Having seen a lot of resumes I’m still surprised by the number of obvious mistakes – lack of spell-checking, all-caps where it shouldn’t be (or should it be anywhere?), incoherent statements. And when it comes to defense industry resumes, far too many people ignore the details and fail to target their resume as they should.Read… Read more »
The Government Man is back after a brief hiatus. In my book, Confessions of a Government Man, a chapter called “Where You Sit is Where You Stand” was all about the stovepipe mentalities once prevalent in government. Fortunately a lot of this type of thinking is gone but not totally forgotten. The subject matter conjuresRead… Read more »
Patra’s money quote: “Money. Salary. Compensation. All a critical aspect of your job search and yet to many Americans, more difficult to talk about than sex.” What do you need to do to determine your strategy? Learn what you are worth in terms of the job you want. Be clear with hiring managers about yourRead… Read more »
I don’t wish to come across like some old “back in my day” type of person reminiscing about the good old days for several reasons. First when I was starting out the powers that be, thought it would be a good idea to buddy me up with a lot of the senior technical staff andRead… Read more »
Remember the days when you would get a hand written letter? Or your friend would send you a cool postcard while they were on vacation? We all know that social media and email have ended the art of a hand written letter. If you get a hand written letter now, it is really special, noRead… Read more »
Last week produced a “déjà vu” experience although it was definitely not the “déjà vu all over again” variety. For only the second time in my speaking career I received unanticipated feedback from participants of a workshop two or more years after the actual event. This is not trivial as one of the challenging aspectsRead… Read more »
Leadership development is an important investment in employees and a means to improve the performance of federal agencies. Considering the current budgetary constraints, there are a number of no-cost or low-cost training and development options that you can use to help educate and develop your managers and team members to fill in any gaps. AsRead… Read more »
It seems traditional classroom training as we know it may be dying, but there are ways to bring it back to life. “Recent remarks* by Tony Bingham, CEO of ASTD, suggested that much of the formal classroom with instructor-led training has gone the way of scheduled classes, blackboards and overhead projectors. Replaced by the ‘pull’Read… Read more »
I’m surprised that more government employees aren’t discussing the President’s SAVE Awards website more. There are about 5,000 ideas posted so far, of which there are about 50 good, solid ideas. Most of the other entries are simply rants/vents from a frustrated workforce, or duplicatations of other similar ideas (e.g. telework, combine agencies, go paperless,Read… Read more »
VoltDB is a company fielding a technology designed by DBMS pioneer Mike Stonebreaker. It is designed to address challenges of performance limitations in existing systems, and also provides significant potential cost savings, giving it the virtuous position of having more functionality at a lower cost. In conversations with Stonebreaker I learned a bit more aboutRead… Read more »