Email can be hazardous to you health

Inter­est­ing arti­cle dis­cussing con­flict res­o­lu­tion through var­i­ous media for­mats:
http://​dav​e​fleet​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​1​1​/​h​o​w​-​r​i​c​h​-​i​s​-​y​o​u​r​-​c​o​m​m​u​n​i​c​a​t​i​o​n​-​c​o​n​f​l​i​ct/ I wanted to share my expeiences with email in particular.

The use­less­ness of email as a seri­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion method can­not be over­stated. I have stepped into heated email threads across divi­sions by walk­ing to one side’s desk and sim­ply stat­ing the same argu­ment that was made by email. The result? Smiles, coöperation.

Have you ever received an email that infu­ri­ated you? I have. I must admit that I have sent emails that I knew would frus­trate peo­ple. One word responses, delib­er­ately not answer­ing the unasked-but-implied ques­tion. When I’ve had my cof­fee, though, I will never reply to an email that gets to me when I receive it. If it’s pos­si­ble I’ll walk over to dis­cuss the issue with the per­son; if that’s not pos­si­ble, I’ll wait until I can write a ratio­nal and unemo­tional response.

Using email with­out actively think­ing about its pos­si­ble pit­falls will never work for you.

Published on 11/20/2008 9:50 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , ,

Translate “Troubleshooting” into something resume-friendly

I work in IT. I’m not a pro­gram­mer, so I end up doing the odd jobs that no one else has any desire to do nor any idea how to do.  One item on the long list of my de facto respon­si­bil­i­ties is trou­bleshoot­ing. I help trou­bleshoot code that is still in devel­op­ment; I help the val­ida­tors trou­bleshoot while they test the sup­pos­edly fin­ished code; I trou­bleshoot secu­rity issues that come up in the field across the coun­try when the offi­cial sup­port per­son­nel are out of ideas.

I would like to lever­age that expe­ri­ence on my resume — high­light­ing the dynamic, problem-solving aspect of the job and down­play­ing the tech­ni­cal knowledge/experience aspect. Take two hypotheticals:

“I have expe­ri­ence trou­bleshoot­ing soft­ware through­out all stages of its devel­op­ment and I sup­port pro­duc­tion per­son­nel in trou­bleshoot­ing end-user issues.”

“I have expe­ri­ence trou­bleshoot­ing issues that come up across all lev­els of my team and our clients. I dynam­i­cally uti­lize my problem-solving skills by think­ing out­side the box to achieve busi­ness results.”

The first one is dry and more attuned for an IT job. The sec­ond makes me sound like a pre­ten­tious jerk with a thesaurus.

How do you trans­late what you do into resume-speak?

Published on 11/18/2008 11:52 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , ,

Career Development? In your dreams.

I met with the Dean of our Career Devel­op­ment Office (CDO) last week. That’s not to be con­fused with the Office of Career Devel­op­ment (OCD). She is an extremely friendly per­son who is more than will­ing to go out of her way to help stu­dents; how­ever, there is only so much any­one can help stu­dents — par­tic­u­larly non-traditional students.

I laid out the facts for her and saw her face tighten; I could almost hear her mind shriek­ing in frus­tra­tion. Full-time work; no week­ends avail­able; min­i­mum salary require­ments; IT back­ground… it just kept get­ting bet­ter. At one point I responded to the look of res­ig­na­tion on her face by laugh­ing and com­ment­ing how I’m all over the place.

And then some­thing changed. She straight­ened her shoul­ders, looked me square in the eye and told me that it can work. I men­tioned how I’m rear­rang­ing my work sched­ule this com­ing semes­ter for the medi­a­tion clinic, since there will be day­time medi­a­tions. That was all she needed to work with. I was given sug­ges­tions of paths to fol­low, sug­ges­tions of how to approach peo­ple regard­ing part-time intern­ships and names of judges who enjoy hir­ing evening stu­dents as clerks.

Most impor­tantly, how­ever, was the fact that she was now aware of my sit­u­a­tion and that I am actively look­ing for expe­ri­ence. When she expressed her hopes that she was being help­ful, I hon­estly replied that I hadn’t expected any options to be avail­able to me. She answered that there are always options; but she’s not entirely correct.

There are only options if you open your­self up to the pos­si­bil­ity that options exist and take the first step.

Published on 11/16/2008 8:30 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: ,

Comments to the Editor

I used to read the let­ters to the edi­tor in the paper. I would be amazed and dis­gusted at some of the opin­ions. I won­dered why the edi­tors pub­lished them.

Then I read the com­ments on online news arti­cles and I real­ized that the edi­tors picked the best of the lot.

Yikes.

Published on 11/12/2008 1:35 pm.
Filed under: blawg

The other kind of Social Networking

I know what you’re think­ing, “Blog­ging, twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, indenti​.ca, what­ever other new­fan­gled appli­ca­tions with man­gled Eng­lish for names are all the rage now.…”

The truth is, I spent about an hour yes­ter­day evening walk­ing around my school’s “Career Explo­ration Fair”. Employ­ees from large law firms, pub­lic inter­est groups and gov­ern­ment agen­cies set up tables hand­ing out info and tschotchkes to curi­ous law students.

It was not a recruit­ment oppor­tu­nity. As a result, I received some solid answers to the types of frank ques­tions I prob­a­bly would not have asked. It was also an edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence in imme­di­ate net­work­ing; unfor­tu­nately much less enjoy­able (per­son­ally) than the online vari­ety and some­thing I expect I’ll be doing a lot more of.

Published on 11/12/2008 10:26 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: ,

Work/School/Life Balancing

What’s the hard­est part of work­ing full time, going to school in the evenings and hav­ing a family?

I’m on track to grad­u­ate in 3 years and a sum­mer from a 4 year evening pro­gram; that’s great. My wife’s on board, despite the fact that she has the hard­est role to play — basi­cally that of a sin­gle mother.

I see my kids on the week­ends and the youngest wakes up before I leave, and that’s hard; but my wife deals with them every day. She makes them break­fast, gets the old­est to school in the morn­ing and drops the youngest off at the babysit­ter, goes to her part time job, picks them up and watches them, goes out with them, gives them din­ner, bathes them and puts them to bed by her­self — a job not made any eas­ier by being pregnant.

I think the guilt that I’m mak­ing life harder for her cou­pled with the help­less­ness that it’s still the best thing I can pos­si­bly do at this point is the hard­est thing to deal with.

Published on 11/11/2008 10:36 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , ,