Tag Archives: problem solving

An Answer to the FTC’s Question?

Posted by on 12/09/2009 No comments

While I was perus­ing the twit­ter­stream yes­ter­day, @ProfJonathon shared a link to a new web ser­vice named CMP​.ly. Accord­ing to the web­site, it pur­ports to be a “dis­clo­sure engine” for every­one online — from blog­gers to Agen­cies.
My first ques­tion to ProfJonathon was whether it was rec­og­nized by the FTC. Since he was merely shar­ing a link and was in no way asso­ci­ated with the ser­vice, we agreed that it was an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tual exer­cise and we each went our sep­a­rate ways. Then, I got a response from @cmply:

@ProfJonathan @mglickman — Good ques­tion. Although the FTC can­not endorse a par­tic­u­lar solu­tion we met and reviewed our sys­tem. DM for info.

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Email can be hazardous to you health

Posted by on 11/20/2008 No comments

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.

Translate “Troubleshooting” into something resume-friendly

Posted by on 11/18/2008 No comments

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?