If you have been unemployed for an extended period of time, you know that potential employers are going to look at your long period of unemployment with a jaundiced eye.

Try reframing your perspective and instead of looking at yourself as an unemployed applicant, think of yourself as a professional job coach. Your mission is to assist someone in finding work. Luckily, you have only one client to devote your time and effort to: YOU.

In homicide parlance, the first 48 hours of an investigation are crucial. Similarly, there are many aspects of unemployment and job search that need to be addressed as quickly as possible.

Looking for work is generally a miserable undertaking. No matter how much education and experience you have, you are in a powerless and vulnerable position.

Don't be surprised or upset if you don't experience an unalloyed sense of joy and optimism when you finally obtain the job you have been seeking for so long.

To lose a job, for any reason, is to lose something of value. Even work we didn't particularly like gave us some type of identity, money, sometimes prestige and power.

Creating a central organizer for our activities can help assure that we have a clear understanding of where we've been and what we've done, and provides a private resource chart for on-going contacts and re-contacts.

The unemployment checks are running out and there is no potential income in sight. Here are five tips to keep you afloat.

Unemployment plays havoc with our emotional system. We take a number of hits all at once: loss of occupational identity, economic pressure, family anxiety, and the humiliation of job search.

Unemployment is depressing: financial pressures stress you out, looking for work is humiliating, and your fragile self-confidence reels under the blows of indifference and rejection.