In the hyper-competitive ‘jobs’ culture, young workers often expect their careers to reach meteoric heights on a quick timeline. Younger generations don’t stay at their jobs for quite as long as their parents did, whether it’s due to economic factors or the view that most jobs are mere stepping stones toward more lucrative salaries and better job titles.

Feeding into the perpetual rat race can lead to burnout, or worse — total disillusionment. While it might be easy to fall victim to this mindset, it’s better to view careers as the decades-long endeavour that it is, rather than a moonshot bid for rapid success.

If you like your job enough, stay for a while

If you’re in a constant rush to scale the ranks, you could risk losing out on opportunities already at your fingertips. Knuckling down and focusing on your current job will allow your skills to blossom, while constantly chasing new pastures in search of professional clout can put you on a merry-go-round where your skills may languish more than they grow.

Most people stay at their jobs for an average of four years, according to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labour and Statistics . That’s a pretty long time for most Millennials — and more than enough time to really master a trade before you feel the need to move on. If you feel you’re being nurtured and treated fairly by your employer, don’t rush for the door — it’s better to wait until the right opportunity, rather than will any quick opportunity into existence.

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Tune out the hype

Not everyone suffers from this, but there’s a noticeable current of careerism in today’s corporate world. LinkedIn is full of would-be influencers and aspiring business magnates who trumpet their accolades and pontificate about the culture of work. This is toxic, but especially so for anyone yearning for professional advancement. Subscribing to this sentiment can make you a status-chaser, and someone who isn’t so much into the work itself as much as potential titles, salary, and acclaim.

Do your best to hit the unsubscribe button. Perusing your peers’ latest career updates and musings on LinkedIn can do a lot to make your career feel woefully inadequate. Focus more on yourself and developing your own skills. That’ll help make work — in addition to life — way more enjoyable.

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Visualise your career path over the long haul

At the expense of sounding like a corporate consultant or corny stock broker, you should try imagining your career track like a graph that shows short-term versus long-term investment gains — it looks volatile in the short-term, but when you zoom out you can see the upward trend. When it comes to taking big risks versus staying the course, your career will likely wind up in the same place, or better, if you play it long.

It can often seem like critical time is passing by, especially as your peers make headway and progress in their careers while you seemingly aren’t, but understanding that no success story happens overnight can help keep you grounded. To put it in perspective again: You won’t be eligible to collect retirement benefits until you’re 65. One’s career spans decades from start to finish, so it’s best to take a deep breath and understand that you can and will get what you want, just maybe not immediately.

The post Your Career Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

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Managing your business’ presence on LinkedIn takes teamwork, but unless you really know and trust your colleagues, you probably aren’t comfortable sharing the company LinkedIn page’s password with another employee just so they can post updates.

Thankfully, LinkedIn now lets you add other users as admins for any page you own. With these new admin tools, you can give someone else the ability to post updates and manage new job listings for your company from their personal account. They never have to sign into the page.

There are obvious privacy benefits to using LinkedIn’s new admin roles, but they can also help you organise your business by assigning admin privileges based on a person’s role in the company.

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There are two types of admins you can create for a LinkedIn page: Page Admins , who maintain the page’s content and communication, and Paid Media Admins who can create and manage ads and sponsored content for a page. Each type has a hierarchy of roles that grant the admin different features and privileges. Here’s a quick explanation of each:

Page Admins:

• Super Admin: Has full access to all admin tools, and is the only role that can edit a page’s information, deactivate a page, or add (and remove) other page admins.
• Content Admin: Can create, post, and manage page-related updates, Events, Stories, and job listings.
• Analyst: Can access a page’s analytics tab on LinkedIn and access the page in third-party analytics tools.

Paid Media Admins:

• Sponsored Content Poster: Can post sponsored content and ads on behalf of a company through their personal LinkedIn profile.

• Lead Gen Forms Manager: Can download marketing lead data from page-associated ad campaigns.

• Pipeline Builder: Can create and edit Pipeline Builder landing pages for other Media Admins and manage leads through LinkedIn Recruiter.

LinkedIn says the new admin tools are rolling out to all users, but it may take some time before they’re universally available. However, once they are, you can start assigning admin roles to any employee, advertiser, or member associate with your page.

How to become an admin on LinkedIn

Users can request admin privileges for any page they work for or are otherwise associated with. The process is identical on desktop and mobile:

1. Add current position with the organisation on your LinkedIn profile. As LinkedIn’s support page notes , this is a required step to ensure you’re qualified to be an admin.
2. Open the LinkedIn page you’re requesting admin privileges for.
3. Click/tap the three dot “More” icon.
4. Select “Request Admin.”
5. Confirm that you’re authorised to become an Admin, then click/tap “Request access.”
6. You’ll receive a notification once your request is approved.

(Note that requesting access grants that page’s Super Admins access to your profile’s public info.)

The post Use Admin Roles to Share Access to LinkedIn Pages appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

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For people who aren’t used to patting themselves on the back, crafting a cover letter can feel like a daunting exercise, especially if you’re applying for a bunch of jobs in a short timeframe. But it’s worth the effort — what starts out as a blank word document will become an essential tool with which you’ll market your best talents and get strangers excited to put you on payroll.

If crafting a fresh cover letter for every application is daunting, you should consider using a template for your cover letters, but if you do, you’ll have be subtle about it. Using an obvious fill-in-the-blank template won’t earn you any points with hiring managers — you still want your personal flavour to shine through.

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Cover the basics

There is a simple formula to cover letter writing, which is to say that every letter doesn’t need to be completely original. Luckily, you can tailor your cover letter to follow a general flow, with paragraphs that discuss different aspects of your qualifications.

Here’s what Resume Genius suggests:

• Introductory paragraph: This is the section that gets you noticed. It’s what separates letters that get read in full from those that get thrown in a slush pile. Use this section to describe your experience in glowing terms, and note why it makes you a good fit for the job you’re applying to. (I always consider it a good practice to name the job you’re applying to, i.e. ‘I think my experience makes me an excellent candidate for the position of [insert job title].’”)
• Body paragraphs: Describe how your experience would be put to use in your role with the company. Feel free to elaborate on the information you have listed on your resume, detailing how it could be parlayed into workplace success.
• Call to action: In the last section — which should also include a thank you — tell the hiring manager about your excitement (taking the opportunity to circle back to your expertise one last time), and note that you’re looking forward to speaking to them.

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Tinker with the same rough outline for different jobs

While the general feel of a cover letter should be the same across the board — the focus is always going to be getting someone to notice you by singing your own praises — the content of your letter should vary based upon the job you’re trying to get.

So consider drafting a cover letter like a jigsaw puzzle, and then cutting/adding what you need to make it more appropriate for various gigs, making sure to address your ability to handle as many of the listed job responsibilities as possible by sharing examples from your career history . If you’re applying to a job in social media marketing one week and then a job in PR the next, you’re obviously going to give different skills more weight in your cover letter, depending upon the listing. But a lot of the general content about your experience, your career ambitions and what you bring to the table as a generous and hardworking colleague will remain the same.

You can think of your cover letter as your professional story. In this way, the letter is like a novel that proceeds toward a predetermined endpoint from a basic premise — only some of the chapters change depending upon the job you’re applying to.

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Realise what works across the board

If you’re able to come up with great copy that you think will make an HR manager weak in the knees, use it in all of your cover letters. Don’t submit the exact same letter across the board. But if you’ve come up with an effective way of phrasing various things — like your professional accolades, or compliments your managers have given you — then don’t be shy about shoehorning those things into all of your letters. Save a draft of every cover letter you send out so you can mine earlier versions for information relevant to other potential gigs.

A simple rule exists to justify cutting down on the time it takes to draft bespoke cover letters for each position: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. This is especially true of the general information about you as a worker and colleague, which will ring true no matter the job you’re gunning for.

The post How to Use a Cover Letter Template Without Making It Obvious appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

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