Education or experience - which one will help you advance in your career?

You're bored in your job, recently unemployed or tired of being passed up for a promotion at work. The real question on your mind is whether you should get more education or work on improving and expanding your skill set and experience. This is a question that frequently crosses my mind and I'm sure ... the mind of millions of other people.

Going back to school can be exciting to think about ... you will (hopefully) learn new things, make new connections with your classmates, professors and school alumni and increase the number of opportunities available to you in your career. However, the process of getting into school and paying for it makes the decision more difficult than just deciding whether you're willing to put forth the time and effort required to pass class. Plus, there's the decision of whether to go back to school part-time or full-time ... either way, you will have to give up something (money or time) to achieve your education goal(s).

Often times, the best reason for going back to school is to change careers. However, there are also careers that require an advanced degree for even a chance to advance to the next level. Before you make the decision to go back to school, think about everything you will have to do to achieve your education goal and ask yourself if more education is necessary. In some cases, if you don't need a higher degree to advance in your career, you might just need to put in more hours at work and show your employer why you deserve to move up.

You might also consider one more step in making your decision about whether or not to return to school. Why not try out the career you're interested in before making a career change or going back to school to earn a degree in another field? I recently came across Vocation Vacations, a company that offers people the opportunity to "test-drive their dream jobs." Testing out your dream job might make you realize that it isn't all it's cracked up to be, or maybe it's better than you expected!
- posted by Joanna @ 3:52 PM

 
Decoding RSS Feeds

XML ... RSS ... what do all these letters mean? Today's internet is chock full of elusive new acronyms that are seemingly created on a daily basis and, unless you are amongst the most tech-savvy of us, you may find it hard to keep up with all of the latest developments.

You may have noticed the new addition of an XML button () on several pages within TrueCareers and, for those who aren't quite sure what these buttons mean, we're here to make things a little easier for you to understand.

The XML buttons are the newest improvement to the services that TrueCareers.com offers candidates by allowing jobseekers' instant access to great content from TrueCareers on a daily basis. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and allows users to activate a free "RSS Feed".

Users can install a software application called an "RSS reader" that will connect them to the RSS Feeds on TrueCareers and each time they click "update" in their reader, the reader will go out to the TrueCareers site and check our feeds for the latest information. TrueCareers is using RSS to send jobs to our candidates and we have gone one step farther by allowing candidates to customize their own data pull based upon desired career categories or specific job search criteria.

If you don't currently have an RSS reader on your computer, here are several that you can look into:

SharpReader
NewsGator
NetNewsWire
FeedDemon
FeedReader

For more info on RSS Feeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
- posted by Jon @ 2:48 PM