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If you are looking for a green job, our site Bright Green Talent can really help as a resource to find your next employment opportunity. Occasionally we also like to provide some advice about the ins and outs of actually getting a job in the green sector. There are many pitfalls in interviews which candidates can encounter and here are 5 mistakes which interviewers have identified as very common. Even if you are highly qualified for the position, these errors could cost you a job:

Following on from my blog post yesterday on the decade of growth in green jobs, I was reading a survey by E2 that showed the expansion of green jobs in quarter two of this year between April and June. While other areas of the economyare still struggling, the green sector has continued to grow with their being an 85% increase in solar installations compared to the same time last year

I do get a bit sick and tired of people going on about the lack of growth in green jobs. What I always do when I am asked about the issue is to refer back to the Brookings Institution and Battelle’s Technology Partnership Practice report of July 2011, entitled the Sizing the Clean Economy” which outlines how between 2003 and 2010, there has been remarkable growth in the green energy sector in particular.

In the many years I have run management training courses for a wide variety of different businesses, a great deal of my time has been spent answering questions about how managers should deal with a lack of motivation among their employees or how structures and processes can be changed to develop their potential. I discovered, however, that one critical issue was normally ignored. How do you build positive, constructive and productive relationships between employees in your organization?

Creativity, inspiration, initiative, drive and purpose: they are all elements which you would associate with any successful business, so why aren’t they present in your firm? It is a question which you may have asked yourself, and one which you may have tried to resolve through management training with limited or very minor success.

The political policy issue of ‘Tax Credits’ for renewable technologies has been making its rounds in Washington again. Given the significant increase in wind generation recently, the two sides of the political spectrum have been passionately arguing their case. The conservatives hold dearly to their principle of allowing the free market to decide the rise and fall of different developing renewable technologies, where as President Obama has been using the jobs created by increased wind generation, to highlight the overall benefits of the evolving green economy.

How good a boss are you? What sort of leadership do you provide? You may well know that leaders give direction, provide inspiration and should always lead. The question is do you practice this yourself? In particular, how well do you direct and inpsire your people? Your future and the future of your team are largely dependent on your abilities to provide credible and motivating direction.

We all tend to stick to a tried and tested formula. If we were successful with a particular strategy early in our career, we tend to repeat it again and again. The problem is that our original strategies normally have a limited shelf-life, and after a while lead to diminishing returns or even prove counter-productive. The British cycling team learned how to transform the way they trained, resulting in extraordinary success at the Beijing and now the London Olympics. Managers can learn a lot from their experience.

At the end of last month, it was revealed that the British economy had retracted by 0.7%. This was the second consecutive quarter where growth had been non-existent, leaving the UK in a double-dip recession. This can engender fear of job loss, stress and anxiety in the workplace. No wonder so many employees are feeling insecure, and the question is how are you going to make your people feel more optimistic?

All the way back in 1996, John Kotter published a book entitled “Leading Change.” Kotter described how as much as 70% of all change programs inside businesses failed. In 2008, a survey by McKinsey was carried out asking 3,199 of the world’s leading business executives about change management programs, and a similar percentage replied that such programs were failing.

It seems as if Republican candidate Mitt Romney is going to make President Barack Obama’s green jobs initiative a central component of his presidential campaign.

The difference between a positive workplace for employees and a negative one comes down to how people feel and how they communicate. You only have to look at how the Great Britain Olympic team have all of a sudden started collecting Gold medals in the last week or so. Most of them are living in a close knit community in the Olympic village at the moment and you could say that GB house is a very positive workplace. Success breeds success as those whose events are coming up are inspired by those previously who have gone out and won gold or other medals.

Did you know that according to a survey questioning HR staff, carried out by the CBI, out of 190 million sick days recorded, an estimated 15% were not legitimate!

A survey carried out by Towers Watson has revealed some quite shocking figures about the state of the British workforce. In its workforce study, UK workers were asked a number of questions regarding their senior managers. Let’s just say that managers didn’t get off lightly!

According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), between 2010 and 2011 in the UK, out of a total number of 1,152,000 work related illnesses, nearly 400,000 were caused by stress. It has now overtaken back pain as the chief reason for being off work. On top of this, it is pretty certain that many more stress related illnesses are not being reported either because colleagues pass it off as something else or because they come into work despite the illness.

How often do you have days when you do not feel like going to work? You wake up in the morning thinking ‘do I have to get up?’ ‘Should I call in sick and just take the day off?’ You may think that this is just how life is, and that it is the nature of work. Well, what if there was a way of preventing this? What if you could improve your mood and start each day in a positive frame of mind?

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision on the Arizona state immigration law. One of the central proposals in the S.B. 1070 was section 2(B) which would allow state police officers to ask for immigration papers after stopping or arresting a citizen if they suspected they were an illegal immigrant. This proposal was upheld by the Court on the basis that it wasn’t clear whether the provision actually undermined Federal law.