Always Be Job Hunting

Your working environment can often have a huge impact on how able you are to do your job. Unless you are freelance or work for yourself, you will probably spend most of your working days in an office with other people who are your colleagues.

Sometimes, these people can make going to work a real joy – you may have a couple of close friends on your team, and you look forward to seeing them every morning. But equally, you may also have some certain people at work who rub you up the wrong way. This is usually inevitable, and most of the time it’s pretty easy to deal with simply by avoiding those people at work who you don’t like. Continue reading →

When it comes to work, there’s a fine line between negotiation and exploitation. In a negotiation, your boss asks you to do something and you have the option of firing back with a series of demands to sweeten the deal. But when you’re being exploited, you don’t have this option. Work is loaded on you like you’re a pack-horse and you’re expected to simply deal with it.

Sometimes the manipulation is more subtle. In some companies, there’s a culture of “just working another hour.” Bosses are often very good at putting social and emotional pressure on their employees, squeezing every last ounce of productivity from them before they return home to their families, often late on a Friday night. Continue reading →

At some point in your career, whatever industry you serve, you will be getting close to achieving expertise in everything you do. And when this occurs, you might be tempted to take those skills away from the safety of your employed status and all its benefits and strike out alone as a consultant.

It makes a lot of sense. With your experience, you can create a consultancy business that chooses who it works with, and you can get a little more control over your life and direction than you currently have as an employee. There is a much higher opportunity for financial success, too. Continue reading →