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To continue from my last post, here are some further tips on making the best use of your career board. Once you have asked all the questions that are bothering you, you can set the stage for achieving them. You need to be very open with your career board in terms of sharing information—if you cannot trust them with all information about yourself, they should not be on your board. A career board can be very useful in helping you identify new trends in the industry, newer occupations that may be emerging, and the like. Keep asking appropriate questions to acquire this information from them. An interesting by-product of these discussions could be that the questions you ask might strike a ...

I have written in earlier posts about the value of nurturing relationships and of developing a career board that will help you shape your career. Once you have decided upon your career board, you need to know how to maximize its effect—in other words, how to make the best possible use of the career board you have chosen. The extent to which the career board can be used differs from one individual to the next. You need to begin by informing each member of your career board the purpose of your forming the board, i.e., what precisely you hope to achieve. The primary purpose of the career board is to help you make short-, medium- or long-term decisions about your career. You can get advic...

In my last post I spoke about some of the reasons that might cause a person to reach their level of incompetence as defined in The Peter Principle. As you go through your career, make sure you do not reach this level of incompetence that bars you from further progress in your chosen field. To achieve this, keep the following checklist of questions in mind: Do I want to be in this job a year from now?If your answer is yes, the first reason automatically becomes invalid where you are concerned. Can I think of three examples where I realized or was told by someone that I was being too personal? If your answer is yes, you need to view your job with caution and see how you can detach yourself a...

In his 1968 book The Peter Principle, Dr. Laurence J. Peter formulated the principle that “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” This pertains to the level of competence of the human resources in a hierarchical organization, and explains the upward, downward, and lateral movement of personnel within the hierarchy. This can be applied in an organization to assess the potential of an employee for promotion as, according to the principle, employees are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which this level can also be viewed as their ‘level of incompetence’ with respect to further promotion. It may also be co...

In my job, I need to travel a fair amount, visiting Kenexa’s offices across the globe and meeting clients. In 2007, I must have made at least 25 international trips and about 40-45 within the US. I have just now returned from a two-week trip outside the US, during which I had occasion to visit a few different countries. During all of the air travel this entailed, I made some observations that I would like to share. Either one interesting fact that I noticed was that none of my flights outside the US was ever more than about 15 minutes late while taking off or reaching the destination. In fact, there were times we actually arrived ahead of time. The US domicile flights, on the other han...