7 Job Search Tips for Military Veterans

7 Job Search Tips for Military Veterans7 Job Search Tips for Military VeteransTo be sure, the challenges can be daunting. Veterans, including those transitioning into the civilian job market, continue to face high unemployment rates and unique challenges. Still, job opportunities, including flexible work, can be found, and a range of public and private organizations offer support (see below).For those with military service, a good starting point is toupdate the skillsyou may have acquired in the military to suit the current job market. Beyond that, if youre a veteran, there are additional ways to get in prime position for success in the job market.Here are seven job search tips for military veteransHighlight your military service on your resume.Deciding whether to highlight your military hintergrund on your resume can bea topic for debate. But it may be worthwhile to make your military service a focal point of your resume, particularly if youre targeting positions or industry sectors where a military background is advantageous. However, if you suspect your military background is being held against you, make sure you know your rights under the Uniformed Service Employment and Reemployment Rights Act.Research local job opportunities.Youre probably well aware that the skills you learned in your military service can translate to job markets around the globe. But make sure you dont forget to check out whats available in your own backyard As a member, you can use our search options to target your job search by geographic location.Show how military skills translate into civilian skills.As a veteran, or the spouse of a veteran, its imperative to build and market skills that can transfer to the current job market. Do your best to take advantage of skill-boosting opportunities that present themselves during deployments, especially if the opportunity offers a chance to learn something completely new.Know the civilian counterparts to your military positions.Seek out milita ry skills translator services that can help you gain an understanding of the kinds of civilian sector jobs that are on par with your military experience. Services like those available onMilitary.com can offer great resources for veterans across all of the nations military branches.Get involved in civilian life.Adjusting to civilian life can offer significant challenges for veterans who may have become accustomed to the comfort zone of military structure. While easing into family life as a civilian can be a major priority, making a career transition can present its own hurdles. In some cases, usingpart-time and temporaryjobs as a career bridge can make the transition easier.Showcase your military awards, honors, andprofessional certifications.By shining a bright punktlicht on everything youve accomplished in your military career, you can demonstrate all the great talents youll bring to the table as a civilian employee. Any specialized expertise or certifications youve earned while in the service can be a springboard for continuing that same line of work in civilian life.Rely on your network to find military-friendly employers.Figuring out how to find jobs that are military friendly, as well as veteran friendly, can be a big step in propelling your job hunt to the next level. Understanding how to capitalize on your networkis a great accomplish for anyone in the job market. Veterans and military spouses alike can get ahead of the game by making the most of the networking resourcesthat may be available to them.These organizations can help in the military-to-civilian transitionBonds of Courage targets both active military and veterans, offering post-service employment support that includes interview preparation, skills translation, and networking advice and support.Veterans Green Jobsfocuses on job opportunities in the environmental and green industries, with an emphasis on helping former military members translate their skills in ways that help the environment.Wou nded Warrior Careers Programis an initiative of the National Organization on Disability that works to help veterans with severe military-related disabilities find meaningful civilian careers.Feds Hire Vetsprovides information and resources to help veterans and their families transition from military to civilian life.Readers, do you have job search tips for military veterans or resources that can help them find rewarding careers? Share your suggestions with us

Talk to Me Artificial intelligence and voice recognition will ...

Talk to Me Artificial intelligence and voice recognition will ... Talk to Me Artificial intelligence and voice recognition will ... Talk to Me Gregory Abowd owns one of the first Tesla cars, built before they were capable of autonomous driving. Abowd may leid have buyers remorse, but since he is a distinguished prof at the Georgia Institute of Technologys School of Interactive Computing and an expert in human-computer interfaces, hes been giving serious thought to how he wants his next Tesla- one that presumably will be able to drive on its own- to handle.One other thing I learned when I took an autonomous Tesla for a drive- I would like it to mimic my way of braking, Abowd said. Its braking style is much too abrupt for me. Today, teaching a smart car such tricks might require some serious programming, or perhaps a lengthy tour through multiple app screens and drop-down menus. But Abowd has a different vision. Within a few short years, he believes, we will be able to tal k with our cars and tell them what we want them to do. Their voice recognition ordnungsprinzips will leid only translate our words, but apply artificial intelligence to understand our intentions as well. Most of us may never learn how to program a cars braking wertmiger zuwachs, but soon we may have a simple way to reach deep into the heart of its control system and customize its behavior. Indeed, we may have the power to program any smart device in our homes, offices, and factories in ways that were previously impractical or impossible for all but the most sophisticated technophile. GE appliances are among hundreds of devices that have the ability to communicate with Amazons Alexa.That sounds radical, but new technology has been simplifying interfaces for decades. In the 1980s, personal computers transitioned from command lines to graphical interfaces that we could access by clicking a button on a mouse. Less than 10 years ago, the iPhones touchscreen and accelerometers revolutionized how we operated handheld devices.Voice recognition, its proponents argue, has the same potential to change what we expect from the everyday products. As those products grow smarter and more capable, voice promises to simplify how we communicate with smart cars, smart homes, smart offices, and smart factories. Instead of mastering one new app after another, voice could make it simpler to command them all.Incorporating voice interfaces will transform product design. The job of the mechanical engineer will be to beschirrung those capabilities, said Henry Lieberman, a pioneer of human-computer interaction at MITs Media Lab. People want to have to understand the details of how things work. Language will become a means- not to help users understand a product more easily, but to have the product understand its users.Machines that hear usAnyone who hung up in frustration on voice-activated virtual assistants such as Apples Siri or on voice-driven customer servi ce centers and never went back has missed the advances in voice recognition. Today it is fast, accurate, and smart enough to understand everyday speech- and consumers are increasingly taking to it. Two years ago, spotty performance discouraged most people from using speech to run Google searches on their phones. This year, 20 percent of queries handled by Android phones were spoken, according to Google. Thats 20 billion spoken queries daily. Voice recognition is also expanding its beachhead in physical products. Many new cars use voice to place calls, set the GPS, write and receive texts, change radio stations, and adjust the temperature. The Eurofighter Typhoon military jet has a speech recognition system capable of controlling communications and allowing pilots to assign targets. This is only the start, Lieberman said. Speech is not only convenient, but also much richer than typing or flicking an app.Think about it, Lieberman said. We only speak to other human beings . So when we speak to a computer, we treat it as another human being. Its like talking to a dog. You know it doesnt really understand you, but you express yourself as if it does. Thats the synergy you get from voice recognition that you dont get from typing.The real sea change wont come from products responding to clearly enunciated commands. Rather, it will happen when they wade through the torrent of half-finished sentences, parenthetical remarks, and place-holding ums- and figure out what we really mean.custompagebreakArtificial intelligence connected to the Internet makes that possible. The machine learning software behind voice recognition analyzes data from actual interactions to improve its performance. By analyzing the words used in searches, for instance, voice systems know which words are likely to go together, and those inferred relationships help them make sense of complex sentences.In the connected world, machine learning software can draw on a billion int eractions a day. That learning shows. Voice recognition can now easily navigate accents or pick out a single voice in a crowded room. Most voice systems are more than 97 percent accurate in identifying individual words. And while virtual assistants may not know the meaning of our words, their ability to link words helps them figure out what we want.Not only is voice recognition more capable, it is also easier for engineers to use. There are many large vendors- Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance, and Baidu- and several offer free software to developers. And semiconductor firms such as ARM Holdings, Intel, and Sensory have introduced new chips optimized for voice. These chips provide fast, reliable voice recognition, even when devices are not linked to the Internet.Nouns, verbs, and beyondThe graphical interfaces weve used for a generation make it straightforward for systems to interpret the commands they receive. A touchscreen may have clearly marked buttons for each input, or specialized apps access different operations. That clarity makes it easy for a device to understand what a user wants.With voice recognition, the same input is used for initiating everything, from setting a thermostat to making a phone call. An always-on virtual assistant in a device that sits on a kitchen counter or desk, such as Amazons Alexa, must field seemingly random requests and figure out whether to access a grocery list or a music library when someone asks for some Red Hot Chili Peppers.Vendors that want to use Alexas voice interface to control their products must first bridge this gap. Wink is one company that has done this. It makes hubs that work with a broad sortiment of home automation products from many different vendors, each with its own capabilities and commands. Wink brings order to this profusion of interfaces by creating a common model for each class of product, Matt Bornski, Winks chief architect of enterprise services, said. Its li ghting model, for example, supports every feature found in smart lightbulbs, from simple actions like turn off or dim to less common ones, such as change colors. Each light uses a subset of these commands.The common interface also makes it easier to link different devices with Alexa. Bornski does this by creating a framework, or domain, for each common model. The domain relates the words we might use to the actions a product can take. This enables Alexa to understand what we mean when we talk to our lights.Wink has been so successful with its common model approach that it recently signed a deal to link the Alexa home automation system with Fords voice-activated car consoles. The resulting system will let customers check the gas tank before the morning commute or turn on their porch light from the car. Creating voice interfaces requires building in safeguards that might not be obvious to those used to tangible controls. For example, Alexa will activate but not disarm a security system. You dont want a burglar to yell Turn off the alarm through the back window, Bornski said. The system also needs to anticipate that it wont work perfectly, given the limits of the equipment and requests from fallible humans.If I tell one light to turn red and it cant, Ill get an error message, Bornski explained. But if I tell all my lights to turn red and only some of them can do it, I would feel frustrated if I got an error message. So our system does what a human would do, and changes all lights that accept the command.Other companies are designing voice interfaces that take into account that speech conveys not just nouns and verbs- but also emotion. IBM, for example, infers the emotional content of words by using its Watson deep learning technology, said Rama Akkiraju, a distinguished engineer at IBM Research in Almaden, Calif. And IPsofts Amelia cognitive assistant can tell when customers are losing patience with automated transactions and call for a live agent.IPsoft got its start developing virtual engineers to automate routine IT tasks. Still, it takes experts to use the virtual engineers. Amelia uses voice recognition so anyone can ask these engineers for help. I can tell Amelia I want to install a new speakerphone in a conference room, said Jonathan Crane, IPsofts chief commercial officer. Amelia will check if the room can support the phone, whether the phone is available, and if I have the authority to order it. It fills out all the paperwork. Instead of me speaking IT, I can speak to Amelia in English and it just does it. Such performance impressed two global consulting firms, Accenture and Deloitte. They recently signed deals to use Amelia to automate business processes and IT center engineering and administration. custompagebreakMarc Carrel-Billiard, Accentures global managing director for technology RD, believes Amelia can help technicians maintain products. He points to air-conditioning repair as an ex ample. We could feed a user guide into Amelia so she understands how it works. Instead of looking for information in a manual or on a tablet, a technician could explain what he or she tried and Amelia would give advice like, If you did this and it didnt work, try that. Over time, Amelia would learn more about how the system worked, and one day might apply what it learned about one model of air conditioner to another.Meanwhile, a few manufacturers have approached Crane about capturing the hard-won knowledge of an experienced but aging workforce. Amelia, Crane said, could act like an intelligent apprentice. It could look over a technicians shoulder, recording and transcribing explanations and abstracting it for later analysis. These conversations are giving us a strong sense of how we might solve these problems, Crane said. Working togetherOther groups are harnessing voice recognition and artificial intelligence to forge new models for human-machine collaboration. Compa nies like Rethink Robotics and Universal Robotics already make collaborative robots. While they learn new tasks easily, they cannot really change collaboration strategies on the fly. But the collaborative robot built at Georgia Tech by doctoral student Crystal Chao, now with Google, and her advisor, Andrea Thomaz, now a professor at University of Texas, adjusts to its human partners by simply talking with- and listening to- them.To show how this works, Chao and Thomaz created a task building a Lego tower. They outfitted the robot not only with mechanical hands and vision sensors, but also with microphones and speakers. Then they gave the robot and its human partner different goals. We might tell the robot to use a red door and the human to make the tower six blocks high, Thomaz said. Sometimes, the robot followed the humans lead, placing like-colored blocks the way one child might copy another. Other times, rather than wait for a command, the robot took the initiative . It might, for example, simply add the red door or ask if the color was okay. The conversation flowed naturally. The robot reacted to human commands, and also to half-formed phrases, laughter, and verbal shortcuts like uh-huh or uh-uh that humans take for granted. Sometimes, the robot even interrupted with a suggestion or a question. The interactions looked very much like the way humans collaborate with one another. In this type of collaborative dialogue, were not leaning anything, were just substantiating what we already know, Thomaz said.The results were far from perfect. Humans are much better than robots at inferring what a partner is trying to do, and to reacting to dialogue that is outside the domain created by the robots developers. Still, this robots flexibility is anything but robotic. It is a glimpse of how AI-driven voice recognition might soon change the way we work with machines. Clearly, voice recognition has a way to go. It still gets simple searches w rong, and nobody is about to use it to control sophisticated machinery. But remember, this is a self-correcting technology that learns from every mistake. It will only get better and better. By coupling natural language requests to the deepest workings of the operating system, we may soon have new types of products that will give anyone access to features that only a professional could manipulate today. Instead of pouring through a manual to find the proper technique for an in-camera effect, one could simply tell the camera, Focus on the faces, and make the hintergrund blurry, and the system would produce the image. A microwave would ask you what you were cooking and then apply a sequence of power cycles to crisp it to perfection. Or the autonomous driving system of a Tesla could respond to the critiques of Georgia Techs Abowd and adjust its brakes- or cornering performance or acceleration- to his liking. It is certainly not hard to imagine technicians working with fl exible robots capable of reacting to their motions and commands on the fly. More powerfully, systems may one day provide advice to engineers looking to boost factory performance, or help designers work through difficult problems when they are not sure how to explain what they are want. Language is a rich enough medium to do all that. And so much more.Alan S. Brown is associate editor at Mechanical Engineering magazine.

Financial Advisor Pay by Commissions

Financial Advisor Pay by CommissionsFinancial Advisor Pay by CommissionsFinancial advisor pay based on commissions is the traditional method within the financial services industry. It is shorthand for saying that clients are charged a fee, usually called a commission, for each security transaction made, whether to buy or to sell. The financial advisor, in turn, receives a portion of these commissions back as compensation, usually through an intermediate process that converts commissions into a metric called production credits. A potential source of confusion comes from the fact that the title financial advisor can be applied to both investment brokers operating according to the suitability standard and registered investment advisors operating under the fiduciary standard. While commission based client relationships are the long-established norm among the former, the latter traditionally work on a fee-only basis. Financial advisor pay may vary by type of security sold, and typically t he percentage he or she retains increases as the total commissions (or production credits) earned during the year increase. It is often referred to as the financial advisors payout rate. The firms matrix of payout rates typically is called its payout grid. Advantages to the Client Basing financial advisor pay on commissions generally is the fruchtwein advantageous option for clients who are long term investors, following a buy and hold investment strategy rather than one which involves frequent trading and rapid portfolio turnover. It is doubly true if the client is largely self-directed and financially savvy, not needing much ongoing attention and advice from the financial advisor. Advantages to the Financial Advisor For financial advisors who are aggressive and skilled in sales, and whose clients are comfortable with investment strategies that involve high transaction volumes, a commission based payment plan can yield considerably higher compensation than alternative metho ds. However, the more active a brsenspekulant a client is, and the greater the financial assetson deposit in the clients account, the more likely the client is to demand (and receive) increasingly discounted commission rates versus the standard rates charged by the firm. Only the most confident and aggressive financial advisors typically succeed in holding the line against client demands for discounts in these scenarios. Conflicts of Interest When a financial advisor is on a commission basis, there is a clear conflict of interest, given that pay is linked directly to generating transactions, rather than to investment performance. The practice by which unscrupulous financial advisors seek to maximize their commission-based compensation through excessive trading is referred to as churning. Churning is a particular danger with so-called discretionary accounts, in which the financial advisor has been granted the ability to enter trades on his or her own discretion, without first obt aining explicit permission from the client. With a non-discretionary account, the financial advisor must obtain such permission from the client for every transaction that he or she proposes. A telephone conversation suffices as a means to obtain such approval. Because of the potential legal exposures, the compliance departments in the most conservative securities brokerage firms tend to place severe restrictions on the ability of clients to open discretionary accounts. Prevalence Among registered investment advisors operating on a fiduciary basis who serve individual clients and have at least $25 million in client assets (these advisors also must be registered to act as broker/dealers), the percentage of those who earn commissions has been 22% in 201023% in 200924% in 2008 Note Some of the investment advisors counted here accept multiple payment plans, which differ by client or client account. Thus the percentages in this study add to more than 100% across all payment types. The se figures come from a study by Dr. Lukas Dean, Assistant Professor and Financial Planning Program Director at the Cotsakos College of Business at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Findings of this study were cited in How to Pay Your Financial Adviser, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2011.