Back-to-school time isn’t just about your coursework. It’s also about your future.
With that in mind, here are eight steps you can take at the beginning of the college year to lay the groundwork for your career. Follow them and you may just do justice to the amount of time you spend sitting in a classroom.
1. …

The last time I wrote about losing weight was right after I had a baby and my agent told me that I would kill my career if I went on speaking engagements. “You look terrible” is what she told me. And I lost forty pounds in two months.
This time, things were not so dramatic. …

By Ryan Healy – For the past six months I have been maintaining my blog, Employee Evolution. At this point I realize that the decision to start a blog is hard, but writing regularly is harder. So here is a list of tactics I’ve used to maintain a full-time, corporate job along side a …

When I founded my first company I didn’t have time to find someone to date, but I knew that I wanted to get married. So I followed all the advice I had read about how you should tell people what you want in order to get what you want. I started telling everyone that I …

In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, we’re paid to process information. And since there’s an infinite amount of information, there’s an infinite amount of work. For everyone.
So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three weeks — if you let it. If …

By Ryan Healy – Video resumes are the hot new topic in recruiting these days. It seems that everyone has an opinion. And job listing sites like CareerBuilder have even launched video resume services.
At first glance a video resume seems like a natural step in the recruiting process. But here are five reasons …

One of the most popular goals among young people is to have their own company. This doesn’t mean people want to necessarily build the next Google or Facebook.
For many students this means smaller companies where you can have fun with friends while you think of cool ideas and then enjoy the steep learning curve of …

One of the ways I got my nearly disastrous financial life back on track was by reading a lot of economic advice online. It helps to be part of a community of people thinking hard about their values and their money and the alignment of the two. And it helps to read a wide range …

When I was playing professional beach volleyball, running around in a bathing suit every day, you’d think I would have been more conscious than ever about my image. But at the start, I was generally oblivious.
In fact, when I was in my first Bud Light commercial, we were told to bring three bathing suits to …

By Ryan Healy – Soaring education, housing and health care costs in recent years have made simply staying afloat in a large metropolis next to impossible without a huge salary and benefits package.
These rising costs are causing the well educated to “sell their souls” to law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms to maintain …

Last week I was on a radio show that I’ve been on a bunch of times. It is a major radio station in a major city. The host likes me because I say inflammatory things like, “If your boss is terrible, stop complaining and start looking for another job.” Then listeners call in and tell …

I wrote an article for Wired, about some of the fastest growing jobs and how to prepare for them in college. Part of this Education 2.0 package was an article by Natali Del Conte about which social networking tools students should use.
In general I think college kids should prepare for the work world by learning …

When I was a kid, there was money everywhere. My great grandpa was a lawyer for the Chicago mob in the 1920s, and today, my dad’s generation is still living off that money. Sometimes I wonder if the key to being able to squash materialism is to have a lot of it as a kid. …

When you are trying to figure out your next career move, the company match is more important than job match. This is because the people who are happiest at work are doing what they do best, every day.
You can be a janitor and use your strengths, and you can be an associate at one of …

Today’s workers have three, clear priorities: Flexible hours, work that leads to personal growth, and the ability to spend a lot of time fostering personal relationships.
These are not the characteristics of jobs that typically attracted the best candidates. Most lawyers have terrible hours, most doctors have little flexibility, and most consultants sacrifice personal time for …

Do you remember the Y2K hoopla? It was a five-year buildup of massively over-hiring COBOL programmers to take care of the impending doom of computers not being able to handle the new millennium. People worried the switch from 19xx to 20xx would crash computers far and wide and we wouldn’t be able to do essential …

There’s been a lot of media focus on how the workplace has changed since Generation Y came on the scene. But what about Gen Y women?
From the moment baby boomers joined the workforce, women made it their mission to create a fair playing field for everyone. But after decades of feminists plowing down the boys’ …

Yesterday I was interviewed on The Morning Blend. Here’s a video of the show. Topics include how to leave stuff out of your resume, why you shouldn’t pay your dues, and how to deal with a boss who says no to your requests.

I am always harping on how important it is to be nice. I have written about how you will be happy at work if you have three friends there, you will get promoted if people like you and you should try to be more likable no matter how likable you think you are right now.
A …