Posted by: John A. Byrne on October 30
Many BusinessWeek.com readers turn to our Management Channel for advice on the best ways to find jobs, and we like to think of careers columnist Liz Ryan as our own secret weapon. The former HR executive gives our readers smart advice on everything from handling a sleepy interviewer to investigating the finances of a prospective employer.
Liz herself has enjoyed a varied career path. As a teenager, she attended the Manhattan School of Music, then moved to Chicago with the dream of becoming an opera star. She took a day job in HR with USRobotics and found she relished the everyday drama of guiding jobseekers in the right direction. During her tenure there, the company grew from a 100-worker operation to a 10,000-employee corporate giant in its field.
Today, the mother of five sings with the Colorado Light Opera and works as a career coach, lecturer, and writer in Boulder, Colo. In addition to penning her regular Liz Ryan: The Workplace column for BusinessWeek.com, she contributes to the user-generated site Glassdoor.com, which features insider info—including salary figures—on 30,000 companies, and provides workplace commentary for BBC Radio.
Liz's best advice for job hunters today? "Whether you're a CEO or a receptionist, you need to stop saying 'I have' and start saying 'I know how,'" she explains. "Instead of talking about how many years of experience you have in T&E;, tell them, 'I love being a sleuth and I know how to ferret out excess spending.' That's the beginning of building your own personal brand as a job candidate."
Liz not only answers readers' questions but also frequently responds to comments. I encourage you to email Liz with your own career-related question for an upcoming column. And thanks for contributing to BusinessWeek.com, Liz—we're singing your praises.
Posted by: John A. Byrne on October 29
BusinessWeek reader Rom Mattesich posted a story idea on this blog to alert us, and his fellow readers, to an issue that was hindering his family-run business. Rom, a retired telecom engineer, helps run his wife’s general contracting business, Avant Construction. Avant has withstood the downturn in South Florida's real estate/construction business through cost-cutting measures that included jettisoning its website to, as Rom puts it, "hitch a ride" on Microsoft's Office Live, Small Business.
As Rom and his wife discovered, moving their company's website and employee email accounts to a free, Web-based service can have a downside. Some business email addresses that were accidentally deleted couldn't be restored for 130 days as a security measure, even though they own the email addresses' domain name. "This is likely to be the case of many other small businesses," he told us. "The loss of our main emails is really hurting my business. We need to fully control the addition/deletion of email accounts."
His situation inspired BW senior technology writer Arik Hesseldahl to write a broader story, Web-Based E-Mail: Businesses Beware. A follow-up story by our senior tech writer Olga Kharif, Perils of the Mobile Cloud, dove deeper into the potential hazards of storing personal and business data with online services.
While we couldn't restore Avant's missing email accounts, Rom says it was a lesson learned the hard way. At least, he reports, "Business is beginning to brighten up, but it has been a rough couple of years." Best of luck, Rom, and thanks for helping us alert other readers whose businesses may take an unintended wild ride on the Web.
Posted by: John A. Byrne on October 06
BusinessWeek reader Andy Rinehart is a proud U.S. veteran who's eager to apply his military experience to business. The Operation Iraqi Freedom vet, currently one of two first-year MBA students at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, suggested that we look at "what combat veterans bring to an MBA program." Alison Damast, a staff writer on our b-schools' team, was happy to oblige, particularly with the Yellow Ribbon program, a new U.S. package of benefits for returning GIs, offering an added incentive for higher education to welcome more combat veterans. Please check out the resulting story, Why Veterans Are Saluting Business Schools, and take a moment to post your own story idea here on a topic you'd like to see us cover. And thank you, Andy, for your service to America and your commitment to the BusinessWeek community.
Posted by: John A. Byrne on October 05
Most of us rely on on our cell phones, with little thought to any potential risks. BusinessWeek technology writer Olga Kharif last year wrote about some consumers' health fears raised by wireless communications. Olga followed up with another story after last month's hearing in Washington, which coincided with an international conference on the health effects of cell phone use. Thanks to BW reader Courtney LaJeunesse (above left), a Chicago-based search engine marketing specialist for Yahoo!, for flagging this as an issue she wanted us to follow. (Update: For more on this story, see Olga's Oct. 16th blog post.)
Calvin Lee, a BusinessWeek reader in Singapore, is watching a different development in Washington: the Obama Administration's move to allocate $1 billion to spurring innovation, including technology that would boost his industry of translation services. Thank you, Calvin, for posting your comment on this blog, which inspired BW innovation writer Damian Joseph to write this story.
Posted by: John A. Byrne on September 08
If all Deloitte employees are as passionate about their jobs as Robert Parkins clearly is, then we picked a winner in naming Deloitte our top company to launch a career for 2009. Parkins, who's based in Des Moines, Iowa, is a director in Deloitte's Consumer and Industrial Products group who has worked for the consulting firm for 18 years. He asked us to take the pulse of the U.S. manufacturing sector, and when asked by our community editor Shirley Brady for a photo and bio to accompany Jessie Scanlon's story inspired by his suggestion, he described himself as "an American with a lot of passion for manufacturing and 'making things' and the importance manufacturing plays in enabling our standard of living." (Indeed, his Twitter handle is @MFG_Zealot.)
I invite you to check out Jessie's story, A Grand Goal for More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs, and thank you, Rob for taking time to stop by our digital newsroom and pitching us on a subject that's top of his mind, and many Americans' minds these days. Rob, you also may want to check out Pete Engardio's story on U.S. manufacturing: Can the Future Be Built in America? Love to hear your thoughts!
