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Importance of a Written Career Plan

by Scott Thompson, Demand Media

since its release in 2004 many people of the present generations around the world have discovered something that a lot of people knew for thousands of years before. "The Secret" movie and book have been phenomenally successful with its method of using your thoughts to change your life.

Parents: here’s how you can give your student a head start in their school and career planning!

Students:  if you’re feeling lost trying to plan your career, or you don’t want to make a decision you’ll regret, read on! (And if you got here first, share this with your parents!)

 Let’s be honest…

If you honestly answered, “yes,” then career coaching can help you!

Why Is It Important To Have A Career Development Plan?

There are few things as important as having a career development plan when it comes to excelling in life and accelerating in your chosen field.  It is vital that you have a clear sense of the direction you would like to head with your career. Career planning is a critical step and is essential to your success not something you want to skip over.
The purpose of a career development plan is to help you reach your goals.  Everyone has aspirations in life and specific levels they would like to reach.
Part of the planning process actually entails you developing specific career goals and mapping out a course on how to best reach them.
To do that, you must determine what is important to you. You may or may not have an idea of what you are looking for in terms of a career – a career coach will ask powerful questions that enable you to determine exactly what you are looking for in your career. Starting out with comprehensive career assessment tools will allow you to uncover your key strengths and determine how those best relate to building a successful career. Once you have your strengths mapped out, you can determine next steps. And, next steps begin with goals.
When setting goals, it is critical that you consider all aspects. Which do you have, a job or a career? What is it about your job that you absolutely cannot stand? If you have a career, what is it that you absolutely love about it? Knowing this is just part of the puzzle – there is much more to uncover and many decisions to make to ensure you find balance, passion, and purpose as well as continued growth.
Part of identifying your career paths includes defining your purpose and passions. Why? Because everyone dreams of getting into a career field they enjoy and have fun with, but most people wander off course. They select a different career aspiration simply because they react rather than plan. They apply for an opening and take a job even though they know it is not the right fit. By having a plan and clear ideas about what it is you really want, you will avoid the pitfalls of career mismatch. You will identify find the right field to get into based on your interests, strengths, and personal passions.
So you see the importance of getting career guidance advice and creation of a career development plan. It is geared toward you and what you’re made of – you deserve to find the proper balance between your personal life and career.  It can be easy to get caught up in work mode and constantly have the job on your mind. However, this can lead to a troubling lifestyle if you do not intertwine passion, purpose, and personal fulfillment into your career.
By setting goals, understanding how you will reach them, finding something you love, and finding a balance between work and play will allow you to reach a level of happiness people only dream about. Manage your career – set your course for success with a career development plan. Dreams do come true.
source;http://www.avitacareermanagement.com/tools-resources/career-articles/why-is-it-important-to-have-a-career-development-plan/

Developing a Strategic Vision for Your Career Plan

by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
How many times will you change careers in your lifetime? If you're like most people, you'll change careers at least several times over the course of your life. How successful you'll be in making transitions among careers can at least be partially attributed to the amount of career planning and preparation you've done.

We all go through moments in our life when there's no other alternative left for us but to motivate ourselves to get us out of a slight depression, an attack of sadness or pure boredom with the drudgery of daily routine. The reason can be anything from a broken relationship, an attack of flu, a bad cold, or just being in a plain rut.

With the rapid rise of crowdsourcing over the last five years since the term was coined by Jeff Howe in Wired, there has been a lot of coverage on how individuals, organizations and businesses can implement the concept into their work. Last year there was a new conference (CrowdConf), a new consortium (Crowdsortium) and a myriad of companies that offered sites, tools and platforms to get more out of the Internet masses.

But what about the worker? Since crowdsourcing is making such a visible impact on the way work is done, how can professionals and creatives benefit from the crowdsourcing model? Here are 18 ideas for participating on crowdsourcing sites for perks, prizes, and, yes, even income.

1. Work for Money

Mechanical Turk

If you’re up for doing small tasks that other people might find tedious, this site may be a fit for you. This micro-labor site owned by Amazon offers HITs, or “Human Intelligence Tasks” which are things that are just a little too complex to be automated. Micro-labor means you often get paid pennies per piece of a task you complete. For example, you could choose an appropriate category for an extensive list of lodgings for a penny per answer. If you respond accurately to 500, you’ve made $5.00, if you do 5,000, you’ve made $50. Another assignment comes from MIT’s Spoken Language Systems, and they’re paying 10 cents per HIT to annotate batches of photos using speech.

Clickworker

This is a Germany-based crowd labor site, but there is also an English version available. You can get paid to provide writing, translation, research, data processing and search engine optimization. You can work for this site if you're in a SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) country or a valid PayPal account.
Before you start as a Clickworker, you have to qualify for the task you’ve chosen to work on including a base assessment and a project assessment. Some scoring to assess your skills will happen automatically while others will require manual review from the company.

Cloudcrowd

Work available through Cloudcrowd includes translation and editing, data entry, image processing, Internet research, and content creation. You need a Facebook account to work for them and a PayPal account to get paid.

CastingWords

Can you type quickly and accurately? Maybe transcription work is your thing. If so, you can find transcription jobs that come from CastingWords. To participate, you have to sign up with Mechanical Turk where CastingWords posts all of their jobs. You can search for CastingWords to see their specific assignments. You are paid through a bank transfer to a U.S. account or you can opt to receive Amazon.com store credit.

2. Pitch to Win Business

blur Group

The blur Group offers a number of specific opportunities for crowdworkers in the fields of design, marketing, writing, photography and video. The agency helps coordinate and filter the crowd of experts. You get creative briefs, and you can pitch on creative work. You are not asked to do spec work, but instead submit a proposal or ideas. The single largest brief submitted to the site so far was for $130,000, but average projects are in the thousands.

GeniusRocket

Like blur Group, GeniusRocket emphasizes a no spec and no contest approach to crowdsourcing. You get paid for work you do, but you have to be chosen by the GeniusRocket team for a project. All creative submissions including written concepts are kept private to help protect your intellectual property. The GeniusRocket staff sits between you and the client to manage the process once you’re on an assignment. You can sign up for the site now and be notified by email when their new vetted model is ready. At that time, you’ll be assessed by your body of work, your past clients, years of experience and your creative specialty.

Whinot

Whinot manages creative briefs for mostly marketing and business strategy projects. They also recommend the project team to the client (for which you can be considered) and the contracts and payments. You can submit ideas during a brainstorming session. The Whinot community votes on each other’s ideas to bring the best to the top. If the client opts to work with you, Whinot may provide a project manager as well. You can then interact directly with the client as part of the consulting team.

3. Contribute Ideas

If you are good at coming up with ideas, you may want to try one of these sites. Remember, there is no guarantee you will win, and you cannot “protect” the ideas you contribute.

IdeaOffer

Create a free account, then peruse recent projects where people are looking for ideas. Idea topics are extremely varied and eclectic, and awards for the best answer range from $1.50 to $100, with most falling around $5 to $15. This isn’t a place to get rich quick or to get steady income, but by participating a few minutes a week here, you could score some extra change in your PayPal account.

NamingForce

This site focuses on creating business names, website names and product names. Creative individuals can sign up for free and access Naming Assignments ranging from about $100 to $250. The competition is stiffer here than on a smaller site like IdeaOffer, with several dozen or more submissions for each assignment, but if you have a knack for naming things, you could win a little bit more than chump change.

SquadHelp

While naming and branding contests aren’t the only thing SquadHelp offers, they do have a variety of opportunities to contribute to both with awards ranging from $50 to about $100 in these categories. Recent contests include coming up with a new domain name for an IT business and developing a new brand name that incorporates the word “karma.” Other SquadHelp categories include marketing and videos, testing and usability, research and advice, and web design and logos. An example of a Research and Advice contest is brainstorming ideas for features on a website (for $100).

4. Enter a Design Contest

While there continues to be a debate about whether or not designers should participate in contests (which essentially lead to spec work), there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it can be a great way to break into an industry or a market. Controversy aside, here are a few to explore.

Threadless

This is one of the “granddaddy” design contest sites that was cited as an example of crowdsourcing in Howe’s Wired article. Threadless lets anyone submit t-shirt designs that are then voted up by the crowd. If you are one of the weekly winners, you receive $2,000 in cash, a $500 Threadless gift certificate, and $500 in cash each time your design is reprinted.
You can also enter a t-shirt slogan contest for a $500 prize, as well as design-specific challenges.

99designs

You have a laundry list of design contests to enter on this popular site, including logo design, web design, business cards, icon design, WordPress themes, stationery design, brochure design, print design, t-shirt design and banner ads. According to the site, benefits of participation include reaching new clients, polishing your skills, building your portfolio and earning money. At the time of writing, there were nearly 1,000 design contests on the site with most awards ranging from $100 to $500.

Crowdspring

Competition is tough over at Crowdspring where there are 88,000+ creatives vying for about 250 or so open projects at any given time. Awards can range from $100 to $1,000 or more, depending on the specific assignment. Main project categories include print design packages, logo and stationery, logo design, company naming and small websites.

Prova

The benefit of working at a design crowdsourcing site like Prova is less heated competition, at least for the time being. You can find contests in the area of advertisement design including logos, postcards, packaging and websites.

Create My Tattoo

You don’t have to be a tattoo artist to enter a custom tattoo design contest on this site. You retain the rights to your original designs if they are not accepted and removed from the site. The company behind the site takes 12% of prizes ranging from approximately $35 to $350.

5. Enter a Multimedia Contest

Poptent

This site seeks individuals who want to make commercials, infomercials, branded webisodes, how-to-videos, and website videos for brands. You are under no obligation to participate, but if you do make a video to fulfill the assignment, upload it to your profile on the site and click “submit.” Poptent staff or the brand client who put out the assignment will watch the video you submitted. If accepted, Poptent then requests your tax information. If you are in the U.S., you will need to submit a W-9 form. You can then invoice Poptent and you are paid Net 30. Most prizes run into the thousands of dollars.

Tongal

Tongal breaks down the creative process so that you can participate in a piece of a larger project, like brainstorming ideas or taglines, shooting commercials, and creating animations or graphic designs. You can also earn money for promoting and distributing content created on the site. Project purses can range from several thousand dollars to well into the tens of thousands. Projects are often split between a number of people who are handling discrete parts of each one.

6. Get Perks

Crowdtap

Looking for VIP access to brands? Looking for cool products, swag and gift cards? Join Crowdtap to provide feedback, help brands spread the word about their products, and otherwise be a brand evangelist (including throwing product-related parties). You can also support your favorite charity as 5% of everything you earn goes to a cause you select with Crowdtap matching that amount. Join via Facebook, answer polls to help build your profile of interests, view opportunities, and earn status, rewards and donations.
Regardless of which site you use to do crowdwork, make sure you understand what you’re getting into and note if the site is asking you to provide spec work via contests with no guarantee of payment or if you get paid for work rendered. Make sure to check with your tax advisor on how to handle money received through crowd contests and crowdwork.
Interested in more Crowdsourcing resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Nikada

Top 13 Nigerian Job Search Websites for latest Jobs Nigeria

At Alexa, you can always know the top sites in the web in Nigeria, ordered by Alexa traffic rank. Yesterday,I decided to find out the top 13 Nigerian Job Search websites on Alexa where you can get latest Nigeria jobs and current Job vacancies in Nigeria. Below is the list I was able to come up with.



Naijahotjobs.com
Ngcareers.com
joblistnigeria.com
hotnigerianjobs.com
latestnigerianjobs.com
jetheights.com
gblcareers.com
naijajobslink.com
jobberman.com
http://naijaguardianjobs.blogspot.com/ (discontinued)
jobsmaster.com.ng
jobrapido.com.ng
nigeriabestjobs.com

I decided not to include Nairaland and NigeriaBestForum in the list above because they are not basically for Job search but you can always get latest Nigeria job vacancies at the two forums too.

NOTE : This listing will not remain the same forever. Hence, you too can always look up the top Job websites in Nigeria by yourself at www.alexa.com . More so, This list doesn't mean these are the only top career websites in Nigeria where you can get current jobs Nigeria. There are loads of great job search websites and blogs out there which are not in this list.

Few people dream of spending their entire professional lives selling cheeseburgers. If you want a top-tier career, you have to invest in the right college degree. Take a look at our list of some of the top degrees that can prepare you to rake in the bucks. We also list the median salaries enjoyed by professionals in these fields, according to 2013 numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rank	Field of Study	Median Salary	Description
1	Family and General Practitioners	$176,530	All those years in medical school pay off: doctors and surgeons make one of the highest incomes in any industry. Nurses and healthcare administrators don't do too poorly either.
2	Dentistry	$146,340	Plenty of baby-boomer dentists should retire within the next decade, freeing up hiring opportunities for newly minted dentists. Dental Assistants can also make very high salaries with minimal training required.
3	Pharmacy	$119,280	In addition to working at retail drugstores, many pharmacists find jobs with mental health centers, nursing homes, and family clinics. You can start out as a pharmacy tech.
4	Lawyers	$114,300	In addition to working at retail drugstores, many pharmacists find jobs with mental health centers, nursinIn addition to formal coursework, your law school may give you practice in supervised mock trials.
5	Marketing and Sales Management	$113,590	If you're a salesperson looking for career advancement, consider studying sales management. Your employer may even offer free on-site management training.
6	Physician Assistant	$92,970	With a bachelor's degree, you can gain enough career training in just two years to potentially become a physician's assistant.
7	Software Development	$92,660 (Applications Software) $101,410 (Systems Software)	The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects an enormous 38 percent job increase in software engineering within the next decade.
8	Education Administration (Elementary and Secondary School)	$88,380	Educational administrators ensure both students' academic success and teachers' job satisfaction. Remember, many administration jobs require advanced degrees.
9	Veterinary Science	$86,640	The BLS reports that job opportunities for veterinarians should be especially strong in feline medicine.
10	Construction Management	$84,410	Plenty of colleges offer bachelor's degrees in construction-related fields, and roughly 60 schools have graduate programs in construction management.
11	Art Direction	$83,000	Who says that artists have to starve? Not only do art directors make respectable incomes, they can expect fast job growth in the next decade.
12	Computer Systems Analysis	$81,190	Computer systems analysts can quickly solve companies' computer problems, from networking glitches to viruses.
13	Civil Engineering	$80,770	Due to common ground in engineering disciplines, certified civil engineers may also choose to explore mechanical engineering or electrical engineering.
14	Industrial Engineering	$80,300	From hospitals to factories, industrial engineers help streamline diverse businesses. During industrial engineering school, you can take courses in statistics, engineering writing, and business analysis.
15	Master's in Business Administration	$63,000 to $80,000	According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AAACB), more than 74 percent of MBA graduates work as managers.
16	Finance	$75,320 (Personal Advisers) $78,380 (Analysts)	You can boost your hiring potential in this competitive field through career training in finance, statistics or mathematics.
17	Computer Programming	$76,140	Brush up on Java and C++ by earning a certificate, bachelor's degree, or master's degree in computer programming.

Now that you've got a feel for some of the median salaries out there currently, be sure to browse some of the school listings below. Alternatively, you can use the search box on the right to get matched to an online school.


Sources
"Occupational employment," U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 30, 2014,
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2007/fall/art02.pdf

Social media marketing in Nigeria is simply selling a product or a service to millions on Nigerians on different social media sites. This might look simply but it requires a lot of hard and

 Here is the top  5 career quote for today

10 Inspiring Career Quotes From 10 Inspiring Authors

Making money online part 1

10 Tips for Successful Career Planning:
An Activity for Job-Seekers of All Ages

by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D

Career planning is not an activity that should be done once -- in high school or college -- and then left behind as we move forward in our jobs and careers. Rather, career planning is an activity that is best done on a regular basis -- especially given the data that the average worker will change careers (not jobs) multiple times over his or her lifetime. And it's never too soon or too late to start your career planning.