A great way to boost your visibility to employers in our increasingly digital world is through creating a LinkedIn profile for yourself. This post will help you create a strong profile that gives you a professional image. Think of your LinkedIn profile as being a broader, more publicly visible version of your resume to show the world of work what you have to offer. Here are the main topics for this post: - Getting through the setup steps - Creating a qua

Now that you’ve completed some self-assessments about your skills, interests, and employment readiness, it’s time to start working on documentation you’ll put in front of prospective employers when applying for a better paying job. Today’s post will focus on creating a resume and will be about double the length of a typical ALRS post, so feel free to spend two days on this topic if needed to digest all the content and complete actions. Here are the main topics for this post:

Along with the work you’ve done from the previous two posts to assess your skills and interests, CareerForce offers another assessment called the Skills Matcher to assess your level of expertise in 40 different skills. In addition to better understanding your strongest skills to share with prospective employers, this assessment can point out less developed skills that need improvement to help you gain better employment. After completing this assessment, review your full list

Life is too short to be spent doing work you don’t like. While we all need to pay our bills and save for our futures, and while no job is perfect (even people doing their dream job don’t like it some days), we spend too much time working accept being miserable there. If you can get a job that’s in the top 20% of what you’re good at, top 20% of what you like, and top 20% of what you can get paid for your skills, that’s a win! Not that you shouldn’t aim higher than that going f

The next step to take toward finding a better paying job is to compare the skills you already have to the skills required for other jobs. Today’s CareerForce assessment is intended to help you compare skills in your current job to skills required for other jobs; jobs that are in demand, jobs that best align with your current job’s required skillset, and comparing your current job skillset to a career of interest, if you have one in mind already. After considering this, it’s a

Continuing the Job Seeker series from the previous two posts, using CareerForce assessments as examples, this post will guide you through the CareerForce Employment Readiness Assessment. This is a simple 12-question survey that makes today’s assignment seem light. However, be sure to plan on time to review the results of your assessment, as CareerForce makes some helpful recommendations based on your answers. Many recommendations will have links to other pages that you shoul

Now that you’ve set up a job seeker account to help you land a better paying job, spend the next several days exploring the different resources available to you. As shown in the two pictures below, start by logging into your account and then look for job search tools: Plan to spend one day on each relevant item listed; for example, those using a CareerForce account should take one day for the Employment Readiness Assessment, one day for the Compare Skills assessment, and so o

This post begins a series of concrete steps for you to take toward finding a better paying job, the first major milestone of the ALRS! You should plan to spend about 15 minutes setting up an account with the economic development agency in your state; the links for all 50 states are provided at the bottom of this post, which will go through setting up an account with Minnesota’s CareerForce as an example. Why Set Up an Account Setting up an account like this gives you access t