My first blog

Posted in Site News. Written by admin on June 11th, 2009

Today I was inspired to action. Finally pushed over the edge to write my first blog post. This is almost lmost as nerve-racking as a job interview or presentation. Regardless, I am leaping in to the great wide blog space! So what can my contribution be?  This Canvas website is built to inspire students to find their career path. Yesterday, I was asked the question, “how is the Canvas program different from career services?” The elevator speech is, “Canvas is a program to help students define their career path based on their strengths”, however this message does not seem to differentiate from the career services on university campuses or guidance counselors. So how are we different? Think about it this way. How much does your company spend on trying to get you to be an engaged employee? Think about the time, conversations, seminars, webinars, books, reviews and meetings. Billions of dollars are spent on employee engagement whether employees see it or not. Especially these days, faster, better, cheaper is the mantra, with less people, less training and fewer all around resources. So, how do we inspire people to go beyond, work harder, smarter and more efficiently?In what activities, when spending time on them, does time fly for you? Is it blogging? Reading? Watching TV? Volunteering, spending time with friends and family? Wouldn’t it be grand if time flew by as quickly at work as it does at those other activities? This is the mission of Canvas, if you can align your strengths, talents and desires with your day job, your employer won’t have to spend  billions of dollars on employee engagement, instead companies can spend money on further honing your talents and skills around things you are passionate about that also contribute to the business. This is what Canvas strives to do, and if your university career services center strives to do this with the students, we would love to hear about it so we can celebrate their efforts and help spread the word to other university career centers!In a nut shell, life is too short to spend one more hour working on a project you are not passionate about, so start aligning your passions to your work, better yet, understand what these are so you can be targeted in your approach to enter the workforce. As an HR professional, I want to know why you are the best person for the job. Skills and experience are just two pieces of the pie, if you can authentically sell passion, and desire for the job that will win you the position over the other candidates.  In the workforce, we can train skills, we can’t train desire.

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