-bibliotech/