Tenomania.com

Out of work? That doesn’t mean you’re also out of opportunities. Any single one of the ten methods below will help you stay marketable. If you try all ten suggestions, you’ll dramatically increase your odds of landing a new job, client, or key relationship:

1. Take a class 

Classes help you build new skills, meet people, and expand your marketable offerings. Day classes or workshops can cost as little as $25. Find classes at your local Chamber of Commerce, professional organization, or community college. Be sure to network while you’re there! If you’re considering a career change, low-cost classes are also a great way to find gauge your aptitude in your field of interest.

2. Join an interest group 

Try to make it an in-person, rather than online, interest group. Meeting people face-to-face is still the best way to network. Career- or industry-themed groups will help you network and learn new tricks. Non-career-themed groups will also help you meet people who could guide you to a new job.

Meetup.com has an extensive selection of themed meetups around the country. Social media outlets like Facebook and LinkedIn also host local groups. You can also look up local branches of national organizations, or try your local Chamber of Commerce.

3. Volunteer 

Volunteer or do a pro bono project for your favorite nonprofit. Stretch yourself, do a good job, meet people, and boost your resume. Bonus: Help people while you’re at it. It’s win-win-win.

4. Attend a conference

Conferences stoke your creativity and provide excellent networking opportunities. You’ll meet major players in your field, learn about new innovations, and get a roundup of new opportunities. Conferences can be pricey. Consider it an investment–if you work the conference right, you’ll come out with invaluable new contacts and opportunities. If you have your own business, a conference also makes fantastic tax write-off.

5. Use social media

If you don’t already have a LinkedIn account, create one! Link up with friends and groups, then join industry-specific groups to learn more about happenings in your industry. Contribute to discussions so that people get to know you.

Try Twitter out. Send quality tweets. Build a network based on solid, interesting content. Follow people you admire. If give Twitter a fair try and still hate it, leave. At least you tried.

Set up a blog. Write quality content. Comment on other peoples’ blog posts. Follow bloggers you like. Build a network. Try it out–it might just go somewhere.

Join Facebook. Put positive content in your profile and on your Wall. Facebook, like any social media vehicle, can either be a tool or a time-waster. Harness it for your own good.

6. Join a job search group  

Job-Hunt.org has a killer resource on societies, associations, and organizations that support job hunters. Social media outlets like Facebook and LinkedIn also host job search groups. Independent job search groups have also been cropping up around the country. Look for them on Craigslist or your local Chamber of Commerce. Ask around–your neighbor could be hosting one.

7. Learn a new language

Knowing a language opens you up to all kinds of new work possibilities. For example, knowing another language will give you an edge in most multinational corporations. If you get good at your language of choice, you can offer translation or interpretation services. You can even go work in your country of choice.

8. Consult 

Have you built up a strong area of expertise over your career? Harness it for the benefit of others. Start by defining where and how you can help people. Set a price. Then email everyone in your network. Tell them what you’re doing. Ask if they know someone who could use your help. Once you start getting responses, business is just a few steps away.

(Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on starting a consulting business.)

9. Set up a business 

Even if your business only picks up occasional work at the beginning, having a legal entity in place will open you up to valuable tax write-offs. Do the paperwork (it’s easy). Devise a business plan and strategy, but don’t worry if it doesn’t immediately take off. You have about three years to be unprofitable before the IRS starts asking questions.

10. Teach a class 

If you know a subject well, tell other people about it by teaching a class or workshop. You can market yourself, your services, and/or your business through the workshop. Contact your local community college. Research how much you have to charge if you rent a space yourself and market the workshop. Speak at a conference or tradeshow. Teach through your local Chamber of Commerce. Where there’s a venue, there is a way.

When I started looking at colleges back at the turn of the century (the middle ages in web time), really the only resources available to me were traditional college guidebooks like The Princeton Review. While those books offered some great general information, they really only scratched the surface of what each college was actually like for students. Even if I sent away to the school for more info, it was still vetted and edited by the school’s communications department.

It wasn’t until I visited the schools I was interested in and actually talked to students that I started to get a real picture of what university life was like at those schools. Thankfully, students of today don’t have quite the same problems, and that’s all because of social media. Here are 10 social media resources for high school students (and their parents) to use in order to find out more about what college life is really like at the school they plan to attend.

1. College Prowler 

Those stodgy old college review books have all the basic information: academics, acceptance rate, matriculation rate, graduation percentage, number of students, etc. But rarely do they touch on any of the things that really matter to incoming students trying to pick where to spend the next four years of their lives. Stuff like, how’s the night life? How’s the food? Is there parking? What’s the weather like? It was with that in mind that Luke Skurman founded College Prowler in 2002. The problem, Skurman thought, was that the people writing traditional college guidebooks were so far removed from the colleges that they couldn’t possibly know what life was really like for students. So Skurman decided to do the most logical thing: he hired students to write the guidebooks.

Originally sold only in stores, the hundreds of College Prowler guidebooks are now available for free on the web site, along with thousands of student editorials and college reviews.  

2. Unigo 

Unigo offers a way for current students to rate and review the colleges they attend so that prospective students get a clearer idea of what life is actually like at the school. In addition to providing the basic information about each school — enrollment, tuition, how selective the school is, and notable alumni — Unigo also offers unique ratings on topics most guidebooks don’t cover, like drug and alcohol culture, political activity, and the accessibility of professors.

The site also provides links to college newspapers, radio, and blogs, and capsule reviews (quotes, best thing, and worst thing about the college) that give a quick overview of what students think about going to school there. In addition, Unigo offers photos, videos, and discussion forums for each school.

3. Communiversity 

At Communiversity, students can share their story of campus life using text, photo, and video. Each school has its own page, and current students can connect and share information about what their lives are like at their school. From Greek life, to off campus living, to what the local scene is like, Communiversity offers information that will be very helpful for incoming freshman choosing a school.

The site is set up in a wiki format, so anyone can go in and edit university pages and add new information, media, or tips and advice.

4. Campus Buddy 

Campus Buddy essentially builds on top of and extends Facebook to connect high school students with students currently matriculating at the colleges they are considering attending. After linking to your Facebook account and adding prospective colleges, students can visit each college’s page on Campus Buddy to learn about the school, view ratings from current students, and connect with students at that school.

Further, each college profile has a Q&A forum where students can ask questions about campus life from the people who are actually living it.

5. Rate My Professors 

There’s nothing worse than a dull, boring, mean, or unfair professor when you’re in college. That’s not to say you should always take easy classes (you’re paying for an education, so you should probably try to make sure you get a good one), but there’s also no reason to suffer with a universally disliked professor when you can avoid it.

That said, the ratings at Rate My Professors should be taken with a generous helping of salt. Still, for students trying to decide which college to attend, it’s a good way to get a general idea of what sort of professors you might have to deal with. If a large majority of a school’s professors are rated poorly, that might just be reason for pause.

6. The College Blog Network 

What better way to learn what life is really like at the colleges of your choice than by reading blogs about campus life penned by the students that live there? The College Blog Network is a directory of student authored blogs at a large number of schools. 

The great thing about student blogs is that they really run the gamut of topics. One student might write specifically about life for someone studying a certain subject, while another might write about what it’s like to participate on a school sports team, for example. The site will be rebranding as CollegeBlender in August.

7. StuVu 

StuVu offers student created videos, photos and reviews of college campuses. StuVu doesn’t just ask for reviews about the college as a whole, but about specific aspects of college life. So the same user might give a positive review to a local on-campus eatery, but completely trash the condition of the school’s dorms. That way, prospective students can get a real perspective on what students love and hate about a particular school and its environs.

Where StuVu really excels is in its video section. The videos offer a way for high school students to get a real feel for what the school and surrounding areas actually look and sound like.

8. YouTube

YouTube’s Education section offers a way for students to view videos from an exceptionally long list of universities. Often those videos will include taped lectures, interviews with students, overviews of campus amenities, or Q&A sessions with professors. Because visiting colleges that are a great distance away can be cost prohibitive for some high school students, the ability to check out schools via video is very helpful when deciding which colleges to apply for and which to attend.

iTunes also offers video from a much smaller number of schools via its iTunes U program.

9. The University Review 

The University Review is a very straightforward college review site for students. Current students select their university, then enter 1-10 ratings in ten different categories: Academics, Athletics, Campus & Facilities, Dining, Diversity, Greek Life, Housing, Parties & Nightlife, Safety & Security, and Surrounding Area. The site also lets users comment pro and con about the school, and rate the strenuousness of their workload. Unfortunately, even though the site is very simple and well-designed, it is not very heavily used yet.

10. YourCampus360

 Though YourCampus360 is only currently used by 10 schools (four of which aren’t active yet), it’s a great idea and very helpful. The site provides 360 degree virtual tours of college campuses and the surrounding area. That allows prospective students to get a feel for the campus before they (or their parents) pay to go visit the school. Hopefully more schools will sign on to the YourCampus360 idea in the future.

The site also enables schools to provide students with their own profiles, allowing them to blog, post photos, and put up videos about their experiences at the college.

Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, Craig List, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has over thirty-five million members in over 140 industries. Most of them are adults, employed, and not looking to post something on your Wall or date you. Executives from all the Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. Most have disclosed what they do, where they work now, and where they’ve worked in the past. Talk about a target-rich environment, and the service is free. Here are ten tips to help use LinkedIn to find a job. If you know someone who’s looking for a job, forward them these tips along with an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. Before trying these tips, make sure you’ve filled out your profile and added at least twenty connections

1. Get the word out

Tell your network that you’re looking for a new position because a job search these days requires the “law of big numbers” There is no stigma that you’re looking right now, so the more people who know you’re looking, the more likely you’ll find a job. Recently, LinkedIn added “status updates” which you can use to let your network know about your newly emancipated status.

2. Get LinkedIn recommendations from your colleagues

A strong recommendation from your manager highlights your strengths and shows that you were a valued employee. This is especially helpful if you were recently laid off, and there is no better time to ask for this than when your manager is feeling bad because she laid you off. If you were a manager yourself, recommendations from your employees can also highlight leadership qualities.

3. Find out where people with your backgrounds are working

Find companies that employ people like you by doing an advanced search for people in your area who have your skills. For example, if you’re a web developer in Seattle, search profiles in your zip code using keywords with your skills (for example, JavaScript, XHTML, Ruby on Rails) to see which companies employ people like you.

4. Find out where people at a company came from

LinkedIn “Company Profiles” show the career path of people before they began work there. This is very useful data to figure out what a company is looking for in new hires. For example, Microsoft employees worked at Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.

5. Find out where people from a company go next

LinkedIn’s “Company Profiles” also tell you where people go after leaving the company. You can use this to track where people go after leaving your company as well as employees of other companies in your sector. (You could make the case that this feature also enables to figure out which companies to avoid, but I digress.)

6. Check if a company is still hiring

Company pages on LinkedIn include a section called “New Hires” that lists people who have recently joined the company. If you have real chutzpah, you can ask these new hires how they got their new job. At the very least you can examine their backgrounds to surmise what made them attractive to the new employer.

7. Get to the hiring manager

LinkedIn’s job search engine allows you to search for any kind of job you want. However, when you view the results, pay close attention to the ones that you’re no more than two degrees away from. This means that you know someone who knows the person that posted the job—it can’t get much better than that. (Power tip: two degrees is about the limit for getting to hiring managers. I never help friends of friends of friends.) Another way to find companies that you have ties to is by looking at the “Companies in Your Network” section on LinkedIn’s Job Search page.

8. Get to the right HR person

The best case is getting to the hiring manager via someone who knows him, but if that isn’t possible you can still use LinkedIn to find someone inside the company to walk your resume to the hiring manager or HR department. When someone receives a resume from a coworker even if she doesn’t know the coworker, she almost always pays attention to it.

9. Find out the secret job requirements

Job listings rarely spell out entirely or exactly what a hiring manager is seeking. Find a connection at the company who can get the inside scoop on what really matters for the job. You can do this by searching for the company name; the results will show you who in your network connects you to the company. If you don’t have an inside connection, look at profiles of the people who work at the company to get an idea of their backgrounds and important skills.

10. Find startups to join

Maybe this recession is God telling you it’s time to try a startup. But great startups are hard to find. Play around with LinkedIn’s advanced search engine using “startup” or “stealth” in the keyword or company field. You can also narrow by industry (for example, startups in the Web 2.0, wireless, or biotech sectors). If large companies can’t offer “job security,” open up your search to include startups.

It’s a given that most of you reading this article believe design is the right tool for translating market needs into tangible product specifications. The people who hire us to design their products or who attend our Cooper U courses think the same thing. Unfortunately, the best designs and the best intentions won’t always lead you to success, because the problem goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level. When design pilot projects fail, it endangers everyone’s willingness to adopt design methods. Over the course of doing hundreds of design projects and teaching our methods to more than a thousand people, we’ve seen that several reasons for failure keep showing up. A discussion of these reasons follows, along with some solutions to consider. Let’s start with the easiest ones and work our way up.

1. Poor choice of pilot project

When you first bring design into an organization, you generally have to convince others of its efficacy. The best way to do this is usually to pick a pilot project and demonstrate how design helped it succeed. However, if you pick the wrong project and can’t demonstrate success, you will certainly lose credibility and may also lose any further chance of persuading people.

Choose a relatively small project with a clearly measurable outcome. For example, if a particular part of your application causes 30% of your tech support calls, fix that part and track the decrease in calls. It’s also a good idea to choose a type and size of project your company has done several times before, so you can show the savings in development time and cost. Also, avoid ill-conceived projects—if it’s a product or function no one will ever use, there’s only so much design can do to help.

2. Not having one consistent project owner

Every design project needs a business decision-maker associated with it—someone who can make trade-off choices between desirable design directions and difficult implementation issues, and will shepherd the product from concept to completion. In many cases, this is a product manager. Companies that try to do this by committee, with no single person responsible for the project’s outcome, seldom succeed. Everyone thinks everyone else is responsible, so the process proceeds very slowly, if at all. Changing project ownership partway through the process is also an enormous risk, particularly if the new project owner has not been involved until now; you will need to revisit every project decision, and may end up throwing out quite a few and starting over. This will lead to a perceived project failure, and will devalue the design process in everyone’s eyes.

So, senior managers, choose a single project owner and be sure that person is someone you’re not planning to reassign in a couple of months.

3. Incomplete design or insufficient design communication

The best design in the world won’t get built if it’s incomplete or undocumented. When clients ask us to design to the framework level (major navigation and interactions) but not provide the detail, they are much less likely to succeed than our clients who ask for bitmaps and widgets. This is generally because the people who have to fill in the rest are not interaction designers, and don’t have the appropriate skills and context to fill things in. Likewise, your documentation must be very complete, because if anything is open to interpretation, trust me, it will be interpreted. It might seem obvious to a designer that my bank’s ATM shouldn’t offer me the ability to withdraw from a money market account if I don’t have one, but it apparently wasn’t obvious to the people who built the ATM software.

This kind of problem is relatively easy to fix; be sure to assign designers for the duration of the project, and make sure there’s someone on the team responsible for providing detailed documentation.

4. Not getting buy-in from top executives

Every time we interview stakeholders on a project, we ask whether there are any executives higher up the chain of command who need to approve the project’s direction. One of our worst nightmares is being told that no one else will influence the project, then having an executive we’ve never met suddenly object to our direction. On one of our projects a few years ago, we were told that a senior executive didn’t need to be part of the process. Sure enough, two days before the end of a multi-month project, he didn’t like the design because he hadn’t gone down the path with us. Several months of formal usability testing finally convinced him, but the opportunity cost to our client was tremendous.

Interviewing top executives at the start and involving them at each decision point will help you avoid this.

5. The wrong people doing design

If you wanted to persuade people that martial arts were an effective means of self-defense, would you hire me, or Jackie Chan? (Believe me, you’d want Jackie Chan.) Design won’t take root in your company unless people see it done by experts. The vast majority of companies I’ve seen try to bring design in-house by telling some programmers that they’re now designers, or by having the product manager do some design in his spare time.

Although the need for designers varies during the project life cycle, design is a full-time job as well as a profession that requires many years of practice. Good interaction designers are hard to find, but they do exist—hire them!

6. Not committing resources to design

Even with the right pilot project and the right people doing the design work, if the management team doesn’t provide support in other ways, it’s much harder to succeed. We often see companies that won’t give designers access to users, or that won’t allow enough time to understand the problem, solve it to the level of detail required, and document it in a reasonable way. Unfortunately, until they’ve seen its value demonstrated, many people view design as a cost, rather than a savings (and more importantly, a strategic advantage).

Think about mini-projects you can use to demonstrate value, even with little or no budget. Use those small successes to ask for resources on a modest pilot project with an obvious opportunity for gain.

7. Failure to separate innovation from renovation

If you have one product manager and one development team, it makes sense for them to be responsible for the visionary new release 3.0 as well as the 2.x maintenance releases, right? Wrong. When that version 2.x deadline looms, no one has time or attention to spare for what the next major release should be, so the future product always gets shortchanged.

Instead, carve off a small team to focus solely on designing 3.0 in parallel with the implementation of maintenance releases. This might mean you throw away a little more of that 2.x code when you build 3.0, but it will save calendar time and increase what you can accomplish for the big upgrade.

8. The inmates are running the asylum

You knew this had to be in the list somewhere, right? It’s here toward the end of the list because it’s a big problem that takes a long time to solve. When we say the inmates are running the asylum, it means the programmers are making business decisions that should be made by executives. In most cases it’s not intentional, and the majority of people are unaware of the extent to which it happens. However, every time a programmer says "That’s not technically feasible," he’s just made a business decision that’s invisible to most people, since "not technically feasible" really means "not in the tiny amount of time or with the constraints I know you’re going to give me."

It’s a designer’s job to mediate this conversation. Changing the process on paper is relatively easy, but changing the attitudes and behaviors behind the process takes more time and effort. One way to help things along is to make sure that design doesn’t report in to engineering, but instead reports to a cross-silo manager who can balance marketing and engineering perspectives. Ultimately, responsibility for fixing this problem lies with senior managers, who have to ask, "What would it take to make it technically feasible?"

9. Unrealistic expectations

I can’t even count how many times someone has called me up to say "We need to design or drastically redesign the product that generates 100% of our revenue, and we want to ship it in two months." For some reason, Fast Company or some other part of the Web boom hype created this perception that you can design, build, and launch a successful product faster than you can get a new driver’s license. While this may have been true for a couple of people who got lucky, it’s simply not true in most cases.

We seldom encounter this myth in companies that build physical products, because they’re much better acquainted with the reality that spending up-front time ultimately results in more efficient manufacturing and more profitable products.

Unfortunately, many companies assume their problems come with the territory, just like traffic noise comes with living in a big city. Have you ever noticed, though, how much more annoying the traffic noise is when someone points out that it’s there? You can do the same thing: bring the points of pain to the attention of the management team, identify the cause, and propose design as your solution. It may take a while to have an impact, but be persistent, tie the problems to dollars, and you’ll eventually get through.

10. Unhealthy corporate culture

For design to work in an organization, that organization has to be basically functional. By this, I mean there needs to be open communication at all levels of the organization, clear delineation of responsibility and authority, competent staff, and trust between managers and their teams. Some degree of risk-taking must be acceptable; otherwise, no one will be willing to stand up and say, "I believe we need to do this." In healthy companies, certain kinds of mistakes are OK, as long as people learn from them. Senior managers challenge their teams to do better, but never ask the impossible, and they give their teams clearly stated problems to solve, instead of specifying solutions.

If your company lacks these qualities, work on fixing these major issues first before you try to implement design. Again, you’ll succeed in getting management’s attention if you tie these problems to dollars: talk in terms of lost productivity, employee turnover, and project delays. A good human resources manager will be your ally in this.