Start with the basics
Questions that will guide your job search
• What am I good at?
• What do I really enjoy doing?
 
Define your skills
Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) tells a prospective employer why they would want to hire you. To define your UVP ask yourself:
• What are my core skill sets (i.e. team building, product development, closing sales…etc.)?
• How have I utilized these skills in the past?
• How transferable are these core skills?
• What value add can I bring to an employer?
 
Structure your Resume
A Resume is not a mere chronological list of jobs
• Your resume is not an autobiography.
• Make your resume relevant to the opportunity. Make it adaptable and modular to show how your core skills are appropriate for the role you seek.
• Build your resume using your career highlights while underscoring your core skills.
• Your resume is a ‘value proposition’ that demonstrates how you can add value to the employer.
• Seek out advice on your resume and be prepared to take criticism – your resume is a means to a desirable end.
• Never add anything in a resume that you are not prepared to demonstrate or elaborate on.
• Stick to the facts – not opinions.
• Include testimonials with your resume. This is particularly relevant for candidates who have come from a management environment where delivery was key.
 
Get the Interview
Your resume has but one purpose, to focus a prospective employer on your positive attributes. Approach each opportunity as though it were your first. Avoid the ‘negative spiral’ of a frustrated job seeker. This becomes increasingly important the longer the search goes on. Enhance your chances of obtaining your ideal role by staying focused on your abilities, their fit and their function within your prospective new role:
• What are your major career accomplishments?
• What were the ultimate ‘outcomes’
• How did you achieve these successes?
• Is the core activity replicable?
• What challenges did you overcome along the way?
• Which of your core skills were utilized?
Don’t forget to obtain testimonials and references to validate these achievements.
 
And finally
Listen to others. Always be prepared to take advice. Make yourself available for the best opportunities by being proactive and demonstrating tenacity.

“The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.”
So says Dane Jasper, Sonic.net’s CEO. American ISPs have convinced us that Internet access is expensive—getting speeds of 100Mbps will set most people back by more than $100 a month, assuming the service is even available. In Chicago, Comcast’s 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 (“premium installation” and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month. The price includes home phone service.
Aevia — Consider the Source

“They wanted to be the absolute best that there was in their field. That was really a business decision, even though it may not seem that way to a group of teenage musicians.”

Authors George Cassidy and Richard Courtney believe the Fab Four followed a classic business model on their way to success. For example, Cassidy says, in any enterprise, you have to be careful about picking your business partners. That’s what young John Lennon and Paul McCartney did when they started a band in Liverpool.
“The period between 1964 and 1966, when they were all lined up together, when they were of a common mind and a common purpose, is when they did amazing things,” says Cassidy. “When they were touring the world and released two albums a year and they made several movies, they were just able to accomplish an incredible amount in a very short period of time, when they all were in sync.”
It was part of the work ethic the four members of the group grew up with.
In “Come Together: The Business Wisdom of the Beatles,” Courtney, an entrepreneur, and Cassidy, a business writer, focus on the Beatles’ persistence and creativity in achieving their goal.
Aevia — Consider the Source

Ideology has taken a bad rap in the shallows these days. And yet, ideals elevate the public discourse. They are the driving force behind even the most material aspects of a society’s achievements. While the mechanism of civilization may be intelligently controlled, occasionally directed by wisdom, it is Spiritual Idealism that advances us from one level of attainment to the next.
In 1934-1954, Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s ten-volume A Study of History came out in three separate installments. Of the 21 civilizations Toynbee identified, sixteen were dead by 1940 and four of the remaining five were under severe pressure from the one named Western Christendom – or simply The West.
Toynbee explained breakdowns of civilizations as a failure of creative power in the creative minority leading to a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole. Toynbee further characterized this decline as a “moral failure.” He presented history in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when “creative minorities” devised solutions that reoriented their entire society.
Toynbee was severely criticized by other historians due to his use of myths and metaphors “as though they are of comparable value to factual data.”
The novelist Ray Bradbury seized upon this very criticism to underscore the value of fiction, or perhaps “the vision thing,” in relation to the self-fulfilling prophesy. His short story, The Toynbee Convector conveys lessons for the one-eyed materialist as well as the child within us.

Ordinary intuitions about integrity tend to allow that integrity is both a formal relation to the self and that it has something to do with acting morally. How these two intuitions can be incorporated into a consistent theory of integrity is not obvious, and most accounts of integrity tend to focus on one of these intuitions to the detriment of the other. A number of accounts have been advanced, the most important of them being: (i) integrity as the integration of self; (ii) integrity as maintenance of identity; (iii) integrity as standing for something; (iv) integrity as moral purpose; and (v) integrity as a virtue.
On the self-integration view of integrity, integrity is a matter of persons integrating various parts of their personality into a harmonious, intact whole. Understood in this way, the integrity of persons is analogous to the integrity of things: integrity is primarily a matter of keeping the self intact and uncorrupted. We might say that a display of strength of will is a particular relation between a person’s intention and corresponding action: it is a matter of acting on an intention given serious obstacles to the action. This is a formal relation to the self in the sense we are after because we don’t need to evaluate the appropriateness, value, justice, practical wisdom, and so on, either of the intention or corresponding action in order to identify the whole thing as a case of strength of will.
A conception of integrity as a virtue is compatible with the existence of constraints. Profound moral failure may be an independent defeater of integrity, just as hypocrisy, fanaticism and the like are defeaters of integrity. One might judge as internal to our conception of the virtue the idea that integrity is incompatible with major failures of moral imagination or moral courage, or with the maintenance of wholly unreasonable moral principles or opinions. On such a view, the Nazi could not, all things considered, be regarded as a person of integrity. The Nazi may be a self-deceiver and a liar (which is highly probable), but even if he is not, his principles and his actions are not rationally defensible under any coherent moral view. And this latter fact may by itself justify the judgment that the Nazi lacks the virtue of integrity.
Because integrity involves managing various commitments and values, one might conjecture that such types of integrity are simply manifestations of a person’s overall integrity, or of their personal integrity. If there is a radical disjunction between the type of integrity which is demanded in one sphere of life and another, integrity overall, or personal integrity, may be undermined, or at least profoundly challenged.
Theories of morally correct action generally aspire to develop criteria by which to categorize actions as morally obligatory, morally permissible, or morally impermissible. Some theories of morally correct action also introduce the category of the supererogatory: an action is supererogatory if and only if it is morally praiseworthy, but not obligatory.
If social educational structures fail to facilitate the life of integrity, other structures may be positively hostile to it. Arguably, and despite what might seem like overwhelming choice, job markets are structured by financial and other incentives, restricted opportunities and economic rents. The result is that many people choose careers they do not really want and for which they are barely suited. There are other perhaps more straightforward ways in which social and cultural structures may be inimical to the pursuit of integrity.
Any attempt to strive for integrity has to take account of the effect of social and political context. The kind of society which is likely to be more conducive to integrity is one which enables people to develop and make use of their capacity for critical reflection, one which does not force people to take up particular roles because of their sex or race or any other reason, and one which does not encourage individuals to betray each other, either to escape prison or to advance their career. Societies and political structures can be both inimical and favorable to the development of integrity, sometimes both at once.
. . . There’s much more at the source!
Aevia — Consider the Source

A private firm announced a $70 million plan Friday to build Maryland’s largest solar energy project on the grounds of a state prison near Hagerstown to generate electricity for the wholesale market.
Maryland Solar LLC of Easton said it is seeking speedy approval by state utility regulators and a long-term lease on 250 state-owned acres surrounding the medium-security Maryland Correctional Institution. The company said it hopes to use inmate labor to tend the grounds and keep the thousands of solar panels clean.
If the 20-megawatt project is built, Maryland would join California in using open space around correctional institutions to commercially generate electricity from the sun. California’s prison agency said May 6 that more than 83,000 solar panels will be installed at five prisons there, with the state and contractor SunEdison splitting profits from electricity sales.
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Around 100 students are expected to enroll this year in EDGE (Educating and Developing Workers for the Green Economy), a public-private partnership that offers industrial and technical certificate programs in biofuels and biotech production, analysis and processing.
EDGE’s first certificate course began in March at MiraCosta community college in northern San Diego County, and a second set of students will start classes this summer. Tuition will be waved the first two years as the program is tweaked, and course materials will later be packaged for nationwide distribution. A Masters of Advanced Science will be offered next year through the University of California, San Diego for biotech entrepreneurs.
The one-year-old EcoTech Institute near Denver, which earlier this month unveiled a new $10 million flagship campus that will host up to 1,200 students. Some 250 students have been enrolled since last July in two-year associate’s degree programs for wind and solar energy technology, electrical engineering technology, energy efficiency, environmental technology and general renewable energy training.
Where California and Colorado are readying employees for whole new professions, Nevada is looking to recruit new talent and update skills of mature workers for its decades-old geothermal industry. This summer, the National Geothermal Academy will offer its first set of eight weeklong courses on geothermal energy development and utilization at the University of Nevada, Reno.
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In Australia, Aurora Algae opened its demonstration facility in Karratha, Western Australia, where the Company’s algae-based biomass is being harvested for products in the nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, aquaculture and renewable energy markets.
“This would not have been possible with a U.S.-based production facility,” said Greg Bafalis, CEO of Aurora Algae, “where we believe the climatic conditions are not economically viable to produce large-scale, cost-competitive algae products.” The company’s open-pond production method, and proprietary pale green cultivar algae strains, utilize dry, arid climates with large amounts of CO2 and seawater as feed stocks.
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With projects like Sapphire Energy’s drive to put a huge algae-fuel production facility in the Mexican desert, you’re seeing the first building blocks of world-scale capability for these fuels.
Margaret McCormick, the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Matrix Genetics said, “I think that microorganisms can solve most of the problems of the world. If you go back, it was alcohol or it was cheese. There’s so much potential that can be harnessed out of these microorganisms and the DNA that’s in them, and we can look at them to solve all kinds of problems.”
McCormick said the latest phase of alternative fuels work is not purely driven by an economic need to reduce spending on oil, but is also by the need to address climate change and national security issues.
Aevia — Consider the Source