Author: Jen van Heerden

LinkedIn isn’t a gimmick, it’s a weapon in your professional arsenal. If you’re not yet using it, it’s time to start! LinkedIn offers users the opportunity to showcase themselves to potential employers, business leads, peers, and social connectors. It can be an incredibly valuable platform to be on, if you make effective use of it….

Get your assertiveness on! A number of years ago when I was working in a large corporate, I received feedback from my manager that I had a “low tolerance for incompetence.” Interestingly, this is was not given as a piece of positive feedback, but rather it was a critique. I know this because the next…

We’re a society obsessed with actions and outcomes. We’re bombarded with apps that increase our productivity, TED talks promising to revolutionise the way we get things done, and self-completing sentences in our gmail. Biodegradable coffee cups mean we can drink our coffee on the run – guilt-free – and 20-minute gym classes allow us to…

Recently, I had a conversation with a woman in love with Twitter. She’s an Employer Branding expert by profession and tweets like the rest of us breathe. She couldn’t believe that I wasn’t on twitter and insisted that as soon as I got back to my laptop, I create a profile and start tweeting. And…

For decades, Industrial Psychologists have argued that regardless of ability, one of the strongest indicators of professional success is conscientiousness – sticking to a task until it’s done and completing it according to expectations. Conscientiousness is especially admirable in an entrepreneurial context, when there is no manager holding you to account, and specifically in new…