Career Advice

Marshalling your online following to foot your bills while transitioning is possible. But it’s probably not worth the effort. Hunting for a job when money’s tight is a pimp slap. It’s soul-wrenching enough to feel unmoored from your work identity. Add penny pinching and fear of going broke. Yeppers, job searching’s a hoot when wolves are at the door. How cool would it be to get financed on top of EI – without taking loans from granny, or from some skeeze at the pool hall? No vig to pay or debts to square. Use any bucks that trickle in to help defray living costs.

Pinpoint your competitive advantage, then power-drill it into the eyes of higher-ups. Your coworkers are smarter and harder working than you. Those who aren’t, sometimes go Machiavelli – backstabbing, sabotaging, swindling and kissing up. I’ve had to dive into that same swamp as an employee. I also found a legit way to make myself less disposable: find at least thing to contribute that leaves challengers begging for dregs.

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.