Ten Things That Spell Checkers Won’t Catch! Be Careful Out There!

10 Things That a Spell Checker Won’t Catch!

We always tell applicants to have their applications and resumes proofed carefully before hitting the ‘submit’ key on the application website. That means printing out your application and resume and having it checked for errors ‘by eye’ rather than trusting a spell checker to do the job for you. In case you’re wondering why, here are some examples of mistakes that most spell checkers will not catch:

• Homonyms (words that sound the same but mean different things depending on their spelling and use): Spell checkers won’t realize that you intended to write ‘pair’ instead of ‘pare’ or ‘pear,’ or ‘there’ instead of ‘their.’
• Incorrectly divided compound words: Spell checkers won’t tell you that ‘court yard’ should be spelled ‘courtyard,’ or that ‘inter net’ should be ‘internet.’
• Incorrect pronouns: Spell checkers won’t realize that you typed in ‘his’ or—worse—’its’ when you should have typed ‘hers,’ or ‘she’ when it should have been ‘he.’
• Usage errors: Spell checkers probably won’t alert you to typos involving ‘its’ and ‘it’s.’
• Missing words: Spell checkers probably won’t catch the missing word in a phrase like, “I attended University of Michigan… “
• Wrong words: Spell checkers won’t alert you to a gaffe like, “My supervisory experience sensitized me to the martial difficulties that married employees can encounter when pressed to work overtime.”
• Wrong dates: Spell checkers won’t question a statement like, “Entering the workforce in the late 0200s, I learned…”
• Misspelled names: Spell checkers won’t catch mistakes with people’s names or with most place names.
• Incorrect verb tenses: Spell checkers won’t warn you that you mixed up past and present verb tenses.
• Repetition: Spell checkers will alert you if you’ve typed the same word twice in a row, but they won’t catch other kinds of repetition, like typing the same phrase or sentence twice in a row—or saying the same exact thing twice, in different words.

Spell checkers are a handy tool for screening out many of the small mistakes we all make when we write. They can’t catch every mistake, however, and they’re not able to catch the really big mistakes, which can only be recognized and corrected by careful editing. Use a spell checker as a first step in proofing your application, but don’t count on it to do the entire job for you.

Source: Admissions Consultants -Hiring Manager Resources

Hurray! Troops Returning Home – Military to Civilian Job Search – Military to Federal Resume and KSA

President Obama’s announcement that all U.S. troops still deployed in Iraq will come home by the end of 2011 is very welcome news.  Professional Resume and Career Development Center is proud to support our troops in finding job  positions after returning home.

Where once some 160,000 U.S. soldiers were in Iraq, now about 40,000 remain.

Since the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003, a million U.S. troops have served there. Over 4,400 died and 32,000 were wounded, many with injuries they will suffer for a lifetime.

So far, the  cost of the war to the U.S. is estimated at $1 trillion – a sum that could have kept thousands of public workers including teachers and health workers on the job, repaired vast amounts of crucial U.S infrastructure, and more. Many of the costs are not yet calculated, including those for the future care of veterans.

Efforts by the Obama administration and some in Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s government to have several thousand U.S. troops remain after Dec. 31 reportedly foundered on U.S. insistence that its troops must come home and be immune from prosecution under Iraqi law.

It is also worth noting that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is the largest embassy in the world. The State Department says some 5,000 security contractors will remain in the country to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities around the country.

As important as the troop withdrawal is what happens to troops after they leave Iraq. Will they go now to Afghanistan? Will they serve in some other location abroad or be able to come home and secure jobs?

Or will they, and the funds needed to deploy and maintain them, come home, where funds and people can be employed instead to build a truly 21st century network of education, health care, child care, affordable homes and human services for all?

We hope withdrawal from Iraq will be a giant step toward full withdrawal of all troops and contractors from Afghanistan  and adoption of a U.S. foreign policy based on cooperation and development aid.
The next step will require a vast movement of all who seek a world of peace, economic, social justice and gainful employment.

What Color Is My Parachute?

“What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers” is the best-selling job-hunting and career-changing book in the world. Twenty thousand people buy the book each month, and there are more than 8 million copies in print. In its lifetime, it has been on the New York Times Best-Seller List (paperback) a total of 288 weeks.

In 1995, the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book listed it as one of “25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives” (alongside such works as Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Saint Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” Henry Thoreau’s “Walden,” Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” and Mark Twain’s, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”).

The author coined the word “parachute” to mean career transitions, back in 1968 when people commonly said, “Well, I’m tired of this job – - I’m going to bail out?” Bolles’ playful rejoinder at that time: What color is your parachute? It later became the title of the book.

A writer for Life Magazine said that the phrase “golden parachutes” appeared for the first time a decade or more later, as a “play” on this book’s title. In fact, a number of common phrases in our culture: “golden parachutes,” “informational interviewing,” “transferable skills” etc., were all born out of this book.

It was first published December 1, 1970 — self-published, in fact, with the author using a local copy shop (CopyCopia) in downtown San Francisco. Its first commercial edition was published in November 1972, by Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, Calif. It began appearing on best-seller lists in 1974, has been revised and updated annually since 1975.

Recent reviews have called it “the jobhunter’s Bible,” “the Cadillac of job-search books,” “the most complete career guide around,” and “the gold standard of career guides.”

Character

Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.  Going the extra mile in your job search is one of them.

Laid Off? Take A Break.

Keep close to Nature’s
heart, yourself;
and break clear away,
once in a while, and
climb a mountain or spend
a week in the woods.
Wash your spirit clean…
- John Muir

Be The Best You Can Be.

Don’t compare yourself to others.  Instead, focus on where you’ve been  versus where you are now  versus where you want to be.