KCSpeaks

This past week, a colleague and I were brainstorming solutions for a job seeker that was having difficulty obtaining employment. This is not an uncommon discussion, but in this particular case the job seeker was having difficulty due to some personal limitations she had imposed on herself. This job seeker had a résumé that demonstrated great education, skills, and experience to work in an administrative and payroll capacity. On paper, she looked great, but she was having difficulty before she even applied. This job seeker was being super selective about the opportunities before she even applied for them.   For this job seeker, there were many advertised job openings that she met the requested qualifications. Unfortunately, she found problems with most of the positions before she even applied. The issues ranged from company size to website design. Although the job seeker had an urgent need economic reason to obtain employment, she continued to challenge many of the options ...

Everywhere you turn it seems someone is playing the latest craze, a game called “Pokémon Go.”   For those that do not understand how the game works, I am going to simplify the process for the non-players. After downloading an application to a smart phone, a player turns on the phone’s GPS option. This allows the application to know the player’s location and turns the physical location into a land full of Pokémon monsters.   The phone becomes a lens to overlay the Pokémon into your real environment, and the player travels the world to “catch `em all”. Certain places a player may wander will be “gyms,” where a player will meet other players of the game and their virtual monsters can engage in a battle. There are additional “PokeStops” for Pokémon to gain resources, and the game allows people to form teams if desired. This game may be just a trend, but the popularity of it has made the news all across the country. There are people passionately against the game and others th...

Each day into the 21 st century that passes, the line between home and work get foggier.    This means that as long as we work, we do it for longer hours and in more places. We can thank the wonders of technology that we cannot live without, including internet connection, cell phones, laptop computers, and tablets, for our ability to work anywhere and anytime. This includes on vacation.   There are countless studies about Americans and vacation time. Studies show that some people do not take any of their earned time off annually, while others do not take all of their annual allotment. There are still many people that do have any paid vacation days at all. Comparing this to many other countries, where the love of vacation is culturally in grained, it seems that Americans have the issue with work.   Many Americans take vacation only to check the email remotely. The reason may be to clean it up or ensure that nothing urgent is happening, but in reality it g...