You probably just think of yourself as you, not part of a massive demographic group. But seeing yourself as a member of a generation is valuable, because it can help explain why your motivations, preferences and work style may seem different from those of your colleagues.Below is a quick primer on each of the generations in today’s U.S. workforce. Every individual is unique and should be treated that way, but these generati...

As a professional today, your online image is essential. It’s just as likely that a potential client will “meet” you through a Google search as at a professional conference. Or, if you’re job hunting, that a recruiter will view your credentials on the LinkedIn® app as on a paper resume. Every professional must craft and maintain a professional online brand that will impress the people who view it and entice them to do busi...

As I wrote earlier this month, the second step to becoming the boss is to face the challenge of being a manager and taking on your first official workplace leadership role. It won’t be easy because you’ll have a lot to learn as you go, but managing other people will be exciting and incredibly gratifying.One challenge you’re likely to face as you move from being “just one of the team” to being in an official leadership role...

Millennials have been in the workforce for well over a decade and over the years employers — and society in general — have developed a lot of complaints about them. In my work, though, I’ve found Millennials have a lot of positive qualities and aren’t as different as many people like to think. This week, I found some great articles about what employers, marketers and society as a whole have wrong about Millennials. R...

I like to define the word leader quite broadly, as someone who has influence over others, with or without formal authority. Even if you don’t yet have anyone reporting to you, or you work alone, or you’re a student, or you’re a stay-at-home parent — in my opinion you have every right to call yourself a leader. More than anything else, I believe leadership begins on the inside with the way you approach the world and your des...

As I wrote last week, the first step to becoming the boss is to learn about yourself. How can you be a great leader of your own life and career? Part of that process is becoming the CEO of you and building a professional and effective personal brand for yourself.With people no longer sticking with a single company for the course of their careers, it’s essential to always be marketing yourself for the next opportunity. And t...

Does college prepare today’s young people for the real world of employment? According to a 2013 Chegg study, the answer is a definitive no. Fewer than two in five hiring managers said that recent grads are prepared for a job in their field of study.Based on my work with entry-level employers across a wide range of industries, I would agree with this finding. There’s a lot of frustration with today’s college graduates’ prepa...

Nancy Ancowitz is a business communication coach who helps clients with vital career-building and leadership skills, and is author of Self-Promotion for Introverts®. I recently connected with her to learn more about strategies introverts can use to succeed on the job and how introverts and extroverts can work well together. Here’s what she had to say: What do introverts tend to struggle with in the workplace? 1...

Based on the great feedback from my post on how to conquer LinkedIn in 15 minutes a day, I wanted to offer another simple but thorough social media guide. This time we’ll talk about Twitter. Twitter is another social network I use every day and find extremely powerful. With over 200 million active users and over 400 million tweets daily, Twitter is an information juggernaut that you can’t afford to ignore as a professi...

The infamous traits of the Millennial generation have been studied, discussed and debated far and wide: they’re always connected, they’re ambitious, they’re approval oriented and more. In this series of blog posts, “Millennials at Work,” I’m diving into each of these stereotypes and discussing how they impact this generation and those of us who work with them. Millennials (a.k.a Generation Y) are the instant gratification g...