Few people doubt the important role mothers serve. A book by Stephan Poulter, The Mother Factor: How Your Motherâ€s Emotional Legacy Impacts Your Life, suggests that “There may be a direct link between our career success and our mothers.” (Hat tip, Anita Bruzzese.)

Alexandra Levit blogged about Anitaâ€s post about our mothers†influence on career success:

The bookâ€s thesis is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, our mothers leave an indelible impression on the people we become. Our ability to function in personal and professional relationships is based on our mothers†“styles.” Poulter defines the five major styles of mothering as:

* The Perfectionist Mother: whose family must look perfect in every way.
* The Unpredictable Mother: whose ups and downs can create lifelong anxiety and depression in her son or daughter.
* The “Me First” Mother: whose children come second or last.
* The “Best Friend” Mother: whoâ€s now in vogue but can wreak havoc.
* The Complete Mother: who provides guidance and shows compassion to her child.

For example, if your mother was a perfectionist, then you might have difficulty taking feedback at work. “Ninety five percent of the time itâ€s your emotional history spilling into the present,” Poulter says.

If this research is correct, I am even more lucky than I thought to have had such an encouraging, supportive, caring and giving mom. My mom was exceptional and unique in many ways. She had high standards for herself and others. She taught me to believe in myself, to set goals and work hard to achieve them. She was instrumental in helping me develop my soft skills, including writing, communication and common sense.

My mom demonstrated a strong work ethic and instilled that ethic, along with a can-do attitude that supports me to this day. I am so appreciative to have had that foundation upon which to build my life and career. I am so grateful…I continue to realize how much my mom taught me the longer she is gone. I think about her on Mother’s Day and every day.

photo by foxrosser

The post A Mother’s Day tribute appeared first on Keppie Careers.

How to best present your credentials (via a resume, online profile, or via your personal website) is a hot topic in the career world. Recently, several sites have come on the scene to help job seekers create infographic resumes. These completely visual (graph based) documents usually draw on information you either input into a form or they rely on existing information about you, for example your LinkedIn or Facebook profile. The resulting resume, conventional wisdom suggests, will help the job seeker stand out from a crowd of “boring,” conventional resumes.

I’ve written about this subject and taken the position that, while fun and visually stimulating, an infographic resume cannot be read via the Applicant Tracking Systems most companies are using, so would be completely useless to use to apply for most jobs. For networking purposes, it can certainly be eye-catching to have a graph-based version of your resume to share, and you may be able to get some millage from sharing a PDF of an infographic resume on your social resume, or personal website.

My opinion is, anything you can do by entering information into a form or connecting an application to your LinkedIn profile and pressing a button does not really illustrate any specific skills you have! For now, you may get some attention with an infographic resume as an accompanying document if a human being reviews it — for example, when mailed — which is very rare.

As I explain in my Job-Hunt.org article on the subject, as with anything related to your job search, consider your target audience and their needs. Unless your resume infographic will be unique and appeal to the employer, think twice before assuming your “outside of the box” approach (and how unique is it really once all of the career bloggers are blogging about it?) is going to be the thing that lands you a job.

These are the tools I mention and evaluate in my post on Job-Hunt.org:

• Vizualize.me
• Kinzaa
• Re.vu
• Brazen Careerist
• Slideshare 

Read the full post on Job-Hunt.org here.

sample infographic resume from Devign Elements

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