This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Good news for career planners looking at education options and financing their next career move. If you have or will have U.S. government guaranteed student loans, your repayment plan may be based on your income level. What a concept! – and hard to believe it has taken this long to implement. You can learn more about the new plan and eligibility at the studentaid.ed.gov website. Jonathan Glater also wrote an excellent article about the new plan in The New York Times today.

And please make sure you max out your federal loan eligibility before turning to higher interest private loans.

Yes, there may be more paperwork to fill out but if you want to go to school, you’d better be able to fill out paperwork. Maybe that should be a foundation skill!

You can learn more at The Career Key website about resources for financing your education – and also at the Career Key Canada website. Canadians: After checking on CanLearn’s section on repayment, it doesn’t look to me as if Canada has a similar income based option for repaying loans. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that. Thanks!

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Our newest partner, Zumeo.com, just received a 2009 Webby Honoree award for their website in the Employment category. If you haven’t checked out their Generation Y career discovery tool and professional social network, you should. It is truly unique and powerful.

They are the ONLY job search and networking website to use a scientifically valid test and career theory to match users with jobs and fellow networkers.

They also have a very cool user interface (hence their Webby award) to deliver this high-quality content. You can see video on their YouTube channel.

Yes, I’m biased because they are our partner but I’ve seen a lot of time-wasting junk out there and Zumeo really does a fantastic job. Okay, enough said.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Sitting on a Seattle (see the Space Needle in the distance) beach with my family this weekend, I had the pleasure of watching lots of people soaking up the sun and BBQing in the park. My 2 year old son, thanks to his father’s love of grilling, was really excited by the charcoal fires. He ran happily on the sand beneath the sea wall, giggling and dragging seaweed behind him. It was one of those moments when you catch your breath and feel the warmth, figuratively and literally.

In my careers, I have had a few days feeling cold, dread, and anxiety. They make me appreciate my warm, carefree days. From age 16 to the present, I’ve cried, been enraged, hated my life – my work – you name it. But everything passes – whether it’s because I hunker down and wait it out, or I leave a job or career.

It’s cliché to say “life is a journey” – but ups and downs are what it’s all about. I wouldn’t give up those cold days for a comfy career in a cubicle with no demands or stress. Boredom would drive me crazy.

When it comes to your job and your career path, it pays to see your level of satisfaction with them in the proper perspective. Are you consistently in “hell” in your current situation? Or is it a rare bad patch? Is it related to personality conflicts with your work and coworkers or a temporary glitch? You can learn more about the different types of job satisfaction at The Career Key website.

As time goes on, I know more about what success means for me. Success is about being able to recognize those warm days and enjoy them. And being able to handle cold days when they come – by letting them pass, or taking action.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Throughout my careers, I’ve struggled with balancing economic reality with my interests, passions, and life demands. Choosing careers throughout your life requires you to decide, again and again, how to spend your time, money, and energy – and prioritize them. A big task.

So I’m always looking for helpful ways to incorporate “reality” into choosing the right career. We suggest a number of activities to “Know Yourself” at our website and I recommend adding one more to this list.

I found a helpful resource in Chapter 7, “Align the Practical Realities” of Tamara Erickson’s book, “Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work.” Although the book is directed to Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 2000), it has much to offer everyone. I got it at the library but it’s reasonably priced on Amazon too. Ms. Erickson also has an excellent blog “Across the Ages.”

In this chapter, Ms. Erickson describes ways you might consider the following issues:

• Time (how you want to spend it),
• Rhythm (how do you like to work),
• Economic reality (financial needs),
• Challenge (willingness to take on learning new skills)
• Responsibility (interest in taking on leadership and management roles)

When you’re evaluating career options that match your Holland personality, consider reading more in this book. It will help you fill in your decision balance sheet you can download for free as part of our “High Quality Decisions” article.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

There’s more ammunition in the fight to support community colleges and increase U.S. “degree attainment.”

Jobs for the Future just came out with a report, “Cost, Commitment, and Attainment in Higher Education: An International Comparison” by Arthur M. Hauptman and Young Kim.

Among the recommendations is increased emphasis and support for community colleges. Although over half the students in the U.S. are enrolled in community colleges, these colleges proportionally receive a lot less public funding.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Although we at Career Key do not sell or share user data (see our Privacy Policy here), many other websites do. Unfortunately there are many job search, business startup, and other Internet scams designed to get your personal information.

I include fake online career tests in the scam category because I believe they are harmful and in the private sector, almost exclusively used to get people’s email addresses and personal information for marketing purposes – not to genuinely help people to make a good career decision.

So it pays to be careful in your career planning online. The tips found via the links below apply equally to career planning and career advice websites as to job search websites. Although Career Key doesn’t require people to register to use our sites, many other websites do.

So make sure you read these tips before registering on any site:

• About.com Job Search editor Alison Doyle’s article on Online Job Search Privacy
• Online Job-Search Websites: Tips to Safeguard Your Privacy from privacyrights.org
• World Privacy Forum on Job Search Sites and their Workplace Privacy Project that includes resources like “Critical Tips for Job Seekers to Avoid Job Scams”
• Want to be a model? Buy a franchise? Be a mystery shopper? Work at home? There are tons of scams related to these and many other fields so watch out! The Federal Trade Commission offers a lot of helpful advice about a variety of job search, business opportunity, education and scholarship scams.

I know this is tired advice but it never seems to go out of style. If it is too good to be true, it isn’t.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Recently it’s been hard to find time to blog. I’m preparing for my Career Key Canada presentation and exhibitor table at Cannexus 2009, Canada’s national career development conference, which starts on Monday.

I’ve been addicted to TED and Slideshare watching better presenters than I am to improve my presentation skills. Even though I practiced law and did courtroom litigation for a number of years, I still have to refresh my presentation skills. And just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t make you a good public speaker. I was also reminded that practicing, out loud any oral presentation is absolutely crucial.

And as you can see from the photo of the wonderful Julia Child and her monkfish at left, practicing over a few days gave me the clarity that this was not the right picture of her for my presentation. Associating monkfish, no matter how great it tastes, with my company is perhaps unwise. Don’t get the Julia Child, Career Key Canada analogy? Sorry, have to attend my Cannexus presentation to find out!

If you’re interviewing for a job, conducting an informational interview, or any other oral presentation, I highly recommend practicing what you’ll say in front of the mirror or someone else. It takes me a few “takes” before I realize I can talk less and more effectively say the same thing. And you gain confidence each time you present it, which makes success a self-fufilling prophecy.

My mother told me practice makes perfect – when I was learning the piano. And like any good daughter, don’t I hate she was right! About a great many things…

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices — career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Never thought you’d hear the word “fun” again? Well, we recommend you include it in your search for the right career choice. In our article, 8 Strategies to Learn About Yourself, we suggest looking at how you spend your leisure time to identify your unique qualities – to help you choose a career that fits you. New research in the Journal of Career Development connects “leisure interests” with Holland’s Theory of Career Choice, which The Career Key test measures.

To begin, write down what you do for leisure activities in the “big picture” and look for patterns and connections with Holland’s 6 personality types. For example,

if you spend a lot of your leisure time in community activities like church volunteering, tutoring young people, or working at ethnic/regional festivals, you can see the parallels between those activities and the Social personality type.

if you enjoy hunting and fishing, restoring old cars, or playing cards and games, these activities are more associated with the Realistic personality type.

No single leisure interest magically shows you the right career path. But when you think about your “off the clock” activities in light of Holland’s Theory, they provide you with more helpful, relevant information for your career decision.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices — career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Learning about your career options and planning and preparing your career path are proven success strategies, regardless of generation. Top guidance and career counselors are trained to provide this kind of help. Ideally, you get realistic and practical advice along with encouragement to reach for higher goals.

A good example of top notch career guidance is Ilene Frommer, who was recently profiled in the New York Times. She is a guidance counselor at a public high school in Sonoma County California. Once you read about a typical day in the life of Ms. Frommer, you’ll not only appreciate the critical work she does, but also the work of thousands of other excellent school counselors across the country. Visit her high school’s online college and career planning resources to see what top quality advice she provides her students and parents. If you’re a working adult contemplating a career change, much of the advice is timeless.

Even if you do not have access to a counselor like Ms. Frommer, thanks to the internet you can take a page from her playbook (forgive the sports metaphor) and learn from her career planning approach, which is similar to ours. In fact, Naviance – the online course, college and career planning system her school uses, includes The Career Key as part of their product. Whether you are 17 years old or 50, the lessons are the same – research and planning, career information and preparation, are your tickets to success.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices — career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.