Baby steps.

Small companies and businesses may not be able to foot as much as the bill for health insurance as they’d like to, but a quick search for health insurance quotes online will let you know if your company is doing what it can to remain competitive in the benefits department!

A chronological resume places an emphasis on dates, job titles, and degrees. It provides a prospective employer with a time line of events relating your career and education, and allows the job seeker to highlight prestigious job titles and honors.

A skills resume places an emphasis on the skills you’ve acquired in your education and career. This resume type is most often used when you are seeking a job in a new field, or when you wish to highlight non paid experiences that may be relevant to the position applied for.

My own resume is chronological, and it allows a prospective employer to see the wide breadth of knowledge I have in the staffing and background investigations industries. However, in my current role at a staffing company, most of the resumes we receive are skill based. This is because we work with very specific needs for IT customers and need to know what type of programming languages a developer can use, or what kind of software someone has worked with. The dates and titles aren’t as relevant to our recruiters.

If you want a degree in mechanical engineering, you’ve probably already heard of Kettering University. If not, you’ll be interested in knowing that Kettering has been named by US News and World report as the #1 university in the US for industrial and manufacturing engineering degrees. (Information provided by America’s US News Best Colleges Guide, 2008 version.) Working in the staffing industry, I can tell you first hand that having a degree in industrial or manufacturing engineering is basically writing your own ticket. You can get a job anywhere, for good money with an education like that.

Kettering isn’t all work though – they’re using humor to make a point with students interested in learning more about their degree program. Stickman is their recruiting talent, and he’s made several videos letting potential students know the 411 on Kettering. This one is my favorite, probably because the sign behind Stickman says “L33TNEES”. A school with a sense of humor!

Check out the site – who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself back in school like me!

Indeed.com allows you to search by city, keyword, and title. The neat thing about Indeed.com is that it’s a huge feed, and it pulls jobs from sites you’ve probably never heard of. Lots of employers chose not to use Monster or Career Builder due to the cost, and they post on smaller, cheaper, niche sites you’ve probably never heard of – how can you find those job listings? When you use Indeed.com, you’ll have no problem finding them, because Indeed pulls listings from those smaller sites and puts them into your results list.

Here’s a tip – in the search field, to narrow your terms to something in the job title, use this:

title:(analyst)

That will ensure the results you see have analyst in the job title. Let me know how it works for you!

26 minutes to go. Did I mention I’m going to be walking? A lot? I packed two pairs of comfy shoes. Ok, they’re not Geox shoes or Josef Seibel shoes, but they’ll do! And I’m NOT bringing my laptop…the first time it’s stayed home in a long series of trips and vacations! (My back will thank me…toting the laptop on my shoulder through airports isn’t fun.)

We’ve done web conferencing a few times for various meetings, but I’ve never set up my own web conference. According to the trainer at work, the software makes it easy and it’s all self explanatory. Sounds good to me – with the pressure of the training I’m planning to take, I don’t need my web seminars to carry a big learning curve!