Carl Bradford

Not every job market is depressed.  In fact, there are a number of employers that are listing job vacancies with third-party recruiters because they are having difficulty filling specific jobs.

While there are several different industries where this is occurring, two in particular seem to be exploding with growth.

One of those will not necessarily be a surprise and that one is the medical field. There is an extreme shortage of just about anyone with skills and experience in that market.

Another one, that surprises many people is the financial services market sector. Given all the news media attention in that market during 2009, you might conclude that little or no hiring is happening there, but that would be wrong.

In this post, I’ll cover just one area within the financial services market that the recruiting division of my Bradford Consulting Company is working on for 2010. This is a large, national search that is likely to go on throughout the year and beyond!

Financial Advisors

Demand for Personal Financial Advisors is projected to grow a whopping 41% between 2006 and 2016 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. CNN/Money ranks Personal Financial Advisor job opportunities #3 on the list of the Top 50 Jobs.

This is represented by such recent media headlines such as:

Why Financial Advisors are Changing Employers

The Sweet Spot for Financial Advisor Opportunities and Where

By going to smaller firms, career growth is more rapid for most of the reasons listed above. With more individual mentoring, better technology and resources, and the opportunity to make significantly more income, the opportunity is very real.

Instant Leadership Opportunity

There is also a new and very enticing opportunity for more experienced Financial Advisors who might like to make and move and take a small group of fellow advisors with them, i.e. move a small team. This will allow these brokers to immediately begin to earn larger override commissions on their teams efforts while at the same time providing everyone on the team with a much more attractive career path.

Video Explains More

At my Bradford Consulting website we’ve prepared a video that provides more detail as well as an opportunity to confidentially explore these opportunities.

Click the video icon to review this video.

Copying with anxiety and stress during a job search is just one of the stress activities that causes that “stressed out” feeling. A job change whether under duress to find a job, i.e. you’re unemployed and need that next job, or just trying to manage the job change process while still employed is often one of your biggest anxiety causes.

Let’s explore how you can cope with not only job search stress, but how you can get some anxiety help that includes a fantastic solution for all workplace related stress.

And…I tell you at the end of this article where you can find out more, including how you can take the FREE Wellness Challenge.

A Definition of Stress

Stress is defined as change that is seen by your body or mind as a threat – large or small, imaginary or real – or a change in your environment that triggers a rapid use of your reserves. Stress creates a demand on your resources. Soon, these resources become exhausted and you get sick.

What Causes Stress?

Distress can come from your environment, your body or your mind. Rather than being just a single event – such as a job search – stress accumulates over time from all three sources. It strangles the joy and pleasure from your days and nights. It makes you miserable, and then it makes you sick. Once you are sick, stress keeps you from responding as well to medical care. Yes, stress is a killer!

Office Stress and Other Work Stress

Yes, psychological stress and anxiety can come from the office, or absence from the office as in the case where you’ve lost your job.  But job search stress isn’t limited to the office environment; it applies to any job search.  You don’t really need an anxiety test to know when you’re “stressed out”, but you do need a solution to help you in coping with anxiety and stress.

Learn How Stress Vitamins and Nutrients Can Help

As the Employment Guy, for over 40 years I’ve seen more than my share of job seekers who are coping with anxiety and stress and I’m certainly not immune to it either, no one is.  But I have found that if I pay attention to my health – and that includes what I call stress vitamins – I do better, a lot better.  You can as well.

According to a stress article by Brazos Minshew the Chief Science Officer at TriVita, a leading Nutraceutical products company, the opposite of stress is homeostasis. He says, “So, while stress is constantly trying to pull you apart, homeostasis is constantly working to put you back together. Homeostasis is the priority process your body uses to combat stress.”

He adds, “Vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are essential for homeostasis. If we have the nutrients we need at the moment we need them, we will thrive! Conversely, if we do not have the proper nutrient base in our system every day we will suffer loss of energy, poor mental performance and an increased risk for disease.”

And when you’re interviewing for a new job opportunity, you certainly want to be at your best mentally.

Add the Right Supplements to Relieve Stress

The word supplement means an addition to something to make up for a deficiency. All supplements are an important addition to a healthy diet. They make up for the deficiency we face because of poor nutrient density in our foods. They also help out when we miss the mark of diet perfection.

Supplements are no substitute for good dietary choices, but the fact remains that most of us don’t make the best food choices on a daily basis. We need a multiple nutrient supplement every day to serve as a foundation for health and to combat the nutrient demands of a stressful life.

A New and Better Supplement

According to Brazos Minshew “Staying on top of our nutrient reserve is important. Our body makes millions of new cells every day – heart cells, brain cells, bone and blood cells. Stress kills millions of vulnerable cells every day. Every time a cell dies it should be replaced. If you do not have the right amount of nutrients to construct a new cell, you will either make an incomplete cell or none at all. The outcome is bad in either case; so, we really need to keep all nutrients on board at all times.”

My wife and I have recently discovered a breakthrough new product and you can find out more about this new product called Wellavoh™ (wel-lah voh), a new multi-nutrient complex for men and women.

In fact, we’ve experienced such dramatic and positive results that we were motivated to create a new website called Health Wellness Answers and I invite you to go there for more information…and be sure to view the  benefits revealed in the short videos on Nopalea and take the FREE Nopalea Wellness Challenge.  This is a fascinating story!

Whether you’re a Baby Boomer like me or one of the younger generation, you’ll find some highly valuable and new health-related information on Health Wellness Answers.

I’ll be forever grateful to my multi-millionaire businessman colleague who introduced me to this health and wellness product line.  Thanks Kelly for paying it forward.  It’s my turn now, I’m paying it forward to the first five people who contact me and qualify for the FREE Nopalea Wellness Challenge.

Do you recognize these frequently used terms?

Home based business
Home business employment
Work from home
Make money at home

These are just four examples, but they are the root of many, many searches on the Internet every day around the subject of work from home ideas.  Of course adding words before and after these terms are also used, but most searches on this subject has some combination of these words.

How many searches are conducted you ask?

I did comprehensive research in Google on a variety of these and similar terms and the number of searches per month totaled 16,375,800!

And, I doubt I covered nearly all searches; it’s just these were the most obvious and doesn’t take into account similar searches conducted on other popular search engines.

So Whose Searching?

The reason is that recently I’ve been asked many times to comment on making money from home.  It seems to be this increase in interest ties with the search results I just mentioned.

And I should add, the individuals that were asking were very often individuals accustomed to earning high 5 figures and well above.  This includes many who were earning $200K and above.

The reasons for their interest are many, but chief among them seems to be more long-term financial stability, greater time freedom and creating additional streams of income.

In quiet a few cases, these individuals had lost their corporate America jobs at least once and sometimes several times through no fault of their own.  Reductions in force, acquisitions, mergers, downturns in business have often been the culprit.  In most cases losing their jobs had nothing to do with poor job performance.  Because of that, they want to better control their own career destiny.

I’m currently conducting a brief survey on this subject and if you’d like to participate, just click on this link.

What’s Often Misunderstood?

In order to earn an income at home, do you get a job working from home (home based employment) or do you get a home-based business (home based business startup)? The two are very, very different and for our purposes it’s important to distinguish between them.

Even before I can lay out the criteria that will show you how to evaluate earning an income from home (in future blog articles), it’s vital to define both methods so you know which one will best fit your needs.

Further, the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate each of them, is not the same. In fact a lot of the negative comments that are often associated with this subject occur because someone pursued a specific income opportunity, let’s say for example, a work from home opportunity and discovered the opportunity is really a home based business. What has resulted is a ton of misleading advertising and scams such as the “legitimate home jobs” sites that promise to get you work from home in return for a fee.

Sometimes the person offering one or the other of these methods does not make it clear up front; and that is where the mis-communication frequently occurs. It is very often how an opportunity is marketed that makes people believe they are a scam.  And some are just that – a scam, yet there are many, many others that are very much legitimate.

It’s a shame that many people are turned off by truly great legitimate ways to make money from home because it was presented to them initially as one thing and then turned out to be something else. Immediately their “scam alarm” goes off.

I prefer to present things as they really are. If it’s a business then call it is business.  If it’s a job working from home, then just say so upfront.

Going Forward

I believe that I have a unique perspective on this subject and feel qualified to lead a discussion with my readers because not only have I been recruiting candidates for corporate America for over 40 years, I personally have worked many years as a typical company employee in a Human Resources leadership role.

However, for most of the last 20 years I have earned my income in a home based business environment as a recruiter, consultant and trainer.  I have both relatives and friends who do the same and most of us earn a comfortable 6 Figure income doing so.  Like, me they create multiple streams of income so that when one stream weakens, others are there to make up the difference.

I’m going to continue blogging about working from home and home based businesses for awhile because I think it has merit and apparently many of you do as well, judging by the many inquiries and emails I’ve been getting.

Stay tuned as we begin to dig deeper into this subject and explore some work from home ideas.

Managing your career today is different! You’re likely to get beat for the best jobs every time unless you start doing things differently.

In order to solve this issue, it’s important to for me to back up a step.

People often ask me to help them improve their careers.  I usually ask them this question. “Are you willing to make changes and be flexible?”  If they say “yes”, I may continue on, if they say “no”, the discussion is over.

In most cases, I get a “yes” answer to which I then ask them to change something that I’ve observed about them.  For example, in one case I asked the person to shave his beard (which by the way was very professionally maintained).  He responded, “I’ve had this beard for the past 8 years and I’d feel completely naked without it.  I won’t do that.”

Discussion over- right then and there!  I really didn’t care whether he was willing to shave off his beard.  It had nothing to do with helping him manage his career.  I just wanted to test his open mindedness to change.  Most people will say they want to change, but they really won’t consider what they really need to do.

Change requires learning and unlearning or you really haven’t changed at all.

Change requires how you “brand” yourself in today’s world. Today the Internet and social networking have made it easier than ever to sell brand “you.”  But this is not a “do it yourself” job, or at least it shouldn’t be.

Don’t take my word for it.  Here are a couple of recent articles on the subject on CNN.  Enjoy the articles from CNN. Very informative.

Me 2.0: Branding Yourself Online By Mark Tutton, CNN

Digital Dirt can Haunt your Job Search By Rachel Zupek CNN

If you would like to position yourself for opportunities for the rest of your career, build a powerful reputation based on your expertise, be recognized as an authority in your industry or in your functional area, I have the solution.  I have a strategic alliance with an organization that works with you personally to achieve all the objectives in the articles

Today’s paradigm for driving a successful career in this digital era is changing at warp speed. In order to survive, you must adapt. Executives who are selected for leadership positions or who want to advance through their companies, have demonstrated that they are state-of-the-art, possess a commanding presence on the internet, and are digitally savvy.

Contact me today and get some information.  Are you really ready for change?

Job titles, or what some call “role titling”, can often improve the chances of attracting, retaining and rewarding top performers, especially when resources and bonus pools are underfunded as many are in today’s economy.

You don’t believe it?

Actually, a survey by Peal Meyer & Partners just surveyed 388 companies that indicated job titles are more important in times like these; i.e. times of economic stress.

The survey delt with issues such as “formal job titles” as well as a secondary title that is more specific to a particular individual’s responsibility.  The survey also reported that this seems to apply less so to senior levels of management where consistency is considered more critical.

So what are some ramifications of all of this?

For one, having a title on your business card that is specifically representative of what your role is, can be beneficial even though the official company records might have a more formal and generic job title.

For example, let’s say your official title is Engineering Fellow (usually meaning you have deep engineering subject matter expertise in a specific discipline) and your role is specifically leading the R&D initiative for new fuel cell technology.  In that case a business card and correspondence title that reflected this role would become much clearer to everyone.  For example it might read, Manager Fuel Cell Technology Development or Director Fuel Cell R&D.

This same rule also is true for titles on resumes.

Job titles often cause confusion for readers of resumes.  Recruiters and hiring managers who read resumes often let the job titles influence whether or not they’re interested enough to pursue an interview.  They often make generic, unfounded assumptions about an individual just by the choice of job titles they include on their resume.

An individual should always be truthful when creating their resume but also be practical at the same time.  If your official job title is Accountant III, but your role is really the lead cost accountant for your group, then say so.  Show your title as Lead Cost Accountant.

The intent here isn’t to deceive, but to communicate.

And for you recruiters and hiring managers, stop reading so much into job titles.  I agree that sometimes a job title can be accurate in indicating the size and scope of a person’s current or past role, but this isn’t always the case.

Take time instead to actually have a phone discussion with someone who has the right background and get the real facts on size and scope of current/past roles and find out just what the person wants in their next role.

Far too many hiring decisions are based on “reading the tea leaves” of resume content.