Career Development Category Archives - General Assembly Blog | Page 31

4 Mental Blocks Preventing You From Landing Your Dream Job (and How To Get Over Them)

In today’s ever-changing economy, searching for a job is hard work. The number of jobs, types of jobs, and even pathways into jobs are transforming at a pace that can feel impossible to keep up with. Add the desire to find a career that feels meaningful and fulfilling, and the job search can becoming a maddening task.

The path to a successful job search often starts with your own mindset. Consider how you think about yourself, your options, and the process to landing a job. These answers will help you form the foundation for the results you can achieve.

As a coach, educator, and practitioner, I work with clients to help them overcome common mental hang-ups that may be preventing them from landing their dream job.

Below are four of the negative mindsets that I see most often, and strategies you can use to overcome them.

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Four Ways Studying Abroad Can Advance Your Career

By Crystal Batya Marsh

If you’re a high school or college student interested in studying abroad, you’re probably familiar with the more obvious “pros.” You’ll have the opportunity to explore a new place and culture, of course, and it’s easy to see how broadening your horizon would lead to a wider, valuable new perspective. But did you realize that studying abroad could also help to advance your career?

More and more employers are recognizing the benefits of studying abroad and are actively seeking out candidates with study abroad experience. Here are four reasons why studying abroad can help advance your career.

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5 Key Steps to Learning From Failure

By Kevin Sandlin

When we hear or say the words “fail” or “failure” in relation to all things tech, we generally conjure up images of locked doors, garage sales of office supplies, empty chairs and desks, and a battle for the best developers who are now on the job market. But there’s more to it than that, and in every startup failure, there are more details than most of us will ever know about because we weren’t there. We can only watch from the sidelines and make armchair quarterback calls about what we would have done differently.

But how do we actually learn from failure? It’s too often a platitude like “we only learn when we fail,” but that doesn’t help the person or startup that just failed. What we need is a tangible process or exercise to walk through – painstakingly – to make sure that we do indeed learn from each and every failure, regardless of how small or how epic. That process is outlined below. Continue reading →

3 Ways TripAdvisor Stays Ahead of Customer Needs

By Corporate Training Team

Due to the rapid evolution in consumer behavior when browsing travel destinations online, TripAdvisor is a brand that is constantly working to stay on top of their customers’ desires, expectations, and digital behavior.

In the video above, Ravi Meta, VP of core consumer product at TripAdvisor, highlights three key methods for staying ahead of customers through both quantitative and qualitative feedback: Continue reading →

Your Ulitmate Checklist for Planning a Successful Hackathon

By Fareportal

Companies across the globe have added hackathons to their roster of annual events to strengthen their corporate community and foster innovation in an engaging and cost-effective way. For employees, participation not only affords them unlimited snacks and beverages throughout the event, but it also bridges the gap between departments, sparks creativity and allows them to work on projects outside of their daily workflow.

Tech companies have begun hosting annual global hackathons and have reaped the benefits of the innovations created—Facebook’s chat feature and OneTravel’s latest groundbreaking mobile feature, Opal, to name a few.

If your company has been toying with the idea of an internal team hackathon, but has no clue where to start, begin with this list of the top five hackathon planning items that every organizer should have on their to-do list. Continue reading →

Six DOs and six DON’Ts for your best presentation

By Kevin Sandlin

You’ve got a huge presentation coming up. You know your material. You know your audience. But you’re not totally confident that you’re going to nail it. Here are 6 things you should DO and then six things you should NOT DO in order to make this presentation your best ever.

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5 Ways To Engage Your Audience During A Presentation

By Kevin Sandlin

Giving an engaging presentation is hard work. Some people are natural orators, but most of us need practice, feedback, and guidance to improve our presenting skills. I teach the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly’s Atlanta location, run a weekly meetup of entrepreneurs every Friday in Atlanta, and lead several other small groups of people in various other capacities. Over the years, I’ve presented countless times to all types of people – investors, customers, employees, boards, students – and I’ve learned that there are five tactics that, used consistently, will help you keep any audience engaged.

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How To build an MVP in 60 days

By James Hu

After a failed attempt at starting a carpool company between 2011 and 2013 in Beijing, I found myself back in the States job searching for startup gigs in the Greater Seattle Area.

Having graduated from the University of Washington with a non-computer science degree, many technical positions were often out of reach.

So during my job search, I started working on a side project to brush up on my technical skills; and I decided that if I was going to build something, it had to fit the following criteria:

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Uncover The Top 10 Quotes from Peter Thiel’s Book, “Zero to One”

By General Assembly

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what tech billionaire Peter Thiel is most famous for. Co-founding PayPal with Max Levchin? Launching Clarium Capital or Palantir Technologies? Early-stage investments in notable startups like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla? Or perhaps it’s his contrarian views on education, science, and technology.

No matter which of his accomplishments you deem most note-worthy — they have certainly solidified Thiel as one of the greatest entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and original thinkers of our time.

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