The Benefits to Becoming a Remote Free Lance Specialist (Pt. 1) Building Your Future Now

The Benefits to Becoming a Remote Free Lance Specialist (Pt. 1) Building Your Future Now In this day and age the internet brings us closer together. We have social media and a multitude of apps to gets us connected to people, place and things that interest us. The internet is also a place where you can start your new career! Sound a bit scary? Maybe for a second but when you do some research there are many opportunities out there that can you net you a better job and more money. Working remotely is a career opportunity that has really taken off in the last decade. More and more people are discovering the potential of earning decent wages while working in the comfort of their own homes. Granted, this isnt for everybody. It is however a great way to reassess your career path just in case you are looking for a change. There are many remote free lancing jobs out there. You can become a customer service representative, a transcriber, a resume writer and even a consultant. The skys certainly the limit. You can also do remote work for a company to gain experience and then eventually put your own business together. If you need further information about becoming a remote free lancer take a few moments and try reaching out to professionals in your LinkedIn network that may have some experience. Also, dont be afraid to send a message to other professionals outside your networkif a few respond back to you ask them questions about their experience. Image: Namair

A Dozen Tips To Getting A Great Start In That New Job

A Dozen Tips To Getting A Great Start In That New Job The following is a guest post by Mark Blayney.  His bio follows. Starting work can be daunting as you enter a new environment, but here’s a dozen tips of things to think about in your first month or so to get you off on the right foot. Be there and be there on time â€" Being punctual one of the simplest steps you can take, but one which is entirely within your control and which is very visible and gets noticed. Get your game face on, give a good impression from the moment you walk in â€" If you’ve seen the film Pulp Fiction, think about how Vincent and Jules go about getting into character outside the door of the flat they are about to hit. They are heading into their own particular work environment so they deliberately adopt their work personas before starting. Don’t just walk in to your work in the morning. Before you get there deliberately make a little time to think about how to give the best impression from the moment you arrive, and if nothing else, before you go in, smile! Dress appropriately â€" You and your appearance need to fit in with the organisation’s culture and values. Firms can have dress codes which are either quite overt or simply enforced through the cultural norms. So, look around at what everyone else is wearing and check that your dress is appropriate. Not being too slack is the obvious failing, but sometimes being overdressed can be a problem in achieving a cultural fit with your colleagues. Listen and take notes â€" Quite simply write everything down. Your work is going to be overwhelming to start with and people will be telling you lots of different things, which you’ll be expected to remember. If you don’t write it down, you won’t remember. There’ll just be too much to absorb too quickly. So, write it down! Get yourself a notebook (or an App if you prefer) and carry it with you everywhere you go at work. Use it to note down everything: work to do, names (and contact details), deadlines, ideas, everything. It’s important to realise how much you are in learning mode in these early days and how much you are going to need to take notes to be able to refer back. People are usually very willing to help someone new and show them the ropes, but there are few things more irritating than finding they have to tell you the same thing time again and again. Acquire the reputation that you only have to be told once (because you write it down and learn it) and you will quickly earn credibility. Plan â€" A properly organised and prioritised To Do list is your best friend. It’s the way you order and organise your world and turn the stream of work heading your way into something manageable. If you don’t plan, others will plan for you and you will simply end up reacting to and running around after their priorities, not yours. Work to make everyone else around you look good â€" Forget about yourself for the moment and instead work on the basis that your job is simply to make your boss (and your team of co-workers) look good. So, think about what their goals are, what does your boss want and why, and how you can support them. Be proactive and always look for chances to help and be useful. This will make you stand out and in due course you’ll start to be seen as indispensable. Focusing on serving others is investing in your social capital, while at the same time helping yourself to learn and develop. Do this throughout your career and it will pay back handsomely, believe me. Always be ready to learn â€" Start off by being honest and embracing the fact you are new. No one expects you to have all the answers so don’t pretend you do because it’s not going to fool anyone. Treat your job as a chance to learn, but don’t simply expect to sit back and be taught. Be proactive and self-starting. So, if you find a problem, don’t just go running for help immediately or ask someone to show you what to do. Instead think about the issue to see if you can come up with answers or options yourself, and then if you need to, go and check you have got the right answer. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you have a problem you can’t solve or aren’t sure you have the right answer for, then ask. People generally like to be asked for help. It makes them feel good about themselves (I’m seen and respected as an expert) and what they’re doing (I’m being nice and helpful, how great am I?) and if they’re passionate about what they do they will positively want to share their knowledge with you. Learn through errors Mistakes happen to us all, it’s part of life. So, when you get something wrong, admit it, don’t hide it. Take it to your boss (yes, you read that right) and show them what you’ve done and why. Work out together what needs to be done to fix it and how you can avoid it in future. Trust me, it’s a better way than them finding out for themselves later. Seek feedback â€" Check in with your manager on a regular basis to get their view on how you are doing. Your job is to make them look good, so don’t you want to know if they feel you have? Share your To Do list with them at the start of each day, is it covering everything they need or is there anything else they want? This helps you ensure you get off on the right track and shows them you are being proactive in planning your work. Check in with them before you go home to ensure everything’s been covered off that’s needed today. Show them your notes on a regular basis (that in itself is likely to impress them). Ask them whether they feel things have gone right and whether there’s anything you could have done better? Participate â€" Your work is a social environment and to be successful you need to understand the culture and build relationships. There is something to learn from each of the people around you, so dive on in and become part of the team. What’s the coffee making rota? (Probably you as the newbie, but you never know.) Where do people go for lunch? Go with them and talk to people. Same again after work if people socialise. Work out the social rules, quickly â€" Every workplace will have its own little customs and practises which are the social norms everybody knows, works by and unconsciously expects everybody else to follow. So, if you don’t, because nobody told you or showed you, then people will see you (probably unfairly but there you go) as acting anti-socially. Just getting a cup of coffee can be a minefield. What’s the fridge and milk etiquette? Do people make a round of hot drinks, or get their own? Do people have their own mugs or is it a free for all? If you’ve used the last of the water in the kettle are you expected to fill it up again? What happens to dirty cups? Are you expected to wash up after yourself, put them in a dishwasher or leave them for a cleaner? Get this wrong and you’ll be seen as the one who took my mug (and my milk), didn’t make a round of drinks for everyone, left the kettle empty for the next person and left your dirty cups in the sink as a mess for someone else to have to wash up and put away. Don’t burnout in month one â€" The first point on this list was about being on time and you should stay on while there’s work to do. But this needs to be tempered with looking after yourself, since taken to extremes there’s always more work to do and you could then get sucked into working longer and longer hours. Unfortunately, in the work environment there’s always more work, and there’ll always be some people who will be happy to let you put in all the hours (even though in the long run this will lead to stress and lower productivity), the only person you can really trust to look out for you, is you. So, take responsibility for your own work-life balance right from the start. Decide what your boundaries are. Ensure that you keep a life outside of work and make sure you work hours you are comfortable with and take the holidays and breaks you need. Bio Mark Blayney (www.theworkpress.com) is the author of Your First Job, an essential guide to entering the world of work for the first time. Want more tips to calm the new job jitters?  Check out the video below! Main image credit.

The Remotiq - A Reserved Professional Resume Template in Quiet Colors

The Remotiq - A Reserved Professional Resume Template in Quiet Colors The Remotiq A Reserved Professional Resume Template in Quiet Colors What if an organization is looking for a more introverted candidate who prefers to work solo in a quiet environment? This might be a remote job opportunity or an on-site position that is rather isolated. And suppose you are that introvert who would love just such a position? To capture that opportunity, you will need to display your desire to brand yourself as a self-motivated candidate who can succeed in a solo work environment. The Remotiq template is traditional, comes in quiet colors, and allows you to showcase your preference for “independence” through the prominent section on key skills. You also have ample space to showcase your work experience, provide some insights on past projects and drop some portfolio links. To give away that “salient power” vibe as a candidate, be sure that you sprinkle in some power words in your resume writing.This professional resume template is free and fully downloadable. Better yet, it can be edited and remodeled as you wish! File size: 187 KB Format: .docx Downloaded 3,003 times License: Free, personal use only. Please read the license terms for resources. Download previous article The Accomplished Academic Professional Resume Template for Researchers next article 6 Popular Phone Interview Questions + Tips for Answering Them you might also likeFine Balance â€" A Creative and Professional Resume Template

How to decide if your commute is too long

How to decide if your commute is too long The average daily commute in the U.S. is about 25 minutes. The shortest average daily commute is about 15 minutes for people living in Midwest cities like Witchita, Omaha, and Tulsa. New Yorkers have the longest commute 38 minutes, which is six minutes longer than the average commute time in Chicago. The average commute is increasing across the board, including the number of people who have extreme commutes 90 minutes or more. A lot of people try to justify their outrageously long commute. I think this is delusional, and I would know, because I used to have one: Two hours each way between Los Angeles and San Diego. Two hours, that is, if I left home at 5 a.m. and went home at 8 p.m. I thought it would be okay because the money was so good, but actually, I nearly lost my mind. So think twice about accepting an outrageous commute in order to make outrageous amounts of money. Especially if your extreme commute means that the time outside of work for family and friends is gone to the car ride. Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London published research to show that if you are going to take a job where you will give up seeing family and friends on a regular basis, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being away from those people. The idea that you move deep into the suburbs to get a huge house is pretty much over. Gen X and Y dont believe in McMansions, which is why theres a glut of them on the market right now. But Gen X and Y do believe in maintaining nimble, flexible careers, so its surprising that this trend isnt the nail in the coffin of deep suburbia. Because Brendan, at The Where Blog, points out that the values we hold highest marriage, community, and extra time with the family are falling apart in the face of a long commute as we are in our cars commuting for so long and spending days far away from our communities during the day. And, if the city is too far to justify driving in for a part-time job, then your commute limits the way you can structure your family. For example, polls show most mothers would rather work part-time than be at home full-time with their children, but Wendy Waters points out, in her blog All About Cities, that the possibilities for part-time work are severely limited if home is a long commute from the city. For both spouses. But even if you are not killing your spouses career potential with your choices for a commute, the amount of stress a commute brings on is bigger than you could imagine and its uncontainable. This is because a bad commute is bad in a different way every day, and you cant predict it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains (video) that the human mind is great at adapting to things that wont change: we convince ourselves we will be fine, and then it becomes basically true that we will be. But if things change all the time, we cannot use that adaptive part of our brain. In this way, having a bad commute is worse than losing a limb. So if you have a bad commute, you are probably not very happy. And you should know that a bad commute spills over into all aspects of your life. Raymond Novaco, a psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that bad traffic on the way home makes for a bad mood in the evening. This is true regardless of age, gender, income, and job satisfaction. A lot of managing your daily commute comes down to making compromises in terms of limiting where you can take a job, what kind of job you can take, and how big a yard your kids can have to run in. For most of us, a long commute is about getting a better job in exchange for less personal time. But the decision about how far to commute is like most career decision points in that you must consider that your biggest problems will not be solved by getting a better job or more money, they will be solved by spending more time with friends and family, or getting to know yourself better.

RSum Writing Style - The Truth About Which of the Following Statements About RSum Writing Style is Not Accurate

RSum Writing Style - The Truth About Which of the Following Statements About RSum Writing Style is Not AccurateIf you want to write quality articles and earn a living online then you have to follow the rules of good writing. I know that this may sound like an over simplified list but it's the truth.The first statement is that everyone needs to use a specific type of writing. While it is true that a particular style or writing style is good for some people then it is not good for others. Therefore, everyone should write their own unique style.The second statement is that RSum writing style is not going to make you rich and successful. There are plenty of free marketing tools that will enable you to reach the millions of readers that are on the Internet today. The truth is that there are plenty of techniques that will allow you to reach the largest possible audience.The third statement is that the goal of RSum writing style is to get the reader to buy. In actuality, many people actuall y stop reading the articles they are on after the first couple of paragraphs. This means that they are simply wasting their time. The goal is to build rapport with the reader and make them feel that they need to purchase from you.The fourth statement is that RSum writing style is 'hot air'. Yes, it is possible for someone to spend a lot of time learning about a topic, but they may spend more time trying to get it correct than actually learning. There are plenty of tools and techniques that you can use to learn about anything and to help you master the skill.The fifth statement is that RSum writing style is a false way to market. Some of the most successful marketers I know are honest people who write their articles as truthfully as possible.The sixth statement is that RSum writing style is boring. Like I said, there are plenty of excellent marketing techniques that do not require you to write boring articles. Some of the best articles I've ever read are made up of the most interesti ng, informative, unique and creative material you can find.The seventh statement is that RSum writing style is easy to master. You can spend weeks and months learning how to write, how to write a compelling headline, how to write a unique, entertaining and creative article that sells, how to write articles that reach the widest possible audience and everything else, but you cannot master all of these skills in a single day.