The following article was posted as a comment on my FOOD JOBS blog. It is most interesting. So thank you Tony for allowing me to share it.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for Aveta Business Institute which offers six sigma online training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

Who Is A Career Mentor?

A career mentor is someone who acts as a counselor, a motivator, and a guiding force in your career. This would be a person with whom you can talk freely and from whom you can expect to receive sound, unbiased career advice.

A mentor is usually a person who is experienced, someone in your company or a similar industry who is higher in the hierarchy, or someone whom you have worked with in the past and still share a cordial relationship.

A good mentor will ideally provide you with impartial advice, as well as coach and guide you. Such a person is someone who will not only help you get a call for a coveted interview, but will also help you perform well in such interviews and increase your chances of getting a good job.

Traditionally, mentoring is something that you would not purchase and would not require a monetary exchange. The relationship between a mentor and a person being mentored is far higher than what money can buy.

Finding a Career Mentor

• It is usually futile to expect your manager to be your mentor. A manager and his juniors usually have different interests while working towards a common goal, and it is not best to tangle those interests in with a mentorship situation.
• Someone higher up in the company can more suitably qualify as your mentor.
• You can also look for someone within the industry and affiliated with your company or in the similar line of business. However, it is not a good idea to approach your direct competitors.
• The person mentoring you should be someone you are able to admire and for whom you have high value and respect. The person should be very motivating, as well as stimulating. It is desirable that the two of you share some common traits like values, style of working, and a sense of humor.

Having a Meaningful Relationship

• Friendship should preferably not be the criteria in a mentor relationship. It should be based on mutual respect, honesty, and reliance.
• A mentor’s concern should be appropriately reciprocated with any help that he or she might require in something where you might be able to help. Even a simple card, or a small Christmas present goes a long way to say that you really appreciate what he/she is doing for you.
• You should always respect the time that your mentor is giving to you. You shouldn’t push the person by calling at unexpected times or being too needy. If things can wait, they should preferably be held until the next meeting.
• Everybody requires different levels of help so you can mutually decide on your meeting times, which may take place every other week, once a month, or on an at-need basis.

Having a good mentor can significantly boost your career prospects and growth. So what are you waiting for – find a mentor now!

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites

Patricia Rain, the Vanilla Queen

I admire Patricia Rain. I think you will find her story to be wonderfully inspirational. It again shows how one dedicated person can change the world.

Becoming a true Queen isn’t an everyday occurrence. Rather, it is earned through years of dedication and hard work, rather like the fairy tales of old where the heroine endures many tests to prove her worth before being bestowed with the title and keys to her Queendom.

Perhaps my early childhood intoxication with the fragrance and flavor of vanilla was an indication of what was to come, but my conscious journey began in 1985 when I wrote The Vanilla Cookbook, after reading an enticing article about the King of Tonga and a royal decree for his vanilla crop.

The book catapulted me into the position of “vanilla authority,” and eventually to a conference in Puebla, Mexico, where I spoke at a conference on the foods of the Americas. After the conference I took a bus to the Gulf Coast, birthplace of vanilla.

The vanilla farmers of Mexico knew of me from my book, and I was astonished to learn that I was a local celebrity. They asked for help to rescue their struggling vanilla industry. My work, largely voluntary, slowly expanded until I launched The Vanilla.COMpany in 2001, just before 9-11 and the anthrax scare, and just after the dot.com crash.

Holding a bootstrap business together was an enormous challenge. But hold on, we did. Our women-owned and operated, socially conscious company continues to grow in ways we could hardly have anticipated.

Through the extraordinary power of the Internet, I met farmers in such far-flung areas as Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, India, The Americas, and Africa. During the five-year crisis when vanilla was unavailable and prohibitively expensive, I coached farmers new to the industry through the steps of selling their village’s crops, and I became “auntie” to many young men and women who often traveled hours to reach an Internet café.

Vanilla by Patricia Rain

It was gratifying to learn that through my assistance the farmer’s lives improved.  Over the years, I visited the world’s vanilla growing regions, and my interest as an anthropologist ultimately led to writing, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance.

In gaining the farmers’ trust, my reputation spread globally and I am now known everywhere as the Vanilla Queen, an honor I don’t take lightly. But, in the greatest test of all, I learned that I am really their queen.

In December of 2003, I was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer.  I was advised to “put my affairs in order and to enjoy my life.”

Word spread quickly around the world, and in the most humbling and transformative experience imaginable, the farmers organized their churches, mosques, temples, villages, and schools to pray for me.  Letters, advice, and prayers poured in from around the world, and continue to do so, incorporated into their daily lives. The upshot of the story is that I am cancer-free.

The farmers and I are now launching an International Tropical Farmers Network created with a determination to teach sustainable agriculture and to empower the producers of the products we love so much.

And this how I went from being an ordinary woman to earning my title as the Vanilla Queen.

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites

Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America

A few years ago all the great bread was baked in France. In the United States artisan bread bakers were a rare breed. Now we can choose among potato bread and sourdough, whole-grain and semolina, pepper bread and bread flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, herbs and seeds.

All these breads are also appearing in boutique bakeries and in bountiful baskets, handed around to guests in restaurants.

Some chefs are baking their own signature breads and bread sticks as long as your arm and as skinny as a California waiter’s ponytail. Irresistibly, the appetite is seduced with a choice of grainy yellow cornbread, muffins, fresh from the oven.

On upscale tables, too, are feather-light, lily-white biscuits, sweet muffins with carrots and cranberries, or raisins and walnuts, along with hot scones flecked with melting morsels of white and dark chocolate. Soft focaccia, buttery brioches, crusty baguettes, crackling croissants, and hearty, healthy seven-grain breads.

Bread has become the icing on the cake.

There are surely many wonderfully satisfying culinary careers but being a bread baker rises to the top of the evolutionary ladder. Many professional culinary schools offer hands-on courses and many offer classes for hobbyists. There are even baking guilds to join such as The Bread Bakers Guild of America and bread baking competitive teams to root for.

Whole Grain Breads by Peter Reinhart

Among the best of the best bread cookbooks are Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor and The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville. The ever-reliable, fanatically-accurate Rose Levy Beranbaum compiled her recipes in The Bread Bible.

As an aside here, I published Rose Beranbaum’s first cookbook, Romantic and Classic Cakes. Her manuscript subsequently evolved into The Cake Bible. At the time, she asked me what I thought of the title.

I was horrified. I told her any religious person would be shocked! — shocked! at the idea of linking the Bible with a cake. Every nonreligious person wouldn’t even think of buying any book that had the word Bible in the title.

Once again this proves how often I am wrong!

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites