Everyone can use a little help with their resume, especially if they’re pursuing a career in a highly technical field. These ten tips can help tech professionals optimize their resumes in order to nab that great gig.

Do you have a foolproof tip for a technical resume? Let us know in the comments.

The Board Meeting is the primary way that Boards function. This post is about making Board meetings effective and helpful for everyone involved.

A Board cannot be effective if it doesn't get together frequently. Some Boards meet monthly. I like that approach when the Company is young and there are a lot of changes happening frequently. But for most companies, a monthly Board meeting will be overkill.

I'm a particular fan of the twice a quarter Board meeting. The idea is to have one meeting mid quarter and one meeting after the quarter has been completed. A lot of public companies use this format since the Board needs to review the quarterly numbers before they are reported to the public. I think eight meetings a year is a great heartbeat for a Board and this schedule works well for all kinds of companies.

With the economy improving, you might be considering a career change. Maybe you'd like to quit your present profession and do something completely different, even start a business. You could be primed for a change but unsure what change to make.

Whatever the motivation, here are some helpful books to guide you. Some are practical, offering step-by-step basics, while others serve as motivation to just get out there and do it.

It’s time to abolish the reference check. The unpleasant process of calling up a job applicant’s former boss to gab about the candidate’s pluses and “deltas” is just silly. Maybe if we all just agree to stop doing it the practice will go away, like pay phones and fanny packs. Instead, I’ve learned a better way to hire that leverages a universal human attribute—namely, the fact that we’re all lazy.

What’s my beef with reference checks? They don’t accomplish the job we intend them to do. In a startup, you can’t afford to hire B-players. But reference checks, which are intended to do the screening, fail to eliminate these candidates who are just so-so. This happens because the person giving the reference has no incentive to say anything but good things about the candidate. Telling the whole truth, warts and all, could expose the former boss to a defamation lawsuit. And legal action aside, no one likes to speak poorly about an ex-colleague. It’s bad karma and just feels icky.

Along with many thousands of others, I attended SXSW this month. And while there, I learned some important lessons (other than “exercise patience while waiting in line, AGAIN,” and “don’t eat barbecue every meal for 5 days.”). These lessons came from the panels I attended, but they were not from anything said within the panels. Rather, they had to do with what I discovered about the types of content I should be seeking.

Initially, I tried to attend talks or panels directly related to my industry and clients, but each time the information felt like things I already knew, and instead of feeling inspired, I just felt tired.

Sabbaticals are a rare perk in corporate America, but they shouldn't be. Here's how to build a program that will benefit both your employees and your company.

When we began our careers, we wanted to change the world.

Some of us, like my colleague Ryan Martens, had lofty aspirations of starting a company that harnessed a new way of thinking to solve the world’s deepest environmental and social problems. The vision of the company, which would become Rally Software, sat at the intersection of business and environmental issues--aiming to satisfy customers’ needs, generate profits, and help solve environmental problems all at the same time.

Olivia Fox Cabane, author of The Charisma Myth, talks with Fast Company about why charisma is so critical to business and how special Jedi mind tricks can help get you there.

As a socially inept teenager, Olivia Fox Cabane realized that she had two choices. “Either confine myself to a desert island, or learn how to make this human thing work,” she says. Cabane opted for the latter. Good thing. By age 24, the French-born author of The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, published on March 29, had addressed the United Nations. The following year she was lecturing at Harvard and MIT, a precursor to her career as an executive coach and keynote speaker. A self-professed science nerd, Cabane came up with the idea for a book on charisma after realizing there was no single resource to help individuals cultivate it. We spoke with Cabane about why charisma is so critical to business and how Jedi mind tricks (not the hip-hop group) can help get you there.

Investors judge entrepreneurs by the commitment they have made to their good ideas.

OF ALL the questions I am asked about my business, the overwhelming favourite is: ''How did you manage to raise the capital you needed for your business - what is your secret?'' The second-most-asked question is: ''How did you value your business at the early stages of development?''

These questions are not easily answered, but I have reflected on them many times and will try to summarise the key points to keep in mind if you are feeling overwhelmed and underfunded.

The first thing is you need to get used to being underfunded and doubted by the ''experts'' - if you can't live with these demons, you should not be an entrepreneur.

A few weeks before Drop.io sold to Facebook, founder Sam Lessin met with New York Tech Meetup's Nate Westheimer.

"We are always going to build subpar products because neither of us can code," the two discussed.

Lessin explained: Idea people who can't code have to relay their vision to others, and part of the vision inevitably gets lost in translation.

"What are the biggest mistakes that you find small business leaders make when using social media?"

Marvin Powell, a Small Business Growth Consultant in Washington DC, posted that question on LinkedIn and 97 people responded.

Here are the most common complaints.

In a few months, Worcester's college seniors will get their degrees, and most of them will go off into the real world. But with jobs scarce, the real world for many of them could be something less challenging than what they trained to do. Should these graduates create jobs for themselves by starting new ventures?

My best advice for most of them is to get 10 years of industry experience before they start a company. Of course, there are some people who started programming computers when they were 10 years old, so by the time they graduate they will have the requisite decade of experience.

When a politician utters a phrase so bleak about his or her own region, it's a calculated risk: During the sharp intake of breath that inevitably follows, one wonders: Will the communities, residents and businesses he or she represents respond with innovative ideas and strong commitments to work together to avoid repeating past mistakes?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel took that chance in March with the release of World Business Chicago's Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs, which soberly diagnoses the impact of what the mayor called the prior "lost decade." The plan identifies 10 strategies for making the next decade a prosperous one, many requiring joint public and private sector action.

Robert DeNiro co-owns restaurants and Jennifer Lopez sells perfume and clothes, but the most coveted job for multihyphenate celebrities these days is something a bit less glitzy and a lot more geeky — tech entrepreneur.

Thanks in large part to the success of Ashton Kutcher, a prolific angel investor who has funded dozens of startups and plugs them to his nearly 10 million Twitter followers, stars are looking beyond Hollywood for business opportunities.

Now A-listers are leveraging their considerable celebrity clout and finances to form their own startups, launch mobile applications, fund companies or serve as creative directors to major tech brands.

The jokes are over for another year. April Fool’s Day has passed and you can go back to enjoying your favourite news sources in peace (that is, unless they get taken in by another hoax). Some big names took part in this year’s April Fools’ party and even though we didn’t (or maybe we did and you didn’t notice because it was that good), we found quite a few of the hoaxes quite fun.

So here is our round-up of our favourite April Fools’ hoaxes. Leading the pack is Google who seems to have crafted a prank for every one of its product on the web.

China’s rise as an economic power has been staggering. Its manufacturing prowess is well-established, having earned it the moniker, "the world’s factory." Roughly half of its population now lives in urban areas, up from less than one in five three decades ago. Over 100 of its cities have populations of one million or more.

More than half of Americans already believe China is the world’s most powerful economy, according to Gallup polls, and a growing chorus of commentators believes that it will overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy by 2030. Some are projecting this to happen as early as 2016.

How rapidly can China's economy move up the development ladder and become genuinely innovative and technology-driven?

It was the first computer - ever - and it was turned on in March of 1951 for the U.S. Census Bureau. The UNIVAC, or Universal Automatic Computer, was big: an entire room, filled with more than 5,000 vacuum tubes and consuming 150 kW of power. It operated at a mere 2000 instructions per second. (By comparison, the average laptop today routinely handles about 100,000 million instructions every second.)

The UNIVAC had Big Bertha printers, too, that could print 600 lines of type every minute on form-fed paper, and weighed in at 800 pounds. Thanks to the folks at Royal Pingdom, who have put together this infographic.

THE Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, became a symbol before the first one rolled off the production line in 2009. The Tata group, India’s most revered conglomerate, hyped it as the embodiment of a revolution. Frugal innovation would put consumer products, of which a $2,000 car was merely a foretaste, within reach of ordinary Indians and Chinese. Asian engineers would reimagine Western products with all the unnecessary frills stripped out. The cost savings would be so huge that frugal ideas would conquer the world. The Nano would herald India’s arrival just as the Toyota once heralded Japan’s.

Alas, the miracle car was dogged with problems from the first. Protesting farmers forced Tata Motors to move production out of one Indian state and into another. Early sales failed to catch fire, but some of the cars did, literally. Rural customers showed little desire to shift from trucks to cars. The Nano’s failure to live up to the hype raises a bigger question. Is frugal innovation being oversold? Can Western companies relax?

Tom Friedman's op-ed today was a riff on Why Nations Fail, a new book from MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson. Per Friedman, the core thesis of the book is the long-term instability of "extractive" as opposed to "inclusive" political and economic systems:

"Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few."

For anyone working in the "digital creative economy" -- the weird little tribe of engineers, designers and venture capitalists that I count myself a part of -- this thesis borders on the obvious.

The JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act is one small step away from becoming law after its fast passage in Congress and President Obama has given reassurance that he will sign the bill when it gets to his desk this week (probably Thursday). The passage of the JOBS Act last Tuesday during a politically charged time is proof that entrepreneurship promotion is a bipartisan issue. As the clock moves relentlessly toward November, both sides of the aisle found common focus and set out to solve the entrepreneurial access to capital problem. The American public should be proud of how functional Washington was these past few weeks.

Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of hosting UK Minister Mark Prisk in Washington, DC, for discussions with Hill staff and others around smart approaches to unleashing the startup potential of our nations. I recall my first meetings with Prisk, days after the UK elections when he set out to tackle everything from removing regulatory barriers to young firms to encouraging new firm hiring through a payroll tax holiday. As readers of this column know, I have credited his government with making great headway while often lamenting our own slow progress in Washington. It turns out that Prisk might have been justified in being skeptical of my pessimism. Prior to his visit, the House passed a bill helping startups and the Senate amended it. It went back to the House, passed, and is now on its way to the President.