The LinkedIn strategies that work in North America and Europe land very differently in a professional culture built on different social norms, different relationship hierarchies, and a different relationship between public self-disclosure and credibility. LinkedIn is a global platform with a local problem in Korea, and most of the advice about using it was written…
Before your resume reaches a human, it passes through software that has no interest in your achievements. Understanding how it works is not optional. Before your resume reaches any human being, it passes through a piece of software that has no interest in your achievements, your personality, or the care you took with the formatting….
The data on Seoul’s nightlife audience challenges almost every assumption the industry makes, starting with who is actually in the room. Spending time in Seoul’s nightlife is, for me, partly the experience of living here for 24 years, and partly the experience of watching a fascinating consumer economy that almost nobody studies with any rigour….
The most common cover letter opening in 2026 tells the hiring manager exactly what kind of communicator you are. Unfortunately, it tells them the wrong thing. There is a sentence that appears in thousands of cover letters every day, and anyone who reads applications for a living is exhausted by it. It goes something like…
Most resumes fail before anyone reads them. Not because of formatting or keywords. Because they were built on the wrong premise. The resume sitting in most people’s job application folders is a filing system. A record of where they were, what their title was, and what the job description said they were supposed to do….
When AI can produce grammatically perfect, professionally appropriate, completely forgettable text in seconds, the bar for human writing has changed. Here is what it actually needs to do now.
Most professionals wait until something goes wrong to look at how they communicate. Here is a 20-minute exercise to do before that happens.
Every organisation is investing in AI tools. Almost none of them are investing in the one skill that determines whether those tools produce anything worth reading.
Most students think of university as something that happens to them. The ones who leave with a real advantage treated it as a launchpad they designed themselves.
Most Western professionals think about trust as something you earn quickly and rebuild if it breaks. Korea taught me that is the wrong model entirely.
Western professionals have spent decades developing emotional intelligence, communication frameworks, and leadership presence programmes. They have been missing the thing that actually makes communication work in real rooms with real people.
Outsourcing your professional voice to AI is not a productivity strategy. It is a long-term credibility risk. Here is what the research says, and what smart communicators are doing instead.
The phrase is not warm. It is a habit. Here is what warmth in an email actually looks like. Every week, somewhere, a startup founder sends a cold email to a potential investor that opens with “I hope this finds you well.” A student emails a professor for a recommendation letter: “I hope you are…
The STAR method has been the gold standard for behavioral interview preparation for roughly 30 years. Built around four elements, Situation, Task, Action, and Result, it gives structure to answers that would otherwise sprawl into five minute rambles involving four different stakeholders and project details nobody needs. Structure is good. I am not here to…
Twenty years is long enough to stop being surprised. Long enough to stop interpreting silence as rudeness, hierarchy as inefficiency, or indirectness as dishonesty. Long enough to understand that what looks like a communication breakdown from the outside is, most of the time, a communication system — one that’s operating exactly as designed, just according…
Most job seekers spend 80% of their energy on the document and 20% on what actually gets them hired — how they talk about themselves.
The conversation about AI and work keeps getting stuck in the same two positions. Neither one is particularly useful if you are a professional trying to figure out what to actually do right now. Here is what the headlines consistently miss.
You can tell within one paragraph whether someone wrote a blog post for a grade or for a reader. Most professional blogs are still writing for the grade. Here is how to stop.
Every week, a brand somewhere launches a campaign that looks great in the deck and disappears without a trace in the real world. The creative is solid. The brief was approved. The content calendar is full. And yet — nothing moves. Engagement is flat. Conversions don’t come. The team shrugs and calls it a “tough…
The question is not an invitation to recite your resume. It is an audition to see whether you know how to tell your own story under pressure. The first question in almost every interview is also the one most candidates answer worst. “Tell me about yourself.” Four words. And most people respond with a chronological…
Twenty years is a long time to think about one thing. That is roughly how long I have been living and working in Seoul, teaching at Hanyang University, training corporate teams, coaching professionals through career transitions, and watching what happens when communication works and when it does not. What I have learned is this: the…