Put your best foot forward with a complete profile. Fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio—include past companies, education, affiliations and activities. Descriptions of roles, responsibilities and accomplishments dramatically improve your appearance in search results. By filling out past companies and educational details you increase the likelihood of being found by former co-workers and alums.

Build your network before you need it. Networking done well is about an exchange of value. Connections are one of the most important aspects of your brand—the company you keep is a reflection of you. Generally, you need about 30-plus connections to start seeing the value of LinkedIn. The quickest way to build your network is to import your address book from Outlook or your webmail account and see who you know on LinkedIn.

Give before you ask. If you find ways to help other people achieve their goals, the laws of reciprocity will work in your favor. LinkedIn helps you maintain your relationships by giving you a way to reach out and help your network when they are asking for advice, hiring or looking for experts.
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by Shannon Joseph

The fear of getting in front of people has never been an issue for me. It’s typically the place I feel most comfortable. Having been an entrepreneur for so many years, selling products and out-of-the-box ideas was second nature. However, selling myself to a potential employer had become a challenge.

After relocating from New Orleans to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina, it was essential for me to re-enter the work force. I spent hundreds of hours glued to my computer searching every possible job site. I have no doubt that I have visited every career search engine in cyberspace. By the time I realized my results were unremarkable, a year had passed and I was still unemployed.
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Hustad, 34, culled from every inspirational book she could find, talked to all kinds of experts and then penned this amusing, enlightening and funny book.

“Start paying attention to how you treat cashiers,” she says. “If you want to be successful in the long run, you need to start worrying more about other people. You need to not just treat them well and express interest in them but make up your mind that to the extent possible, whoever you’re talking to, whether it’s your boss or cab driver, will feel better after having encountered you than they did five minutes earlier.”

Advice Hustad wishes she had gotten when she was 22?
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The “milkshake moment” comes, Little says, when individuals decide they can do the right thing and serve the interest of others—rather than follow arcane internal rules that actually prevent them from serving their customers.

Those rules and procedures stifle creative thought and lead to legions of workers who see no connection between what they do and the overall purpose of their organization, he says.

“At least 80% of the employees I encounter appear to have no idea how their job fits into a grander sense of the organization’s purpose,” says Little.
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Stransky has compiled career life lessons based on the Ugly Betty character as well as what-not-to-do advice from characters on NBC’s The Office.

Some tips :

• Discern friends from frenemies: “Finding colleagues who are like-minded and can be confidants is the first step toward building a network.”

• Be tech savvy: “Being the resident tech expert can give you access to top brass and privileged information.”

• Be wary of office romances: “TV shows featuring young professionals have proved that point with an exclamation point.”

To fix it, they’ve created a results-only work environment they call, appropriately, ROWE. “If you can get your results in 20 hours a week— fine,” says Thompson, a mother of two. “If you do your best work at the beach— fine. ROWE isn’t about face time. It’s about well-defined goals and results, results, results.”

One of the things that plagues the corporate world is “sludge,” which Ressler and Thompson define as “any negative comment we make that serves to reinforce old ideas about how work gets done.”

A few examples:
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