Career Zen Chapter Twelve

C a r e e r   Z e n
by Larry Daly, 'The JOB DOC'

Chapter 12.   Your Personal Research Sources

To review, once you know your work and are good at it, and have set your goals and know where you are, and have started doing your ten major tasks, getting published in order to become an authority on your career work is the way to success -- an expert gets paid more, enjoys more prestige, security, etc. The following items will help you make your research and self-promotion writing the best possible.
You learn by interviewing executives, workers, customers, and other people in your article subject, and by doing research: first hitting the encyclopedia for a basic briefing, then scanning a few books for more solid and extensive foundation and background material, then using more up-to-date periodicals, journals, magazines, catalogues, directories, and even 'junk mail', for the latest in your career field. Then going electronic, for up-to-the-minute refinement, and the current names and events for networking and making contacts and connections in your chosen career field. Here are some clues in these four basic categories: books, periodicals, newspapers, and miscellaneous.

Books
To learn the basics and classic methods and background information in any field of human endeavor, books are vital. The latest books are preferred, mostly, but older books often have valuable things that later ones do not, or in more depth and detail, and are good for understanding the process of growth to what they are today.
Book authors often feel that their mission is to help you learn and understand their subject, so they can become exhaustive on it, which can be trial and tribulation as well as blessing. (Maybe like this one?) Use the table of contents, index, and appendices to focus your search and save time, but be aware of all else available; a non-fiction book without an index and good bibliography is almost useless for research, so look for these first. If illustrations are needed, look for good ones.
The brief list of books below is basic to literacy in all careers, but then you are on your own to find the best that suit your particular purposes in your specific careerand towrd your future careerand life goals.
Bookshop staffs are accustomed to people browsing for hours, and if you can build a relationship with them, they can be of great help when you really need it; unlike people in most businesses, most book store workers truly love their work, or they wouldn't do it for such low pay.
Avoid textbooks used in colleges and schools. They are designed and written to fit a very narrow and very low and slow and shallow 'average' intellectual slot. You need better. Also because textbook publishers waste years passing all the required approvals, they are so badly out of date before they are first available. In trying so hard not to offend any segment of the population, textbook publishers achieve the lowest common denominator, and their books lose all real vitality. And they are PC. (Who invented Political Correctness? Is PC a crime? How did it become so popular and powerful a movement? What should be done about it?)
Information obsolescence is especially high in electronics and biology and genetics and other highly technical subjects, where eighteen months (Moore's Law) can be a whole generation of development and improvement. In these fields it may make sense to get on the publisher's advance notice lists, and often be able to get the latest title before it appears on the bookstore shelves.
Most of the following can be purchased in used book stores or by mail order, to save money.

Dictionaries
You need the best you can find, unabridged, above college level. Use several at your local library to see which is best before purchasing one. I find myself most often using my 1990 Oxford Unabridged Desktop, $27.50 then, but there are many other good ones. If you can find a big Webster Unabridged or Oxford unabridged 2 or 3 volume set, at a good price, you will be glad you did, but most of us have to do with less. Get the best you can afford. You will also need access to a good medical - psychological dictionary; a Physician's Desk Reference [PDR]; a good scientific-technical dictionary; a good business dictionary; a good legal source (the law says that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law, so you must know it, in self - protection, but there is no one book of all of the laws we must obey -- and deliberately so -- guess why); and a specialized dictionary for your career, if one exists. (If not, can you write or compile it?)

Encyclopedia
You'll need the best you can find. A desktop one-volume encyclopedia such as the Columbia is okay for a brief overview on most subjects, and is available virtually everywhere at low cost, but the hard cover multi - volume sets are much more comprehensive, especially with their annual update service. (If you obtain an optical character scanner for your computer, get the hand held rather than full page, so you can run the wand down the columns of text to capture and read them right into your word processor and 'write' complete articles in seconds, then combine them with material from other more up - to - date sources and edit them to do very good piece of work.) Also consider those on Compact Disks that go into a CD drive in your computer. In a few keystrokes, your computer can insert whole passages directly into your writing program. Great convenience and speed. And most now have on - line auxiliary monthly up - date services that can be really valuable. Some will do research for you, and turn that into published articles for others. Neat.
Elements of Style by Strunk and White, or other good writing style book.
A Whack On The Side of The Head by Roger Ochs. And look at his other books.
Sideways Thinking by Edward De Bono. See all of his other books, also.
How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie, a classic as pertinent today as when it first came out.
The Bible. Religion of all kinds and flavors is so deeply essential to so many people, in every career context, that it is truly necessary to study at some length, in general and in particular. Whether the King James or any other version does not matter, nor whether you are a believer of any faith, or agnostic or atheist -- you must be familiar enough with the Bible to understand how much it has contributed to Western Culture and language and thought, in what ways, and affected our history, today's religions, and even the future. So much of it is referred to so often by so many people that they will think you stupid and ignorant unless you know what they are talking about. The contributions of the Bible are so great that you cannot ignore it and still consider yourself knowledgeable or educated. The "Parallel Bible", if you can find one, contains King James Version, New International Version, Living Bible, and Revised Standard Version in four parallel columns on facing pages (really handy for comparisons), from Guideposts, Carmel, NY, 10512 (1987) Unfortunately, since most bibles omit it, you will have to obtain the excerpted Apocrypha separately. You should have it.
Also obtain a good copy of the Koran, the Tao, the writings of Confucius, the Mormons' Bible of God in the New World, and as many other basic religious - philosophical - moral writings as possible, as well as a few books on historical background of these books. Isaac Asimov's works, and even a paperback which claimed that the Bible reported visits from aliens which we attribute to a deity, will all help you see a balancing (and sometimes humorous) opposite side to such intense religiosity in some of these sources. Look at everything from shamanism and witchcraft and New Age materials to scientology and beyond, to try and understand what people will believe in, and thus how their minds work and can be influenced. Try to get a head start with the Bible simply because it is the biggest and needs the most time. Try to construct in your mind a time - map of religious growth and separation of all of the branches and roots from the original prehistoric shamanism and witch - doctors on, to grasp this whole temporal structure, as you study the subject of beliefs and religions.
Shakespeare   Complete Collected Works. There are several different publisher's collections, and any complete one will suffice. No need to read it all the way through unless you want to, and you should, but reading several major and several minor works will soon show you how much the Bard gave to our language and culture. Many thousands of other writers, and in fact probably every writer you can find in any good bookstore, have also contributed to our knowledge and communications, and have quoted from his works, and have contributed quotable items of their own, but it is said that more than half of all quotations are from either Shakespeare or the Bible, and it may be true, from 'pound of flesh' to how a king can 'pass apace through the gut of a beggar'. More, he is fun, with all his puns and wordplay, so be ready to enjoy, and to use them yourself in impressing others. Any author quoted from so much for four hundred years must be saying something worthwhile sometimes.
Timetables of History by Grun & Stein, Simon & Schuster. You may read H G Wells or many other historians in trying to get a comprehensive picture of the historical development over the past six to ten thousand years of man, but this book makes it easy, listing in convenient column format what happened in each year or period, side by side, in the fields of politics, religion, music, art, science, technology and daily life. And, as an added treat, in the Far East and Mid-East as well as our Western civilization. Get also either the booklet or long rolled graphic pictorial time chart to put on your wall, to help you visualize our full history.
A World Globe. You must have one. My preference is for the lighted model, which when it is not lighted, drops out the temporary political boundaries of man's nations so you can see the world simply as a globe with high and low lands, rivers and mountains, ocean depths and undersea geography, and when the internal light is turned on, all of the nations and capital cities that man has imposed upon the natural planet. When you try to find out where the South American Anomaly is, and see whether it could have been caused by a meteor plunging into the planet from space in the distant past, and causing the gravitational and magnetic center of the planet to be some 250 miles away from the actual perfect physical center of the planet, it will be easy to see where, and understand the proportions and locations of the real world, which is a globe (an oblate spheroid, if you want to be picky). A good ATLAS, with wind and water currents on it, and something on geology, plate tectonics, etc, is also needed. Globe and atlas together are most useful.
Roget's Thesaurus Absolutely essential, and available in dictionary or subject form, though Miriam - Webster and other publishers have good synonym - antonym dictionaries.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations or more recent books of quotations, in subject or dictionary format, will be needed. (Is there one in your career field? If not, can you...?) If a quotation did not come from Shakespeare or the Bible, Bartlett will tell you who did say it, and help you quote it correctly. (Never use a quotation without checking it, no matter how well you think you know it or how many times you have read it or heard people say it -- check it out first!) Also, interesting, is a book called 'They Didn't Say It', about things ascribed to people in error, but since they are so long accepted, Bartlett will do well enough for most situations.
The Classified Telephone Book Get the regular yellow pages and the Business to Business edition also. This is one of the most valuable resources in the world. To show you how valuable, do the phone book exercise (this should take about one hour): Get a paper and pencil ready and go through EVERY page of your local classified directory, as fast as you can, and make a note about everything you find in it that surprises you, that you didn't know existed, or that looks useful or valuable or helpful to you in the future, or that might be useful for someone else you know to tell them about. If you cannot find at least one hundred interesting, surprising and potentially useful things in the yellow pages of the classified phone directory, that you didn't know about, you are either much too smart for careering, or much too dumb.
If you live in a rural or suburban area that has a small limited local directory, call your phone company to send you the large one (free) from the nearest of the seventeen largest million - plus population metropolitan centers in the US, for this exercise. Directories are very cheap. The phone company has millions printed up at the same time. They want you to have and use them; looking up your own numbers saves them hiring operators for that non - income job. Or did, until 1999, when they started the nation-wide 411 service, and charging users for look - ups, and the people paid. The phone co was losing millions of dollars every year looking up numbers for those legitimately unable to, like the blind, or people using outdoor phones where there is no directory, so they will usually send a free book within most dialing areas. (They will even send Paris, London, and other major world directories if you want, and even "800" number and fax directories, but at a price.) Find out what other 'free' services the phone company does for people, and what else is available for a price.

Trade Directories And Publications
In every career, business, or industry, there are 'trade' publications that cater to that trade in particular ways: news about and calendars of upcoming events, seminars, conventions; promotions and moves of prominent people in the business, company changes of names, mergers; interviews about current events and how they will affect that business; descriptions and details and sources of new products, services, inventions, processes, etc. If you don't already have them, begin acquiring trade publications in your career immediately, by subscription if possible, and begin studying them like a bible, to get to know the names and ranks of people and companies in it, those who keep showing up in the news over and over again, those who shun the limelight, the pundits and fools, leaders and followers, and all of the rest of the atmosphere and environment of your career. A year from now, when you walk into the office of one of those companies, or any other, to be interviewed for a position, you should know more about that company and that person and that business than ANY competitor for that job, and probably more than most people who work there. You will get much of it out of those trade publications, and that is where the man who hires you will be getting it, too. He does not know or care about what anyone learned in college, but more about what good that grad can do for him and his company and his business, right now, which is something you can't get in ANY college. When the college grad comes to start work, he will have to do what you have already done, learn that business. You have a huge head start. And if, in your first interview, you can show hjim that you already are familiar with these things, he may just quit interviewing anyone else.
Also, in every business, there is a set of directories of every company in that trade, and most serving it. For instance, in the building construction business it is called the Blue Book, and lists all of the architects and others who use or need construction done, and others who sell to the construction industry, from labor suppliers to big crane renting companies and union officers who can put the best or worst people on a building job. A contractor trying to open his business without the Blue Book is under a huge handicap. In architecture the most important directory is Sweet's, an immense catalogue of every kind of steel and parts and materials and facilities without which an architect is virtually helpless. All of the companies and services that want to offer their products or help to an architect have their catalogues bound into Sweet's, so he can save the time of sending for it, even if he has heard of them, and compare them with their competitors. In every trade or business, from medical and pharmaceutical and chemical to aeronautics and space exploration, there is something like a Sweets or Blue Book. Most of these are restricted circulation. The Blue Book, for instance, is free, but available only to contractors and builders who are members of the local builders' association. Sweets goes only to registered architects. The publishers print up only enough to cover their membership, and, since they know that number in advance, there is no waste, so they can keep costs controlled. Such catalogues are not only essential in every business and career, but are incredibly valuable learning tools, containing an awesome amount of information, detail, and practical how - to that is vital to know in that business but never taught in schools. You should obtain all of the restricted circulation directories serving your career, and familiarize yourself with them in the same way you have the phone book, above, by scanning every page of each. You don't have to memorize it. You couldn't, and shouldn't, since no much detail changes so often, and getting locked into the past can prevent keeping up with the new, but you must know the general structure of it, what is available, and where things are, so you can go directly to something when you do need it, and how they relate, and some of the basic current detail that will probably remain useful. More, try and get the restricted circulation directory of another industry or business field and compare them, see what is unique in each and what is similar in concept or purpose if not in detail, and what is common to both. People do not talk about these directories in some businesses, keeping them as an 'in' secret, sometimes using them only in the design or higher circles, but there is hardly a business that does not use at least one such directory of all of the businesses upstream and downstream of them, those they sell to, and those who sell to them. If, in your job interview, you are able to mention that you are writing a piece to contribute to the next edition of that trade 'bible', or any of the trade publications, the interviewer knows he is talking to a pro. (Better be able to back it up, though, or your mouth can dig a hole for you.) And if you can actually show your writing published in one of them, you are a thousand miles ahead of anyone else applying for the same opening, or looking for a raise or promotion in your present company.
A Who's Who   A general one, preferably the annual edition of the original one. Also get one in the career field in which you are most interested - or build your own who's who in the business you are in or intend to enter, from business magazines and newspapers in that field, company in - house phone books, etc.
Collect at least one Corporate Directory of a major company in your career field, showing the names of all current executives, their titles, phone numbers, and extensions. When you choose the five companies you would most like to work for, one of which you seriously intend to become hired by, you should obtain the corporate directory of each of those companies, its annual reports for the past several years, a D&B or other credit report on it, stock and bond records, and all other data possible. A copy of the Corporation papers is in the public records, and available to the public. Research any other information you can find, including newspaper clips and magazine stories, any secret material, rumors, and so forth. All these go into your 'dossier' on each company. Some of this might give you bargaining or negotiating power, and, discretely used, will impress your interviewer, but be careful not to let him think you are a stalker and scare him away, but rather a legitimate and effective researcher. Some who are really serious purchase a stock and attend stockholders' meetings, to make connections and get the latest dirt, etc.
Cultural Literacy and Dictionary of Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, et al. (Note: Both books contain so much material so essential to your career and personal success that you should read them cover to cover. More, try to select from them enough material to be able to teach a course in the subject. You and your team should drill each other on as much as possible, until each of you is competent and at home with this information and its use and purpose, so you can use it in such a casual manner that your listener or reader is certain to be so impressed by the incredible range of your knowledge that you achieve a great deal of social and intellectual and informational stature. Of course, you should never dwell on such details long enough to allow your audience to see that you have only surface knowledge, but instead keep up a flow, keep it moving, a rolling boil, to never need to distract or confuse or change the subject should they attempt to dig into any certain point to catch you. You should already know all of these things if you have had a good education to date, so this may be merely a review for you. If you have not had that good an education, you will be astonished at how much you do not know of what you should if you are to be able to tap the reservoir of common knowledge for getting your ideas across to others and understanding most of what other people are saying and referring to. When you read the N Y Times or Wall Street Journal or other top grade career material, you will often come across these and other things you should know and understand. When you become familiar with these two books you will find few allusions you do not recognize, but when you do find more, record them, add them here as loose pages. You can not be judged competent in AMEN (AMerican ENglish) until you know this material well.
Any Annual Almanac of Instant Information such as The World Almanac and Book of Facts which comes from St. Martins every year, or other complete one.
A good book of synonyms and antonyms,
A good dictionary of technical and scientific terms will be helpful.
N Y Times' guide to research sources (Never have to ask where you can find something - by the time you complete a year of this work you will be a master researcher.)
"What Do I Do Next? A Manual for People Just Entering Government Service" by Warren W. Jones and Albert Solnit, published by Planners Press of the American Planning Association, 1313 E. 60th St., Chicago IL 60637 (c) 1980 ISBN 0-918286-20-4 paper $15.95. This is an overpriced but vital booklet, not just for those who are entering government service or any branch of public service, but also essential reading for those also entering any branch of business or law or who may have to deal with the government (And who doesn't, sometime in our lives?), even taxpayers who might want to vote more sensibly than they otherwise might. It contains many good tips and self-help from many sources, but so many typos, bad spellings, and other mistakes, that they should have called it "Tips and Typos".
LAW The law is so huge and diverse and with so many specialties that no one book can hold it all, but buy at least one comprehensive book on general law and another on business law, and, as a balance and eye-opener, I also suggest as essential:
The Death of Common Sense by Philip K Howard, 1994, Random House, 0-679-429948 $18.
BIP Learn how to use Books In Print and ISBN's -- They will save you time and money. The electronic BIP is beautiful, and always right up to date, but expensive. Make friends in a bookshop that has it, so you can use theirs.
Matthew Lesko has written several really good books on government agencies and other really useful information, most of which are updated each year or so. Check them out.

Periodicals
Books are essential for the basics and foundation of any study, but journals and magazines and advertising will be your primary source of up - to - date information during most of your career life. Unlike books, which may take years to research and write and publish, periodicals are current, real, and reliable in their fields, about people and companies of interest and value to you. Many will still be valuable years later as a historical record of what was going on, important then, etc. I also hold that you should not ignore but observe advertising, because it shows you what is new (until they overdo it).
Periodicals may be grouped loosely as two kinds: those that carry advertising (magazines) and those which do not (journals). In both cases there are those that are very widely general and those very narrowly specialized.
You can get a hundred or so magazines on most good news stands, but to access the wealth of the 75 thousand more you must work their names out of either Gale's or Ulrich's Guide to Periodicals or the Standard Rate and Data Red Books (SRDS) (in your local public library) and obtain them by separate order or subscription.
(You can usually get a free copy of a recent issue of almost any periodical by calling or writing for their rate card and sample copy, saying you wish to advertise in it, or, if it doesn't accept ads, your company wants to get it for the corporate library, or you want to submit an article, etc.)
For additional career power, because your work relates to everything else and everybody else in the whole world context around you, immediately locate, choose, and (over the next year or two, at a sensible pace) order subscriptions to, or recent copies of:
   A major news magazine such as Newsweek or Time or USNWR, etc.
   A science magazine such as Discover or Science Digest or Science
   A government printing office index periodical or catalogue (MUST: Visit your local government book and pamphlet outlet -- very educational.)
   A periodical in earth sciences or environmentalism, etc.
   A major business magazine such as Forbes or Business Week or Fortune
   A small business magazine such as Venture or INC
   A motivational business magazine such as Success
   At least two international magazines (one social or news and one business) from each continent, as well as two British periodicals
   One hobby or homemaker type such as a gardening or popular mechanics type
   One travel or other service industry such as hotel or restaurant type
   One personal improvement type such as a writers' or artists' or craft periodical
   One in a social field such as education or teaching or consumer etc.
   One in the politics and international affairs field
   One local/regional (most large cities and most states now have their own metropolitan or state magazines)
   One general medical or dietary or health care type
   One police, military, civil defense, survival or martial arts
   One sales or public relations or promotional merchandising
   One agricultural, farming, forestry, conservation . . .
   One nature, outdoor sports such as hiking, climbing
   One factory, production line . . .
   One union, brotherhood, fraternal, veteran . . .
   At least one in a profession such as architecture, medicine, law, education, etc., (in addition to those in your own career or profession).
   Two religious, moral, ethical (one conservative and one liberal)
   And at least seven more magazines in specific fields such as plumbing, electrical, construction, transportation, food, clothing, hardware, recreation, mining, etc., four of them in whatever fields might interest you, and one in which you have no interest at all, never will, never had, and at least two periodicals in fields toward which you hold some substantial degree of antipathy.
All these, and more, will absolutely be needed during your career. Locate sources now and remember that it usually takes six to eight weeks to receive the first issue. Your problem will not be which magazines to get, but how to select the best from the many thousands available. Within six months you should be reading at least ten different magazines per month, and preferably twice that number, for maximum 'cross - pollination' effect, from which to learn and add new dimensions to your own career from other careers and occupations, including international. Some career students get more than forty different periodicals each month, and the high quality of their work shows it. To help you select, consult Ulrich's Guide to Periodicals, or the one put out by Gale, the Red Books of SRDS, and other sources.
Also, become familiar with political periodicals. You MUST obtain the Congressional Record and your state and local 'Records' a few times, to know them. The government and politicians will always interfere in your career business, and sometimes help.
Also, check out an issue or two of each of these on your local newsstands: art; Hi - tech; Mid - America (Grit, Yankee, etc.); how - to; Tabloid and other sucker publications, get - rich - quickies, car and chess and sports and womens' interests, and at least ten other kinds of special interest publications.
All these magazines both reflect and mold the interests and attitudes, the mind set and knowledge range and depth of their readers. For instance, The Readers' Digest, at more than 35 million copies a month, in almost a hundred languages, is vitally important for you to study from cover to cover for a few months, or a few times annually, so you understand, in your bones, instinctively, without having to think about it, how those 35 million people and their friends (pass - along readers) feel and think about things. Rolling Stones and Cavalier and American Rifleman and thousands of other segment publications also reflect as well as affect the interests of their readerships just as strongly.
In short, to know America, know its magazines.

Newspapers and Newsletters
As a general rule, both are either redundant or useless, slower than TV and other electronic sources, and almost as skimpy, lacking the depth and background of periodicals, but there are a few exceptions.
You will want to check out (get each for a dozen issues) at least one 'hard' newspaper such as your local equivalent of the NY Times and a financial or business newspaper like WSJ, Barron, for at least a month. Learn how to use the NY Times' Times Index. If you live in NYC or other major metropolitan areas, you can probably use the one in your local library. Most all of them and many many others are already available on the Internet.
   A historical note: Most of these 'real paper' news publications will become rare in another decade or two, because Teletext and beeper text and E-mail and E-fax and electronic publishing on the internet are already here and more wonders are up the pipe, so collect and preserve a few for your grandchildren. In fact, most newspapers are already extinct, but don't know it yet, or refuse to accept it. See how many have folded in the past few years, make a graph of the trends, and you will understand this before they do.
Get a copy of the Newsletter Of Newsletters, and order at least two.
Get a dozen different in - company in - house publications; a few are truly great.

Miscellaneous
JUNK MAIL Please DO send for every free TV and other offer you can. To learn from them. Most of these are either scams or useless, but not junk - they are incredibly fertile information and idea sources from which you can learn how smart and how dumb people are, think they are, and think others are, so study them each until you can figure each item for what it is, how the deal or scam works, who benefits and how, what fault of the victim it exploits, how you would run it, what you could make out of it, a way to improve or better it, and so forth. Any magazines you write to or subscribe to will put your name on their mailing lists, and then sell all those names to other mass mailers, so by the end of the year you should be getting lots of junk mail from many different sources. Cherish it. It is an education in itself, and for free. If you advertise in a few of them, a hundred more you never heard of will send you free copies of theirs to get you to advertise in them, too. Some of those wannabe scams will make you laugh out loud, guaranteed. Others may make you think, and a few will startle you by making you realize that you would have to really extend your mind to come up with such creative ideas. You will learn! And that is what this whole program is all about.
Get the Barnes & Noble catalogue, and those of other booksellers and specialty publishers, including educational publishing houses such as Scholastic, FIND/SVP, Newbridge, and don't forget Dow Jones, American Management Association, Microsoft, Sybex, Que, etc. Many books published today are overpriced (and as publishing costs rise they will become more so, until books will become once again highly expensive and perhaps rare in the electronic world of instantly transmitted information printed instantly on a video screen and erased as instantly, almost as ephemeral as the spoken word now is) but the offerings of those like Hamilton, who deal in remainders (books a year or so old which publishers dump at deep discount for ready cash to finance new books they hope will sell better) are to be carefully considered. You can often buy a fifty - dollar book a year later for five dollars, or less, if you wait. Most books do have some value and some are of great value to certain searchers, but it is up to the reader to be demanding and critical and discard the chaff and trivia to find the treasures they contain.
There are many other books, periodicals, magazines and miscellaneous other information and reference sources that can be helpful in your personal career preparation. Just guessing, what do you think they are? Make lists of what you think they should be and could be, in advance.

On-Line Research
The search engine is your tool of choice.
There are already dozens of search engines, and more everyday, so any list will be quickly outdated, and futile. Ask others or check the computer magazines for names and website addresses (URLs). I have found Lycos, Yahoo!, and the other older ones perfectly satisfactory, and am certain that any old or new search engine you choose will be at least adequate, though some have more bells and whistles than others. My favorite is Google. CitiDex is handy for urban dwellers of the larger metro areas. Your personal preference is the only criteria, and developing that will take a series of personal tests of all the engines you can find. Choose a topic with which you are already familiar, and see how well each of them searches for it. Compare results. Some will give you too many results, others not enough. Make your search line request as specific as possible, since the worst problem is overload; any good engine will give you thousands of responses for any general search term. Learn Boolean logic and use it to be most selective. This research process is so fast and effective that it is liable to become addictive; retain an ability to do book and magazine research, also. There are so many books and websites and other aids from which to learn on-line research that it is hard to keep up with them, so see me personally for the latest and most practical ones for your career purposes, as opposed to literary, scholarly, technical, or other specialized research. And I try to keep up with all the employment opening and other career help sources.
Here's a little Windows tip that can save you much research time: when you arrive at a list or page of text you can use: simply highlight it, and press control and C, and it will be captured to your Windows clipboard (up to 32K limit). Then open a blank notepad or wordprocessor file, and hit control V, and it will be inserted whole into that file, which you give a name and save, so you can read it later, off line, at your convenience, and insert into your report as is, or modified to your desire.
Bibliography
   (Not complete, yet)

End of Chapter Twelve
Click HERE to go to Chapter 13

Click HERE to go to the Introduction
Click HERE to go to Table of Contents
Click HERE to go to Chapter 1    Your Career, your Life Work
Click HERE to go to Chapter 2    People Study
Click HERE to go to Chapter 3    Your Career in Context
Click HERE to go to Chapter 4    Setting Your Career and Life Goals
Click HERE to go to Chapter 5    Long Term Career Development
Click HERE to go to Chapter 6    Career Strategies and Tactics
Click HERE to go to Chapter 7    Realistic Expectations
Click HERE to go to Chapter 8    Your Personal Career Support Team
Click HERE to go to Chapter 9    Team Management; Research and Writing
Click HERE to go to Chapter 10   How to become an Expert
Click HERE to go to Chapter 11   Miscellaneous, and Executive Summary
Click HERE to go to Chapter 12   Your Personal Career Research Resources
Click HERE to go to Chapter 13   Those Awful People At Work Problems
Click HERE to go to Chapter 14   Assumptions and Expectations
Click HERE to go to Appendices
Click HERE to go to Bibliography
Click HERE to go to Index
Click HERE to go to Personal Career Coaching FAQ
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Careerists, please contact me directly to obtain your own personal printed copy of Career Zen, more complete and up to date, especially with the latest on Internet career information sources and research.   Note that Career Zen is privately published, is only for my clients, and is not available in any bookstore or from any other source.

Page Created 6/15/02 by Mld Last updated 8/21/02 by Mld [ Note: This Web Site is still under construction; some documents still in editing or conversion to html format for uploading; some links not yet working, or require free registration and ID and password for full access. Please call me for your free password.
© Copyright 1998 - 2002 Larry Daly, All Rights Reserved
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Mail: 99 Park Ave., PMB381-A, New York, NY 10016
Tel: (212) 876-5483 Fax: (212) 427-8414
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