The other day I received an email from someone I've known a long time who is definitely a promoter type - big on hype and talk about how what they're doing is the greatest idea on the planet.  You may know someone like this - they surface every couple years touting the next big thing they're working on.  After a while you think - yada, yada, I hear the talk, but where's the result?

This time they surfaced with a brand new product in the career planning arena (of course, that's a very empty space, isn't it).  What made it interesting was that this duo had never worked in career planning or guidance.  Until now their focus had been on entrepreneurship and helping young people get rich by starting businesses.  Guess that didn't work out because now they claim to have used their years of experience and the expertise of a world-class behaviorial scientist (who is unnamed) to finally solve all of the problems you ever had finding success and happiness in your career.  And the answers come to you in a report (a premium report) that you get to pay for.  This sounds suspiciously like all those career guidance tests you took in high school and college.  The big difference is that the ones you took at school have been validated over years of research and testing.  There is no evidence that this assessment (which takes 15 minutes) has been normed across groups and tested for reliability.  That was the first red flag.

The bigger red flag was that they addressed this email to "friends" who could try the assessment for free before they went public with it.  The trouble is that in their distribution list for the promotion they listed someone who had died several years ago. Duh!  What does that say about their ability to guide your career?  (not to mention that your distribution list should always be in the Bcc portion of your email). The devil is definitely in the details when you're trying to convince people that you know what you're doing.  Your previous track record and your attention to detail can make or break your efforts. Your successes will speak for themselves.