June 3, 2014

10 Free Resources for Career Development

LearnOutLoud’s collection of 10 Free Resources for Career Development showcases audio & video from teachers and leaders that are dedicated to helping others find their life calling. We’ve searched diligently for many years to bring you the best career advice we can find on the web, and here you’ll find audio & video tips on how to sharpen your Professional Edge, learn methods to optimize (and reduce) your workload from Tim Ferriss and even get spiritual guidance on how to find work that is aligned with your deepest goals. We also delve into how professional culture is changing in the modern world, how stress can be managed, and how the recent economic crisis has affected who can work where and why. Whether you are just entering the job market, yearn for a career change or want advice on how to adjust your work methods, this selection should have something to help you on your way:

1. 25 Life Purpose Lessons from Sounds True

Sounds True has launched a wonderful new section of their site that features 25 Life Purpose Lessons to help you grow in your passions, your career, and your wealth in the coming year. With 5-15 minute audio lessons from Sounds True’s best business & wealth teachers such as Rick Jarow, Mark Albion, John Mackey, Fred Kofman, and Vicki Robin, these 25 life lessons will propel you into 2010 with vision & motivation. They’ve thoughtfully divided these lessons up into three sections. Enjoy these 25 lessons from Sounds True! Please Note: These lessons are streaming audio only and not downloadable.

2. Take Control of Your Career and Your Life with Marcus Buckingham Podcast

Listen to or watch this podcasted class offered by Oprah.com, featuring bestselling author Marcus Buckingham. This eight-step course explores finding fulfillment in your career. Marcus Buckingham guides 29 students that are seeking personal success in their business and life. Throughout the course Marcus teaches you how to leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. This podcast is available on audio & video download (for some reason the streaming doesn’t seem to be working too well). Enjoy the course!

3. Alain de Botton on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Philosophical writer Alain de Botton discusses his latest work The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. For writing the book he surveyed ten different jobs and came up with many interesting observations about working in today’s society. For instance he found that much of the time at work people aren’t actually working, but that they are still working long hours. He also found that highly specialized work forces often perform the best, but when it comes to the individual they tend to lack a sense of meaning. Watch Alain de Botton make many more of these observations on this streaming video from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation available on FORA.tv.

4. Sue Morem’s Professional Edge Podcast

In this podcast, author Sue Morem points listeners to ways they can achieve success and satisfaction in their professional careers. On the feed she features her video podcast series The Job Seeker, as well as other podcasts on professional topics and interviews with career experts such as Sonia Choquette, author of How To Trust Your Vibes at Work. Start your work week with some professional advice from career expert Sue Morem.

5. Authors@Google: Marci Alboher & Tim Ferriss

Work Less & Do More! In this @Google Talk Author Tim Ferriss discusses his bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Also featured on the talk is Marci Alboher, author of One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. Both authors discuss the ways in which individuals can stop being overloaded with work and start doing the things they’re really passionate about. Ferriss tells his story about how he went from working 70 hour weeks to traveling the world and becoming a world champion kickboxer and tango dancer all while keeping his job and learning to delegate his workload. Alboher talks about how she went from being an overworked lawyer to becoming a part time lawyer and part time writer while living in different parts of the world. They give tips about how they accomplished their multifaceted lives and encourage listeners to not delay pursuing their passions until retirement.

6. Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

37signals co-founder and Rework author Jason Fried makes some provocative suggestions regarding why work doesn’t get done in the workplace. He suggests that interruptions are the key component contributing to the lack work accomplished in the workplace and that managers and meetings are to blame. He relates the stage of work to the stages of sleep and in order to get the best work done one needs to go through these stages without interruption. This talk was delivered at the TEDxMidwest Conference and is available on streaming video and MP3 audio download.

7. Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet

Most of us face certain dilemmas in our jobs between living according to our own principles of doing good and complying to the need to make a good living. Maybe you may want to do good with your work and benefit others, but you also have to live up to the needs of a company or organization that has to make money. This talk, with co-authors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and Howard Gardner, addresses such work-related dilemmas which they confronted in their book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. They specifically look at two professions and the ethics associated with the work. They discuss journalists & journalistic ethics, and they talk about bioethics and geneticists. Through analyzing these professions they are able to come to some interesting conclusions about the interplay between doing good work and making money, and other dilemmas faced in the workplace. Maybe thinking about this can give you a better understanding about doing good work this year in your occupation.

8. Sir Ken Robinson on The Element

After a witty intro, Sir Ken Robinson talks about paradigm shifts in the modern world and how the education system is failing to meet the imaginative demands of life in the 21st century. The idea of going to school and college in order to get a steady, well-paying job which you will hold for the rest of your life is now rarely the case, and the new skills needed in the 21st century, don’t necessarily match the narrow focus of any degree. When a majority of people don’t particular enjoy their jobs after they’ve been educated, Robinson feels that the education system is failing to help people find their passion and develop their skills towards meeting their passion in life. He presents ideas on how individuals can educate themselves in order to find not only what they are good at, but what they love to do. Because if people are doing what they love, then they’ll never have to work another day in their life.

9. The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class

Check out this popular lecture from YouTube EDU featuring distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren. Delivered six months before the peak of the financial crisis, professor Warren sets out to explain why maintaining a middle class living is a much riskier proposition than it was 40 years ago despite the fact that women have entered the work force. She goes through the hard data of what Americans are spending their money on and sees financial debt, housing costs, and health care as major factors which have led to this age of financial anxiety for middle class families. This lecture is available on streaming video from UCTV through YouTube.

10. Barbara Ehrenreich: Bait and Switch

In this talk given at Books Inc., author Barbara Ehrenreich discusses her book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream which examines the difficulty of middle-aged professionals trying to get white-collar jobs in corporate America. In her bestselling 2001 book Nickel and Dimed she went undercover to expose the hardships of the working poor. In Bait and Switch she goes undercover in the corporate world to explore white-collar unemployment. In this talk Ehrenreich uses her characteristic wit to describe the many curious ways that corporations have used to justify their layoffs and to blame middle class workers for their own unemployment. Towards the end she mentions her non-profit group United Professionals which she formed in 2006 to organize activism amongst white-collar workers who are unemployed. This talk is available on streaming video and MP3 audio download from FORA.tv.