Use eSight as a Dynamic Tool for Managing Your Career

Summary:
Tap into eSight's resources and dialogues. Join job-seeking/employed individuals with disabilities and disability-friendly employers who are generating answers to key disability employment questions -- answers you may need.

Benefits

You benefit two ways by registering -- for free -- as a member of eSight Careers Network:

• You gain immediate access to career management guidance geared to those of us with disabilities who are dedicated to lifelong learning and who believe we are responsible for managing our own careers.
  
  
• You join an extensive network of individual employees, job seekers, career counselors, job developers and prospective employers who are sharing their ideas, based on personal experience, about what works best in a wide range of disability employment issues.
  
  

Managing your career can be a lonely journey.

But, as a member of eSight Careers Network, you are not alone as you take personal responsibility for your own career -- and begin to develop a sense of accomplishment, hope, dignity and purpose for yourself through work.

By interacting with other members of eSight Careers Network, you'll begin to identify your individual strengths and discover how to use them as a full participant in today's workplace.


Approach

By pinpointing what you do well and what you enjoy doing, you'll likely find yourself helping individuals with a set of problems you love to solve.

And, by helping an individual solve problems, you may discover you're solving many of your own.

Individuals count. The approach eSight Careers Network takes in career management is based on these three principles:

1. Individuals hire people to solve problems.
   
   
2. Businesses thrive by helping individuals ease a pain or attain a gain.
   
   
3. People work for individuals -- not companies, firms or organizations.
   
   

Features

You can build a meaningful career for yourself by learning how to interact effectively with individuals. You can do that, as a first step at least, by using eSight Careers Network as:

• An exchange for sharing your ideas and experiences with others who are dealing with circumstances that are similar -- and not similar -- to your own.
  
  
• A support group for discussing specific work issues and the best approaches for dealing with those issues.
  
  
• An interpreter of what job forecasts by others in various parts of the world mean in terms of career opportunities for you.
  
  
• A guide for approaching career management on a step-by-step, integrated basis (either by yourself or with the help of a career counselor) so you can chart and implement your own plan.
  
  
• A clearinghouse for recommending, assessing and ranking career management resources on eSight Careers Network and on the Web according to how well they meet your needs and the needs of others.
  
  
• A bridge for connecting you to key business leaders and what they are telling us about how you can successfully build a career in today's job market.
  
  

Distinction

Building your career around helping individuals effectively deal with problems you love to solve is an achievement that often does not happen by chance or in isolation. It's more likely based on an intentional, step-by-step approach to career management with the help of a career counselor, mentor or another eSight member.

That's why the content within eSight Careers Network revolves around 19 steps in a comprehensive approach to career management. Through comprehensive, well-researched, well-written articles, those steps specifically address issues you, like most people, will probably face at one time or another in your career development.

But eSight Careers Network also goes beyond mainstream career issues. Each of its 19 career management steps also addresses the additional issues those of us need to resolve because we are blind or have a visual impairment or live with other physical disabilities.

So, whether you're a job seeker, a budding entrepreneur or an interested employer, you can jump into the step or career management stage that most accurately describes your current interest, perhaps with an individual you've met through eSight Careers Network.

Or, you can start with step one and systematically proceed through the entire process, perhaps with a career counselor.

Whatever your need, you can use this dynamic resource to develop a personalized plan for managing your career. Those 19 career management steps are organized into three simple guides which provide context for the more than 1,000 articles in eSight Career Network's database.

The references on eSight's login page represent a small portion of the extensive content you'll be able to access after you register as an eSight member. Get a feel for the depth and richness of that content by checking out this week's Recommended Reading List for Job Seekers, Entrepreneurs and Employers. All of those articles have been written by individuals with disabilities who have experience in the mainstream world of work.

The real action on eSight Careers Network, though, is the information sharing and knowledge building that occurs in several of its key interactivity venues. These venues provide opportunities for people with a wide variety of disabilities to connect with one another and with prospective employers. They are what makes eSight Careers Network unique.

These opportunities for interactivity include:

• Blindstorming combines the concepts of brainstorming, weblogging and self-help into a unique eSight tool people with visual impairments and other disabilities can use for sharing ideas, supporting each other and developing community wisdom about career management issues.
  
  
• TalkBack is an editorial feature in eSight's NetWork News, a free e-mail newsletter. Subscribers have an opportunity to quickly submit their comments about the current editorial.
  
  
• Member Net is a problem-solving forum about disability employment in which eSight members generate potential answers to disability employment issues submitted by those within the eSight community.
  
  
• Second Thoughts forum offers Sight members an opportunity to tap, rethink and reshape their best insights from the past few months about managing a career with a disability.
  
  
• eSight Phone Conferences bring people together from different states in the U.S. to hear experts discuss disability employment issues and get their questions answered.
  
  
• Company Profiles of disability-friendly organizations provide direct links to available jobs and encourage online resume submissions.
  
  

eSight Careers Network is dynamic because it continually changes and develops as you join other eSight members in adding, through your submissions, your insight to disability employment issues which matter most to you.

Register as a member of eSight Careers Network now. As a member, you'll receive the latest newsletter, eSight's NetWork News, or discussion topic notice each Wednesday by e-mail so you can keep up with what's new on eSight Careers Network and participate in its forums.

In doing so, you'll be helping people with disabilities throughout the world build resources for managing their careers.

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