So you aspire to be a chef? Do you have the patience to spend 15 hours in a hot, stuffy and greasy kitchen cooking up a storm for your customers? Are you able to create innovative and tasty dishes? Do you understand food ingredients well enough?

Will you remain passionate enough to go on, even after receiving criticism from demanding customers? Do you value your food?

If your answer is a resounding Yes!, you may have what it takes to be a chef.

Being a chef is not just about cooking. It’s a job that requires hard work, creativity and passion. Chef Jonathan Koh, head chef at Miss Clarity Café says, “A good chef has to love and respect food. Proper treatment of food is important to ensure that the end result is good. Food has to be packed and stored properly to maintain its freshness. Timing is also vital. The time spent on preparing and cooking the food will affect its taste.”

Whether you are struggling to write your résumé or attempting to answer questions like ‘Where do you expect to be in three years from now career-wise?’ at a job interview, a well written career plan is a helpful tool in addressing these ‘challenges’. Writing your career plan forces you to think tactically and strategically. It also helps you to identify your strengths and weaknesses besides your natural talents. Writing a career plan also provides an opportunity to examine your personal attributes critically. Career planning provides a chance to explore episodes and experiences in your life that impacted your attitudes, beliefs and may even have been turning points in your career.

A well thought through and effectively written career plan is an exercise no one can afford to miss in the 21st century working world. With the disappearance of job security, an annual review of your career plan can provide the much needed impetus to propel you forward and even upward in your career. In writing the career plan you will assess the past year’s events in your career. If it has been a ‘monotonous’ past year with no new or exciting opportunities, you will inevitably think of something to do to break the monotony. If you have made career gains, you will think of ways to consolidate the gain.

Whether you are driving a forklift, making fengshui divination or lecturing in economics, you must stand out and be recognised by everyone as the expert in your trade.

Not too long ago, to be an expert meant that you had to have an advanced degree and be doing a specialised job for years. Today, people will pay attention to you if you can deliver what they need, regardless of your professional experience or academic qualification.

Experts are sought after. They get cushy job offers and business opportunities, and command high fees. Even expert forklift drivers are in high demand as trainers and to display fancy moves in industrial competitions.

Reporters interview them whenever an issue or situation crops up in their area of expertise. They get invited to speak at conferences. And if they own a business, their firm gains more market share than their competitors. They are not anonymous because people recognise that they know more.

By Mr Tim Hird, Managing Director of Robert Half Singapore

(15 Dec) 2009 - The Ministry of Manpower today issued its labour market report for the third quarter of 2009 (3Q2009). Amid the recovering economy, employment grew 14,000 in Q3 09, offsetting losses in the preceding two quarters. Services employment rose 12,700, significantly higher than the gains of 7,500 in Q1 09 and 3,800 in Q2 09. In particular, services industries with external exposure (e.g. in terms of international trade and visitor arrivals) such as hotels & restaurants (400), wholesale & retail trade (1,300) and financial services (2,100) added jobs, after shedding workers in the first two quarters of 2009.

Over the last 12 months, many organisations have undergone varying degrees of corporate and manpower changes. With businesses now gearing up for growth amid improving overall economic prospects, they face the challenge of attracting the best people from a limited talent pool and retaining them, or risk missing the recovery bandwagon due to a lack of suitable ‘business ready’ resources.

Being out of work for an extended period can get you down. Even worse, whenever you apply for a vacancy, you know there will be many others applying for the same post, and – what the heck – many of these people are still employed!

You feel you can’t compete with them because prospective employers are more likely to favour such people when looking at applicants. (Employers don’t like idle people, you suspect.)

Thankfully, this is not true.

Saying nothing
A resume-writing adviser from ExpertResumes.com says if you are unemployed for less than a year, your best strategy may be to say nothing about it in your resume.

“Shorter time frames of up to a year or so aren’t absolute necessities to explain on a resume,” says Teena Rose. If you are still jobless after more than a year, a possible strategy is to fill the time with useful but unpaid activities such as community work, special projects or a study programme.

At JobsCentral and JobsFactory, clients and partners help form the intricate web of success that both companies have built over the years. It was with an air of familiar excitement that the JobsCentral & JobsFactory Presentation 2009 took place on Friday, 30 October.

By Nabilah Husna A. Rahman & Colin Lim

An exclusive event, the presentation was only open to clients and partners of JobsCentral and its sister company JobsFactory. Held annually, this year’s presentation attracted over 150 attendees from more than 90 companies, comprising mostly of HR personnel and representatives from organisations in both the private and public sector.

Featuring engaging talks by the Chief Executive Officer of JobsCentral, Lim Dershing, Managing Director of JobsFactory, Huang Shao-Ning and Content & Community Manager, Colin Lim, the event was an informative session aimed at keeping clients informed of recent developments within the companies, as well as relevant industry trends.

Sharing recent achievements
Firstly, attendees were given an insight into how this year’s JobsCentral Career & Learning Fair was extremely well-received in August. Shao-Ning announced that more than 70% of exhibitors and jobseekers expressed their satisfaction with how the annual event turned out, a clear indication of its growing popularity and effectiveness. Attendees were also given first-hand information about next year’s fair.

With new features, a bigger marketing budget, and a refreshing approach to publicity, the JobsCentral Career & Learning Fair 2009 was truly in a league of its own.

The annual fair, brainchild of online career portal JobsCentral, has gained increasing recognition since its inaugural launch three years ago. Despite a placid job market, this year’s event garnered a record number of 110 exhibitors (comprising leading employers and education providers) and received more than 50,000 visitors.

Exciting new features
This year, the JobsCentral Fair introduced three new elements to the event:
• A by-invitation-only networking session
• Free seminars conducted by industry professionals
• A job application engine on the event website

Held on the morning of the first day, the networking session was a closed-door event, exclusively for a selected pool of JobsCentral portal users. Invitations were sent based on the exhibitors’ general recruitment criteria.

You must have heard hundreds speeches in your life. Do you remember all the speeches and the names of the speakers? I doubt it. However, I am sure there are a few speeches which have found a permanent place in your minds and hearts. In this article, I will outline few ways to add power to your speeches and presentations.

1. It’s not about how good you are
Many speakers make the mistake of showing their ‘talent’ and bragging about how good they are. Well, it is important to establish credibility that you are an expert, but it is unnecessary to brag a lot about your achievements. In the first few minutes of your speech, you have to answer the “What’s In It For Me?” question of your audience members. The audience must feel that they made a wise decision to attend your speech.

How can you do that? Simple. Focus on their needs. If you are speaking to a group of engineers, talk to a few engineers and discuss with them a brief synopsis of what you are about to present. Take their feedback and tweak your message.

2. Warm-up
You know the importance of a warm-up before you play a sport or working on your routines at a gym. Similarly, you must also warm-up before your speeches. Many speakers arrive few minutes before the speech and are busy setting up the equipment (mainly laptop-projector connections). That’s not warm-up. Here are a few examples of warm-up:

“Living life to the fullest” is one of the many adages over-churned enough to lose its true definitive value to most people. But at only 25, Celestine Chua, founder and principle coach of The School of Personal Excellence (TSOPE), aims to bring back purposeful living and help extricate others from the common rat-race towards secular goals.

“Many people have goals and dreams which they are not pursuing. One of the most common examples is people working in jobs they are not fully passionate about,” observes Celestine, who has been coaching since the beginning of the year. “They may have big goals and dreams before, but they choose to settle for lesser instead, opting for what’s already before them. Some refuse to dream as they think there is no place for dreams in the real world.”

Launched just this month to encourage personal excellence amongst its individual clients, TSOPE is a business that, in fact, settles for nothing less than the best quality of life development. Each programme is designed by Celestine’s own coaching philosophy, frameworks and tools, all unique to her own personal experiences.