Career Advice

Remember when Jimmy Kimmel’s "Mean Tweets" segment was an actual joke? Was it the muse for Twitter to unfold as the official platform for slander? The interpretation of free speech has taken on new meaning in the digital age.

A whole lot of us leave paid days off unused. Here are some useful tips for blowing your entire wad. We’re sadly a nation of nay-cationers. 93% of Canadians say vacations are essential to happiness, says a study. Less than half of that use their full entitlement.

The beautiful game has its own special language. See what the oddball terms mean in everyday work-speak. Hey hooligans. Lace up your boots (cleats) and cheer for football (soccer). It’s FIFA World Cup time! So whip out your vuvuzelas (noisemakers) and blow for your favourite team. Like any sport, the beautiful game has a unique jargon; Panenka, Nutmeg, Kit, Yellow card. Which, when you think about it, is kind of like office-speak: obscure words in place of common ones. Which is why we’ve devised a translator. You’ll learn lots and have a chuckle or two. Now get out there with your magic spray and play with the golden ball!

What to do if you want to look back at your work history with pride instead of disappointment. 40 years – the average length of a career – is lots of time to amass regrets. Blown opportunities can pile up like stacks of empty boxes.

Only a blooming idiot wouldn’t want a job in one of these growing fields. Don’t vegetate in some rootless job. If you’ve got a green thumb, it’s your ticket to a blossoming career (or a sign of late-stage gangrene).

Get more bargaining power by having more than one employer at a time bid for you. Boo hoo for cybersecurity IT specialists. With every humongous data breach (yep, your private info in the hands of identity thieves), demand for their services skyrockets. Imagine the burden of fielding multiple job offers.

What you can do if staying home for that bracing year between. School’s out, gap’s in. An entire year to fill after graduating. Bouncing abroad is so cliché. Like you don’t have loans the size of Canada’s debt anyway.

Work as a distributed ledger Developer, Systems Engineer, Product Manager, Miner and more in this emerging field. People hear “Bitcoin” and ache to be billionaires. The tech behind such frothy cryptocurrencies is blockchain. It’s also for new commercial uses spawning jobs aplenty.

Fear the tears! We may work in kinder, gentler times with greater emphasis on personal and emotional balance, but the truth is boohooing at work may hold you back in your career. Unfortunately, it’ll have colleagues and managers questioning your capacity to keep your sh*t together.