Thanks to those readers who responded to my Surviving the Weeding Process series. I had one good piece of feedback from a guy who wondered if my advice of getting certified really was a productive thing to do when in fact experience is probably much more important and useful to future employers. I would agree with him 100% that experience beats certification in this current market, especially since I'm a high-school drop-out myself! However, the point of the series was...

In this age of performance improvement, candidate-hunting recruitment consultants and company HR people are overworked and under appreciated. To keep up with the demands of their business managers, they are having to become more efficient and a common way they're doing this is to cut down the time spent on overall interviews by weeding out weaker candidates early on. The weeding process happens by throwing out resumes that don't include...

As many readers will know, among other things, I'm in the IT business, so I follow the local trends quite closely. What I'm seeing over the last 4 months (Jan-Apr 2005) is that foreign firms are back in the market for senior IT people, both software, hardware, and networks/security. Just about daily, not just through DaiJob, but also personally. I'm receiving urgent requests from clients for...

While Japanese ability is required for most jobs in multinationals, and is certainly a strategic skill to have, there are nevertheless a number of job categories out there which do not require much more than basic “Where is the train station?” skills. Top of these would be of course English...