Business Career Center.com

When your business is seeking employees, it is crucial to have proper business career descriptions on file. The applicant must be made aware of exactly what is required of the job in this business. It is tempting to rely on background knowledge—after all, most individuals have some idea of what tasks their careers entail. But this is a mistake. Each company must make clear exactly what each job entails for them. And it is important to have these business career descriptions on paper.

Legal issues, as well as general dissatisfactions, can occur, when precise business career descriptions are not written and appropriately distributed. Avoid this at all costs. Remember that a well written job description offers the following benefits:

• forces managers and employees to agree on job responsibilities
• helps human resources know how to hire for a job
• gives new candidates the information they need
• helps employees assisting with the interview process know what questions to ask

If you are working in the design field, then you understand how powerful fonts can be. But whether you are a designer or simply a business man or woman who is responsible for designing his or her own presentation materials, you must have some background with font usage for your presentations to have the right impact.

1. First of all, be sure that your fonts constrast sharply with your background. We have all seen those movies where the subtitles are unreadable because they are too close in color to the image on the screen, so don’t let that happen to you. There should be a sharp color contrast between the font and the background, and the background should not vary, but be a single color.
2. There is often a temptation to use one of the many wonderful, artistic fonts that are available to you in your software program. Don’t fall for it. Save those fonts for making greeting cards and doing art projects. Easy-to-read fonts like Arial are best for presentations, handouts, publications, and other business work.
3. Be consistent. If you have a really good reason to use two different fonts, you can do it, but never use three. There is no need to go crazy making each slide or handout unique. Remember that uniqueness and creativity should be the hallmarks of the content of your work, not of the presentation materials themselves.

When putting together a PowerPoint presentation, be sure to follow these three tips to better reach your audience.

1. Make your slides easy to follow. Be sure the title is at the top and that statements and lists read left to right, top to bottom. Getting too creative with a slide is not a good idea, because each one is only meant to be glanced at briefly as a visual aide to learning the spoken information. Don’t confuse the reader.
2. Many people don’t know that the typical rules of grammar don’t apply to PowerPoint. You should limit or eliminate punctuation and avoid all capital letters. These things needlessly clutter up the slide, distract from the message, and draw too much attention to themselves. Capital letters, to an audience, feel like shouting.
3. Keep it simple. That means no fancy fonts. It is always tempting to get creative when the program offers you so many options, but don’t go there. Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana are the easiest fonts to read, so stick to them. The object of the game is to relay simple bits of information quickly and effectively, not to create a mood or dazzle people with your creativity. Do that within your business work. The presentation is just there to present.

Your business career is dependent on doing great presentations, and PowerPoint is, of course, the most widely used presentation software on the market today. When making your PowerPoint slides there is a lot to keep in mind. Many do not realize the abbreviated nature of a PowerPoint presentation and how they are meant to interact with it, so let’s look at how to make great presentations.

The most important thing in a PowerPoint presentation is to keep statements concise. You should limit the number of words on the screen. Use short bulleted lists with isolated bits of information accompanied by powerful graphics or eye-catching pictures. That doesn’t mean your listeners will get less information though. It is up to you to have your own notes and elaborate upon each and every point with dexterity. Remember that the slides are just there to sum up the information, not to relay everything one needs to know. It is up to you to provide plenty of detail about each point and, in necessary, supplemental materials to help listeners fully understand each concept.

The best, highest paying careers for women are those where women are scarce. For instance, engineering and technical careers are often overlooked by women, but pay very well. Of course, these are also the highest paying jobs for men. The trouble most women face is either a lack of interest in the subject matter, lack of encouragement toward that subject matter by educators, and discrimination within the field itself.

It is often said that in order to be respected in a mathematical or science career, a woman must be twice as good as her male peers, and this is still true in many cases. However, there are two fields where women actually earn more than men on average. These include the following:

• Sales engineers
• Automotive service technicians (mechanics)

Many theories exist as to why this may be, but some suggest that women have better people skills and are more willing and able to explain the details, for instance, of a product for sale or a vehicle’s dysfunction. Women are trusted by other women, and this gives them the advantage when dealing with women buyers and auto owners.  What does this mean for business owners? Consider hiring women in these nontraditional roles. If they are making more money, you will be too.

If you are in the art business, then you know how important each sale is. That’s why the subject of each painting you invest in is so critical. According to Art Business Today, there are ten top-selling subjects for painting that every art investor or business person should know about. These top sellers have not been selected as a trend for 2010, but all all-time favorites for investors. Unlike many other businesses, the art market has been excelling at selling these particular subjects for such a long time that business people know art isn’t about trends, it is about tradition. Let’s take a look at those top ten subjects:

1. Traditional landscapes
2. Local views
3. Modern or semi-abstract landscapes
4. Abstracts
5. Dogs
6. Figure studies
7. Seascapes
8. Wildlife
9. Impressionistic landscapes
10. nudes

Email is such a convenient way to communicate that sometimes we forget it can also be one of the biggest time-wasters in the office. You have to manage your email just like you manage all your other communications, so here are a few tips for email management that can help you succeed no matter what business career you have.

1. Use filters. Be sure to set up and use your filters so that they drive spam directly to the trash. You shouldn’t be wasting your time deleting spam.
2. When you are working, keep your email program turned off. You do not want to be in the middle of a difficult project and hear “you’ve got mail.” It is too distracting.
3. Select the right time of day to answer your email. Many executives handle their email first thing in the morning, but if morning is your most productive time, you may not want to do this. Use your most productive time of day to do your difficult projects, and answer email during a time when your body naturally slows down. Choose a time and stick to it

When you have written a job description, you have clearly communicated your expectations to a prospective employee, and that effort alone could prove invaluable as time goes by. Employers who try to be “laid back” and use discussion or any less formal style of job description are really asking for trouble when it comes time to enforce your company code and standards of conduct.

Business career descriptions set clear expectations for employees and can even be posted publicly so that there is never a misunderstanding. If an employee feels he or she is being asked to do work that is outside the natural purview of the job, he then has a document to reference to determine whether or not this is the case. Finally, others rely on these job descriptions as well, not just the hired employee. When there is a team atmosphere, each member of the team should know the responsibilities of the others. A lack of understanding between team members can usually be traced back to a lack of specificity in the business career description of one or more of them.

When you start looking for a job, stop and do something else first. Sit down and design your ideal job. That’s right, go ahead and indulge your fantasies. What would you really like to be doing? What facets of the work fascinate you, and what facets would you just as soon as not hand off to an assistant? What lifestyle do you want—one of constant change or one of steady growth? When you consider these things and write a business career description of the ideal job for you, you will have a much better idea of what to look for. You may even come up with some new ideas for where to find this dream job.

Now that you have the ideal business career description at your fingertips, be sure that you are prepared to pursue it. You will do this by having:

• A great portfolio
• A great sense of business or personal promotion
• An organized approach
• Set rates and fees
• Prewritten legal contracts, if applicable

With all of these details taken care of, you should be able to land that freelance gig or business career job without a problem. You will know what you want to make and what type of work you seek. You will be able to picture the lifestyle you expect to lead and you’ll be prepared for the work you find. Writing your own business career description is invaluable for landing that “dream job.”

If you are a freelancer—whether it be a writer, graphic designer, musician, or other professional—you should know about the freelancers union. Offering health insurance, job postings, networking events and more, this union could be an excellent connection for you in your effort to stay independent yet successful.

The Freelancer’s Union offers a yellow pages and a section for “gigs,” each of which enable job seekers and hiring managers to locate one another. The union also is able to obtain numerous discounts for its members on everything from corporate bookstores to hotels. The excellent group insurance benefits available through the union alone are an excellent reason to become a member, so look into it today.

In business school you probably learned the value of word-of-mouth advertising, but did you know that you can build this type of informal advertising with a newsletter? Whether you have a small business you want to promote or just want to ensure that you and your skills become known, a newsletter could be just what you need. In order to get your newsletter project off the ground, you will need to know the steps.

First, you must gather your contacts. After all, you must have people to send this newsletter to, don’t you? So consider clients, family, friends, past coworkers, other executives in the same field, and classmates. Next, you’ll have to determine the content of your newsletter. A brainstorming session should help you come up with numerous ideas to write about: anything pertaining to your latest ventures and projects will be interesting to the readers. Once you have the articles written, you will want to format them in some way that looks a little more dressed-up than a simple email. There are many templates available for formatting email newsletters, so this should be relatively simple. Finally, send the newsletter out to your list, and you are finished. The whole process is reasonably quick and painless and could have innumerable positive benefits for you in the long run.

Why take the trouble to send out a newsletter? Many business men and women have considered the idea of a newsletter, but abandoned it as too labor intensive. After all, if your business or career is well established, why spend the extra money on something that most people will just treat as spam? There are a few good reasons to rethink this position, however. The main one is that you simply never know what the future holds. You could be looking for work, or even for new employees at some point, and someone on your newsletter list could end up helping you out.

Newsletters keep your company or your work fresh in the minds of all the people you know. So whether they are clients, friends, family, freelancers, or company executives, they will always be curious to know the latest projects you are working on or the latest accolades you have received. Once you get used to publishing your newsletter, you will find that it is quite easy to do. If you are a good writer, simply utilize a template where you can plug in a photo here and some text there to create a simple, but handsome newsletter that is no trouble at all. If you are not comfortable writing the articles in your newsletter, hire a virtual writing assistant. You will merely give this person the basic information and then he or she will write the newsletter for you. Such an assistant can be invaluable for so many projects, in fact, that you may want to expand upon the relationship. You can see that publishing a newsletter is both simple and useful and could, in fact, lead to a wide variety of interesting relationships.

Once you have your degree in graphic design, you are well on your way to a great career in the art business. You will be able to work for publications and design for magazines of all kinds, book layout, and web design. As the designer, you will also be a manager in charge of various other graphics personnel, so be sure you understand the principles of management, not just of art and design. You may wish to go into a business job with your degree, or you may decide to go into business for yourself, but in either case, it is important to know how to make your personal brand known.

Even if you have begun your career with a large company, there is always the chance that you will need to make a move—whether vertical or lateral. So do the following in order to make your work well known and respected over the years:

• Encourage word-of-mouth to grow your business and your brand
• Create and email newsletter for your work and send it to an ever-growing list
• Always have business cards handy
• Get a credit line for yourself as a designer

• Start a graphic design blog if you really want to attract a following

Whether you are looking for a new job or hiring someone to work in your company, you should know that a job description is a powerful thing. It attracts new employees, but more importantly, it creates expectations. Workers, whether consciously or unconsciously, base their job performance on the job description. If they read something that sounded like a slacker’s dream, they’ll act that way and if what they read is extremely businesslike, they’ll act that way instead. So let’s take a look at what a good job description should do:

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• It creates agreement among managers and others in terms of exactly what duties are expected from each employee.
• It gives the human resources department the information it needs in terms .of knowledge, skills, education, and so forth, so it can do its job effectively.
• It informs candidates for the position exactly which duties they will hold.
• It protects the employer legally if he has to demonstrate why a certain candidate is not appropriate for a position.

Social media has made business today completely different from any other time and place. Today, it is important to use applications such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with employees as well as clients, to market goods, and to create a brand. Twitter is especially crucial to any business, such as an ebusiness or software business, where updates are crucial and periodic system checks are essential.

If you have a business where software makes up a great deal of your inventory, be sure to twitter whenever new updates and new applications are available. New versions of apps as well as problems with the database or website are things you can communicate effectively through twitter, thus preventing any misunderstandings and keeping everyone up to date.

If you have to make presentations in your job or business career, then you know the embarrassment of making others sit through flat, boring lectures and PowerPoint presentations that don’t inspire or enthrall. The information you have to impart is interesting. . . at least some part of it is interesting, so you must find a way to make your audience relate to it and care about it. Here are some tips:

• First, create anticipation. Use social networking sites like facebook and twitter to let people know what the presentation will be about and to answer their questions in advance. Always discuss how the topic affects others and how it will help them achieve their goals.
• Ensure your presentation is video and image rich. If you use PowerPoint, there is plenty of opportunity to add relevant images, but other programs also enable you to utilize video and image in new and interesting ways.
• Use social media to make your presentation more interactive. You can encourage audience members to respond to a poll or express their opinions vial text message or tweets. This way the audience feels included and important.

Seeking a fascinating career—whether in the music business, in Hollywood, or in the corporate world—usually starts the same. You’ll need a resume and cover letter no matter how “cool” your prospective job is and no matter how casual the work environment. Many individuals spend a great deal of time on their resume, but when it comes to the cover letter, they don’t try as hard. This can be a huge mistake because after all, the cover letter gets read first. The two documents should both be perfected. With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the different types of cover letters you may want to keep on hand for different job search situations.

• The customized cover letter. This document is specially prepared for each individual job application and designed to appeal to each individual company. These tend to be preferred and are the most commonly used, if the most time consuming, style of cover letter.
• Targeted cover letter. This cover letter can be written to appeal to a variety of similar companies. It doesn’t have to be customized with the company’s name, but it will assert the field the job should be in and present your qualifications. This is appropriate for situations such as job fairs, where you will be handing out quite a few letters and resumes to people you just met.
• Finally, there is the cover letter requesting a meeting. This cover letter is more assertive than the others. It assumes some contact between you and the recipient has already been made, and requests an interview or meeting to set job-search process in motion.

If you are in the process of deciding upon a first career or making a career change, then you know there is a lot involved with that career choice. Follow these three steps to get started on a truly successful business career plan that has been carefully considered and effectively planned:

• Evaluate the job satisfaction you currently enjoy. When going about your daily activities, keep a diary of what themes recur in the work, what uncomfortable or enjoyable situations recur, and how you feel about your work on a day to day basis. It can be helpful even to rate your workdays on a scale of one to five. Analyzing these notes later will give you a great idea of what aspects of this career you want to keep and what aspects you don’t.
• Next, try finding volunteer opportunities that enable you to get involved in the career you find interesting. After some time in the field you may be convinced that this is the job for you, or you may come crashing back to earth and realize it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
• In your current job, look for ways to develop new skills that can lead you into other fields or departments. This is a way to get free training for a career switch.

If you are considering using a career coach, you probably have a lot of questions. This is a relatively new field and although many individuals feel stuck in a rut with their jobs or career choices, they often don’t know exactly how a career coach could help them. Below, we answer some important questions.

• The first thing to ask yourself is What exactly does a career coach do? The answer is simple: he or she identifies career options for you, helps you make potential career choices, and assists you in focusing and targeting your employment search.
• Next, you will be curious to know how much these professionals charge: The range is anywhere from $50 to $200 per hour, so be selective about the coach you choose and make sure the money is well spent.
• Finally, you should have some idea where to find a career coach if you intend to hire one. The best method is to see the National Career Development Association. This and many other organizations certify coaches and can let you know of coaches available in your community.

If you are in business for yourself, you know that sometimes you can pay yourself your salary and sometimes you have to make do. If anyone in the business is going to feel the brunt of hard times it must be you and not any of your employees. So to ensure that you do receive your full salary each month, work hard to grow the business using word-of-mouth advertising. After all, satisfied customers are the best marketing technique known to man.

• Have a newsletter. Everyone you know or has ever expressed interest in your work should receive it. It should present the latest information about your company and its projects.
• Never be without your business cards. Keep them in a neat holder for best presentation, and always close at hand. Give a handful to anyone willing to pass them around for you.
• Include links all over the web. Be sure your web site is in good repair and you have numerous articles and other postings linking directly back to your website. When a friend recommends your website, you want it to be easy for any other consumer to locate.