Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

Category: Blog

  • Someone asked me this recently: You have 2 options: Work with a good boss, but the work is some boring stuff, or work on some interesting project, but the boss is not good. Which one would you choose? My mind jumped to all the boss-work combinations possible, see the picture. If I make this a…

  • This post is a follow-up to my earlier post Creating Resumes that Work where I shared some tactics for creating purposeful resume. I review a large number of resumes every week – they come through ‘Get Resume Review’ section of our website (now closed), from Sunstone students, and from family and friends. I share my…

  • It is not easy to change your domain when changing jobs. A domain change may mean moving from a functional domain to another (say Banking to Real Estate, or semiconductors to internet) or moving from one discipline to another within the same functional domain (Developer to Product Manager, Support Engineer to Sales Person, etc.). In…

  • An effective resume presents you in an impactful way and compels the reader to invite you to an interview. It also acts as a marketing brochure for the product YOU and presents the value you offer to a prospective ‘buyer’ (employer). Therefore, it is very important to construct this document carefully and provide right information…

  • Recently, I had an opportunity to meet many test engineers from a large IT services company. These were 0-5 years experienced engineers. Here are a few comments I heard multiple times: “I am in performance testing and I don’t know about manual testing” “I only write automation scripts (execution and reporting is done by other…

  • In a previous post 3 bad reasons to change job, I presented 3 reasons which people usually give when changing jobs, but which are really bad reasons to do so. Subsequently, I was asked what are good reasons to change jobs, and hence this post. A job is a promise of fair exchange between you…

  • This is the final post in the series about Organization Politics. In the first post Organization Politics – Truth or Myth, we presented some examples of situations which might be termed ‘political’ and proceeded to analyze these situations in more detail in the next post Organization Politics – Anatomy of Office Politics. In the last…

  • This is a post in the series about Organization Politics. In the first post Organization Politics – Truth or Myth, we presented some examples of situations which might be termed ‘political’ and proceeded to analyze these situations in more detail in the next post Organization Politics – Anatomy of Office Politics. In this post, we…

  • In the previous post Organization Politics – Truth or Myth, I presented a few examples of situations that can be described as ‘political’ in nature. I also talked to a few more managers and individual contributors since then to understand a few more examples of such situations in various types of organizations. In this post,…

  •   I recently conducted a 2-week course on Being Effective as a New Leader which was offered as part of an initiative from Sunstone Business School. A theme that I heard from many participants was ‘politics is creating too many problems for me’. It was brought up by people with deep experience in leading teams,…