Statistics reveal that companies lose millions of dollars due to their employees' miscommunications. If you are looking to advance your career, consider asking yourself these questions about your communication skills first.

What makes the job search process difficult is the fact that you are both product and salesperson. With that in mind, consider the important distinction between presenting and positioning. Presenting is telling your story from your point-of-view. Positioning, on the other hand, is telling your story from the customer’s point-of-view.

Laura Warren didn’t know how to make the right career connections – until she learned she’d had them all the time.

Blogging has become an impulsive contemporary art for careerists. Should you develop your own blog or shouldn’t you? Will it help or hurt your career? Let me present this canvas to you as a primer of sorts to think about this issue.

If you haven’t figured out that you are being Googled in your job search just as frequently as you are Googling your business contacts, then it is time to enter the world of modern career management. Whether you want to or not, you must develop and maintain some kind of professional online profile and recognize that people are forming opinions about you based on what they find after typing your name into a search engine.

Along with a little humility, there are three important 'ilities' that are critical to your candidature. These traits will ensure that you get noticed by hiring managers and executive recruiters.

No matter how much you want -- or how right you may be for -- a position or a promotion, if you are unable to set yourself apart from your competition, you will lose to the candidate who does. So, how do you "dazzle" the person making the decision regarding your next advancement?

Many individuals approach their work with a need-the-job-to-pay-my-bills attitude -- not a winner's strategy. Adhering to employer-laborer dynamics, reminiscent of the nineteenth century, provides very little motivation to the workforce. Work becomes a forced endeavor with such a mindset and there is no desire to make a difference or to go the extra mile. The end results of this approach are minimal professional growth and a lack of satisfaction. However, what if the perspective were reprogrammed?

However humbled you've been by a layoff, whatever savings you've lost in your portfolio and regardless of the size of your home's equity value - you're still the one with all the power. When, as now, headlines hammer home what you cannot control, remind yourself of the one thing you do control: You.

Simply put, personal branding can be defined as the initial and authentic lasting impression you want to give people. True career entrepreneurs understand that personal brands should be built during times of career comfort.