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After getting laid off for the second time in three months, programmer Daniel Higginbotham knew he had to make job hunting less stressful. So, he built Happy Job Search (www.happyjobsearch.com), a tool for keeping track of the tens or even hundreds of job listings people encounter when looking for a job.

“The first time I got laid off, I made a lot of mistakes. I emailed some organizations twice and a few times forgot to attach my cover letter. I had to keep track of when to send a follow-up in my head. It was very stressful. This tool allowed me to approach the job search in a methodical, intelligent way. It also showed me how much effort I had put into job hunting, which felt good,” Daniel said.

Happy Job Search also allows you to keep track of your cover letter and “interview reminders” - those bits of information you want to have fresh in your mind before an interview.

Happy Job Search is completely free.

The Lovely Bride is using this service right now while she is looking for a new job, and I will do my best to - ah - help her write a post about it.

As the new year approaches, many folks begin to think about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the coming year. Sometimes these goals involve your job, your health habits, or other personal development topics.

Jeremiah Owyang published a list of Six Career Tips for people in the corporate world. One of the most interesting was this one:

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Another tip that resonated with me was his perspective on education. Quite a few of the people that I have managed and trained in the past have been young people, just going off to college, and they have asked me about the value of education and what they should study in order to get a “good” job.

My advice often conflicts with what they have heard from parents and guidance counselors. In my own experience those guidance counselors were dead wrong and the whole profession should be outlawed. An education is important, depending on what field you are looking to go into. Most of the time I recommend that you go to college and study something that you are passionate about, or at least very interested in. I’ll let Jeremiah cover the rest:

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

The future of work is changing, schools are not preparing children for it.It is increasingly up to you to help and educate yourself.

Solving problems in groups can be a process of trial and error, unless you have properly identified the problem.
Developing a clear and accurate understanding of what the problem is can help you avoid doing the work of solving the problem over and over again.

When you have a problem that has no obvious solution, ask the meeting attendees to define the problem to the best of their ability. Write these definitions down, where everyone can see them, without challenging any of the suggestions. Once everyone has proposed a definition, then you can get to work on crafting a single, unified version.

When the problem itself has been defined, you can get to work on the solution.

Every athlete has one, whether for an individual or team sport, from little kids on the sandlot to professionals on the gridiron. Even bridal parties need someone to instruct and manage the actions of the team members. Professional football and baseball teams often have a different coach for each particular aspect of the game, offense, defense, you name it.

Yet many people outside of these arenas are completely on their own.

The worlds of business and work, family and life are just as important to each of us as they are to professional athletes, yet once we are out of school or college we rarely get any coaching on our performance.

What can a coach do for you?

A coach or mentor is there to help you develop your skills. In many areas of life (such as money, parenting, marriage, leadership, public speaking, even health and excercise) there are coaches available who can guide you to:

• Discover and develop your passions
• Build a clear vision for the future
• Write your personal mission statement
• Learn how to relate to co-workers
• Learn how to manage people
• Learn how to navigate change
• Build your communication skills
• Appraise your performance
• Break out of a rut
• Learn to think about problems in a different way
• Take action in areas that need improvement
• Free yourself of a destructive self-image
• Improve communications in a marriage or relationship
• Become more confident in yourself
• Take more responsibility
• Take more (or less)! risks
• Grow in your faith

If you have had a growth experience with a coach or mentor, tell us about it in the Comments! If you are interested in getting some coaching (particularly about Productivity practices), see the services page and drop me a line.

Or just send me an e-mail. And to totally free Productivity information, and share your experiences with others, join the Productivity Mastermind conference call on Thursdays at 4:00pm Eastern.