Can You Choose the Perfect Career?

Many high school and even college students feel the pressure of deciding what to do with the rest of their lives. They may have dreams of a six figure salary and a job they absolutely love, but how do they get there from here?
Once a decision is made many people will l find life getting in the way of their career goals, many people start their careers with high aspirations and find that life gets in the way, often in the form of financial or family obligations.
I have learned over time, and by trial and error, that circumstances have often dictated my career options. My folks believed that if I wanted a university education I would have to fund it myself. As a single mom I found myself having to support a family on very little income. Have I made poor career choices over the years? Absolutely! However I have also had some wonderful career opportunities.
In my musings about my meandering career path I’ve come to understand that it’s wasn’t reasonable for me to expect the perfect job. It has been about deciding on the most important things in my life and working from that point. For much of my working life my family has been the center of my life and my jobs had to fit. In fact, my education was completed at a community college in alternating years with having children. I then I ran a home-based business when my children were very young.
Years later as an Executive Director, I interviewed scores of applicants for a variety of positions. I met a few young people with clear career goals and enough enthusiasm and drive to ensure career success, however most were like me...doing what it takes to get the job done, whatever that job may be for that particular person. That sounds an awful lot like career success to me! Life Strategies can help you navigate your career path. Call 604-856-2386 for more information.

Google Docs

Cassie and I have been fiddling with Google Docs. There are definitely limits. It seems like it's best used with a small project team and with documents that aren't heavily formatted.

For one organization, we've posted a document listing upcoming blog topics - a simple document, amongst a few contributors, seems to make sense.

However, we wanted to use Google Docs for our policy manual (which has a lot of necessary formatting). It seems like the Intranet or our own computers may still be the best home for a document like this. Google Docs might be useful when crafting/word-smithing new policies.

I'm interested in your thoughts and reflections

Shared Learning

Just wanted to update those of you who we don't see quite as often about what's been going on "in head office" (AKA the garden patio :-)). Our revised website is almost ready to launch (thanks Deirdre!), Cheryl has worked miracles with Moodle (it finally has graphics!), and we're actively working with SUCCESS again designing Essential Skills training. We expect fall to be busy...and the focus of our work internal to Life Strategies is "consolidate." To do this, we're working on integrating our social media (blogs, websites, linked-in, Twitter, Facebook) to make them work better for us. We're also going to be more consistent with writing and design standards (Cheryl will work with us to develop and share the standards) and we'll develop and use more templates (for flyers, handouts, PowerPoint, etc.). We'll be working on smaller project teams, so wanted a means to share some information with our complete team (hence this blog!).

We miss the shared learning and tech tips from our team meetings, so hope that this blog will allow us to continue to learn together. Did you notice you can even upload video? So, if something's easier to just "show us" try that. :-)

Getting Started

During our social media workshop today, a key recommendation Linda identified was to create an organizational learning blog for staff to share learning from workshops, conferences, and courses. We decided this was a great idea but wanted to expand the focus to an overall keeping in touch.

We've made the blog private so it should (if the settings are correct) be just for our team. Please set a reminder task to check-in weekly (whether you have something to post or not) just so we're confident that if we share something here everyone will see it.