Today Americans are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday, so I am — not surprisingly — thinking about dreams. I’m not talking about dreams of paying off the credit card and taking a vacation dream. I’m talking about long-term visions for yourself. What would you be doing and where would you be living if money were no object? If experience, education and those pesky credit card bills weren’t standing in your way? There is no doubt that a large part of our career decision-making is affected by the nitty gritty reality of life. Eating is obviously a...

What a beautiful day! My whole family is outside enjoying the unseasonably warm weather… except for me! I’m stuck inside working. C’est la vie, I guess: Such is the life of a freelancer! I am managing to find a lot of great inspiration from the blogosphere today, though, and wanted to share some of my favorite reading material with you. >> Can Networking Impact Your Income? 81% of Elite Professionals Think So @ The Smart Networking Blog. I just came across this blog recently and it’s great. The author is networking guru Liz Lynch, author of Smart Networking. Gi...

Are you looking for a job? Have you checked JobMonkey’s free job boards lately? Updated daily, the database features jobs from around the country (and the world) in every imaginable field. From high school students to retirees to everyone in between, the job center is a great place to start your job search. Every Wednesday (well, in this case Thursdays – sorry!), I try to make your search a little easier by spotlighting three of the hottest new opportunities for the board. This week, there are gigs for seasonal workers, including a summer camp job fair in Ontario, Canada; treeli...

The current economic recession (or wait, are we calling it a depression now?) has caused forced a lot of retirees to go back to work. The uncle of a friend of mine is 63. He has been retired for a year, but just went back to work last month as a bagger at Trader Joe’s. His boss told him the other day that over 1,000 people had applied for the job (!!!) and many of them were retirees just like him. Admittedly, the job market is tight these days. But if you are a retiree and you find yourself wanting or needing a full-time, part-time job or seasonal job, there are a growing number of on...

Have you recently decided to go to school? Maybe you’re a first-timer  with your sights set on grad school and then a corporate job. Or maybe you are returning to school after a long break and lots of real-world work experience along the way. Whatever your story, odds are financial aid will be a part of your college tale. The average four-year state school education costs over $50,000.  And it’s going up more than 7% a year, which means that even if you put money aside, you need to be earning a pretty decent interest rate to keep up with that kind of inflation. Then there is ...

I can hardly believe we are 9 days into 2009. On my weekly perusals of the blogs, I found a lot of New Year’s Resolutions posts — like the one I did here about job seeking resolutions on JobMonkey. It’s interesting to read about the goals others are setting for themselves.  It looks like a lot of Americans are aiming to get their financial and professional lives in order this year — and it couldn’t come at a better time. Here’s a look at some of the better things I’ve read online this week. Hope there is something here that you will connect with as we...

For many people, working from home seems like the ideal situation (and I work from home, so believe me, I get how great it can be!) Maybe you are a new mom and want to be home with your baby. Maybe you are sick to death of your boss and want some autonomy. Maybe you were recently laid off and think you would be better off freelancing than competing with every other Joe looking for a job right now.  Or maybe you just really want to be able to work in your pajamas (yes, as someone who works from home, I can tell you that you *can* work in your jammies… but I don’t recommend it!) ...

Did you know that the JobMonkey has a cool job board?  The center features job listings from every imaginable field, all 50 states and numerous foreign countries.  You can run your own search by topic or location any time, day or night.  But on Wednesdays, I make your search even easier by bringing you the three hottest jobs on our recent listings. This Wednesday, I am changing things up just a bit because I wanted to point out a special feature on the JobMonkey that you may not have known about. On the JobMonkey home page, we have links to featured employees. These companies and organiz...

If you are a college senior, you are entering the most glorious semester of your educational career. You are riding high, about to graduate and start the next chapter of your life. And in the meantime, you get to enjoy enough collegiate-style entertainment to last a lifetime. Perhaps you know you are going to graduate school and are just waiting on your final acceptance notices. But statistics tell us that most of you will be looking for a job come May — and given the current economic climate, that might feel like a pretty daunting task right about now. Here are some tips for starting...

Welcome to part 3 of our series on distance learning.  You can check out past posts on whether online classes are right for you and what the significance is of accreditation for distance learners. Today, I am focusing on financial aid for distance learning. Here’s the good news:  As long as you are attending a nationally accredited program (here’s a link to a list of accredited online schools), you are eligible for the same federal and state financial aid as a student attending a brick and mortar school. This also applies to most private scholarships, although some scholarship...