Career Center Blog | Advice for new grads: Get your hands dirty

All over the Puget Sound region, college and high school graduates will do the cap-and-gown shuffle in the next few weeks as they collect their new diplomas and head into the next stage of life. For the last four years,

Career Center Blog | With starting salaries, don't expect to be average

When I accepted my first full-time job offer, back in the heady autumn days of 1989, I was a recent college graduate with a journalism degree (I know -- tragic, right?), and everything seemed possible. The Berlin Wall was suddenly

Career Center Blog | It's never too early to think about summer jobs

Do you remember your first job? Try as I might to forget it, mine is still seared into my memory banks: A shopping mall in suburban Maryland, the sweltering summer of 1985, lifting bags of mulch, restocking tools, assembling picnic

Career Center Blog | How to think like a hiring manager in job interviews

Although it may not seem like it during a high-pressure job interview, hiring managers are only human. They may occasionally give you a withering stare and ask sometimes unanswerable questions just to see how you react, but they are essentially

Career Center Blog | Fill in those hollow resume adjectives with real results

"Hello, my name is Randy. I'm a creative person specializing in organizational efficiency and effective communication. I'm a motivated individual with extensive experience in journalism and have a proven track record of creating innovative solutions. In my previous positions, I

Career Center Blog | First be good at what you do and the passion will follow

Follow your dreams? Just child's play. Discover your true calling? An impossible fantasy. Work your way up the company ladder? Sucker! While never stated quite this bluntly, these are some of the harsh admonitions that author Cal Newport aims at

Career Center Blog | Will the long-term unemployed soon get a rescue platform?

Earlier this year, while going about their usual business of investigating the nation's power brokers and exposing corruption wherever they find it, the journalists on the CBS TV news magazine "60 Minutes" told one of the more uplifting stories to

Career Center Blog | Three ways volunteering can help land your dream job

We've all heard them before -- the long list of steps that job seekers are supposed to take in order to get their resume looked at, much less get themselves in front of a hiring manager. Often those tips are

Career Center Blog | Overcoming the age-old 'maturity' problem

First impressions play an enormous role in how a candidate will be evaluated. Sometimes, however, these impressions are completely out of our control. Take the case of one job seeker I recently spoke with, who met a hiring manager about

Career Center Blog | Adding resume 'interests'? Better make them interesting

During a recent chat via Facebook with a friend of mine, an acquaintance happened to mention how much his experience in the Boy Scouts of America has meant to him, even into his adult years. He even said that his

Career Center Blog | Get your cover letter and resume in synch

Ask most job seekers which document they spend the most time on and they will likely say their resume. True, the resume is an essential element of the job-search arsenal and is deserving of much attention, but it is almost

Career Center Blog | Three tips to rev up forgotten resume elements

The rise and near ubiquity of online resume-processing algorithms has done quite a number on the art of resume writing over the past few years. Almost gone are the days when an eye-catching font, a coordinated color scheme and a

Career Center Blog | Summer jobs not always a breeze for teens

With the end of the school year coming up for college and high school students, the yearly ritual of parents everywhere will soon begin in earnest: getting their teenage sons and daughters off the couch and into a summer job.

Career Center Blog | Think outside the hospital to build nursing experience

One of the enduring myths in the job-search world is the idea of getting into a "recession-proof career," one that will always have high demand for job candidates no matter what the economy is doing. While these mythic careers are

Career Center Blog | The ol' college try: Making the most of your internship

For most college students and recent college grads, the old Catch-22 of job search -- you can't get a job without enough real-world experience, but you also can't get real-world experience until you get a job -- is one of

Career Center Blog | Job seekers: No need to highlight that work gap

I know a lot of people who are in the midst of dispiriting and anxiety-ridden job searches. Whenever I talk to one of these job-hunting friends, I hear the same questions over and over: Am I at all appealing to

Career Center Blog | When describing work experience, show, don't tell

Creative. Organizational. Effective. All of these are great words you would want associated with your previous work experience. But do you want them on your resume? Not necessarily. According to the online networking site LinkedIn, those three adjectives are what

Career Center Blog | Erasing unsightly blemishes from your resume

In most cases, the more experience you have on a resume, the better it looks to hiring managers. But are all experiences created equal? Not always. Have you had several jobs that only lasted a few months? Were you ever