U.S. Soccer has 250 employees and a $170 million budget. It fields and funds teams that compete internationally. It hires coaches, negotiates with sponsors and flies players and support staff where they need to go. But it also oversees youth soccer, recreational soccer and even wheelchair and beach soccer — a total of more than 3.7 million registered players. Cone presides over all of them. The comparison isn’t perfect, but imagine the commissioner of Major League Baseball also running Little League — and beer-league softball.
The divergent interests make for an unwieldy organization, and frequently a dysfunctional one. Votes are apportioned to membership blocs and state organizations. “The structure of U.S. Soccer requires that each member advocate for their own interests,” Garber says, and some of these members have been advocating on the local and regional levels for decades. To them, those teams on television in red, white and blue could constitute a distraction and a drain on resources… At times, that tension grinds the organization to a standstill. “I don’t think if someone was putting together the federation today, they would set it up like this,” Cone says.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word unwieldy in a sentence?
Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.
Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.
If you want a better idea of how unwieldy can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.
Last week, we used our job skills list to choose a resume type that best aligns with your needs. Now, you should have all the ingredients ready to start building out your resume. Over the next two issues, we’ll discuss your resume section-by-section, and by the end of this series, you’ll have a thoughtful resume built to help you go after your desired future role.
There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump right in.
Here’s part one of your resume section-by-section breakdown.
Quick note: Here, we’re discussing resume sections for chronological or combination resumes since they are the most readable options for applicant tracking systems (ATS). Sometimes a functional resume may be a better choice, particularly if you’re transitioning into a new career path and not applying for roles through an ATS.
Resume header
Keep your header simple. Stick to your name, email, phone number, city, and portfolio/website URL, if you have one. Generally, there’s no need to put your full address here. That practice has become a lot less common as businesses have shifted toward digital communications.
Objective or summary
Do you need a resume objective or summary? Not necessarily, but this is a nice place to neatly introduce yourself as you want to be seen and set the tone for your resume.
Career change tip: If you’re changing careers and are having a hard time finding comparable language between your past roles and your desired role, consider taking an entry-level online course in your desired role. Sometimes, even if the tasks are similar across both roles, the way people talk about those tasks differs. Taking an entry-level course can be a quick way to gather insight into the language people use when talking about transferable skills.
Your objective is your statement of intent, or your immediate goal with this job search, and can be a useful addition if you are applying for your first job or changing careers. Your summary is a synopsis of your achievements so far, which tends to work better if you’re aiming to advance your career. (Whether or not you include an objective or summary statement, it is a good practice to write a LinkedIn summary for your profile.)
Work experience
The work experience section is where you detail your tasks and impact in your previous roles. Here, you should present the most compelling evidence that you’ve been growing toward your target role for as long as you’ve been working (whether or not you were doing so intentionally).
For each role, include the company and location, your title, and the dates you worked there. Then, add a few bullet points describing what you did during your time in that role. With page-limit constraints, you likely won’t be able to include everything you did in any given role. Use the items on your job skills list to guide which of your responsibilities to include.
Try to frame your responsibilities as achievements. One way to do that in a resume bullet is to follow the template “Did [task] in order to [outcome], which resulted in [impact].” For example:
Analyzed web traffic data to identify new content opportunities, resulting in a 50 percent increase in site visits year-over-year.
With this format, you can see what I did, why I did it, and why it mattered—all in a 19-word bullet point. You can also show off a workplace skill by incorporating adverbs, adjectives, or descriptive phrases.
In this section, align your phrasing with the language you compiled in your job skills list. You don’t have to directly lift your resume phrasing from the job descriptions, but try to use similar terms since the ATS may be programmed to seek those words and/or their synonyms.
If you feel like your resume bullets are reading a little flat or repetitive, take a look at our list of resume action words to see if there’s a more specific or interesting verb to kick off your resume bullets.
Lastly (for now), if you’re overwhelmed by the amount of experience you’re including in this section, consider whether you can cut out some of your earlier roles. Learn more about how far back your resume should go based on your experience level.
Next week, we’ll continue building your resume with sections for your education, certifications, skills, hobbies, and volunteer work. (Are we missing a section? Let us know in the comments so we can be sure to address it!) See you then!
Have a career question you’d like us to answer next? Share it below. And, as always, we welcome YOUR advice and experience in the comments.
Do you get enough one-on-one attention from your teachers? Have you ever wished you had more access to tutors — in or outside the classroom? Would you ever want an A.I.-enhanced chatbot as a tutor or coach? Why, or why not?
On a recent morning, Cheryl Drakeford, a third-grade teacher at First Avenue Elementary School in Newark, projected a challenging math question on her classroom’s whiteboard: “What fraction of the letters in the word MATHEMATICIAN are consonants?”
Ms. Drakeford knew that “consonant” might be an unfamiliar word to some students. So she suggested they ask Khanmigo, a new tutoring bot that uses artificial intelligence, for help.
She paused for a minute while about 15 schoolchildren dutifully typed the same question — “What are consonants?” — into their math software. Then she asked the third-graders to share the tutoring bot’s answer.
“Consonants are the letters in the alphabet that are not vowels,” one student read aloud. “The vowels are A, E, I, O and U. Consonants are all the other letters.”
Tech industry hype and doomsday prophesies around A.I.-enhanced chatbots like ChatGPT sent many schools scrambling this year to block or limit the use of the tools in classrooms. Newark Public Schools is taking a different approach. It is one of the first school systems in the United States to pilot test Khanmigo, an automated teaching aid developed by Khan Academy, an education nonprofit whose online lessons are used by hundreds of districts.
Newark has essentially volunteered to be a guinea pig for public schools across the country that are trying to distinguish the practical use of new A.I.-assisted tutoring bots from their marketing promises.
Proponents contend that classroom chatbots could democratize the idea of tutoring by automatically customizing responses to students, allowing them to work on lessons at their own pace. Critics warn that the bots, which are trained on vast databases of texts, can fabricate plausible-sounding misinformation — making them a risky bet for schools.
Officials in Newark, the largest district in New Jersey, said they were cautiously testing the tutoring bot in three schools. Their findings could influence districts across the United States that are vetting A.I. tools this summer for the upcoming school year.
What experiences have you had with tutoring — as a tutor or tutee? What do you think makes an effective tutor — human or otherwise?
What is your reaction to the pilot test of Khanmigo, an automated teaching aid developed by Khan Academy, in Newark Public Schools?
The article says that proponents of A.I. contend that classroom chatbots could “democratize” tutoring by “customizing responses to students, allowing them to work on lessons at their own pace.” However, critics warn that the bots often “fabricate plausible-sounding misinformation” and give students answers rather than helping them “to use their critical thinking skills.” What do you see as the risks and benefits of using A.I. as tutors?
How has A.I. affected you as a student? Have you experimented with the technology? What recommendations would you give to creators of Khanmigo or other A.I. tutors as engineers design and improve their classroom bots?
Ms. Singer writes that extreme fears around A.I.-enhanced chatbots sent many schools “scrambling this year to block or limit the use of the tools in classrooms.” Does your school have a policy on the use of A.I.? If so, do you agree with that policy? How do you think we should view the role of A.I. in education? Should schools be afraid of it? Or, as in the Newark pilot, embrace the technology and explore possible benefits?
Do you think A.I.-assisted tutoring bots are an educational game-changer? Will they be in every classroom in the future?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Guatemala is holding a runoff presidential election on Sunday in which an anticorruption crusader is vying against a former first lady aligned with the country’s conservative political establishment to lead Central America’s most populous nation.
… Given that neither of the two current candidates secured more than 20 percent of the vote in June, the runoff provides a chance for the winner to obtain a stamp of legitimacy. But the abstention rate, which was nearly 40 percent in the first round, will be closely watched by pro-democracy groups as a sign of broad disenchantment with Guatemala’s political system.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word abstention in a sentence?
Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.
Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.
If you want a better idea of how abstention can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.
1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On Thursday afternoons, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?
The Reveal
We’ll post more information here on Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned!
Students 13 and older in the United States and the Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools moved classes online. Was your school one of them? If so, what was it like to attend school online? Did you enjoy it? Did it work for you?
In early 2020, as the coronavirus spread, schools around the world abruptly halted in-person education. To many governments and parents, moving classes online seemed the obvious stopgap solution.
In the United States, school districts scrambled to secure digital devices for students. Almost overnight, videoconferencing software like Zoom became the main platform teachers used to deliver real-time instruction to students at home.
Now a report from UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational and cultural organization, says that overreliance on remote learning technology during the pandemic led to “staggering” education inequality around the world. It was, according to a 655-page report that UNESCO released on Wednesday, a worldwide “ed-tech tragedy.”
The report, from UNESCO’s Future of Education division, is likely to add fuel to the debate over how governments and local school districts handled pandemic restrictions, and whether it would have been better for some countries to reopen schools for in-person instruction sooner.
The UNESCO researchers argued in the report that “unprecedented” dependence on technology — intended to ensure that children could continue their schooling — worsened disparities and learning loss for hundreds of millions of students around the world, including in Kenya, Brazil, Britain and the United States.
The promotion of remote online learning as the primary solution for pandemic schooling also hindered public discussion of more equitable, lower-tech alternatives, such as regularly providing schoolwork packets for every student, delivering school lessons by radio or television — and reopening schools sooner for in-person classes, the researchers said.
“Available evidence strongly indicates that the bright spots of the ed-tech experiences during the pandemic, while important and deserving of attention, were vastly eclipsed by failure,” the UNESCO report said.
The UNESCO researchers recommended that education officials prioritize in-person instruction with teachers, not online platforms, as the primary driver of student learning. And they encouraged schools to ensure that emerging technologies like A.I. chatbots concretely benefited students before introducing them for educational use.
Education and industry experts welcomed the report, saying more research on the effects of pandemic learning was needed.
“The report’s conclusion — that societies must be vigilant about the ways digital tools are reshaping education — is incredibly important,” said Paul Lekas, the head of global public policy for the Software & Information Industry Association, a group whose members include Amazon, Apple and Google. “There are lots of lessons that can be learned from how digital education occurred during the pandemic and ways in which to lessen the digital divide.”
Jean-Claude Brizard, the chief executive of Digital Promise, a nonprofit education group that has received funding from Google, HP and Verizon, acknowledged that “technology is not a cure-all.” But he also said that while school systems were largely unprepared for the pandemic, online education tools helped foster “more individualized, enhanced learning experiences as schools shifted to virtual classrooms.”
Education International, an umbrella organization for about 380 teachers’ unions and 32 million teachers worldwide, said the UNESCO report underlined the importance of in-person, face-to-face teaching.
“The report tells us definitively what we already know to be true, a place called school matters,” said Haldis Holst, the group’s deputy general secretary. “Education is not transactional nor is it simply content delivery. It is relational. It is social. It is human at its core.”
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
You don’t get a second chance to make a lasting first impression. It’s a powerful statement, but it’s also daunting when you don’t know about personal branding, its value as a determinant of success, and how to curate a strong brand. What does it mean for you to have a personal brand? Do I really need one? Who would see it? Where would you share it? In this article, we delve into the power of personal branding and explain how this can boost your professional reputation.
What is Personal Branding?
Here’s what personal branding is not. It’s not just a catchy tagline. Nor can it be reduced to having an active and attractive online presence on every social platform. Personal branding is your personal story and narrative that tells the world who you are, what you do, and what you stand for. Your personal brand is an authentic representation of all these things, sharing what value you bring to any room.
Why is Personal Branding Important in Today’s Business Landscape?
Gone are the days when branding was solely attributed to big companies and organisations. Personal branding is a cornerstone of success in today’s business landscape for several compelling reasons.
Increased competition: The globalised nature of business means you are contending with other professionals and entrepreneurs across the world. Each one vying for the same opportunities. Having a personal brand is what will set you apart from the competition.
First impressions: Businesses have gone digital and a lot of the first impressions are done online. Potential employees, partners, and clients do online searches before making decisions. Your online presence tells your page visitors who you are, and if what you represent online, aligns with their organisational brand.
Career growth: A strong personal brand allows you to showcase your skills and experience. It also helps you facilitate meaningful connections and make partnerships that can help you reach your career goals.
Thought leadership: Developing a solid personal brand and creating a narrative that speaks to who you are, helps you highlight your strengths, address issues, and frame your story to align with your goals. When you share your thoughts, expertise, and insights through contention creation, you assert your authority and establish your position as a thought leader.
Visibility and differentiating yourself from others through personal branding empower you to take ownership of your professional identity, guiding how others perceive you and the value you bring.
Creating Your Personal Brand
Building a personal brand is not a one-time thing. Instead, it’s an ongoing process of refinement that changes as you grow, and it’s an investment in your long-term personal development and professional success. Here are a few things to consider as you develop your brand:
Self-assessment:You need to know yourself and understand your strengths, values, and goals. Alison’s Workplace Personality Assessment is designed to help you discover and answer the essential questions at your brand’s heart.
Define your target audience:Who do you want to see and experience your personal brand? Who are you trying to influence?
Develop a unique value proposition: What sets you apart? What do you have that no one else has? What makes you different from everyone else?
Craft your brand message:How do you want to be perceived? What impression do you want to give to others about yourself?
Create a consistent online presence:Social media is not just for posting photos or leaving comments. It’s a powerful tool that when used correctly, can be a valuable way to share your brand to a global audience. Learn which platforms your audience visits and use them to build and grow your brand.
Invest in yourself:An investment in yourself pays long-term dividends. Investing in learning and presenting your continuing education lets people know that you have a growth mindset, a valuable trait in today’s business landscape. Sign up for a few courses to kickstart your learning journey:
Your personal brand will evolve over time. It’s a reflection of your ongoing efforts to refine and communicate your identity, growth, expertise, and values to create a lasting impact in your professional pursuits.
What to Remember When Building Your Personal Brand
Have a strong professional reputation.“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently,” Warren Buffet. Be conscious of what you put out because everything you do, affects your professional reputation.
Personal branding goes beyond just a resume. A great custom-designed resuméis a professional way to document your skills and experience. Utilise a Resumé Builder to design your resumé and understand that, although a document, it influences the perceptions of those who will read it.
Show yourself off. Your personal brand can introduce you to people, spaces, and opportunities that you may otherwise have missed. It’s here that you differentiate yourself from others in the job market. Let your brand demonstrate your skills and knowledge and propel you in career advancement and opportunities.
Strengthen your platform. Come up with creative ways to showcase expertise: writing articles, giving presentations, participating in webinars, etc. Also, use this platform to show how you are continually learning and making efforts to stay up-to-date in your field.
Your brand serves as a strategic tool to network both online and offline. Share it with people. Let those who know you advocate for you. It is through your personal brand that you make new connections and find ways to grow and people who can walk that journey with you. With anything you do, you’re bound to make mistakes, experience challenges, receive pushback, self-doubt, and many other things. But you need to persevere and, better yet, use any setbacks as stepping stones to become and build the best version of yourself.
There is a strong relationship between your personal brand and your professional reputation. Be intentional about aligning these two because when people know who you are and what you stand for, they may be more trusting of doing business with you professionally. Everything you do, or don’t do, matters.
The power of personal branding lies not just in its ability to make you memorable and stand out from the rest, but in its capacity to foster trust, and credibility and ensure your message resonates with those who see and hear you. As you craft your personal brand, remember that your authenticity is the cornerstone of your personal brand. This ensures that any connections and networks you form align with your brand – your true self. Just as a strong reputation can open doors, a consistent and well-crafted personal brand can open doors you never knew existed.
Do you recognize this image, which documents something that was in the news this week? If you do, what is your opinion of the event it is depicting? If you don’t, what guesses can you make about what is happening here and why?
In general — whether you recognize the image or not — how do you think this picture relates to or comments on our society?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
On Wednesday, Sept. 13, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.
5. By Friday morning, Sept. 15, we will reveal below more information about the graph, including a free link to the article that includes this graph, shout-outs for student headlines, additional questions, and Stat Nuggets. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.
Reveal
We’ll post more information here on the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 14. Stay tuned!
• Learn more about the notice and wonder teaching strategy from this 5-minute video and how and why other teachers are using this strategy from our on-demand webinar.
• Sign up for our free weekly Learning Network newsletter so you never miss a graph. Graphs are always released by the Friday before the Wednesday live moderation to give teachers time to plan ahead.
• Go to the American Statistical Association K-12 website, which includes teacher statistics resources, Census in the Schools student-generated data, professional development opportunities, and more.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
There’s a common saying in business that you should “fish where the fish are,” in other words, focus your efforts in the places where you’re likely to find success. When it comes to freelance tech work today, there are plenty of metaphorical “fish” in AI.
From writing effective prompts for AI chatbots to knowing how to test deep learning models, understanding the nuances of AI systems and how to use them gives you a valuable edge. Read on to learn which skills are best suited for freelancers who are looking to reel in some new business.
The top AI skills for freelancers
The freelancing platform Upwork recently analyzed data from the first half of 2023 (January to June) to see which AI-related skills companies sought out when hiring freelancers for projects. Here are the top 10 generative AI skills and tools that companies looked for — and the courses and paths to take to start learning them today.
Learn something new for free
1. ChatGPT
No surprise here, ChatGPT is a hot skill that AI practitioners should know if they want to find generative AI work. If you’ve played around with the chatbot in your daily life, you know how powerful and versatile ChatGPT can be. You can take your ChatGPT knowledge to the next level with our free course Intro to ChatGPT, then try our ChatGPT case studies to sharpen your prompt engineering skills. If you want to learn how to stay ahead of AI advancements, you can check out our course Learn the Role and Impact of Generative AI and ChatGPT.
2. Natural language processing (NLP)
NLP is the range of methods that computers use to process language with AI. NLP is the reason why ChatGPT can understand our written requests and autocorrect can predict what we’re going to type next. You can learn all about how computers work with human language and complete a portfolio-ready project in our skill path Apply Natural Language Processing with Python.
3. TensorFlow
This framework is used to develop, train, and test deep learning models. Companies like Google and Airbnb use TensorFlow to integrate machine learning capabilities into their products, so it’s a well-known framework to have listed on your resume. If you know Python and NumPy and are familiar with the basics of machine learning, you can take our skill path Build Deep Learning Models with TensorFlow.
4. Image processing
Language models and machine learning algorithms can be used to describe and classify images, a technique known as image processing. Image processing comes up in diverse scenarios across lots of different fields. For example, image processing can be used to enhance the visual quality of an image, detect objects in computer vision tasks, or analyze medical imagery. You can delve into this field in our course Deep Learning with TensorFlow: Image Classification.
5. PyTorch
PyTorch is an open-source framework with an optimized tensor library (based on the Torch library) used for deep learning. You can install PyTorch for free — just make sure you have the NumPy module first.
Using Discord bot commands, you can enlist Midjourney to create images, animations, and other artistic output based on text prompts. Midjourney can be used to quickly make advertisements, logos, thumbnails, or prototypes. You can also use the text-to-image bot as a brainstorming tool when you need inspiration. Want to learn more about other business cases for AI-generated images? Try the case study Creating Marketing Assets with Generative AI to learn how to use DALLE-2 to make logos and other images.
8. AI chatbot
Creating an AI chatbot that can simulate human conversation is a great way to get introduced to AI — and coding in general. In our skill path Build Chatbots with Python, we’ll teach you how to use the beginner-friendly language Python to create rules-based and generative chatbots. Already know some Python? You can jump in with the bite-sized course Language Models in Python: Generative Chatbots.
9. Model tuning
A key step in deep learning workflow is model tuning, the process of configuring parameters and experimenting with a model to fine-tune its output. Read this article to learn more about how neural networks are applied to real-world scenarios, and where model tuning comes in.
10. Stable Diffusion
Another text-to-image AI tool, Stable Diffusion uses a diffusion model to generate visuals that are similar to the material it was trained on. The result: You can create high-quality photo-realistic images from any natural language prompt. For example, here’s how Stable Diffusion interprets the prompt: “A freelance web developer using AI tools.”
We asked Stable Diffusion to generate an image of “a freelance web developer using AI tools.”
How to start freelancing in AI
Getting a freelance side hustle off the ground can take a lot of time and effort (especially if you’re also balancing learning to code or working a full-time gig). Here are some general tips for freelancing in the age of AI.
Familiarize yourself with AI applications
As a freelancer, you might be expected to work with a range of different tools depending on the client’s needs. It can be hard to keep up with all of the buzzy new AI applications that are launching as developers tap into generative AI’s potential. While you don’t have to be an expert in every single AI tool, you should know the similarities and differences between popular AI tools and how to choose the right AI solution for a project.
Unlike a full-time employer who may pay for continuing education or provide on-the-job professional development, freelancers have to make time for learning, researching, and practicing these tools outside of billable hours. Signing up for a Codecademy Plus membership is a great choice for freelancers who want to continue building in-demand skills for projects at their own pace.
Revamp your resume
As you pick up more AI-related skills, you’ll also have to update the way that you market and offer your freelance services. Adding AI terms to your resume or professional website is one way to get discovered and hired for work.
According to a LinkedIn report published in August, there’s been a 75% uptick in LinkedIn members adding AI-specific keywords each month since January. The top terms that people use on LinkedIn to attract new AI business include “GAI” (short for generative AI), “ChatGPT,” “prompt engineering,” and “prompt crafting.”
Network the AI way
Finding clients and maintaining relationships (not to mention following up on invoices and keeping track of contracts) is a huge part of freelancing. See if there are ways you can streamline your process using AI. For example, you could use generative AI to help you write follow-up emails to clients. Or you could have ChatGPT help you develop a marketing strategy for your freelance business. If you want even more ideas, read this blog about how to network with ChatGPT.
