Welcome to Career Horizons: The Blog!

Welcome, one and all, to the first official post of my new blog — which will be dedicated to passing along a steady stream of “pro bono” career tips, job hunting insights, and employment resources relevant to Pacific Northwest professionals in career transition!

I’m particularly excited by the symbolism behind this new blog launch, since it’s taking place exactly five years to the day after Career Horizons was born, and I believe that this new forum will turn out to be a powerful extension of my career coaching and outplacement practice — enabling me to share information even faster with folks who are in active job search mode, as well as allowing people to comment on my posts in order to help create a vibrant “community discussion” around critical career and employment-related topics.

Going forward, the mix of content I plan on featuring in this blog includes many of the same features I’ve included in my monthly newsletter over the years, for those who have followed that publication, such as: career book and website reviews; advice on changing careers, resume development, interviewing, and overall job hunting effectiveness; key career questions (and answers) that have come up in my work with people; and various other inclusions such as guest postings from other local experts and perhaps the occasional contest or survey, as well!

Additionally, as you’ll note on the right side of this page, I’ve already populated the blog with over 200 past articles from my newsletter series — so there’s already a wealth of advice on career management you can immediately search through either by category or by using the keyword search box provided.  And while I can’t swear that the information in every single one of these postings is still 100% valid, and that all the resource links are fully operational, for the most part this content should still be quite useful in a wide variety of situations.

So again, welcome to Career Horizons: The Blog! and please don’t hesitate to make any suggestions in the months ahead about topics you’d like to see addressed — or to use the “Leave a Reply” box under each blog posting to submit your own thoughts, recommendations, and opinions.  And while such comments will be moderated before they get posted, for obvious reasons, as long as you send in something that is relevant, civilized, and largely profanity-free, there’s an excellent chance you’ll see it published!

Best wishes to all of you for the New Year and here’s to some great career developments in 2009…

Clients-Only Resource: Green/Sustainable Companies List

Over the years, in order to help our clients clarify their goals and uncover potential hiring opportunities, Career Horizons has researched, built, and maintained a large number of target company lists related to key industries within Washington State.  These current lists, for example, include detailed breakdowns of local companies in the Biotechnology, Consumer Products, and Telecommunications/Wireless sectors, in addition to hundreds of companies who are in “Start-Up” mode or who have been voted to be a “Best Company to Work For” by one or more local publications.

Given the increasing number of folks we’ve met who have expressed the desire to work for “green” companies in the area, however, we’ve recently channeled a number of hours into pulling together a brand-new list (available to our clients here using our standard website password) of Washington organizations that appear to be engaged in some aspect of the emerging green/sustainability wave.  At present, our list includes 120 organizations, ranging in scope from alternative energy firms (solar, wind, tidal, biodiesel) to companies involved in green technology, green building and construction, recycling, renewable resource management, business sustainability consulting, environmental advocacy, and similar niches.  All in all, we’re excited to have this new eco-friendly list available for our clients, especially since Washington continues to position itself as one of the leading areas in the country in terms of the “green collar” jobs revolution!

Not a client of our firm?  While we unfortunately can’t provide a copy of our full list of firms, we’re delighted to steer you to a similar set of data that was recently compiled by John Cook over at the Seattle PI.  Mr. Cook identifies 35 top local “green” firms on his website here for those who may be interested…

Clients-Only Resource: Boolean Web Search Handout

Do you find surfing for information on the Internet about as fun as getting your teeth pulled?  Do you get angry, frustrated, or annoyed by the amount of “junk” that comes up when you search for job leads or target company possibilities?  Do you see people typing things like ((title:sales OR title:”business development”) AND title:VP NOT title:assistant) and have no idea what this means?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, we’ve created a brand-new handout that might “ease your pain” and greatly increase your efficiency when hunting for things on the web!  This new two-page resource provides a quick tutorial of the basic “Boolean” web search syntax that drives almost every searchable site on the Internet, ranging from Google to Yahoo! to specific career-related sites such as Indeed, Monster.com, and LinkedIn.  Following this initial tutorial, we then showcase a number of creative ways that job hunters can apply these syntax rules on-line to generate relevant, useful career leads and opportunities.  This handout is perfect for the many people we’ve come across who’ve never had the chance to learn these basic syntax guidelines — and who have likely wasted an inordinate amount of time hunting for things in cyberspace.  Additionally, even many of our tech-savvy clients may not fully realize the depth of what’s possible using complex keyword searches, so this handout might be a very useful refresher if you’re in this camp, as well.

As just one example of the type of creative search you’ll read about in this handout, we’ve illustrated how to use Google to locate the resumes of a bunch of your competitors, for free!  All you have to do is run the keyword search below through the Google website, substituting the word “keyword” for a word or phrase that relates to your own professional background — such as marketing or accounting or sales management.  If the term you use is more than one word in length, however, you’ll need to enclose it in quotation marks (e.g. “sales management” OR “advertising executive”) for things to work right.

(resume AND keyword) AND (filetype:doc OR filetype:pdf OR filetype:txt)

Typically, we make these kinds of handouts available solely to our client base, as part of their career coaching and outplacement program benefits, but given our passion for helping people improve their overall Internet experience, we’re making this resource available to our entire newsletter audience for a limited time via our website.  To access this file, simply visit the “Client Resources tab” of our site by clicking here, then click on the first link listed under the “Career Handouts & White Papers” section…

Clients-Only Resource: Venture Capital Firm List

If you are a client of Career Horizons who is interested in working for the venture capital sector — or in offering your management experience to one of the hundreds of start-ups that local VC firms have invested in — we’d invite you to e-mail us and receive our updated list of Northwest venture capital firms and networking groups.  We’ve not only added several firms to this list that weren’t previously included, but have created a “Notes” column where we’ve entered some additional details about each firm’s specific investment focus.  To receive an updated Excel tab of this data, simply click here and send us a note!