I was preparing a candidate for an important interview the other day that prompted me to dispense some ‘career counseling’ advice to my readers out there in the blogosphere!

In an interview, don’t EVER use the F-Word.

Some of you may be thinking, “Obviously Corey, I know to never swear in an interview”.

Others don’t actually know that it’s considered really bad form to swear in an interview. I know who you are, and STOP IT! You’re costing yourselves job offers!

Though swearing in an interview is not the topic of my blog today. The almighty F-Word I’m talking about is……

FIRED

Ahhhhhhh – it’s such an ugly word! Synonyms for ‘fired’ are torched, burned, ablaze, smoking, etc. In my opinion, people use the word ‘fired’ far too often in their every day lives and most especially in interviews!

My husband is a prime example – the poor guy always ends up being my example.

Regardless of the circumstances, if he or someone he knows loses their job he says that he or someone he knows “got fired”. To my husband, and a great many people “fired” is the only word in their vocab to describe that a job was lost.

Downsized – FIRED

Laid Off – FIRED

Rightsized – FIRED

Position Eliminated – FIRED

Company closed – FIRED

Branch relocated out of the area – FIRED

New management came in and hired a former colleague to replace you because they really really like that person, and they don’t know you from Adam – FIRED

My manager let me go but never gave me any reason as to why – FIRED

The list goes on and on.

The employment world is so nuanced; not one job is exactly the same and not one circumstance is exactly the same. So, why would we use the same word for something that is so personal in individual?

The real problem comes during interview time. As a recruiter, I am trained well enough to probe further when I hear the phrase, “I was fired”. I realize that many people don’t know how to articulate their reason for leaving an employer and they default to the F-Word.

I am not the tough hurdle to jump; I’ll get the information I need. The tough hurdle is when you’re on an interview with a prospective employer and they ask you the same question. Most of the people interviewing you have a lot invested into their company; sweat equity, real equity, emotion, etc. When they hear the F-Word it raises a big RED flag. They begin to fixate on the word. They begin to worry. They begin to sweat. Then, they begin to think about ways they can cut the interview short and GET YOU THE HECK OUT OF THEIR OFFICE. Hiring managers aren’t trained interviewers, and because of their emotional connection to their company you’re SOL as soon as those fateful words leave your lips.

I’ve spoken with some terrific candidates over the years that didn’t know the power of the word ‘fired’. They would tell me that they’ve been on dozens of interviews but don’t understand why they can’t get a job. 9 of 10 of these people were misusing the word and/or ineffectively describing the circumstances behind their departure.

The problem with the word is that it’s misused and too vague. Just remove it from your vocabulary altogether. Clearly this topic gets me ALL FIRED UP!

Enterprise Messaging

• Provides data and transactional integrity as part of data movement
• Communications that handle interruptions seamlessly
• Simpler business applications through a consistent interface
• Flexibility to distribute data in multiple ways
• Works with many applications and programming languages
• Ideal for moving batch systems to real-time

Mobile Messaging

• Enables mobile apps to easily interact with existing applications and services
• Messaging that is optimized for needs of HTML 5apps and mobile networks
• Reduces network load and increases responsiveness

Managed File Transfer

• Leverages messaging infrastructure for SOA-based MFT
• Provides secure, reliable transfer of business data contained in files
• Provides end-to-end visibility and audit

IBM Messaging provides a universal messaging solution for all your enterprise, mobile and managed file transfer needs.

Customers have seen up to a 9 times increase in transactional capacity and 2/3 reduction in round-trip order time.

What Capabilities Does Your Business Need?

Messaging maps to a variety of customer needs. Refer to the chart below to outline which messaging capability most closely relates to your needs.

WebSphere MQ Advanced

Are you wondering what makes WebSphere MQ Advanced so unique?

• Widest coverage of client and server platforms
  • 87 different combinations of OS & hardware
• Wide selection of programing languages and APIs
  • Java, JMS, Javascript, C/C++, C#, .NET, Visual Basin, PHP, Ruby, Python, F#. PL/I, Cobol, RPG
• High performance
  • Thousands of transactional credit card updates per second
• Reliability
  • Works over satellite, DSL, fiber, cellular, etc
  • Built in transaction manager, works over slow connections, provides reliable data transfer and is proven to work in mission critical environments
• Widespread and Mature
  • 93% of the world’s banks conduct their business using WebSphere MQ
  • Proven and mature with tens of thousands in production and 10 years as MOM leader
  • TxMQ has skilled developers and administrators ready available to assist with any MQ project

Businesses today need reliability, security and performance and WebSphere MQ Advanced gives you control over all aspects of your IT infrastructure. You will gain visibility to all your data, along with the success and failure of your connectivity to allow you to do more with your business.

Here’s a view of the WebSphere MQ family of offerings.

For more information about TxMQ’s MQ solutions and services, please contact Miles Roty, miles@txmq.com or call him at 716-636-0070 (228).

Exciting news. There’s something new in the WebSphere MQ Advanced offering that is intended just for use by developers.

The new release of WebSphere MQ Advanced enables developers to install and use the entire WebSphere MQ Advanced stack on their personal development machines without needing to pay a PVU based license.

Note: this doesn’t replace existing test and production usage.

Use this opportunity to build your skills in WebSphere MQ and practice enhancing applications in new an innovative ways. Now you don’t need to wait for shared infrastructure availability. This opportunity also limits the impact of errors and mistakes and allows for faster iterations of development and unit tests.

Developer Benefits:

• Greater productivity and reduced errors
  • Improved skills with access to personal MQ Servers will improve quality of integrated code
  • Reducing errors at each stage will speed up completion of projects
  • Reusable functions
    • More opportunity to practice coding against WebSphere MQ Server will increase the likelihood of faster development and reused code in the next project

It’s simpler than ever to build applications for universal messaging. Developers can now deploy reliable, secure, simple and rapid messaging between applications, systems and services.

MQ Advanced for Developers allows you to send files over your existing WebSphere MQ network, configured and managed right through your MQ Explorer console. With end-to-end encrypted messages, selected by policies, there’s no reason to change applications. Instead you can extend your enterprise applications to mobile and M2M devices with an integrated lightweight standard protocol – MQTT.

Likely, your IT infrastructure is the backbone of your company. All important business functions tie back to your IT department and configuration. If it shuts down, how much money will your company lose per minute? How about per second? Have you ever evaluated that?

So, like getting your brakes checked on your car before they fail and you get into an accident, we think it’s a great idea to get your systems checked before they fail.

Recently, a large regional bank commissioned TxMQ consultants to come in and do just that. They requested from us an IBM® “WebSphere® MQ report card” of sorts of how their MQ applications were running compared to other organization of like size and functionality.

TxMQ has a great subject matter expert with extensive IBM® MQ experience who was able to go onsite at the bank and work interactively with members of the department to dig into their daily activities and diagnose weaknesses and strengths. This is the second such HealthCheck that TxMQ has completed for this bank, the prior being a CICS HealthCheck.

To see the results of the HealthCheck, please click here. If you’re interested in proactively heading off potential issues within your IT infrastructure, please contact Miles Roty at TxMQ today, miles@txmq.comor call (415) 535-3960.

In most cases, a thorough HealthCheck is a 1-2 week engagement and will not interfere with your daily tasks. Each system HealthCheck is completely customizable based on your environment and we have a team of experts who can complete the task no matter how heterogeneous the applications are that your company is running.

Specified operating environment

Hardware requirements – IBM Integration Bus V9.0

IBM AIX

64-bit IBM Power® systems only, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.

Any hardware capable of running other trademarked AIX systems from IBM or other vendors that have passed a set of certification tests for compliance with the IBM AIX application binary and programming interfaces.

HP-UX on Itanium™

Itanium systems: Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running the specified operating system, all the corresponding supporting software shown below, and any associated applications unmodified.

Linux on IBM Power

64-bit IBM Power processor-based systems only, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.

Linux on x86

x86 technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.

Linux on x86-64

AMD64 and EM64T technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.

Linux on System z®

Any server capable of running one of the Linux for System z releases listed in the software requirements topic below.

Solaris x86-64

AMD64, EM64T, and compatible processors: Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running the specified operating system, all the corresponding supporting software shown below, and any associated applications unmodified.

Solaris SPARC

Sun Microsystems SPARC processor machines.

Microsoft Windows™

Windows x86 technology-compatible PC hardware, capable of running the required level of a compatible operating system with enough storage to meet the requirements of IBM Integration Bus.

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0

• Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running PowerVM® , IBM AIX , IBM Integration Bus V9.0, and all corresponding supporting software
• IBM Workload Deployer, with minimum firmware level V3.1

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for x86, V9.0

• Any hardware that is explicitly compatible and fully capable of running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, IBM Integration Bus V9.0, and all corresponding supporting software
• IBM Workload Deployer, with minimum firmware level V3.1

Software requirements IBM Integration Bus V9.0

IBM AIX

• IBM AIX 6.1 (Technology Level 5)
• IBM AIX 7.1
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

HP-UX on Itanium

• HP-UX 11i V3 (plus PHCO_38048, PHSS 42980, and PHSS 41496) for Itanium
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on IBM Power

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on x86

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
• Ubuntu 12.04
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on x86-64

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
• Ubuntu 12.04
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Linux on System z

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V5.5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS V6
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Solaris on SPARC

• Solaris 10
• Solaris 11
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Solaris on x86-64

• Solaris 10
• Solaris 11
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Microsoft Windows x86

• Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise (32bit and 64bit) Edition
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition
• Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate (32bit and 64bit) Edition
• Windows 8 Basic, Professional and Enterprise Editions
• Windows 2012, Standard Edition
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

Microsoft Windows x86-64

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition
• Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate Edition
• Windows 8 Basic, Professional and Enterprise Editions
• Windows 2012, Standard Edition
• WebSphere MQ V7.5

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0

PowerVM must be installed on the system targeted for deployment of IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition V9.0 for IBM AIX .

The IBM AIX V6.1 operating system is included in IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition IBM AIX , V9.0. However, clients must purchase the license for IBM AIX separately as part of their Power System hardware and PowerVM setup. All other required software is provided with IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX , V9.0.

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for x86, V9.0

VMware ESX must be installed on the system targeted for deployment of IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux . All other required software is provided with IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition V9.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux .

• Why now is the best time to upgrade
• Explain the upgrade process (best practices, pre-requisites, known migration issues)
• How TxMQ can help
• Options for staying on WAS 6.1

If you’re looking for more information on WebSphere Application Server V8, TxMQ’s subject matter experts can assist with your decision to upgrade or purchase extended support. Each environment is different and depending on your needs, we can develop a customized solution that will leave you feeling secure with your application no matter what you decide to do.

Contact Miles Roty, (415) 535-3960 or miles@txmq.com to consult with a subject matter expert and plan an upgrade strategy today. Don’t get caught without WAS V6.1 support.

TxMQ is an IBM Premier Business Partner and we can help you either upgrade or create a support package as soon as you’d like. Contact us today!

Apply business insight to make near-real-time decisions to influence processing flow

Many organizations exploit business rules to improve the quality of transaction- and process-related decisions that are made repeatedly, determining the appropriate course of action for each customer, partner, and internal interaction. When business rules are combined with an integration solution, such decisions are able to influence data as it is being processed in near-real-time, helping to achieve an optimal business outcome.

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides built-in capabilities to invoke rules during processing in order to make intelligent routing, validation, and transformation decisions:

• Integration developers can get started quickly and easily using simple rules created using intuitive editors within the IBM Integration Bus tooling. Existing or more powerful rules may also be imported from IBM Operational Decision Manager tooling.
• Rules are packaged and deployed alongside the integration logic and executed in the same runtime container, minimizing the overhead associated with rule invocation.
• Business users have visibility to rules and the ability to govern and change the business logic without requiring rework or redeployment of the integration logic.
• IBM Decision Center may be used to manage rules running within IBM Integration Bus as part of a broader Decision Manager solution.

Existing clients transitioning to the built-in rules support from the “IAM9: WebSphere Decision Service Node” SupportPac will benefit from improvements in usability, installability, and deployment.

Rapidly create integration services to meet the needs of process designers

Business process management (BPM) enables organizations to automate, manage, measure, and continuously improve the processes that drive their business. For a given process, this involves choreographing a series of steps that may include human tasks, business rules, and integration services that trigger requests to underlying applications and systems.

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 simplifies and accelerates the creation of integration services in support of a BPM solution:

• A prebuilt development pattern allows integration developers to rapidly build a new integration service to the exact specification supplied by a process designer. Alternatively, existing integration logic can be easily encapsulated as an integration service for reuse by BPM.
• IBM BPM tooling allows process designers to discover an integration service implementation, select from the available operations, automatically map the input and output elements, and perform testing from within the BPM development environment.

Manage integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages

The scope of integration solutions is broadening to extend beyond enterprise boundaries, enabling an explosion of new endpoints (such as mobile applications, cloud applications, and sensors) to have access to enterprise applications and services. This enables a broad spectrum of new opportunities from increasing productivity and responsiveness to deeper customer engagement and loyalty. With these opportunities come the challenges of maintaining availability of business-critical systems in the face of increasing demand or spikes in activity, and effectively managing resources to reflect workload priorities.

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides new capabilities that allow operational awareness and control over processing traffic:

• A policy-based approach to controlling the processing rate for integration flows. Policies are defined at design time and can be updated operationally.
• Individual policies that define thresholds (in messages per second) along with actions to be triggered in order to maintain a desired processing rate. For example, the breaching of a threshold can be configured to trigger subsequent workload to be delayed or rejected in order to protect downstream systems.
• The ability to send a notification to operational personnel as a threshold is breached.

Include application-to-application integration in centralized business activities

Application developers are increasingly required to connect applications they create with existing applications to deliver a new composite solution. To assist with this, they need a lightweight integration framework that allows them to quickly and easily enable applications for connectivity and configure common tasks without the need for deep integration skills.

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 deliver new capabilities and productivity aids that provide a simple way for an application developer to compose applications. Once in place, integration between applications can be instrumented, and events flowed to IBM Integration Bus for inclusion in centralized monitoring, audit, or analytics activities:

• Simple connectivity tasks for application developers (such as service versioning) are supported by drag-and-drop graphical data mapping and pre-built developer patterns. This enables applications to connect to each other, as well as to external standard interfaces such as XML, REST, JSON, and web services.
• Integration logic developed in the Application Server environment can emit events that can be captured by IBM Integration Bus. This data can then be flowed to business activity monitoring (BAM) solutions, stored in a system of record for audit purposes, or sent to a data warehouse for processing by business analytics engines.

Improve elasticity and response times by exploiting flexible caching capabilities

Caching is a fundamental technology that facilitates the building of scalable infrastructure to support growth in the demand for services. For an integration solution, a distributed cache provides a repository for data reuse and sharing across the network. This creates an elastic processing network able to respond to a request from any available node, and minimizes the amount of data retrieved from back-end systems.

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 includes an embedded IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale global cache, along with new options to connect securely to an external cache:

• Out-of-the-box capabilities to use embedded cache to store state for integrations and maintain a predictable response time even as the number of clients increases.
• Support for connecting securely over SSL to an external cache such as IBM WebSphere DataPower® XC10, enabling a single cache to be shared by multiple products.

Monitor and visualize performance statistics in real time

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides powerful new tools to graphically view operational performance statistics. This provides operational personnel with access to:

• Highly configurable views of integration throughput rates in a line chart or tabular form.
• The facility to drill down to an appropriate level of detail, scoping statistics to an execution group, a thread, or even an individual node.
• Foundational BAM capabilities such as the ability to assign and view the business context of particular data, for example its value.

Exploit new patterns to rapidly integrate Microsoft applications

IBM Integration Bus V9.0 delivers additional productivity aids enabling Microsoft applications to be rapidly integrated as part of a heterogeneous integration solution. Prebuilt patterns for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allow transformation and synchronization of client data with another CRM application. This facilitates sharing of the state of business relationships and transactions consistently across an organization, while preserving data quality:

• A prebuilt pattern assists with the integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a SAP system. Updates to customer data from create, read, update, and delete operations via a SAP BAPI can be easily reflected in a matching Dynamics CRM Account Entity.
• A second prebuilt pattern builds upon the first by allowing Microsoft Dynamics CRM application to be updated using a variety of other mechanisms, including WebSphere MQ messages, HTTP, or flat files.

Flexibly provision solutions across a range of physical and cloud environments

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition offers flexible integration solution provisioning across a range of physical and cloud-based deployment options. Stable and tested configurations are available for use with IBM Workload Deployer and IBM PureApplication™ System. These offer particular benefits in deploying and managing an integration solution:

• Workload Deployer allows the rapid deployment and simplified management of a large-scale deployment of IBM Integration Bus across your existing hardware infrastructure. Demands for newly deployed systems can be quickly satisfied, hardware utilization optimized, and maintenance costs reduced.
• PureApplication System enables IBM Integration Bus to provide preconfigured integration capabilities as part of an optimized hardware and software private cloud platform. IBM Integration Bus provides the foundational integration capabilities with which PureApplication System patterns of expertise deliver complete software solutions.

Should your integration requirements develop or change, you have the freedom to nondisruptively transition between these options irrespective of the initial selection.

IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition can serve as a basis for the provisioning of IBM Integration Bus on public cloud environments using bring-your-own licensing.

Import and convert existing integration assets from WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

IBM Integration Bus represents IBM’s strategic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) offering and is the successor product for existing clients of both WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB.

IBM Integration Bus provides tooling that facilitates the conversion of existing WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus assets so they can run on IBM Integration Bus. The tooling enables:

• WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Project Interchange files to be imported and viewed
• Common flow primitives to be converted automatically whilst maintaining the flow structure
• An understanding of remaining manual tasks via a task list
• Resulting flows to be modified and deployed

The conversion tooling is built upon an extensible framework, enabling further enhancements that reduce the number of manual tasks required.

WebSphere MQ

WebSphere MQ V7.5 is provided with IBM Integration Bus.

WebSphere Adapters

WebSphere Adapters V7.5 for SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards are provided with IBM Integration Bus. The adapters enable connectivity to these commonly used package applications. These adapters are available for both development and production usage.

Modes of operation

IBM Integration Bus offers a number of modes of operation to licensed clients. The mode of operation may be selected at any time, subject to the purchase of license entitlement. Existing clients may select any mode of operation at deployment time and are not required to reinstall their existing IBM Integration Bus media.

• Express® Edition provides an entry-level starting point to deploy an integration solution with the option to grow to full function and performance. It has restricted features and is limited to one process.
• Standard Edition offers the choice of a full-feature mode of operation, which is limited to one process, or a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions. This intermediate edition offers the flexibility to fulfill either broad-capability or high-performance scenarios.
• Advanced Edition is the full-feature edition of IBM Integration Bus with no function or capability restrictions imposed. It is the default mode of operation.

Hypervisor Editions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX

The Hypervisor Editions offer a combination of IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere MQ, and the operating system compatible with the supported hypervisor, optimized to run in server virtualization environments.

Remote Adapter Deployment (RAD) Edition

The RAD Edition enables deployment of adapters for connecting to applications and other data sources, including databases.

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License

The IBM Integration Bus WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License provides comparable capabilities and performance to those available in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. It offers a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions.

Maximizing the value of your IBM software investment

IBM Software Subscription and Support is one of the most cost-effective ways for your business to ensure that your users have access to the latest technology. Whether you choose to upgrade and how you choose to upgrade are always up to you. You manage your upgrade cycles in the way that works best for your business. A comprehensive product upgrade and Technical Support solution, IBM Software Subscription and Support, available through IBM Passport Advantage® and Passport Advantage Express , delivers:

• Product upgrades
• New releases and new versions
• Phone and technical support

For information on the benefits of migrating to IBM Integration Bus, contact TxMQ by emailing Chuck Fried, Chuck@txmq.com.

For more information and the complete announcement, please click here.

New enhancements allow clients to:

• Rapidly enable business insight to be applied to in-flight data
• Accelerate the creation of integration services for business process management (BPM)
• Increase operational awareness and control over workload
• Gain visibility and insight of integration in application environments

The new capabilities naturally extend the powerful productivity features of IBM Integration Bus to develop and manage integration solution deployments and extend its industry-leading performance and scalability.

Integration Bus V9.0 delivers key enhancements that enable greater visibility and insight of data as it flows through the bus. This allows you to:

• Apply business insight to make near real-time decisions to influence processing flow
• Rapidly create integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
• Manage integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
• Include application-to-application integration in centralized business activities
• Improve elasticity and response time by exploiting flexible caching capabilities
• Monitor and visualize performance statistics in real time
• Exploit new patterns to rapidly integrate Microsoft™ applications
• Flexibly provision solutions across a range of physical and cloud environments
• Import and convert existing integration assets from IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

Availability Dates:

June 14, 2013

• IBM Integration Bus V9 – Electronic distribution
• IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for IBM AIX®, V9 – Electronic distribution only
• IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition for Red Hat Enterpise Linux™ Server for x86, V9.0 – Electronic distribution only

July 5, 2013

• IBM Integration Bus V9.0 – Media Pack

For the full announcement, please click here.

In today’s business climate it can be very challenging to stay positive. My boss Natalie is a big advocate of ‘you get what you give’. If you’re giving off positive, happy vibes, positive outcomes will come your way. Conversely, if you’re emanating upset or unsure or agitated feelings, it will be more difficult for success to find its way back to you.

I’m not sure where my philosophical stance falls on this topic. I’m more of the kind of person who believes that hard work and dedication SHOULD pay off in the end. If I work harder, I SHOULD see positive results. Logical; right?

One thing I can attest to, is no matter how hard you work, and no matter how good you are at what you do, if you don’t do it with light-heartedness and optimism you’re setting yourself up for an abysmal work-life.

Things have been frustrating this quarter on the employment front. From speaking with many of our steadfast clients, I’ve come to the conclusion that dropping of the fiscal cliff and being faced with another fiscal cliff had everyone in hiding. There ARE job openings. Companies are in dire need of filling those vacancies but are tremendously trigger-shy right now.

On the other side of the coin, I am fielding frantic phone calls from job seekers wondering why they are seeing awesome job opportunities posted but aren’t receiving calls for interviews. I’ve had to put my career-counselor hat on a number of times in the past 2 months and explain the situation to them.

So, regardless of where you stand, it seems as though we’re letting our fear and negativity get the best of us (myself included until my dear co-workers snapped me out of it). Suffice it to say, if all of us stay in the doldrums we will stay trapped there for who knows how long?

I found an interesting article written by U.S. entrepreneur, Nadia Goodman on “How to Train Your Brain to Stay Positive”. She opens her article with a powerful statement; “conquering challenge and failure is essential to the success of your business”.

Resilience is the name of the game; are you in?

Nadia has provided us with three tips to train our brains to stay positive.

1. Express gratitude. Negative events loom large unless you consciously balance them out. “When you’re faced with challenges, it’s important to take stock of what’s going well,” Della Porta says. Thinking about the good in your life can help balance that bias, giving your brain the extra time it needs to register and remember a positive event. 

To help your brain store positive events, reflect on what you’re grateful for and why at least once a week. Write down your blessings, such as the opportunity to pursue a career you love or a family that supports you. If you prefer a daily habit, then keep a nightly log of good things that happened that day. “Just keep it very short,” Della Porta says. “If you try to hammer [gratitude] home, then it becomes mundane.” Day One, a journaling app for Apple devices ($4.99), or OhLife, a free email-based journal, can to help you do this. 

2. Repeat positive affirmations. As any politician or advertiser knows, the more often you hear a message, the more likely you are to believe it. The same goes for messages about who you are and what you are capable of doing. By repeating positive affirmations with conviction several times each morning, you are training your brain to believe them. “Over time, you’ll start to internalize them,” Della Porta says. Repeat your affirmations silently if you feel self-conscious.

Choose two to three affirmations that represent your values and goals, such as ‘I can handle whatever comes my way,’ ‘There is plenty of time,’ or ‘I’m getting better every day.’ The repetition will influence the way you interpret negative events, making you more resilient. “Especially if you’re predisposed to negative thinking, this can be extremely effective,” Della Porta says.

3. Challenge negative thoughts. Each time a negative thought arises, we choose how to respond. If left to our own devices, we tend to dwell. Our brains home in on negative events so they seem much bigger and more significant than they are. To combat that, start by imagining the thought as separate from yourself, as something you can observe and deconstruct. “Get in the habit of distancing yourself instead of dwelling,” Della Porta says.

Next, challenge negative thoughts that are unfairly self-deprecating. For example, if your startup doesn’t get the traction you hoped, you might think, “I’m a failure.” That’s untrue and unproductive. Instead, practice interpreting the same event differently. You might say, I worked really hard but I didn’t account for a quirk of the market, so I’m disappointed, but now I’m going to try again with new information. That interpretation is gentler, truer, and more proactive. “At first, [this strategy will] be hard and you’ll think it doesn’t work,” Della Porta says. “But over time, it’ll become automatic and negative thoughts will be less likely to come up. No one does this naturally; you have to learn and practice.”

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/225683#ixzz2RJPkfiCw

What is really cool about this article for me is that I have a purple sticky note on my note board that has two words written on it; gratitude and grace, which remind me of what Nadia has to say. These are two affirmation reminders I turn to on especially tough days. I try to remind myself to be grateful for all of the wonderful people and things in my life, and I try to remember to take failure and temper it with grace. I try to remember that one failure does not define who I am or how I got here. I try to remember that one failure does not negate my many, many successes.

I would also like to add a #4 to Nadia’s list.

COREY’S #4 – Separate work feelings with your personal life. I don’t know about you, but if I’ve had a bad day and I’m feeling particularly self-deprecating, I allow myself to feel like a monstrous failure in all aspects of my life. You cannot allow one bad day, or week, or quarter define who you are as a person and dictate how you feel about yourself. It’s on days like these that you have to consciously express gratitude for all of the wonderful things that have come to you as a result of you being the individual you are!

We hear a lot of talk about resilience in a down economy. Any entity has the ability to bounce back from suffering a setback, but resilience through positivity has to start on an individual level and trickle up. We cannot wait for someone or something to tell us it’s OK to feel optimism again. It’s like what Natalie says; think positive thoughts and welcome positivity back into your work life!

By Corey Switzer-Kruss

In Lieu of the tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon and ensuing manhunt in Boston & surrounding suburbs, I wanted to highlight how engineering and applied sciences have helped piece together a swift understanding of the bomb technologies used which aided in the identification of two suspects, one of whom is still at large.

When people think of the FBI, they see agents in the field wielding guns on under cover operations protecting the U.S. from domestic and international threats. Until Monday, when I read an article that cited the FBI sending bomb remains as well as unexploded bombs to their laboratory in Quantico, VA, I didn’t think of the vast number of engineers who must be employed by the FBI to investigate such devices.

According to post 9/11 data, the FBI trains up to 2000 new recruits each year – many of them field agents with an engineering or computer science degree. Their Applied Science, Engineering & Technology Career page states:

The FBI’s Applied Science, Engineering & Technology (ASE&T) professionals are at the cutting-edge of advances in forensic science, communications technology, electronic surveillance, biometrics, and other related fields. Our ASE&T Professionals utilize their scientific and technical knowledge and their expertise to solve problems faced by the FBI and other members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities. Typical challenges range from how to identify a potential terrorist based on a partial fingerprint or a single strand of hair, to how to listen in to the conversations of a suspected criminal, to how to perform lawfully authorized searches.

The FBI’s laboratory division, according to the site:

…is one of the largest and most comprehensive crime laboratories in the world. It provides forensic and technical services to FBI and other duly constituted law enforcement agencies to support investigative and intelligence priorities. Laboratory activities include crime scene searches, special surveillance photography, latent-fingerprint examinations, forensic examinations of evidence (ranging from blood and other biological materials to explosives, drugs, and firearms), court testimony, and other scientific and technical services. The FBI offers these services, free of charge, to all law enforcement agencies in the United States. In addition, FBI Laboratory Specialists provide training to other state and local crime laboratory and law enforcement personnel.

Further down the Lab Division career page they suggest useful backgrounds in forensic science, firearms, hazardous materials, incendiary/explosives, and weapons of mass destruction.

I have to believe that working for the FBI in any sense is not for the faint of heart. Take a deadline at a civilian job and multiply the stress by 100,000 – at least that’s my take on working for the bureau; though, what an incredible way to utilize your education and skills!

I would like to thank the FBI, Boston PD, Boston Fire Department and all other first responders (and heroic civilians) who came to the aid of our citizens on Monday and continue to work sleeplessly behind the scenes to serve justice.

If you are interested in working for the FBI, visit their career page here: https://www.fbijobs.gov/index.asp