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Welcome to the Green Career Tip of the Week
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Online Version of this Issue Green Career Tips Archive
It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that my dear mother, Margaret, passed away unexpectedly on April 16th. To honor her and this time in my life I'm going to take some time away from my business to spend with family and friends as well as to take care
of all the necessary arrangements.
My terrific Green Career Central team will keep things going during my absence and I will be in close touch with them. We will have some wonderful articles to share with you over the next few weeks written by guest writers who have graciously stepped up to help. This week’s tip offers invaluable ideas about researching your new green career written by our GCC Research Expert Lauren Delp.
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers and I’ll be in touch with you soon!
Highlighted Announcement:
Green Building Professionals Career Panel
Thursday, May 1, 2008 (5:30 pm –8:30 pm)
Are you wondering whether there's a place for you in the green building industry? Join Dr. Carol McClelland, founder and managing editor of Green Career Central, and a panel of speakers from a broad range of green building careers as they talk about what they do and how they entered the field. During the evening you'll also learn more about the green building industry as a whole, future trends, and new opportunities within this growing industry. Take the strategies you hear to jump start your own green career. Light refreshments and reception at 5:30. Presentation and panel begin at 6:00.
Co-sponsored by Green Building Exchange and Green Career Central
Location: Green Building Exchange, 305 Main Street, Redwood City
Reserve Your Seat - $10.00 – by April 30th
Pay at the Door - $13.00
(accept images to view more info below)
Tip of the Week:
Research: Getting Stuck Before You Get Started
by Lauren E. Delp, Green Career Research Expert
Chances are that at least once you will find yourself frustrated and stuck while researching your green career. It might be in step 3 while exploring possible niches for yourself in the green economy, or in step 6 when you’re way ready to take action and get going already.
One of the areas where people tend to feel stuck the most during their career research is when first getting started looking for information on a subject or in an industry you know very little about.
What you might experience:
• You're not sure where to start looking
• You don't know what keywords to use in a search engine or what questions to ask of an expert you’d like to contact
It’s easy to want to give up at this point, but really there are ways to get unstuck again. First, take a deep breath, drink some water, walk around the room, stretch, get some oxygen to your limbs and brain. If you can, go for a short walk. You’ll be surprised how new the world looks after just ten or fifteen minutes of brisk walking. Here’s a trick that works for me: I take off in any direction, just following my nose. After five minutes I turn around and retrace my steps. No don’t worry about distance or direction. Just treat myself to a ten-minute break.
Then, when you get back from your walk, make an outline of the kinds of information you want to end up with. For example, you might want to know about the types of jobs in an industry, or the education requirements for specific job types, employment conditions in a company, or contact information for a person to go to for an informational interview.
Going through your outline, add, for each item, ideas of where to go look. It’s okay to start out general, for example, a search engine, or a university website or even my own network of friends, family and colleagues. Then make a second pass through the outline, adding more detail. Which search engine, which university, who in your network.
Some good places to get started:
- Wikipedia is a great first stop for topics you know very little about. Here you will learn some of the buzzwords, pro and con issues, controversies and history. Here you can usually find links to expert sources you might want to turn to. This is also a good place to go if you’re having trouble with your initial outline.
- About.com will give you a broader and more mainstream description of a topic. The information here is not as deep and tends to be more one-sided, as each section is maintained by a single expert. Still, you should probably check here as well for an initial background on new topics.
- Google is more time consuming and requires quite a bit of picking through to find the gems, but a very large percentage of the Web can be found through Google. I also use Google when I don’t know how to identify the right Wikipedia entry. Scan the first page or two of results, looking for Wikipedia.org in the URL. Click on the link and you will either have found the entry you need, or the page will mention the right phrase to use in looking for your entry.
- Clusty.com is a unique approach in searching, bringing you results from multiple search engines but rather than just one long list of results, it clusters them by topics, making it easier to zero in on what you're looking for. Try it at least once; you’ll be amazed at how much your life has just been simplified. Look for the relevant cluster in the left hand column. Following each grouping, in parenthesis, is the number of results for that cluster.
A few unconventional resources:
- AccessMyLibrary provides free access to millions of news and information articles (current and archived) from thousands of journals and publications - simply use your library card, or in some cases a U.S. driver's license, for immediate online access to this database.
- Web U.S. Higher Education from University of Texas at Austin provides listings of state universities and community colleges in the US, browsable by state or alphabetically, with links to each institution's website. On the same page you will find links to U.S. Regional Accrediting Organizations' websites, which usually offer a hyperlinked list of their member schools.
- Finding People: NNDB Tracking The Entire World They say they are “an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people [they] have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts) but it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious…”
- Business & Economics Research Advisor (BERA) Business Reference Services, from the Library of Congress. This site provides a series of guides to doing research in business, science, technology, etc. You might want to go straight to Issue 9 (same link as above) which covers resources useful for beginning research on a wide variety of industries.
- How to Gather Competitive Research on BNET This is a good web page to visit to give you an idea of what to look into when researching an industry through specific companies. Their focus is to provide a crash course to assist companies in developing a strategy for researching their competition. You can learn a lot from their resources. Their What You Will Need sheet on the home page is worth a careful read.
Your personal and business network is your greatest asset! Think creatively of where you may find some answers. Have you thought about parents at the PTA? Your old high school teachers? Online social and business networking sites? Your photography or gardening club? Neighborhood Association? Make a list—it will come in handy before you’re done getting your new green career.
Your reference librarian is a great resource, they are sure to have ideas you may not have thought about. Give them a call, they may surprise you.
Remember: don’t lose sight of your outline; always decide in advance where you're going to look and why. It will make your job a lot easier.
-- Lauren E. Delp is a Research Expert at Green Career Central.
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"I've got my green niche! The brainstorming sessions in this eBook are a great tool for capturing my random thoughts and actually organizing them into cohesive career paths. Amazing! Thank you Carol!" --Taj
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Are You Searching for Your Green Niche?
You know you want a green career, but do you know what you want to do in the green economy?
The key to discovering your green niche is pinpointing how to leverage your skills, passions, talents and experience to plug into the green economy.
When you know what part of the economy you want to target, you’ll have an entirely new level of clarity. With that new clarity, your current level of overwhelm and confusion will decrease.
The What’s Your Green Niche eBook eBook takes you through a step-by-step process to determine your green niche. Here's a list of some of the things you'll gain as you work through this eBook. You'll:
- Create your personal definition of success.
- Discover how you know what you are drawn to.
- Develop a list of your 40 favorite skills and interests with the help of checklists.
- Brainstorm over 40 career ideas based on your favorite skills and interests in an hour or so.
- Narrow your career ideas to your top two ideas.
- Develop a plan to achieve your green career goals whether you want to return to school, launch your job search, or start your business.
Members - Download (part of membership)
Non-Members - $55.00
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"This is likely the only site of its kind on the Internet. A lot of thought and care have been put into it. Thanks to the exercises in Step 1, I'm finally able to articulate what I'm passionate about and how I want to use my passion in the world. Thank you so much." -AM, California
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About Us
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Green Career CentralTM is a membership site for people who want to transform their passion for the environment into a prosperous green career.
Carol McClelland, PhD, founder and managing editor of this site, has helped thousands of people discover their dream career through her book Your Dream Career For Dummies and her work with individuals, groups, and students. Together with her team of experts, researchers and writers, Carol has pulled together sixteen years of experience into a broad collection of how-to articles, resources, support, and teleclasses to help you find your way to make a difference and prosper.
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