I hope you got as much out of reading and commenting about the posts in Career Week as I did writing them. While the posts themselves were written to speak to those who are currently unemployed, I think the ideas and tips I shared are applicable to anyone looking for a job. If you have employed and are looking for a better job, you can use the tips from Career Week to get to the next level. If you are employed and looking to change your career path, you can use the ideas from some of these posts to help you make that change.

For this week’s Your Take, I wanted to ask you to share your best career tip. It can be anything related to career advice from looking for a job to preparing your resume, from interviewing preparation tips to salary negotiation. There are many many topics I didn’t cover in the series, so feel free to cover them here in your best career tips.

I’m eager to hear the great ideas you have! (feel free to leave two or three or five, don’t feel like you need to limit it to just one)

(Photo: krishnade)

An MSNBC article this week discussed how women are increasingly earning more than their husbands. Twenty years ago, 17.8% of women outearned their husbands. In 2007, 25.9% outearned their husbands if they both worked and 33.5% of married women outearned their husbands period. It’s estimated that the percentage bas probably jumped because of all the jobs lost in the recession, it’s estimated that nearly 75% were held by men.

The Shriver Report conducted a survey and found that 65.3% of women and 61.2% of men were comfortable with women earning more than men. I want to know, what do you think?

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You never forget your first job, right? At the age of 15, you can’t legally work in New York yet unless you jumped through all these hoops to get a work permit. It was this stupid little green card that said you would only work during certain hours of the day, the total number of hours per week couldn’t exceed some number, and was a really big pain in the butt to get.

I wanted the card because I needed one to work the cushiest job I knew about, the library. I heard librarians were making ridiculous money putting books away in a nice, air conditioned building. After getting the card, I soon learned that everyone else had the same bright idea and some crazy people were doing it for free! The wait-list for a summer job at the library was months.

So we went to option two and my first job ended being at a Chinese takeout restaurant. I answered phones, prepared people’s take out orders, and banked a lovely $5 an hour tax free. Turns out the stupid card was completely unnecessary if they just handed me cash at the end of the day. I think I worked there for a year or so, getting a couple raises in the process (I think I ended at like $6.50 an hour), and getting a good lesson in life. All in all, I think it was a great first job experience.

What was your first job?

(Photo: rhoran)

Last week, I asked you what you’d tell yourself ten years ago. Today, I’m flipping the script… if you were visited by your future self, say ten years into the future, what would you like your future self to say about what you’ve accomplished the last ten years?

I would like my future self to tell me that I had started a family, started holding annual charitable events (much like my friend Scott and his very successful twice-annual Ghent Bar Tour), and built up Bargaineering to be a premier personal finance resource on the web. I’ve always measured success as a mixture of family, community, and career so to have reached those successes within ten years would be pretty exciting to hear. To top it all off, I’d like to know that I did it with hard work and determination mixed in with a little bit of luck, to help solidify what I learned the last ten years.

What would you like to accomplish in ten?

(Photo: bitterjug)

If you want to learn how to effectively build your brand, something you’ll need and take with you regardless of who you work for, then you need to get Me 2.0 by Dan Schawbel because it’ll teach you all the techniques and tools you’ll need to master. One of the most important lessons I learned in becoming a full-time blogger was the importance of building a brand. Bargaineering has grown, mostly by accident, to one of the top personal finance blogs over the last four years. I’ve learned to use tools like videocasts, forums, Twitter, and internet radio to build up the Bargaineering brand and I’ve been blessed that people like you find value in what I write and speak about and continue to read and visit the site every day.

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When I was a kid, my parents taught me that my job was to do well in school so that I could get into a good college. In college, my job was to do well, earn my diploma, and then get a good job. Once I started working, I was told that leaders take leadership training classes and took rotational assignments in areas others didn’t. I, of course, wanted to be a leader (that’s what’s next right?). I started signing up for all these classes that had great names and interesting content but really lacked any application in my day to day activities.

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“Excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity.”

That’s a quote from a TED.com video I watched this week in which Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and social action at Swarthmore College and frequent contributor to the New York Times, calls for discusses how our society has gone mad with an abrupt loss of “practical wisdom” in the face of bureacracy, the failure of incentives, and rules often protect us from disaster but ensure mediocrity.

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Jonathan Fields was once a “high-powered mega-firm Manhattan lawyer,” who worked “endless hours and was literally getting sick from the demands of is intense career,” that is, until a 72-hour work bender had him rushed into a stress-induced emergency surgery. He had a perforated intestine. Afterwards, he decided to leave his six-figure job and seek a better life based on meaning. He became a serial entrepreneur, building up several successful health and fitness companies (among other things) and penned Career Renegade – How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love. What’s very interesting is that his story isn’t unique – Bargaineering contributor Gary Bonner worked himself into a heart attack and Professor Jim O’Donnell left a lucrative career in finance to pursue a life with greater meaning, but Jonathan Fields wrote a book about it.

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