Career Development All-in-One For Dummies
Overview
Take control of your career today Want to get ahead in the workplace? Learn new skills and increase your visibility as a leader in your company with the help of this practical, hands-on guide to professional development. You'll find new techniques for being a better leader, tips for writing better emails, rules for running more effective meetings, and much more. Plus, you'll discover how to give presentations that will keep your audience engaged and learn to be a more mindful person. Combined from seven of the best For Dummies books on career development topics, Career Development All-in-One For Dummies is your one-stop guide to taking control of your career and improving your professional life. Perfect on its own or as part of a formal development program, it gives you everything you need to advance your career.
- Become a better leader
- Manage your time wisely
- Write effective business communications
- Manage projects more effectively
Success is an individual responsibility—so put your professional future in your own hands with this guide!
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The Experts at Dummies are smart, friendly people who make learning easy by taking a not-so-serious approach to serious stuff.
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career development all-in-one for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Sooner or later in your professional life, you'll have to give an important presentation. Before the presentation, rehearse and ask someone to evaluate your performance. Discover the common project management pitfalls to avoid in the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today's world.
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General Careers
To truly practice mindfulness in the workplace, you need to know how and when to use technology. Technology includes any application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. In the industrial age, technology was dominated by mechanical machinery driven by the steam engine. But in the twenty-first century, your daily life is probably dominated by digital technology.
General Careers
Effective time management requires more than good intent and self-knowledge. To keep your time under careful control, you need a framework. In your arsenal of time-management ammunition, you want to stock organizational skills, technology that helps keep you on track, and planning tools that help you keep the reins on your time, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, and so forth.
General Careers
Your conclusion can be soft-spoken or electric, depending on both your personality and your audience, but every type of conclusion should follow these guidelines to be effective.
Conclude, don’t include
If you forgot minor, unimportant pieces of information, don’t add them to your conclusion as afterthoughts. A conclusion wraps up and tightly summarizes what you said and is not a forum for new information.
General Careers
Effective writers recognize the need for editing. It’s part of the writing process. With practice, you can teach yourself to change hats and assume the editor role. The writer and editor roles reinforce each other.
In writing, you plan your message or document based on what you want to accomplish and your analysis of the reader, brainstorm content possibilities, organize logically, and create a full draft.
As a leader, one of your responsibilities is to maintain an orderly environment. This means listening to and mediating disputes that may arise (some of which concern themselves with the mission, but many more of which are personality-centered) and eliciting the cooperation of your team members to get them to cooperate when they are feeling torn apart from the group by their own concerns.
General Careers
A good leader, while managing in the present, is always looking ahead to see what threats are just over the horizon, and what opportunities are there, as well. Vision is a kind of distant, early-warning radar that is set two steps into the future, like a chess player anticipating her response to all the possible moves an opponent may make, and knowing the outcome of the move after that as well.
General Careers
Whether in a romantic novel or a spy thriller, much has been written about the mystique of a person’s eyes and the effect they can have on people, including those in your presentation’s audience. It’s been said that the face is a picture of what lies in the mind and heart with the eyes as the interpreter. You have, of course, heard that the eyes are the mirror of the soul and the expression “They were seeing eye to eye.
One way to determine your effectiveness at time-blocking is to check results. In as little as two weeks from when you launch your time-blocking schedule, you can probably see where you need minor adjustments. The best way to keep tabs on results is to track them on an ongoing basis. Conduct both a weekly review that focuses on the past week and a periodic review of where you stand in relation to your overall goals.
General Careers
There are some techniques people use to avoid providing accurate answers during a negotiation. Do not allow these ploys. When you’re alert to these substitutes for honest information, you can demand the real McCoy.
Don’t tolerate the dodge
Politicians, as a group, seem specially trained to provide anything but an answer when asked a question.
First and foremost, a leader has to keep the vision in the minds of his or her followers in every conversation, whether in a spoken or unspoken manner. When a leader is speaking as a leader, and not as a friend or confidante, he or she needs to remind people in a simple and straightforward manner and without a lot of additional explanation why they are being asked to turn the vision into reality.
Believe it or not, you can apply mindfulness to every task you approach, even emailing. Email is both incredibly convenient and incredibly stressful. As the existence of over 5 billion email accounts demonstrates, however, it is certainly popular.Here are some facts about email:
Over 100 trillion emails are sent every year.
General Careers
You increase the chances for project success when your WBS is accurate and complete and when people who will be performing the work understand and agree with it. The following guidelines suggest some ways to improve your WBS’s accuracy and acceptance:
Involve the people who’ll be doing the work. When possible, involve them during the initial development of the WBS.
General Careers
Effectively managing your time can sometimes be overwhelming. According to Earl Nightingale, the dean of the personal development industry, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or worthy ideal.” His definition doesn’t confine achievement to a fixed point but instead presents success as a journey.
General Careers
Welcome to the Department of Lost Causes. Because of the nature of organizations, even failing and dying organizations need leadership, lest they sell the furniture, close the offices, and let their workers go. An organization in its death throes is a sorry sight, especially if the organization has a proud history.
Almost everything said so far about how you lead when your group is internally diverse is even more critical when you're involved in international situations. To the normal cultural differences amongst your own group, you now have to add differences in language, customs, legal structures, standards, and other oddities, such as work rules and holidays.
The virtual age presents new challenges for leaders. Increasingly, people do not come together in the physical sense to act as teams or to meet as groups. They network. They use the Internet, phones, and computers to cooperate with each other on projects they want to achieve in common. Leading in the Age of the Internet requires at the same time more skills and fewer skills, because certain things that conventional leaders struggle with are already givens.
General Careers
Most people write too passively in their business writing. They use too many verbs that are forms of to be, which force sentences into convoluted shapes that are hard for readers to untangle. Worse, all those to be verbs make writing so dull that many readers don't even want to try.
Active verbs say everything more directly, clearly, concisely, and colorfully.
You are the most important single element in this negotiation. Even if you are the most junior person in the room, your performance at the negotiation is more important to you and your future than any agenda or seating arrangement.Do not shortchange yourself. Keep your confidence up. This just may be the moment that helps you climb the executive ladder.
General Careers
If you want to practice mindfulness in the workplace, your brain may need a little rewiring. Your brain is made up of neurons, which are like wires that carry electrical current from one place to another. Each neuron is connected to many others. The brain is the most complex organism in the known universe and scientists still have very little idea about how it works.
Few words elicit the same reactions of anger and frustration that the word meeting can provoke. People consider meetings to be everything from the last vestige of interpersonal contact in an increasingly technical society to the biggest time waster in business today.You’ve probably been in meetings where you wanted to bang your head against the wall.
General Careers
The opening offer is the first specific statement of what you’re looking for in a negotiation. After you've set your goals for the negotiation, you can consider the opening offer. For example, in a job interview, the opening offer is the salary you’re seeking. Don’t look for any hard-and-fast rules or magic formulas.
General Careers
Nothing says boring like a predictable, conventional (a nice way of saying slow and dull) introduction to a presentation or speech. Ramping it up just a couple of notches with some creativity can make all the difference. And, in some cases, going from mild to wild with your imagination fires up your audience.Imaginative, unexpected approaches to starting a presentation are eagerly welcomed by an audience weary of typical talks.
General Careers
Just about everything you write is a chance to build relationships with people you report to and even other people above them in the chain, as well as peers, colleagues, customers, prospects, suppliers, and members of your industry. More and more, people succeed through good networking. In a world characterized by less face-to-face contact and more global possibilities, writing is a major tool for making connections and maintaining them.
Can technology be used mindfully? Anything can be done with awareness, wisdom, and compassion is a form of mindfulness. Although mindfulness has traditionally been associated with more natural surroundings, there’s no reason why mindfulness can’t be applied between uses of and while using technology.Technology can help to make you more mindful.
General Careers
In addition to helping you identify work you need to complete, a WBS helps you identify unknowns that may cause problems when you attempt to perform that work. As you think through the work you have to do to complete your project, you often identify considerations that may affect how or whether you can perform particular project activities.
The when of closing a negotiation is easy: early and often. Some people don’t seem to want or need to close the deal. They are like cows chewing their cud. They just go on and on enjoying the process, burning up time, and never bringing discussions to a close. And then again, like cows, they will put something away and bring it back up later and chew on it some more.
General Careers
Working in the modern age means that you have to take responding to email into your time management practices. Do you have days when you receive hundreds of emails, even after using the filtering techniques described previously? Receiving only what you need to deal with is only half the battle. You must create a system that shrinks the response time and investment if you still get a large volume of emails.
General Careers
It’s important (and healthy) to keep your home and work lives separate. And one way to do that is to create different emails for your job and your personal correspondence. Setting up email accounts through services such as Gmail is easy and enables you to have all personal emails, newsletters, and store offers sent to a specific personal account.
General Careers
Effective listening requires probing, especially in a negotiation. No one says everything you want to hear in the exact order, depth, and detail that you prefer. You have to ask. No phrase describes the job of questioning better than tickle it out. Questions are a way of coaxing out information that you want or need.
General Careers
You can apply the six basic skills to every negotiation, no matter what. But some of the negotiations you’ll encounter may seem beyond the scope of these skills. Let’s face it, they aren’t. You simply have to remain focused on the six skills.Negotiating is like tennis. You have to serve the ball whether you're playing a rank amateur or in the finals at Wimbledon.
Sooner or later in your professional life, you'll have to give an important presentation. Before the presentation, rehearse and ask someone to evaluate your performance. Discover the common project management pitfalls to avoid in the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today's world.
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