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7 Reasons to Update Your LinkedIn Profile

As an IT professional, odds are you regularly update your resume. This ensures you are ready for opportunities as you learn about them.

Similarly, you should regularly update your LinkedIn profile. Keeping your details current and relevant shows hiring managers and recruiters what you have to offer employers.

Engaging with hiring managers and recruiters opens you up to new opportunities. These opportunities can advance your career.

Discover seven reasons to update your LinkedIn profile.

1. An Annual LinkedIn Update Is Essential

Conducting an annual review of the knowledge, skills, and accomplishments you gained in the last 12 months lets you add the details to your LinkedIn profile. You also can delete the information that is no longer relevant to your career path. These actions help hiring managers and recruiters focus on the details that can lead to your next opportunity.

2. Industry Professionals View Your LinkedIn Profile

Hiring managers, recruiters, and other professionals in your industry use your LinkedIn profile to determine your qualifications for roles. As a result, they might reach out about potential career opportunities. Sharing current information facilitates this process.

3. A Recession Is Coming

Entering a recession means economic instability. As a result, you should be prepared for anything to happen within your company and industry.

Having a complete, current, and engaging LinkedIn profile helps you pursue relevant roles if the need arises. It also makes you an attractive passive candidate for opportunities that fit your knowledge, skills, and experience.

4. Position Yourself for Opportunities

Updating your LinkedIn profile ensures it aligns with your career goals. This shows your authentic interest in professional growth. It also demonstrates you are equipped to take on the role you desire.

You also can connect with other professionals, hiring managers, and recruiters in your industry. These individuals might help you land your next role.

5. Gain the Latest LinkedIn Updates

Check your LinkedIn feed when you update your profile. Accept the relevant connection requests you received. Also, respond to the messages in your inbox. Additionally, read articles to find out what is new in your industry. These activities help you prepare for your next career opportunity.

6. Show Relevance in Your Industry

Activate Creator Mode to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You can publish content and share your area of expertise.

Creator Mode lets you identify the top five hashtags you want to be associated with. These hashtags sit below your headline to let viewers know more about you when they click on your profile.

7. Stand Out from Your Peers

Updating your LinkedIn profile increases your visibility and credibility with industry professionals, hiring managers, and recruiters. This helps increase your network and professional opportunities.

Include images and videos to provide greater insight into your brand. This helps others connect with you on a more personal level.

Are You Ready for Your Next Opportunity?

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Building a Strong Personal Brand: How to Stand Out in a Competitive Job Market

Building a strong personal brand helps you stand out in a competitive job market. Differentiating yourself shows what you have to offer an employer that others do not.

Creating a strong personal brand positions you as a thought leader in your field. This shows other IT professionals, hiring managers, and recruiters the value you can provide to an organization.

Having a strong personal brand helps form a lasting impression on hiring managers and recruiters. As a result, they likely will contact you about the jobs you apply for or opportunities that fit your skills and experience. These activities can help secure your next position.

Learn how to build a strong personal brand and stand out in a competitive job market.

Create Your Foundation

Build an authentic foundation that shows who you truly are. Purposefully and strategically showcase the value you provide for others.

  • Ensure your brand reflects your values, beliefs, and passions. Include your interests, skills, and credentials.
  • Focus your brand vision on what you want to be known for. Develop it according to your purpose and what you want to accomplish.
  • Create a brand message that you want to communicate to your audience. Ensure it reflects your personal characteristics and traits.

Determine Your Target Audience

Consider the industry professionals you want your personal brand to appeal to. This should include IT professionals, hiring managers, HR professionals, company leaders, and recruiters.

Your personal brand is designed to attract people in your target audience. This means your brand resonates with these individuals and attracts them to you.

Develop an Irresistible Offer

Determine what you want to sell to your target audience. This may solve a certain problem or attain a certain result.

Focus on the value you provide others, such as employers, in exchange for something, such as a desirable job with competitive income, benefits, and perks and an attractive work environment.

Set Your Content Strategy

Create and share content that helps your target audience. This builds trust and positions you as an authority in the IT industry.

  • List topics that would be helpful to your target audience. You can use an online tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to conduct keyword research and uncover popular topics.
  • Decide which type of content to create and where to publish it. Types of content include blog posts, videos, and infographics. Publication sites include LinkedIn, YouTube, and Quora.
  • Focus on quality and consistency when publishing your content. You might want to start by creating two content types, such as blog posts and videos, and publish them on two platforms, such as LinkedIn and YouTube, and add more later.

Is It Time to Find a New IT Job?

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Yes, Mondays Are That Bad: 3 Ways to Make Them Better

Monday has a reputation for being the worst day of the week. Many employees view Monday as disrupting the happiness they experience by not working over the weekend.

Zety research shows that 41% of respondents dislike Monday. They report having the heaviest workloads and lots of meetings, experiencing a high-pressure work environment, and being expected to work overtime.

Further, 80% of respondents say that Monday is the most stressful day of the week. As a result, they feel the least motivated and productive at the start of the work week.

Fortunately, you can help change your employees’ beliefs about Monday to set them up for a positive, productive week. The following suggestions can help.

Implement these three ideas to make Mondays better for your employees.

1. Emphasize the Importance of Each Employee’s Role

Remind your employees of how their work impacts the organization. Provide examples of how their contributions and results help reach company goals and contribute to the bigger picture.

Encourage your employees to tie their work to their identity. For instance, an employee who has a strong work ethic can demonstrate it by being productive throughout each day. Or, an employee who excels at motivating others can show it by positively impacting their colleagues and coworkers.

Support your employees in pursuing personal interests. Experiencing happiness in their personal lives impacts how they feel about their professional lives. This is especially important when your employees return to work on Monday.

2. Monitor Employees’ Workloads

Talk with each employee about their workload. Include the hours they invest and the tasks they must accomplish to attain their results.

Encourage each employee to schedule their work throughout the week to even out the demands of each day. Also, support being as productive as possible each day, especially on Fridays, to complete as much work as possible.

Find out whether an employee is unable to accomplish all the work that is assigned to them. Develop ways to adjust the timeline or delegate when needed. Also, establish ways to maintain healthy boundaries going forward. This encourages your employees to go to work on Monday.

3. Support Employee Relationships

Emphasize the importance of your employees’ building relationships with colleagues and coworkers. Encourage them to spend time together outside of work. Forming work relationships provides motivation and support for your employees to start each week with a positive mindset.

Support your employees in recognizing their colleagues’ and coworkers’ accomplishments. This encourages feelings of value, respect, and cohesion. It also makes it easier to come back to work on Monday.

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Work-Life Balance: The Evolution

Work-life balance looks different for every employee. However, balancing professional and personal responsibilities is essential for maintaining a healthy work environment.

Sustaining a work-life balance helps reduce stress. It also lowers the odds of employees experiencing physical or mental health concerns.

Employees who experience chronic stress over an extended period may experience burnout. This can happen when continuously working overtime and not enforcing boundaries between work hours and personal time.

Creating a work environment that prioritizes work-life balance considers the needs of employees from all generations. Understanding the differences in beliefs and approaches to work-life balance can be beneficial.

Learn more about the evolution of work-life balance to better support your employees.

Baby Boomers and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1945 and 1960, baby boomers were exposed to hardships that resulted from World War II. Because earning a living was difficult, this generation desires opportunities for employment and workplace stability. Therefore, work-life balance is not a main concern.

Most baby boomers remain with companies for years. As a result, many hold senior- or director-level roles with significant amounts of responsibility and stress.

Generation X and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1961 and 1980, members of Generation X grew up seeing their parents work long hours. Therefore, Generation X experienced the impact of poor work-life balance on their families. As a result, they understand the importance of prioritizing work-life balance in their lives.

Many Generation X employees prioritize spending time with family and friends. As a result, they tend to use all their paid time off each year.

Generation X employees typically look for flexibility when deciding which companies to work for. This may include remote or hybrid work arrangements, flexible work hours, generous paid time off, and extended parental leave.

Millennials and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1981 and 2000, millennials view work as a part of life. Because their student loans are significantly high, millennials value stable employment to pay for their education and their children’s education.

Covering rising housing costs also is among millennials’ top priorities. Finding career paths that support their lifestyles also is important.

Supporting Work-Life Balance for All Generations

Encouraging employees to fulfill their professional and personal needs promotes productivity and healthy lifestyles.

  • Prioritizing a healthy company culture creates a positive work environment. This encourages employees to feel comfortable working to advance their careers rather than simply for a paycheck.
  • Providing competitive compensation and benefits, and opportunities for career growth increases employee tenure within an organization.
  • Offering remote or flexible work options, a flexible schedule, and generous paid time off increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, and morale. It also decreases employee stress and turnover. This benefits the bottom line.

Are You Looking for Help with Hiring?

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Important Skills to Develop as an Engineer

Working as an IT engineer provides access to in-demand and lucrative jobs. This provides a foundation for long-term career success.

Continuously developing your skill set helps you take on more senior engineering jobs. This provides additional opportunities for career growth.

Develop These Important Skills To Grow As An Engineer

Communication

Team discussion and collaboration are important parts of an engineering job. Open communication helps you understand the client’s needs, create the product or service, and resolve issues.

Sharing ideas, asking questions, and providing input is essential. Actively listening and sharing constructive feedback also are required.

Using the right form of verbal, written, online, or in-person communication helps you effectively share information. Speaking in non-technical terms when interacting with professionals in other departments is important as well.

Creativity

Dealing with novel situations is part of being an engineer. Innovation is required to develop things that previously did not exist.

There will be times when the typical solution cannot be implemented or does not work. This requires using your knowledge, skills, and experience to resolve the issue.

Critical Thinking

Developing a strong sense of reality and trust in your abilities is essential. Drawing on your knowledge and experience helps you accurately evaluate situations and take appropriate action. Digging deeper for more information helps you make educated decisions and respond appropriately.

Problem-Solving

Working as an engineer involves identifying, analyzing, and solving problems. This is especially important in urgent situations.

Ongoing education and experience help you apply relevant theories and formulas to resolve issues. Learning from your mistakes also is beneficial.

Attention to Detail

Following systems to check your engineering work is essential. This may involve keeping a notebook of the mistakes you made, how you fixed them, and what you learned. You can refer to your notebook as needed to improve your performance.

Leadership

Being a self-starting engineer who wants to lead others as you increase your value to an organization is important. The more skills and experience you gain, the better equipped you are to take on management and leadership roles.

Your ability to motivate your colleagues, assess their strengths, and assign roles helps your team efficiently complete projects. Providing guidance, answering questions, and resolving issues help build team cohesion.

Ready To Grow Your Engineering Career?

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What Are Common Interview Styles?

Interview styles differ by the method of asking the questions. For instance, participation in a panel interview may involve being asked behavioral questions to learn more about your work experience.

Some interviewers might choose multiple interview styles. Different styles can gather the information needed to fill different needs.

You can practice answering questions in different interview styles to prepare for the one your potential employer uses. These tips can help.

Learn about the common interview styles and how you can prepare for them.

Open-Ended Interview Style

Open-ended interview questions typically are broad in scope. This means you speak significantly more than the interviewer.

One topic may be how your strengths can help you succeed in the position. Or, the interviewer might ask you to describe how your skills and experiences relate to the role and can benefit your performance.

Emphasize your hard and soft skills in your answers. Include specific examples of how you used these skills in previous roles. Demonstrate that you are well-equipped to carry out the job duties and responsibilities.

Situational Interview Style

Situational interview questions present real-life scenarios and ask how you would approach the situation or solve the problem. This helps the interviewer determine whether you would handle the issue in line with company culture.

Be sure to include specific examples of how you handled similar scenarios in previous positions. This demonstrates how you would handle related situations with your next employer.

Behavioral Interview Style

Behavioral interview questions focus on your thinking, behavior, and outcomes in previous professional, personal, and interpersonal situations. The results of your behavior show what likely would happen under similar circumstances while working at another company.

Behavioral questions may be broad, such as asking how you work while under pressure. Or, they might involve how you would handle a specific situation in the workplace.

Use the STAR method to answer behavioral questions. Explain the situation you encountered, the tasks you performed, the actions you took, and your results. Demonstrate effective communication, leadership, creativity, teamwork, flexibility, organization, and problem-solving in your answer.

Want Additional Interview Prep?

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Is Your Performance Monitoring Effective?

Performance monitoring involves regularly verifying and tracking how consistently and productively your digital platforms are performing. This may involve using dashboards and alert systems to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Action may be taken if significant changes in performance occur.

Implement these tips to determine whether your performance monitoring strategy is effective.

Monitor the Data Collection

Make sure your server monitoring platform is scalable. This is essential as your data collection and reporting needs change over time.

Your data collection must have sufficient detail for each metric at the poll interval level. This requires enough storage to hold the data at the poll intervals.

Develop a Baseline

Create a baseline for each server monitoring metric. This lets you set alerts for unusual server or network performance.

Define the Performance Alerts

Performance alerts typically are breaches of a static threshold and baseline deviation. Both require frequent review, especially in the early stages of performance monitoring. Otherwise, normal changes in workloads may create false positive alerts.

Establishing sufficient historical performance statistics for each metric provides more effective predictions of events that may impact service. This results in fewer false positives.

Establish the Report Creation

The server monitoring tools include visual and printed reports showing the performance statistics required for server monitoring. Additional online and paper reports are typically required to help resolve issues.

The visual monitor must be as close as possible to real-time. Also, the data must be properly stored to accommodate increasing workloads. This may involve archiving the data by period or moving it to a distributed database architecture.

Focus on the Data Analysis

Predict which events will impact service and how to troubleshoot them. Also, look for any bottlenecks or potential configuration changes that could benefit the performance of the infrastructure.

Consider using tools that model infrastructure changes. These models help make informed decisions about whether to fix or replace the infrastructure.

Look at the Result Distribution

Share the results of the server monitoring with your IT team. This helps everyone carry out their functions.

Need Help with Your Performance Monitoring?

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Gamification’s Importance in the Modern Workplace

Some of the most popular apps use gamification as motivation to hold users accountable and reach their goals. This may involve receiving badges for reaching milestones that promote progress.

Social sharing often is combined with badging to provide additional motivation to attain goals. Sharing achievements with others creates a sense of status that supports additional movement toward success.

Gamification can be used to motivate employees in the modern workforce. Combining badging and social sharing elevates employee engagement, performance, and productivity. It also increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and retention rates.

Discover gamification’s importance in the modern workplace and how it can benefit your organization.

Include Gamification in Your Learning Management System

Choose a learning management system (LMS) that combines courses with gamification options and integrates with your other employee experience (EX) technology. Ensure the LMS rewards employees for completing a set number of courses with a time-sensitive component. This may involve a badge or a place on the leaderboard.

Rewarding time-sensitive elements encourages employees to complete courses as soon as possible. It also encourages ongoing learning at work.

Implement Internal Recognition for Learning

Encourage managers to assign training courses with gamification elements connected to them. This encourages employees to complete the courses and further develop their careers.

Internally recognize employees who complete their courses. This may include using your intranet to share employee course accomplishments, scores, and rewards.

Seeing their peers’ accomplishments motivates employees to continue learning. Ongoing learning is important for career development in the modern workplace.

Provide External Recognition for Learning

Implement methods to share badges, course completions, and certificates to employees’ social media accounts as part of the gamification process. It is especially important for employees to share their accomplishments on their LinkedIn profiles for other professionals to see.

Offer rewards for employees who share their recognition on social media. This shows you actively invest in your employees. It also helps attract and retain employees in the modern workforce.

Pair Gamification with Real-World Rewards

Let employees use their badges and leaderboard positions to earn points toward attractive rewards. This may include gift cards, the option to work remotely for a day, or additional vacation days. Providing these rewards encourages employees to complete courses and continue learning. Ongoing employee learning benefits your company’s culture and bottom line.

Integrate Gamification with Performance Reviews

Use technology to include course completion, badges, and other rewards in employees’ performance reviews. This increases course completion and elevates the employee experience. It also promotes learning, career advancement, and loyalty to the organization.

Is It Time to Hire IT Professionals?

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Tips to Improve Your IT Resume with No Experience

Improving your IT resume when you have no experience helps you establish your career. The information in your resume shows why you are a desirable candidate who should be contacted for an interview.

When improving your IT resume with no experience, focus on other experiences that helped develop your skill set. Demonstrating your strengths, accomplishments, and willingness to learn shows you can be trained to fulfill the job duties and responsibilities. This increases your odds of securing an interview.

Implement these tips to improve your IT resume with no experience.

Update Your Experiences Section

Clarify how you are building the IT skills relevant to the job you want. Listing these experiences demonstrates your work ethic and desire to build an IT career.

Your experiences may include extracurricular activities or volunteer work:

  • Join a tech community such as GitHub or Stack Overflow to learn and share information about programming.
  • Participate in hackathons to solve technology problems in teams.
  • Take advantage of free online resources, tutorials, and open-source software to learn programming languages.
  • Learn to code through Coursera or other online courses.
  • Volunteer with a nonprofit organization focused on IT, such as teaching children to code.
  • Enter technology competitions through Cisco or other IT companies.

Highlight the skills you developed through each experience. Emphasize the skills included in the job posting. Include the goals you attained that are relevant to the role you desire.

Emphasize Your Soft Skills

List your soft skills that are relevant to the IT position. Examples include communication, organization, self-motivation, collaboration, and leadership.

Soft skills are harder to develop than hard skills. As a result, demonstrating examples of your soft skills shows the value you can provide the employer.

Include Your Education

Provide details about your education. Your high school diploma or GED and relevant coursework, IT certifications, or college degree demonstrate your commitment to ongoing learning and ability to fulfill commitments.

You might pursue certification in any of the following fields:

  • Data
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Business applications
  • Google Cloud
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Project management

You could pursue a degree in one of the following fields:

  • Information technology and information systems
  • Computer science
  • Information science
  • Software engineering
  • Computer engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Ready to Begin Your IT Job Search?

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7 Valuable Soft Skills That Can Help Boost Your Career!

Developing your soft skills helps boost your IT career. Although your hard skills are important, your soft skills have a greater impact on your employability and longevity with a company.

Your soft skills determine how you interact with others. This affects how well you work with colleagues and coworkers to finish projects.

As a result, you should prioritize developing your soft skills along with your hard skills. The following are some of the soft skills to focus on.

Discover seven valuable soft skills that can help boost your IT career.

1. Communication

Communication is required to write, speak, actively listen, and collaborate. These skills are important for writing emails, talking with colleagues and coworkers, and sharing presentations.

2. Productivity

Your ability to strategize, organize, plan, and deliver results impacts your productivity. Showing your teammates, manager, and coworkers they can count on you to have things done by the deadline makes you a valuable team member.

Your productivity skills help you manage your time, maintain focus, and finish your work on time. This also helps you create a plan to reach the goals and requirements of a project within the timeline.

Using your productivity skills helps you balance multiple projects and changing priorities. This also lets you overcome obstacles to get more done in less time.

3. Problem-Solving

Problem-solving skills help you analyze and resolve issues both individually and as a team. Your ability to think critically, ask questions, and make decisions helps you solve problems. You can calmly and objectively discuss an issue, develop potential resolutions, and implement the best one.

4. Creativity

Your ability to think outside the box helps you develop original ideas and perspectives. Your curiosity encourages you to ask questions, learn, and find unique ways to add value to the organization.

Developing your creativity helps you contribute ideas to solve problems and resolve issues. It also helps you remain open-minded while overcoming obstacles.

5. Confidence

Confidence in your ability to complete tasks and reach goals is important. This helps you learn and develop your skills to provide more value to the organization.

Displaying confidence involves finding the resources and support needed to finish your work. This helps you maintain a positive attitude.

Showing confidence means assertively interacting with others. This can help you secure leadership positions.

6. Agility

Your ability to adapt to changing work situations is essential. This helps you complete your work and meet expectations during times of change.

Agility is required to stay curious and navigate through challenging times. It also helps you remain open-minded when talking with others.

Remaining agile lets you make fast decisions when information is limited. It also lets you change between tasks as your priorities change.

7. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness lets you appropriately monitor, manage, and display your emotions in the workplace. This helps you professionally interact with others.

Being self-aware involves reflecting on and learning from your experiences and mistakes. It also includes seeing things from others’ viewpoints.

Displaying self-awareness helps you collaborate with colleagues and coworkers. It also builds trust with others.

Are You Looking to Boost Your IT Career?

When the time comes to advance your career, include RightStone in your job search. Use this link to our job board.