What do George Clooney, Jodie Foster, Antonio Banderas, Hale Berry, Keanu Reeves, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Nicholas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn or Julianne Moore have in common? All of them are 50 or older and are professionally active.

What if you are not an actor? Google “employees 50+” and you’ll find a lot of different articles on the situation of those who are professionally active over the age of 50. There is everything from:

Painted doomsday scenarios
and/or highlighting lost benefits (according to an article on PulsHr.pl “every 1% of additionally active 50+ would generate additional fiscal income of 4 bn PLN (almost 1 bn EUR) per year)

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“If I could turn back time…”, as Cher sings. Everybody has their regrets, that’s an inevitable part of life. The important thing is to learn from your own mistakes, but why not learn also from somebody else’s errors?

Career-wise, it can also be beneficial to reflect on what other people might have done differently in their job search so as to know the “don’ts” of job hunting and avoid them.

The short BlueSteps article “4 Things Most Would Do Differently Job Hunting If Turning Back Time” gives you the opportunity to do so. So, what would your fellow job hunters would have done differently if turning back time was an option?

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A survey by Salary.com discovered that:
– 37% of employees always negotiate their salaries
– 18% never do
– 44% have never brought up salary during their performance reviews.

Linda Babcock’s study for her book “Women Don’t Ask” reveals that:
– 7% of women attempted to negotiate their first salaries while 57% of men did
– of those who did negotiate: they got a 7% increase

7% is not much? Stanford negotiation professor Margaret A. Neale puts it into context for us:

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In our LinkedIn Learning-based series of blog posts we have covered the topic on interview preparation. But what about your own questions? What would you like to know from recruiters, hiring managers, headhunters… the interviewers?

To quote Jenny Foss, a career strategist and the author of the next LinkedIn Learning video, “show up with some questions to ask so you don’t look like a dang fool.”

This course of 17m 16s, entitled Job Seeker Tips, is rather short but very insightful. It also covers other tricky issues, such as handling gaps in your CV!

We chose the most interesting highlights for you & here is the sneak peak of the content:

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The current job market is an ever-changing competitive environment. There are more start-ups and innovations than ever before which results in increased job insecurity, but also completely new opportunities. Though some still might think “I don’t have to worry about it, my job is stable and I won’t get fired”. Just think about all the international corporations who choose Shared Service Centers or go through deep restructuring by e.g. flattening their hierarchy. It effects all of us. Sooner or later. Expectedly and sometimes out of the blue.

In other words: be prepared. Always! How? The Linkedin Learning video series on career advises you to adopt a permanent “job hunting” mindset. Here’s the sneak peak of the content of the video we choose for this post:

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According to a LinkedIn survey published on August 15:

• the average American has been in the same job for 9.88 years, rising substantially to 13.91 years for professionals over 55
• 22% admit that they “fell” into their job rather than actively choosing
• 23% say that they feel like they are “on a treadmill going nowhere”

Although the data represents 2000 US American professionals, we confirm that – based on our experience and observation – the numbers across Europe could be very similar.

At Career Angels we call that a career “on autopilot”. Looking at the research data from Decision Dynamics, as many as 64% of over a million professionals do not have a career that matches their innermost preferences and motives.

Why does that happen and what can you do about it?

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How would you like to be described by a potential employer after your job interview? Confident, experienced, determined?

“Desperate”: that’s certainly not something you would like to hear.

When your job search process drags on and there’s still no offer on the horizon, you may start to unwillingly show signs of desperation to your prospective employers.

But how to stop worrying and not appear as if you “need a job too much”, you may ask. Here’s an approach: Read more →