For most workers, being laid off or furloughed is a scary thought, and, unfortunately, this scary thought became a reality for many professionals who had their jobs impacted by COVID-19 and the recession that followed. However, for some, losing their job is the push they need to make a career change.
It's not as crazy as it sounds!
Some people need a change but are too afraid to make one, and losing their job is the perfect opportunity to do so. In addition, many workers who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 crisis may find it difficult to get back into the industries they were working in.
Making a career change isn't easy, but with an organized approach, it can be done successfully. It won't happen overnight, but with patience and commitment, you can ultimately end up in a better place.
Here's what you need to know about the career change process as you embark on the job hunt after a layoff...
Before committing to a career change, make sure you're ready to close the door on your current career.
A career change should not be an impulse decision or strictly driven by the trauma of a layoff. So, it's important to take some time to really think things over.
But if your decision comes from a prolonged period of career unhappiness, then the time may be right.
Identify the new industry that you're looking to get into and then create an interview bucket list of 10-12 companies where you would like to work. Take a self-inventory of yourself and identify the transferable skills you possess that would also apply well to this new industry. Identify where you need to upskill.
What skills are you missing for this new position? Come up with a plan for gaining these skills. Attend training courses, workshops, classes, or certification opportunities.
Now that you've drafted a career change plan, the real challenge begins: building your network.
When applying to a new industry, it's not enough to just apply online and pray that you'll get an interview. You have to put the work in.
Go to the company's website or LinkedIn account to identify the human resources manager and the company's key players. Try to make an actual connection. Tap into your current network to see if you already know someone working at the company or have a friend who knows a current employee.
Use any connection you make to learn more about the company and to tell your career story—where you've been, and why you are choosing to change careers. Any connection that you make is a foot in the door.
This is a much more efficient way to conduct a job search, rather than just applying for every online job posting (spraying and praying). Most resumes don't even make it past the applicant tracking system (ATS).
In addition to trying to secure an interview, putting in this work will also help you build networking skills and expand your professional network. No matter where you are in your career, it always pays to network. This would also be a good time to update your LinkedIn profile, too.
What if you could get a job at the company you want to work for, just not in the position that you wanted?
That would actually be a career victory. When it comes to career changes, very rarely can you just switch lanes and land your dream job. Sometimes you need to ease your way in.
If you're struggling to get the position you want within a certain company, research other positions at that company to see if there are any positions that better fit your current skill sets. If there is, apply for that position. That way you at least get a job at the company.
From there, you can figure out a way to gain the skills that you need, so that you can one day move into your dream position.
This may be hard to believe, but when it comes to a career change, sometimes salary is the last thing that you think about.
That's because the career change process is so involved. It takes a lot of effort to come up with a plan and eventually secure an interview. Salary considerations are something that gets placed on the temporary back burner.
But if you've reached the point in the process where it's time to discuss salary, you've done something right and don't want things to unravel.
Depending on the type of industry you're going into, you'll be looking at either a salary increase, decrease, or match. It's essential that you do your research about the position and the average salary for such a position in your geographical area. Websites such as Salary.com and Glassdoor can be good resources for this information.
Having this information could be helpful in salary negotiations or, at the very least, mentally prepare you, particularly if you're facing a salary decrease.
It's also important not to lie when asked about your current salary in order to get a higher salary. It never pays to be dishonest.
Being laid off and then deciding to change careers is a lot to take on. If you're organized and committed, you can do it, but you don't have to do it alone!
Need more help making a career change after a layoff?
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This article was originally published at an earlier date.
One portion of an employee’s personal development is work-related, but there is more. When you think of an employee’s personal development do you think of the skills for them to keep current, get a promotion, or transfer to another department? Improving core skills such as analytical abilities, critical thinking, and/or decision making? Skills to take on a leadership role and manage staff? Obtaining higher credentials?
Assuming so, organizational leaders should:
1. Make sure you understand what employees do and how it aligns with the company’s goals2. Let employees do the job you hired them to do (leveraging their strengths and interests); nobody likes to be micromanaged3. Challenge employees with stretch goals4. Encourage employees to learn new things and give them the tools they need to learn:
These are great work-related considerations, but there is more. There is a saying by Confucius: “I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.” Do you encourage employees’ personal development (and the key word is personal) to be the best version of themself? Have you asked them what is important to them? If it’s important to them, it should be important to you too.
Personal development is lifelong learning and it’s never too late to start. Encourage employees to develop a growth mindset and continue learning while working for the company. This includes opportunities to:
1. Enhance their quality of life such as health/fitness, self-care, self-confidence
3. Realize their dream - maybe to become an entrepreneur and start their own business
Has your organization recognized that they need to think differently about developing employees? They should work together with the employee to create a custom personal development plan (PDP) based on what the employee is interested in (including both work and personal aspects). Four basic steps are:
1. Perform a self-assessment
2. Establish and prioritize goals (both short and long term) breaking up the goals into manageable tasks
3. Create a step-by-step plan identifying required resources, timelines, etc.
4. Measure progress
As a leader, be available when employees want to talk with you as well as periodically check in with them to ensure they have a good work-life balance. Both of these could be good coaching/mentoring opportunities.
When there is a comprehensive personal development plan, the employee is more likely to be and stay excited about what’s next (and stay with the organization longer). For more information about personal development, follow me on LinkedIn!
I got an email yesterday from a client wanting to know if I had any job search tips. Unfortunately, he had been recently laid off and found himself on the job market. Talking to him got me thinking...What really makes a job search successful?
The bad news is that there isn't a magic formula. The good news is that there are a number of very simple things you can do to improve your marketability.
Here are four easy steps to follow if you want to speed up your job search:
This might sound simple, but it is by far the most important (and first) step in a job search. You need to have your resume ready to roll at a moment's notice.
The way I see it, there are two kinds of job seekers. There is the job seeker that draws confidence from being prepared and then there is the kind of job seeker that gets blindsided by the unexpected. I know which kind I'd rather be.
The best time to focus on your resume is when you don't need it.
Is your resume for you or is it for prospective employers? The resume might have your info, experience, and accomplishments on it, but, ultimately, the documents that make it past the ATS not only have the right amount of keywords peppered throughout but also show, very clearly, what the applicant can do for the potential employer.
When writing your resume, always keep potential employers at the forefront of your mind. Make sure you quantify your experience, skills, and accomplishments. Give them a preview of the kind of positive impact you could have on their organization if they were to hire you.
Really. It's not. The most successful job seekers understand that it's about what you do for others, not about what they can do for you.
This is a fundamental idea that for some I hope turns the act of "networking" completely upside down. In every interaction, the most important thing is to demonstrate, "How can I help YOU?" It's the folks who unselfishly look out for those around them who make opportunities happen. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
What connections can you help make? Ask open-ended questions. You may even choose to treat the conversation like an informational interview. What professional needs does the other party have and how can you fill them?
This is such a simple concept, but it's probably the biggest obstacle I see with many of my clients. You need to have a target. It is as easy as that. How can you expect to reach the goal of employment without aiming for a bullseye?
The first step is to clearly identify the job/profession/industry you are targeting. You may even have a company that you've always wanted to work at. (It's always a good idea to have an interview bucket list—a list of companies you're passionate about that you'd love to work for someday.)
Make sure that your goal aligns with your experience. Then (and only then) are you free to begin outlining a plan to achieve your goal.
Here's an example:
I have an open door policy with my resume clients and I keep tabs on them throughout their job searches. Out of all the resumes and resume clients I've ever had, only one resume didn't work. One. When I wrote the initial resume, my client was targeting retail sales positions. Then she called one day a couple of months into her job search wondering why she wasn't getting any responses. I asked her to send me an example of the jobs she was applying for and guess what? All the online job applications she had filled out were for human resources positions. No wonder her resume didn't work!After rewriting her resume, she found work relatively quickly and it just goes to show how important it is to aim before you pull the trigger.
Know your audience, be proactive, and remember that it's not about you. If you apply these things to your job search, you'll be employed in no time!
Need more help with your job search?
“Do you really want to work in a contact center?”
Let’s be honest: five-year-olds don’t dream about working in a contact center when they grow up. Proud parents never boast about their children working in contact centers. Teachers at private schools never recommend students to work in contact centers.
People see contact centers as cubicle farms with hundreds of people on the phones selling non-existent products and services.
I’m going to tell you something different.
Contact centers are a great way for a person to start their career.
About 2.79 million Americans and U.S. residents, slightly more than 2% of the working population, work in contact centers.
The real figure may be higher. Many companies may call their contact centers “service centers,” “customer service centers," or “help desks.”
A contact center agent’s average tenure is three years. All 2.79 million agents change their jobs every three years. The industry will have 930,000 vacancies every year, which equates to approximately 77,000 vacancies a month.
If you’re leaving university with a student loan to pay off, there’s no shortage of vacancies.
It’s tough for newcomers to the workforce. Everyone wants previous experience. Contact centers are less likely to demand that. Joining a contact center attached to a specific industry can get you a grounding in that industry.
The companies serving consumers run contact centers. They include banks, debt collection agencies, the government (both local and national), insurance, healthcare, information technology, telecommunications, travel and tourism, and utilities. If you want to get experience in one of these industries, there’s a contact center for you to get your foot in the door.
As well as industry experience, you will also develop your people skills. That’s more than you’ll get from an MBA course. As a contact center agent, you’ll deal with up to 100 people per day. You’ll learn how to build rapport with complete strangers, explain things to emotional people, and stay calm under pressure or in the face of insults. Some people call these “soft skills.” These “soft skills” make people want to do business with you, hire you, or maybe even marry you!
Contact centers are a tech-heavy environment. You will learn to work with various programs and applications from day one. This will improve your technical skills and, more importantly, develop your ability to learn how to use technology. Technology changes all the time, but it will always be with us.
Contact centers give you the opportunity to work on yourself. Contact center work can be monotonous and repetitive. So is unemployment. This is your opportunity to develop your resilience and determination. Most contact centers provide you with regular coaching to improve your performance. Responding positively to coaching is a key element of being employable in today’s workforce. Contact center agents learn how to work in teams where success is not one person getting good exam results, but a customer having their requests fulfilled as quickly and effectively as possible.
You can learn all this in your first job!
What can contact centers offer people who stay longer than three years?
In the U.S., the average contact center employs 54 agents. That means one manager for every 54 agents, and on average, there is one supervisor for every 8.6 agents.
The contact centers industry is unusually “democratic.” Over the past 12 years, I have worked with more than 200 contact centers on three continents. In most cases, the managers started their careers as agents.
The industry also needs data analysts, IT specialists, developers, trainers, and coaches. Many of them started their careers as agents.
Two factors have had a major impact:
The pandemic forced many companies to abandon face-to-face operations, relying on their contact centers to communicate with customers. Customers got used to doing business online. Now, many customers don’t want to go back to physically visiting a branch. Companies also welcome the change. Offices and shops are expensive to run in relation to the number of customers they serve. Companies are looking to expand their contact center operations as part of their strategy to go digital.
Legislation in many Western countries makes changing bank accounts, insurance, telecommunications, or utilities providers easier. Customer service is now the competitive battleground of the 21st century. Contact centers are expected to hold that ground and win.
The shift to cloud technology is revolutionizing the industry, making access to transformational technologies less expensive and more available.
Companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots to handle simple interactions. This increases capacity without increasing headcount and frees up humans to handle more challenging interactions.
As automated systems handle simple tasks, human agents will handle more complex requests or help out customers who having trouble dealing with the bots. Human agents will need to be better trained both in terms of product and service knowledge and also in terms of emotional intelligence and communication skills.
Supervisors are likely to become more human-centered as automation will handle the numerical tasks. Supervisors will concentrate on coaching and motivating human agents or assisting in solving the most complicated customer issues and requests.
The wrap-up
The contact center industry has much to offer anyone looking for a job, regardless of experience. If you’d like to talk to an industry veteran, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Further reading...
Here are some more articles about the contact center industry:
Creating Quality Standards For Contact Centers
Using Quality Management To Improve KPIs
How To Reduce Average Handling Time (AHT) In Contact Centers
Many CDOs/CDAOs (and even CMOs) have raised some interesting questions about these three data management and data science titans: Snowflake, Databricks, and DataRobot. Some of the questions include:
Later in this post, I’ll be discussing these questions with Ed Lucio, a New Zealand data science expert for Spark (telecom provider) and former lead data scientist for ASB Bank. We’ll be giving our POV on these questions as well as highlighting a few data analytics use cases that can be driven by these tools once they are in place. I would love to hear from you regarding other use cases and your experiences with data lakehouses.
Before diving into my conversation with Ed, a quick overview of environments and tools...
We, as an industry, have gone from the data warehouse to data lakes, and now to data lakehouses. Here’s a brief summary of each.
The data warehouse: Closed format, good for reporting. Very rigid data models that require moving data, and ETL processes. Most cannot handle unstructured data. Most of these are on-prem and expensive and resource-intensive to run.
The data lake:
Pros
Cons
Data lakehouse: Merges the benefits of its predecessors. It has a transactional layer on top of the data lake that allows you to do both BI and data science in one platform. The data lakehouse cleans up all of the issues of the data lake, supporting structured, unstructured, semi-structured, and streaming data.
Current Data Environments and Tools
The following tools summary is from my deploying the tools as a CDO/CDAO and executive general manager, not as an architecture or engineer. This is a synopsis of the top-line features of each but if you want to add to your experience with the features please reply to the post and add to the synopsis.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a highly flexible cloud-based big data warehouse that has some unique and specialized data security capabilities allowing businesses to transition their data to the cloud as well as to partner and share data. Snowflake has made much progress in building partnerships and APIs and integrations. One interesting possibility that marketers may want to consider is that snowflake can be leveraged as the CDP directly and activate campaign data through a number of their partners. See their website for more details.
Snowflake is a data lakehouse that like its competitors is indifferent to structure variability and can support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Its uniqueness for me is a few folds:
Many organizations today are using data clouds to create a single source of truth. Snowflake can ingest data from any source, or format, using any method (batched, streaming, etc.), from anywhere. In addition, Snowflake can provide data in real time. Overall, it is good practice to have the marketing and analytics environments reside in one place such as Snowflake. Many times, as you generate insights you want to operationalize those insights into campaigns hence having them in one CDP environment improves efficiency. High-touch marketers, supported by their data analytics colleagues and Snowflake, can activate their data and conduct segmentation and analysis all in one place. Snowflake data clouds enable many other use cases:
What is Databricks?
Databricks is a large company that was founded by some of the original creators of Apache Spark. A key strength of Databricks is that it’s an open unified lakehouse platform with tooling that helps clients collaborate, store, clean, and monetize data. Data science teams report the collaboration features were incredible. See the interview below with Ed Lucio.
It supports data science and ML, BI, real-time, and streaming activities:
Based on managing data scientists and large analytics teams, I would say that Databricks is preferred over other tools due to its interface and collaboration capabilities. But as always it depends on your business objectives in terms of which tool you select.
What is DataRobot?
DataRobot is a data science tool that can also be considered an autoML approach: it automates data science activities and thus furthers the democratization of machine learning and AI. The automation of the modeling process is excellent. This tool is different from Databricks which deals with data collection and other tasks. It helps fill the gap in skill sets given the shortage of data scientists. DataRobot:
Using Databricks and DataRobot together helps with both data engineering AND data science.
Now that we have a level set on the tools and vendors in the space, let’s turn to our interview with Ed Lucio.
Tony Branda:
Many firms struggle to deploy machine learning and data operations tools in the cloud and to get the data needed for data science into the cloud. Why is that? How have you seen firms resolve these challenges?
Ed if you could unpack this one in detail? Thanks, Tony.
Ed Lucio:
From my experience, the challenge to migrate data infrastructures and deploy cloud-based advanced analytics models is a more common issue in traditional/larger organizations which have at least one of the following: built significant processes on top of legacy systems, is in vendor/tooling lock-in, in a ‘comfortable’ position where cloud-based advanced analytics adoption is not the immediate need, and the information security team is not yet well adept on how this modern technology is aligned to their data security requirements.
However, in progressive and/or smaller organizations where there is an alignment from senior leaders down to the front line (coupled with the immediate need to innovate), cloud-based migration for infrastructures and deployment of models is almost natural. It is scalable, more cost-effective, and flexible enough to adjust to dynamic business environments.
I have seen some large organizations resolve these obstacles through strong senior leadership support where the organization starts building cloud-based models and deploys smaller use cases with less critical components for the business. The objective is just to prove the value of the cloud first, then once a pattern has been established, the company can scale up to accommodate bigger processes.
Why is Databricks so popular as one tool category (Data Ops/ML Ops), and what does their lakehouse concept give us that we could not get from Azure, AWS, or other tools?
How does Databricks help data scientists?
What I personally like about Databricks is the unified environment that helps promote collaboration across teams and reduces overhead when navigating through the “data discovery to production” phases of an advanced analytics solution. Whether you belong to the Data Science, Data Engineering, or Insights Analytics team, the tool provides a familiar interface where teams can collaborate and solve business problems together. Databricks provide a smooth flow from managing data assets, performing data exploration, dashboarding, and visualization, to machine model prototyping and experiment logging, and code and model version control. When the models are deemed to be ready by the team, deploying these through a job scheduler and/or an API endpoint is just a couple of clicks away and flexible enough for the business needs whether it is needed for either batch or real-time scoring. Lastly, it is built on open-source technology which means that when you need help, the internet community would almost always have an answer (if not, your teammates or the Databricks Solutions Architect would be there to assist). Other sets of cloud tools would be able to provide similar functionalities, but I haven’t seen one as seamless as Databricks.
On Snowflake, AutoML tools, and others, how do you view these tools, and what is your view on best practices?
Advanced analytics discovery is a journey where you have a business problem, a set of data and hypotheses, and a toolkit of mathematical algorithms to play with. For me, there is no “unicorn” tool (yet) in the market able to serve all the data science use-case needs for the business. Each tool has its own strengths, and it would need some tinkering on how every component would fit the puzzle in achieving the end business objective. For instance, Snowflake has nice features for managing the data asset in an organization, while the AutoML tooling (DataRobot/H2O) is good for automated machine learning model building and deployment.
However, even before proceeding to create an ML model, an analyst would need to explore the dataset for quality checks, understand relationships, and test basic statistical hypotheses. The data science process is iterative, and organizations would need the tools to be linked together so that interim outputs are communicated to the stakeholders to pivot or confirm the initial hypothesis, and to share the outputs with the wider business to create value. Outputs from each step would typically need to be stitched together to get the most from the data. For example, a data asset could be fed into a machine learning model where the output would be used in a dashboarding tool for reporting. Then, the same ML model output could be further enhanced by business rules and another ML model to be fit for purpose on certain use cases.
On top of these, there must be a proper change control environment governing the code and model versioning and transitioning of codes/models from development, pre-prod, and prod environments. After deploying the ML model, it needs to be monitored to ensure that model performance is within a tolerable range, and the underlying data has not drifted from the training set.
Are there any tips and tricks you’d recommend to leaders in data analytics (DA) or data science (DS) to help us evaluate these tools?
Be objective when evaluating the data science tooling and work with the data science and engineering teams to gather requirements. Design the business architecture which supports the organization’s goals, then work backward together with the enterprise architect and platform team to see which tools would enable these objectives. If the information security team objects to any of the candidate toolings, have a solution-oriented mindset to find alternative configurations to make things work.
Lastly, strong support from the senior leadership team and business stakeholders is essential. Having a strong focus on the potential business value, the need to enable the data science tools would always come in handy.
What is the difference between a data engineer and a data scientist, and an ML engineer (in some circles referred to as a data science data engineer)? Is it where they report or do they have substantial skill differences? Should they be on the same team? How do we define roles more clearly?
I see the data engineers, ML engineers, and data scientists being part of a wider team working together to achieve a similar set of objectives: to solve business problems and deliver value using data. Without going into too much detail:
Each of these groups would have their own sets of specialized skills, but at the same time, should have a common level of understanding of how each of their roles work side-by-side.
Many thanks to Ed Lucio, Senior Data Scientist at Spark in New Zealand, for his contributions to this article.
In summary, this article has provided a primer on data lakehouses and three of what I consider to be the leading-edge tools in the cloud data lakehouse and machine learning space. I hope Ed Lucio’s POV on the tools and their importance to data science was helpful to those considering their use. At the end of the day, all of this—selection of environments and tools—depends on the business needs and goals: what are the problems that need solving, as well as the level of automation the business is driving towards.
As always, I’d love to hear about your experiences. What has your experience been with data lakehouses, ML Ops, and data science tooling? I look forward to hearing from you regarding this post.
Don't let your employment status dictate how much you enjoy the holidays. This is a time for happiness, family and friends, and delicious food!
I mean, c'mon. There's no reason why your job search should interfere with Grandma's famous pumpkin pie. But it can be hard to stay positive during the holidays when those aunts and uncles are nagging you about your job search and old friends are asking what you're doing for work these days.
It can be so tempting to completely remove yourself from holiday festivities so you don't have to experience that agonizing awkwardness of answering the same dreaded questions over and over again. Don't let your insecurities ruin the most wonderful time of the year. Here are our three tips for staying positive during your holiday job search:
via GIPHY
You don't have time for that pity party nonsense! You've got to bake cookies, play with your dog, and sip hot cocoa with your family.
Whenever you start feeling worn down from the stress or start feeling bad for yourself, do something productive. You could make yourself a structured job search plan that incorporates, or research companies you're interested in. Or you could do something that's not related to your job search at all.
You can hit the gym, take a walk outside to get some fresh air and sunshine, or you can indulge in a good book for 30 minutes. Don't feel guilty about doing these things—they're necessary for your mental and physical health, which are two things you can't neglect, especially during a job search.
When someone asks you, "How's the job search going?" don't focus on the negative. Remember: you have the power to control the tone of this conversation. If you focus on your lack of success—how many interviews you haven't gotten or how many companies didn't call you back—you're not only going to make the conversation awkward for both of you, but you're going to feel awful about yourself.
Instead, tell them about a few companies and opportunities you're excited about. Focus on your little wins like having a great informational interview with someone from one of your target companies. Convey your enthusiasm for finding a new job opportunity. It'll make you feel uplifted, and it gives you the opportunity to talk about your job search in a positive way.
What makes you laugh out loud, even when no one is in the room? What songs make you want to get up and dance, even when people are looking? Find those little things that make you happy and pepper them in throughout your day. There's honestly nothing better than a good laugh.
Distract yourself with positivity—and don't feel bad about taking a "Happy Break" every once in a while. It will help keep you in balance during your holiday job search.
If you read my article from last week, I talked about COVID-19 career PTSD. There are so many people who are stuck in their careers right now and can't figure out what to do next. I know from 20 years of career coaching that the answer lies in figuring out whether you need a job, a career, or a calling.
@j.t.odonnell Do you need a JOB, CAREER or CALLING right now???? @j.t.odonnell #careers #jobs #jobtok #careertok #tiktok #howto #dreamjob #workitdaily ♬ original sound - J.T. O'Donnell
A job is something that just pays the bills. It's serving a singular purpose. You don't feel any identity tied to it. A really great example of people who work jobs would be Olympic athletes. A lot of them will work at places like Home Depot because they can just go in and do the job. A job like that has flexible hours, which is perfect for them because their main pursuit is becoming an Olympic athlete. Or maybe you've got something going on with family right now that's way more important than feeling connected to the work that you do. Whatever the reason, you just need a job where you can punch in and collect a paycheck.
Then there's a career. I would say the majority of people fall into this category. These are people who want work to be meaningful to them. We've seen a big shift in this as a result of the pandemic. People are becoming purpose-driven professionals who don't just want to do a job. They want the work that they do to have some sort of impact or meaning or at least make them feel satisfied. Careers support intrinsic motivation, meaning you do the work because of the connection that you feel to it, whether it's the connection to the work itself or maybe to the organization and what they do. And that becomes very important for satisfaction. We have to do work that works for us. So when you know you want a career, you have to pursue it differently. You have to become a job shopper. That's how you'll find the right career for you.
The last category is a calling. Very few people fall into this type of work. This is when what you do becomes a large part of your identity. Finding a calling happens when people get super passionate about solving a problem, alleviating a pain, and creating more happiness. I have a calling. I left corporate America 20 years ago because I got very frustrated about the fact that the people that we were recruiting that we weren't able to place could have secured better jobs if they had received coaching. So I became a career coach, and for the last 20 years, I've been trying to disrupt that industry and build an online platform for people. It's come at a sacrifice. I've traded out a lot of hobbies and recreation to put toward work. Also, financially, this isn't overly lucrative. But I'm doing it because it makes a difference. And that's important to me. That's a calling. It's not for everyone, but it might be for you.
So which one do you need right now? A job, a career, or a calling?
Need more help finding a job, career, or calling?
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Why Does Taking Good Notes Matter?
I graduated college and graduate school many years ago. I took notes like crazy when I was in school, and they were my own cryptic code of the subject at hand. I thought I was “done” with this style of capturing information.
To this day, I keep a notebook within arms reach of me at work. Each meeting, phone conversation, and even some personal conversations get recorded in my notebook. Much of the time, I capture brief elements or tasks from a discussion. Other times, I have long volumes of knowledge written on the page. In my desk are many years of notebooks filled with these tidbits of past conversations.
School’s out, so why do I keep doing this?
Let’s face facts. As I age, my memory declines. With stress, I forget many things discussed during a work day. Do I remember what I ate last week? I do not always remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Life throws so much information in our direction, how can we remember everything?
Write it down. Transfer the information from the short term to the long term. Allow pen and paper to serve as your memory.
I will misquote this… during an interview, Albert Einstein was asked for his phone number. He rose from his seat, opened a phone book, and pointed to his number. When asked why the smartest man in the world did not know his own phone number, the physicist answered, "Why would I remember something trivial when it is written down?"
Use note-taking for your long-term memory support. If it is written down, the information can be referenced at any time with minimal need for recollection.
Ever disagree with a customer on something said in a meeting? Did your boss recall a conversation differently than you? Do colleagues neglect to follow through on a task agreed upon? Do you get into disputes over dates, times, and actions from a meeting?
Remember the old notebooks? Just last week, I found meeting minutes from a discussion nearly two years ago, and I was able to show attendance at the meeting and a skeleton of the discussion. My customer denied being present, changed the terms of our agreement, and challenged me on the validity of our claim. Looking in the notebook, I showed he was present and agreed to bullet points in the conversation. We still needed to find a consensus between our perspectives; however, I was able to begin at a basic agreement the discussion had taken place.
Because my memory was not clear, and my customer’s memory was not either, my notes clarified our position. Dates, facts, attendance, and action items were stored for my retrieval.
For me, the answer is yes. I am a visual learner first and a tactile learner second. I need to have the physical motion of writing to help me reinforce a concept, capture knowledge, or learn a skill. Seeing it and making it real works well for me.
I have often wondered about the tablets which capture handwriting, and I have yet to make the jump. As a former PalmPilot user, I learned quickly that electronic capture did not work for me. Taking typed notes is a challenge as a self-taught typist. When I am creating the idea in my head, I can type very well. When I am transposing someone else’s thoughts, I am much slower than writing.
Use what works best for your learning style. The media only matters if it helps with comprehension. Auditory learners may record everything in their phone’s voice memos. Visual learners may benefit from a tablet to doodle their conclusions. Tactile people may prefer pen to paper like me. Use many techniques. Simply take the notes!
Here are a few things which work for me. I suggest you try them and manipulate the ideas to fit your needs. Use these as my guidelines to help shape your own unique system.
Professionals take a lot of training, spend years in school, or develop their expertise over many years of effort. I would like to believe this information is common sense everyone should know.
In my observations, many professionals do not have this skill nor prepare for it. Too many people walk into meetings with nothing in hand. Some bring phones and text or surf while meetings occur. Others grab the Post-it ® notes and decorate their desks with the colorful squares.
We all learn differently and have unique styles. My comments in this article reflect how I need to work, and I merely recommend ideas that have worked for me. Sometimes simply reading about another’s successful actions is enough to spark new behavior in yourself. My goal is to share my ideas to help someone struggling to make a modest improvement in their effectiveness.
If one person walks away with a general idea of how to improve their memory at work (or home), my message is well received. For others, they may not see value in my note-taking message. For those who took the time to read, I can only hope my recommendation will help you be more effective and efficient in recalling details. My note-taking has certainly helped me over time, and I hope it may be able to help you as well.
Thanks for reading, and make a note!
What is a business continuity plan (BCP)?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company. The plan ensures that personnel and assets are protected and can function quickly in a disaster.
BCP involves defining any risks affecting the company’s operations, making it an essential part of the organization’s risk management plans. Risks may include natural disasters—fire, flood, or weather-related events—cyber-attacks, and Centers for Disease Control events (COVID-19). Once the risks are identified, the plan should also include the following:
BCPs are an essential part of any business. Threats and disruptions mean a loss of revenue and higher costs, which leads to a drop in profitability. And companies can’t rely on insurance alone because it doesn’t cover all the costs and the customers who move to the competition. It is generally conceived in advance and involves key stakeholders and personnel input.
When I worked in Football Operations at the NFL, I was heavily involved on the Risk Management Team. Our team knew that the NFL had a plan if a tragic plane crash event eliminated an entire team. The plan was to have an emergency meeting involving all 32 team clubs. Team management would conduct a special draft of the existing 31 clubs, pulling enough players and staff to field a team to continue business operations for the rest of the season.
BCPs and disaster recovery plans are similar; the latter focuses on technology and information technology (IT) infrastructure. BCPs concentrate more on the entire organization, such as customer service and supply chain.
BCPs focus on reducing overall costs or losses, while disaster recovery plans look at technology outages and related expenses. Disaster recovery plans tend to involve only IT personnel—which create and manage the policy. However, BCPs tend to have more personnel trained on the potential procedures.
How mature is your organization when it comes to business continuity? Does your business continuity management (BCM) program crawl, walk, or run? From self-governed to synergistic, we have identified six levels of BCM maturity that most companies fall into.
Immature
Levels 1-3 represent organizations that still need to complete the necessary program basics to launch a sustainable enterprise business continuity management program.
Level 1 – No real plan in place. A wait-and-see approach.
Individual business units and departments can organize or implement their business continuity or disaster recovery efforts. The state of readiness for disruptive events is low across the business enterprise. The business or individual department reacts to disruptive events when they occur. No actual planning is involved: business continuity recovery is reactive rather than proactive.
Level 2 – Departmental: The one and only—you’re in a class alone!
At least one business unit gets it. You have reached Level 2 of BCM maturity if at least one department or business unit has initiated efforts to establish management awareness of the importance of business continuity. A few functions or services have developed and maintain business continuity plans within one or more business continuity disciplines, such as:
At Level 2, your organization has at least one internal or external resource assigned to support the business continuity efforts of the participating business units and departments. The state of preparedness may be moderate for participants but remain relatively low across most of the company. Management may see the value of a BCM program, but they are unwilling to make it a priority at this time with minimal executive buy-in.
Level 3 – Cooperative: Moderate preparedness, but on its way to full maturity.
Participating business units and departments have instituted a sophomoric program, mandating at least limited compliance to standardized BCM policy, practices, and procedures to which they have commonly agreed.
Maturing
Levels 4-6 represent a definite plan for a maturing enterprise BCM program. If your business achieves Level 4, you are compliant with most standards.
Level 4 – Standards in place: You have climbed to early BCM maturity adulthood.
Congratulations! Your management has arrived on the scene and is committed to the strategic importance of an effective BCM program throughout the organization. In addition, there is an enforceable, practical BCM policy that adopts structure, including procedures and tools for addressing all four business continuity disciplines:
Level 5 – Integrated: Almost there!
At Level 5, the company meets all of the requirements of Level 4 that are now implemented throughout the company, adopting continuous quality improvements.
All business departments have completed tests on all elements of their business continuity plan, including their internal and external dependencies.
Level 6 – Synergistic: You have reached BCM nirvana!
You not only conquered levels 4 and 5. You own it! As official business continuity gurus, you have:
Work is important to a lot of us. And we all have egos. The trick is to balance our own view of work and success so that the ego remains a helpful source of support and not a tyrannical master. One is the road to relative contentment, the other to continued misery. Have you struck the balance?
We particularly need to know we have the balance as close to right (for us and others at work—everywhere!) especially given the likely turmoil and stress employees, colleagues, leadership, and ourselves may feel because of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding us right now.
Why do I even write about ego and why should any of us in business care about it?
To understand the influence of our own ego at work, let's first get a working definition of what ego is. Oxford Languages defines ego as, among other things, ‘the part of the mind that …is responsible for reality testing.’
So, what does reality testing look like on the ground? How do we implement reality testing at work for us?
Through a rule book. Our own internal rule book. An individual set of rules we each carry around inside our heads for how we deal with the world including at work.
Everyone has their own internal rule book. Your job is to make sure that your internal rule book continues to support and serve for the benefit of all including your stakeholders, your colleagues, your team, your company, and yourself at work.
We all have this internal rule book for all parts of our lives. So, our internal rule book pervades our waking moments including at work.
Almost from birth we acquire, adopt, and develop our own set of rules which drive what we expect and therefore what we impose on others and ourselves as a way to decide what is going on—that is we are reality testing.
For instance, simple rules picked up through experience like if you pay a baker for a bread roll you expect them to hand over a bread roll. If they don’t hand over a bread roll then you start reality testing. In this example, where the baker didn’t hand over the bread roll as you expected (rule about exchange) you might immediately reality test the situation by asking ‘Did I hand over the money to the baker’ or ‘Did he hear my order correctly?’
You see how the rule book works—it's reality testing what you expected. You expected a bread roll after handing over the money (a rule about exchange), yet the baker didn’t hand over a bread roll. So, you try to understand what happened given your rule explains there ‘should’ have been an exchange. You could call this sort of rule a ‘standard rule’ as many people follow it. In this scenario, the rule of exchange is a standard rule because it is widely followed and understood.
So, applying the rule book to work, if you delegate to someone and then they don’t meet your expectations...here is where things can get interesting. Remember our internal rule book guides and drives our expectations.
Your rule book is active 24 hours, 7 days a week in your subconscious, whether you’re at work or not, and whether you are always aware or not. The application of our rules often happens on ‘autopilot.’ Remaining mindful of how you apply your rules will increase your likelihood of successful interactions and activities at work and in general.
Why?
Because being mindful means you are in that very moment, live, and you are adjusting to the actual, live situation and the interaction or person in that very moment. Rather than applying the rule when it may have first formed for you.
Remember, right now, people may be in a heightened state of stress for other reasons than the immediate interaction with you. So make sure your rule is the best possible fit, in the moment, to that situation and people.
This mindful assessment of the ‘best fit’ of your rule in the moment will lead to better, healthier, more successful interactions and outcomes the more you can do it.
Remember: a negative emotion you may feel during the day at work, with others or during an activity you are doing—e.g., reading a work email, for instance (anger, frustration, annoyance)—is a pretty good indicator that someone or something has tripped over one of your rules.
This is then a split-second opportunity for you to grab hold of how you are feeling, and then recognize that it’s actually because of a rule you have in play. You then have the immediate opportunity to do something potentially different to how you would ‘normally’ react.
This can lead to a different (and possibly) better outcome for you and the person or situation than might otherwise have been the case.
Let’s continue with the example mentioned of delegating work to someone. You have more choices in this latter example scenario of delegating work to someone which is of course more complex than a simple transaction of buying a bread roll—obvious right?
What may be less obvious is that you and the person you delegated to don’t just have standard rules (i.e., widely followed and understood what is expected). We all have non-standard or individual internal rules as well. In other words, everyone has a standard set of rules that are widely followed and understood by others and non-standard rules where expectations between people might vary.
It’s also worth thinking about how you apply your rule book in say, difficult work situations like distressed projects and teams (see "6-Point Checklist For Taking Over A ‘Distressed’ Project Or Team" for more on this).
Let’s say in our delegation example you explained to your colleague that she keeps you in the communication loop on the progress of work you delegated to her. Let’s say she doesn’t copy you in on an update email and you find out from a colleague instead how the work is progressing.
This is the second time you have found out indirectly rather than directly from the person you delegated to. Do you apply a rule that says this colleague cannot be trusted or is slack or absent-minded? Or could it be that your rule instead interprets your colleague’s behaviour as they are purposely leaving you out of the loop.
What if her behaviour of leaving you off the update email is actually because she is continuously overworked and doing her very best and slips up sometimes because of how busy she is?
Take your pick of how you respond in this scenario.
Your response is driven by your internal rule about what you expect—in this scenario, what you expected when you delegate work to someone. So, when your expectation wasn’t met, your internal rule book kicks in (to reality test) and then reacts by judging the situation (and the person).
Remember that our rule book is built over time and evolves through observation, our own experiences, as well as our beliefs—a topic for another (many!) blog series.
How much you check, question, and validate your own internal rules that you use and apply to a given situation, such as the example above, will potentially influence your attitude and behaviour towards this person as well as similar scenarios in the future.
Ask yourself, ‘Do my rules...
I’ve barely mentioned ego throughout this blog yet that’s where we started. We could spend a lot more than my 1200-word limit allows. So instead, I focused on a practical example of what is driven by our ego—the internal rule book.
At its most basic, our internal rule book is there to protect us and reassure us that we are in control as we deal with and decide what is going on around us at work (and beyond).
It’s important you place as much effort as you can muster into making sure, especially in today’s uncertain work environment, that the application of your rule book (i.e., in situations with stakeholders like colleagues, employees, or leadership) remains as balanced and unemotional as possible, no matter what is going on for you and your stress levels. Not an easy ask I realize—but I know you can do it!
The tips I provided aim to help you recognise and understand your own internal rule book, the one you apply at work especially, and help you ensure it remains supportive rather than one that drives unhelpful behaviours that can make things worse for you and those around you.
Remember the ultimate aim of our internal rules is to help not hinder.
Would love to hear about your internal rule books and how they serve you or how you review your rules regularly to make sure they continue to support you.
In today's job market, your resume is the most important document you have to get your job application in the hands of the hiring manager. If you can't get your resume past the ATS, it doesn't matter how much experience or how good your cover letter is. That's why you need to be strategic and intentional about the words you include in your resume.
When a hiring manager is seeing the same old resume time and time again (which includes the cliché words and phrases such as "highly dedicated individual" or "great team player") you are guaranteeing that your resume will be tossed. Not only is it probably not optimized with the right keywords, but by taking up space with subjective statements, you're missing out on the chance to quantify your experience, skills, and accomplishments on your resume.
Poorly chosen words and clichéd phrases can destroy the interest of the reader. Powerful words, when chosen correctly, can have the opposite effect of motivating and inspiring the reader.
Here are the most powerful resume words you should use to stand out from the competition and increase your chances of getting hired...
The next time you're writing your resume, be sure to include some of the powerful words above. Your job search depends on it!
The dreaded interview question, "Tell me about yourself," stumps a lot of folks. People of all ages and experience levels often fail to answer this one correctly, in a way that conveys meaningful information to the interviewer—information they will actually use to consider your candidacy.
First off, please know they are not asking you for a boring chronological recap of your professional history. That is the quickest way to lose their interest! What an employer is really asking is, “Why should I hire you?"
That being said, here's my three-step process for giving them an answer that gets their attention.
Enthusiasm for solving a business problem they need help with is the quickest way to get a hiring manager's attention. Let's face it, they aren't hiring you for the heck of it. You need to explain how you can make things better for an employer.
You are a business-of-one. At the end of the day, you provide a service for your employer. By talking about the problems you love to solve and how you go about solving them, the hiring manager will clearly see the type of employee you are and could be for their company.
Companies hire people who can save and/or make them money. So when you provide examples from your personal and professional past that demonstrate the value your problem-solving skills bring, you are proving your worth.
It also shows that you are thinking like an employee who understands that their job is to make things better for the company.
The research you conducted on the employer before your interview will come in handy here. Connect your past accomplishments and problem-solving experience to the current problems you know the company is trying to solve (from your research). You'll impress the hiring manager with your knowledge of the company and you'll further answer the question, "Tell me about yourself."
Let them know how you hope to grow your skills and abilities by taking your problem-solving skills to the next level. Also, mention how passionate you are about what the company does and how you feel connected to its mission (echoing what you wrote in your disruptive cover letter). This lets the employer know you plan to focus on being successful and expanding your value to the organization if you get hired.
Employers love candidates who clearly plan to hold themselves to a higher standard. If you make it to the last round of interviews, you should consider coming prepared for your final interview with a 30-60-90 day plan.
But that's the long game. In your first interview with an employer, combining your problem-solving expertise and your passion for the company in your explanation is an excellent way to answer the interview question, "Tell me about yourself."
If you follow this three-step guideline when answering, "Tell me about yourself," in your next job interview, I guarantee you'll create a compelling story that will have the employer sitting up and taking notice. This is your chance to sell your value—don't pass it up!
Inspiration lacking this Monday morning? On the job search and feeling blue? Stuck in a career you hate? Not sure what success means to you? You're not alone. Grab a nice, warm cup of coffee and let us help you out.
Light your inner fire with these inspirational career quotes:
Professional quotes motivate and inspire you to become the best professional you can be in your career. They remind you that you can achieve what you want to achieve. What does success look like to you? If you ever need some inspiration, read these quotes...
We hope these quotes motivated you. Please share with someone you know who needs a little inspiration right now.
Need some more inspiration in your career?
A common interview question employers ask during job interviews is, "Why are you interested in this position?" They want to know why you want to work at their company, and the specific motivation behind why you applied for the job (not that you need a paycheck).
Knowing how to answer interview questions well is always important, especially with this question.
To persuade the employer that you have a true connection to the company and a passion for the job you applied for, your answer to this interview question should start with, "I'm interested in this job, at this company, because…" and then list at least three reasons why you want to work there.
Here is how you should structure your answer to the interview question, "Why are you interested in this job?"
In order to effectively answer "Why are you interested in this position?" during a job interview, you need to list three reasons why you want the job for a well-rounded response. Those three reasons are professional fit, cultural fit, and personal fit.
Your first reason should always show fit in terms of professional skills.
Example: "I'm interested in this job because I can see that, in this role, my skills could help solve this problem within your company. I also see an opportunity for me to learn and grow these skills, so we both would benefit personally, professionally, and financially. If I can come in here and solve problems and accomplish your goals, I know I can develop my career the way that I want to."
This part of your answer lets them know that you are excited about what you will be able to accomplish for them, while still emphasizing what they are getting out of the bargain. You need to sell yourself as a business-of-one who can provide a service better than the competition.
Your second reason when answering, "Why are you interested in this job?" also shows fit, but in a different way.
Example: "Also, I like the culture of this organization. From what I've heard and what I've been reading about the company, it seems like a great fit for my personality and my values. I really connect with your mission statement, and feel passionate about the work that you do."
This is a general answer, so if you can be more specific by actually naming a couple of things you've heard or read about the company's workplace culture that you like, it will help your cause. This is one area where your pre-interview research is critical.
Here are a few things you may want to look for when you research the company:
Mention those things that truly speak to you and your values so your sincerity shows.
Wrap up your answer to this interview question with something that personalizes it a bit more.
Examples:
Say something that gives you another reason of your own for wanting this job. This interview answer is a fantastic place to let your enthusiasm for the job show. It's very appealing to employers, and it gives them one more reason to hire you.
To summarize, if you want to effectively answer the question, "Why are you interested in this position?" you should touch on your professional, cultural, and personal fit.
Here's a good example of an answer that has all three of these components:
"I'm interested in this job because I can see that my skills could help solve this problem within your company. Also, I like the culture of this organization. From what I've heard and what I've been reading about the company, it seems like a great fit for my personality and my values. Plus, I've always used your products, and I just love them. I am really excited about being a part of that."
You'll have a very clear and thorough answer to the question, "Why are you interested in this job?" if you follow the formula above. Set yourself apart from the competition today!
Are you struggling to answer other common interview questions? We can help.
I think one of the hardest things about networking events is just getting a conversation going with someone—without being awkward about it. Approaching someone new can be stressful, but it doesn't have to be. So, what are some natural and easy ways to break the ice?
Here are some tips and tricks for starting a conversation at a networking event:
While waiting in line for food, start chatting up the person next to you. This is a great opportunity to get a conversation started because you already have something in common: the food. Everyone is thinking about the same thing. What am I going to try? What looks good? So instead of just standing there in silence, start a conversation.
Here are a few conversation starters for this situation:
If you see someone standing alone in the corner, clutching his or her drink, and looking miserable, don't be afraid to walk up and introduce yourself. Typically, these people need a little help getting the conversation going.
Here are some icebreakers:
Everyone loves compliments, especially when they are feeling insecure (and many people do feel that way when attending networking events). If you're struggling to start a conversation with someone, find something to compliment.
Here are some ideas:
People love talking about sports. If you're a sports person, use it to your advantage!
See someone wearing a Red Sox cap? Say something like, "Red Sox fan, huh? Did you catch the game yesterday?" Overhear a group of people talking about last night's game? Express your interest in the conversation by saying something like, "Are you talking about ____?" and then chime in.
Sometimes, the easiest way to meet someone is to offer a handshake and say, "Hi, I'm Peter."
Simply introducing yourself with a smile and a dash of confidence can work wonders.
I know what you're thinking. Yes, yes, that's all well and good, but how can I keep the conversation going after the initial question? It's easy! Talk about something else you have in common—the event itself!
After that, try learning more about them. Questions can include:
Next step: get them talking. Remember, people generally like to talk about themselves. So, once they tell you what they do, ask questions about it. Here are a few:
It's that time: your drink is dry and you're ready to move on. When the conversation starts to wind down, don't try to force more. Remember, you're there to mix and mingle—don't chain yourself to one person all night.
If you'd like to exit a conversation, try one of these lines:
Remember these conversation starters (and enders) during your next networking event to get the most out of your time there. Happy networking!
Need more help with your career?
This article was originally published at an earlier date and was inspired by the author's personal experiences and the advice of Susan RoAne, author of How to Work a Room.
During the pandemic, organizations had to interact with their customers digitally. Contact centers provided the company’s “human face.”
Without face-to-face interactions, it is a lot harder to understand how your customers feel, since you cannot experience customer behavior directly.
Running a contact center is like steering a submarine: you need a periscope to see what is going on.
Contact center managers have two tools—post-call customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and sentiment analysis.
CSAT surveys ask customers to react after their encounters with the company, prompting them to give a numerical score.
Sentiment analysis uses speech analytics to take customers’ “emotional temperature” during the conversation.
I believe that sentiment analysis is a better “periscope” than post-call surveys.
How It Works
When the interaction ends, the automated survey asks the customer to give a numerical score. This measures how they feel about the interaction. Customers may also be asked to say why they gave this score.
Survey Wording Issues
One popular CSAT measurement is the net promoter score (NPS). Customers are asked how likely they are to recommend the company to their friends and relatives.
NPS’s strongest advocates believe asking how likely customers are to recommend the company is better than asking how happy they feel. It’s not clear how carefully respondents think about the question. They are asked to respond unexpectedly. They rarely have the time or the interest to consider the question carefully. Their response will most likely reflect their emotional state.
NPS’s scoring system may not match up with how customers think. NPS classifies anyone giving a score of 6 out of 10 or below as “detractors,” or people who will complain about the company. Customers giving 9 or 10 out of 10 are classified as promoters, or people who will tell everyone how good the company is. Those giving 7 or 8 are classified as “passive.” Respondents are unlikely to think in such depth. If their problem has been solved, they will give a high score, if it hasn’t, they will give a low score. Some respondents have even given a 7 or 8, because “they never give 10 on principle.”
Penetration Rate
About 3% of customers respond to post-call surveys. This is too small to be considered a representative sample. Where results show poor CSAT, this may reflect angry customers’ motivation to show their feelings or get “revenge” on the agent. It does not necessarily indicate how all customers feel.
Data Aggregation
Inconsistent customer reactions and low sample sizes make aggregating CSAT data a frustrating task. Inaccuracies potentially baked into each result are then compounded by the volume of results.
At a high level, ranking agents’ average CSAT or NPS scores can raise some red flags if an agent has a lower score than the team average. The same can apply to team or queue averages.
This is a much newer technology than post-call surveys. Speech analytics software can be programmed to identify and indicate whether customers are expressing positive, neutral, or negative feelings.
It is trained to recognize such feelings based on samples where the speaker’s feelings are known. The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to construct a picture of which combinations of phrases, pitch, pace, and volume match feelings that have been identified in a recording by the AI’s trainer. Where mismatches are discovered, the system can be further trained.
For sampling purposes, the sounds on a voice call can be split into each party on the call and analyzed separately. Sentiments can be identified even when both parties are speaking at once.
Sample Size
This is the major differentiator between sentiment analysis and post-call surveys. Sentiment analysis is usually applied to all calls. It can be applied to all parts of a call, showing users how customers’ feelings change throughout the call. The sample size is likely to equal the population being studied, so the statistical significance of the data cannot be denied.
Sentiment analysis reflects how the customer feels without having to process and respond to a question.
One limitation is that because there is no question, you cannot tell why the customer is angry. The root cause might be the agents’ behavior, the issue with the product, or be unrelated to the call at all.
Since the sample size is so much larger, there is more scope for aggregation and analysis. You need to build a set of benchmarks to establish what is “normal” for your population. If a water-utilities contact center handles issues relating to wastewater disposal, customer sentiment will be fairly negative as a matter of course.
League tables showing average sentiment by agent, team, or queue can quickly identify where improvements can be made. Comparing or correlating this with other data such as call length or first contact resolution, you can see how contact center operations affect customer perception. You can see what makes customers angry or happy, and then tune your offerings as a company accordingly.
Sentiment analysis clearly produces more data than a post-call survey, but it's usually more expensive to collect. Cloud computing is making speech analytics and sentiment analysis more affordable for smaller contact centers.
What do you use as a “periscope” on your contact center? How useful are the results? Do they match your expectations or are they surprising? I’d love to hear more!
Here are links to some other articles on NPS, customer feedback, and customer sentiment:
How to Calculate… Net Promoter Score
The Ultimate Guide to Sentiment and Emotion Analysis
Sentiment’s Role in Contact Centre Management
Whether you're a college student trying to figure out where your true calling lies, an experienced professional getting back to work, or someone just looking for a career in another field, you need to make your choice carefully. With women making considerable strides in fields that were previously male-dominated, the lines of career limitations have blurred.
There are more career choices available to women now than ever before. A woman plays many roles—sister, daughter, friend, wife, mother, confidante, breadwinner, and so on. You, being a multitasking woman, need to find a career that not only pays you well, but allows you to be a career woman without having to compromise on any of these roles.
If you think this is impossible, think again!
Lots of women have found careers that balance beautifully with their family life. So, now that you know it isn't unthinkable to achieve work-life balance, how about making it happen for yourself?
With a plethora of options, you may have a tough time deciding which career would be most suitable for you. Of course, no two women are the same and neither are their choices. But some careers provide women with the best opportunity to achieve both career success and work-life balance.
Here are the top eight career choices for women:
The best careers for women are entrepreneurship, IT, medicine, teaching, human resources, psychology, interior design, and media.
According to this article from College Consensus, these are the most popular highest-paying careers for women and their average salaries:
For women who want a chance to do what they really love doing, who have always dreamed of starting their own business, entrepreneurship could be the perfect career.
Wouldn't it be great to work from a place of your choice and at your own time? This would give you the flexibility to allocate time to your business and family as needed.
This is also one of the biggest challenges you will ever take up in your life as every decision will rest on your shoulders. Your employees would depend on you for their livelihood. Hence, this is also a great way to contribute to society.
Being an entrepreneur lets you be in charge because it is you who runs the show. Instead of putting in efforts to generate profits for other companies, why not channel those efforts towards creating greater profits for yourself?
With IT companies starting up and mushrooming rapidly, it's little wonder that this field has become so popular among women.
Young women can take up a career in the IT sector after earning a certificate or bachelor's degree in an applicable field, like computer science, informational technology, and cyber security. There are also many programs available to women of all ages who want to learn how to code—one of the most useful and in-demand skills in today's job market.
The ease and excitement of working on the internet, designing software and apps, implementing IT solutions for businesses, security, gaming, smartphones, etc. could be a huge draw. This is another field where you can make a difference as well as earn good money.
Whether you choose to be a pharmacist, a surgeon, or a nurse, a career in the medical field provides women with the ability to achieve career success and wealth. Plus, there's good job security.
As a qualified professional, you will always be in high demand, and once you've gained significant work experience, there's going to be no looking back.
Teaching has always been considered one of the most women-friendly careers as it allows women to spend sufficient time with their families, de-stress, go on vacations, and balance home and work. It's also one of the most rewarding and important careers anyone can choose to pursue.
The best part of being in the teaching field is that recession or no recession, your skills will always be sought after.
This field is perfect for women who have a penchant for working in the corporate world and interacting with people to solve organizational issues.
The job involves shortlisting and interviewing candidates, hiring and training them, setting their pay, benefits, and perks, designing appraisal systems, formulating policies and leave structures, looking after employee welfare, and settling disputes.
Every large organization needs qualified and experienced HR personnel and they are paid quite well, too.
No one solves problems like a woman does.
Given the fact that most women are good observers, empathetic listeners, and great communicators (all soft skills employers want in employees), they're sure to excel as psychologists or therapists.
A career in this field allows you to help those struggling to overcome many different personal and family problems. With substantial work experience, you can stand to make a lot of money and even charge on an hourly basis.
You've probably put in a lot of thought and effort into designing your home and making it look stunning. From selecting the perfect hangers for the closet to picking out the most exquisite lampshade, you know what it takes to make a home beautiful.
Now, how about extending this talent a little further and helping others make their home look gorgeous, too? A career in interior design is a great option for women who are creative, organized, and detail-oriented—who don't want a boring office job.
As you develop your career as an interior designer, you also gain the flexibility to pick your clients and appointments and get paid immensely well.
For women who are creative, good at communication, and love research, media is the place to be.
All companies nowadays have (or should have) social media accounts that need managing, in addition to their primary marketing and PR departments, so this field is only growing.
Writing, advertising, public relations, journalism, photography—there are many choices available for women who want to pursue a career in media.
Women today can achieve it all, from financial independence to a family, and from a progressive career to a great personal and social life. And, why not? Your decisions have the potential to give you all that you desire.
So, make sure you decide well!
If you're a woman struggling to find the right career for you, we can help.
We'd love it if you signed up for Work It Daily's Power Hour Event Subscription! Get your career questions answered in our next live event!
In this article, we are going to review the elements of a good analytics planning framework and how analytics planning is part of data product ownership in the data mesh.
As part of any CDO or CDAO role, there is both data and analytics governance and a process for ensuring that analytics and insights are generated from the right data to solve a variety of business problems.
To make sure that data products (i.e., dashboards, insights, commercialized analyses, etc.) in the data mesh are fit for purpose, the business and analytics problem framing must occur to have workable high-impact solutions.
Analytics planning and next-generation analytics are helpful to a variety of stakeholders—chief data analytics officers, chief data scientists, heads of marketing analytics, and heads of digital analytics.
Many times, data analytics is a center of excellence, and therefore is vital for the professionals in the COE to have a seat at the table whether that is with a data product owner, a tribe lead, or a business person. This linkage and relationship are vital, not only from a relationship management standpoint but to enable the right data mesh design by helping to identify the right analytics and data products. The goal is to get the data needed to improve business decision-making and monetization.
Analytics liaisons and data stewards from the COE should meet with data product owners and business people in what I call data analytics governance meetings where the types of analytics and data products are discussed. This is a “seat at the table” meeting among business partners to discuss the appropriate types of proactive analytics that would drive problem solutions and business impact.
Data analytics topics to be discussed include:
These leadership meetings should occur at least quarterly. Monthly (or more frequent) reviews should occur at the project team level. Typically, data analytics functions can have hundreds or thousands of projects depending on the number of business partners.
For analytics or data products to be fit for purpose, you will want to review the partner's business strategy as well as any P&L drivers where analytics might have an impact:
Data analytics governance creates a prioritization process.
The prioritization process could include business ROIs, GCOs (good customer outcomes), or other metrics to determine what gets worked on first. Are these projects high priority, medium, low, strategic, or even non-negotiable? (Non-negotiable might mean compliance projects which means the data analytics team must carve out bandwidth to create new data pilots/new analytics pilots. Pilots could include identification of new segments or new scoring systems based on transaction data and more.)
What is the number one reason analytics fail? We hopefully all know this, but it is worth mentioning again: the number one reason analytics fail is due to a failure to frame the business problem correctly.
What type of problems may clients mention to the data analytics team during the quarterly check-ins?
Let’s review the categories of analytics that may be part of the discussion during the analytics planning meeting with the business and product owners.
So that's a little bit about how to match the business problem to the type of analytics. The next step would be for the analytics leader or analytics liaison to work with the data product owner or business lead to provide an endorsed quarterly data analytics plan which would also identify data needs in order to perform the agreed-upon analytics.
What are the elements of the analytics plan?
Given the data mesh puts a higher degree of quantitative skills on business partners, it is imperative for all stakeholders to have a better understanding of data, analytic methodologies, and execution. Training and knowledge maturity is critical.
I hope this post helps fill in some of the planning gaps in the data mesh concept and shows how analytics planning can inform what the data product owners can work on and how an ongoing engagement and governance model can be established to benefit both the analytics team as well as the business as a whole.
What has your experience been with data analytics planning in the data mesh? We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
The COVID-19 crisis has sent the economy into a recession and impacted numerous careers. Although people are naturally on edge right now, it's important to know that while searching for a job during a recession isn't easy, it's not impossible.
As a result of the COVID-19 crisis, millions of people quit their jobs or were laid off by their employers, and many are still struggling to find a job. There are record levels of competition for open positions. If you want to stand out to employers, you need to be prepared for the job search process.
Here are four common myths about the job search process during a recession, and what you should do to land a job in hard times.
Businesses are always hiring!
There are some businesses that are greatly impacted by recessions that will reduce staff and implement hiring freezes, and others that will slow their hiring, but in general there's always some need to hire people as a result of vacancies and retirements. In addition, there are some industries that continue to do well in a recession.
However, while businesses are still hiring during a recession, the job competition will be greater and you'll need to work harder to market yourself as an employee worth hiring. There are multiple ways you can make yourself a better candidate. This includes finding ways to upskill, networking, improving your resume, and writing a disruptive cover letter.
Layoffs are a fact of life and businesses realize that.
But from a competition standpoint being laid off puts you at an initial disadvantage. Layoffs are common during a recession. This increases competition because of the number of people in the job market in need of work.
If you're laid off, you have to work even harder to market yourself to potential employees. But at the same time, you don't want to come across as too desperate. Like with any job search, do your research and leverage your professional network whenever you can.
You may also want to consider which industries are still hiring during the recession and taking a job in one of those industries to hold you over. There's no shame in working outside of your desired industry. There may even be benefits to it.
Given the circumstances of COVID-19 and the recession, future employers will understand the career detour.
Age discrimination is a topic that comes up from time to time but in reality it's actually called experience discrimination.
People over the age of 50 are staying in the workforce a lot longer but have to compete with millennials and Gen Z that make up more than half of the workforce. These younger generations are highly skilled, tech savvy, and a lot cheaper to employ.
This means that anyone over 50 looking to get hired needs to work even harder to get noticed. You need to clearly understand and sell what it is that you do well (your specialty). You also need to invest in yourself and be willing to upskill whenever you can.
Finding a job during a recession doesn't mean an automatic pay cut!
Recession or not, you should prepare for a typical salary negotiation process. Do your research and have an idea of the competitive rate for the position you're pursuing.
If you've settled on a salary range, be ready to prove to the company why you would be worth the investment. You can do this by demonstrating why you'd be a valuable asset to the company and how your unique skills/experiences will make you the best fit for the role.
It always comes back to marketing yourself.
Recessions come and go and we will get through this one! Recession or not, one thing about the job search process remains true—you have to work hard and be your own best advocate.
Yesterday, I had a “bad day.” Poor sleep, work was a challenge, family issues, and feeling worn down. I was not in a good mood by any stretch of the imagination.
I went home to my lovely wife who made a nice dinner. She asked if I was OK, and I said no. She left me alone for a while, and I opened up. We talked. Still, I was having a bad day.
This morning, I woke up and had my daily meditation. I listened to expert-led meditation on resetting my day. The teacher pointed out you cannot retake yesterday’s breaths; you can only breathe the breath of the current moment.
Think about this for a moment (while taking a breath). Can you retake your last breath? Can you retake the breath from two weeks ago, two years ago, or two decades ago? Can you take a breath two years from now? The answer is no—you can only breathe in the present moment.
Profound, thought-provoking, and so simple.
I am Jim, and I have a problem. I cannot let go of my past. I dwell on mistakes. I rethink and rethink my actions repeatedly. I go over in my mind what I did wrong and what I would do differently given the chance.
Those breaths are gone, and I cannot get them back. No matter what I do.
I have been doing a lot of reflection in the past several years. I have found a new philosophy for life that I am actively exploring. Mindfulness and being present are at the forefront of this study. Breathing my current breath.
I am Jim, and I have a second problem. I overthink my future. Similar to my past, I replay what I want to do repeatedly in my mind. I work through scenarios (many worst cases) to plot how I want things to go. I even stress over those things I cannot control—like someone’s response.
These breaths have not even occurred, and I cannot predict when and where they will fall. No matter what I do.
Preparation and being mindful of the future are OK. Worry and obsessive planning can be stressful. Regardless of how hard we try, we cannot control every aspect of the future, nor can we predict those breaths.
I am not an expert, and I am only several steps along my life path. I can tell you, I have struggled with being mindful and present. Whether I am replaying my day past or I am predicting my indeterminate future, I am adding undo stress to myself. I am creating chaos. Until this morning, I did not (and may still not) fully appreciate the words "you cannot breathe yesterday’s breath." Your breathing is the one thing you can follow to remain present and in the moment. It only occurs once, and it cannot be recreated. No two breaths will ever be alike. No breaths can ever be repeated.
The only breath that matters is the one you are taking right now. You can learn from the previous breaths, and you can prepare for the future takes. However, the only one truly in your control is the one taken right now. All the others are meaningless.
Take your breath, and know it is the best breath you can take in this very moment. Enjoy it.
I spoke to a senior business leader who talked about how the thoughts of navigating the risks associated with some of the business processes he currently manages keep him awake. He leads the segment of his company that coordinates customers' activities, mobile transactions, and e-commerce payments. Some of the reasons why he was worried were:
Addressing all these concerns requires a risk management strategy. An effective risk management strategy is extremely important to mitigate potential risks that might prevent the achievement of business objectives. A survey from EY showed that 84% of board members do not believe their organizations have a highly effective risk management strategy. Risk management strategy is a vital part of the risk management process, which involves the following steps:
The first step of the risk management process is to identify the organization's assets, including physical assets, employees, information, and intellectual property. After identification, the assets are prioritized based on criticality. Assets could be classified as high, low, or medium based on their criticality to business operations.
This helps to identify, prioritize, and determine how risk is treated. It involves three (3) steps:
This is the third phase of the risk management strategy. It is also known as risk treatment. It is the approach adopted by an organization to address risk. It leverages the information and results from the risk assessment process which includes identification threat, determining their probability of occurring an impact. It varies based on the company's risk appetite.
The risk management process is an ongoing exercise. After the risk has been identified and analyzed and an appropriate risk treatment strategy has been determined, there is a need to continuously monitor risk by tracking changes in the environment, its impacts on business objectives, and existing risk management strategies. This process will help adjust strategies as required to ensure they are still relevant and effective.
There is no business without risk. Developing and implementing a risk management strategy that allows business executives to identify, address, and monitor risks is crucial to risk management success. Effective risk management creates a healthy environment to achieve business objectives and helps business leaders identify opportunities and actions they need to take.
If you're interested in learning more about how risk management can help achieve your business goals or have any questions, please feel free to follow/connect with me on LinkedIn.
We're seeing a rise in cases of "career PTSD" since the COVID-19 pandemic. If you don't know what this is, it's when you're feeling anxiety and stress related to work. You feel in a funk. You feel like you can't find the right career or job for you.
Maybe you quit during the Great Resignation and haven't been able to find the right job. Or maybe you're really out of it at work and you want to fix it. But you've got depression. You've got anxiety. Work stresses you out.
Why do you feel this way?
Well, during the pandemic, we all had to juggle so much. Mental safety, physical safety, our health, our family, our friends, our work. And now, as we're trying to come back to some normalcy, our body's sort of catching up with us, and it's giving us a hard time.
So, what can you do to recover from this career-related post-traumatic stress?
@j.t.odonnell Do you have COVID Career PTSD? #careertok #jobtok #jobs #careers ♬ original sound - J.T. O'Donnell
The solution lies in something called microlearning.
Microlearning occurs when you stop and take a minute or two to learn something. You're curious and that changes you. It's firing some synapses in your brain and you're getting little dopamine hits. You don't need to (and shouldn't) do hours and hours of learning every day. Just a few minutes would be a great start because your brain is going to get more curious. You're going to see more and you're going to want to learn more. And you'll actually get to a point where you're ready to learn. Then you'll ask yourself, "What's something I need to learn?"
This is where the choice becomes paramount because the secret to getting back to health is feeling a sense of control and the way we feel control is through choice. If you choose to engage in microlearning today, you'll eventually get more curious, but you'll choose what you want to learn and you'll be able to feel that sense of control again.
Microlearning is the secret to regaining that sense of control that you lost during COVID-19 and reigniting your motivation in your career. Trust me, I've been doing this for 20 years. I know it works. This is what my company has been helping people with.
With Work It Daily's Event Subscription, you can choose what you want to learn. It's an affordable resource that you can use to try the microlearning process and get your sense of control back. There are thousands of people in there right now, all talking to one another, learning together, and getting their mojo back. I hope you decide to join them. Your future professional self will thank you.
When you apply for a job, it's important to do your homework on the company so that when you get a job interview and your interviewer asks, "What is it about us that drew you to our company?" you aren't left stumped or jobless.
Not only that, but it's important to figure out if the company is a place YOU would enjoy working at. So, before you send off that resume, check out these sneaky ways to research a company:
Most companies have a staff page on their website. On this page, the company will list some, if not all, of the employees at the company. Here, you can get the names (and sometimes contact information) of people who you'd be working with if you got the job.
How to learn more:
Warning: Don't be creepy or demanding when contacting these people! Simply reach out to them in a professional manner, introduce yourself, and tell them you're interested in learning more about the company and work environment. If they respond, go you! If not, move on and leave them alone.
These days, everyone is on social media—including employers. Look them up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and so on. Look closely at what they're tweeting, posting, or filming. This is a great way to get a feel for the company's values.
When browsing the social channels of companies, ask yourself these questions:
Ever wished there was a place that rated companies based on how much people like working there? Well, now there is! Sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Comparably are great places to learn about a potential employer and how people like working there. With these sites, individuals can comment on the company's benefits, culture, work, and more. Not only that, but they can rate a company based on how much they like working there.
You can also learn more about salary and past interviewing experiences! According to Indeed's Employer Branding Survey, 83% of job seekers say their decisions on where to apply are influenced by employer reviews.
So before you apply for a job, make sure you do your research. Doing a little research can go a long way in your job search. Don't be lazy—learn more about your dream company now!
If you feel like many of the job postings you come across in your job search are scams, you're not alone. You are not the first job seeker to tell me they feel this way. But we have to think about where this comes from.
@j.t.odonnell Replying to @nana_5075 Why job listings feel like a scam... #jobs #careers #careertok #jobtok ♬ original sound - J.T. O'Donnell
Back in the day, a company would post a job in the want ad section of a newspaper, so you'd have to open up a newspaper, read through it, write up a resume and cover letter, and snail mail your application off to them. When the idea came to post jobs online, it meant more people who were the right fit could apply. But over time, that's broken down.
Now thousands of people will apply for one job when it gets posted. And many of those job applicants are not a fit. So employers now have to hire recruiters, who are also called sourcers, to go through thousands of applicants so they can whittle it down to about 50 qualified applicants. What's the rhyme or reason they're using to select some applicants and screen others out?
This is why you don't get called—because it's just so random.
After employers get down to 50 applicants, they look through those, find a few they like, and call them. That's why only 3% of people who apply online ever hear back from companies.
It's a completely broken system, so I can see why it feels like a scam. The whole thing is flawed.
So, how do we improve this system? It starts with making better matches, getting back to a place where only the right people are applying to the employer. We actually want fewer applicants, but more of the right applicants. That's the solution. And there are hundreds of millions of dollars in this industry trying to figure it out. But the one thing we have seen is that storytelling is one of the ways to do that.
You're going to see a rise in companies telling their stories. And there's a fancy term for this in our industry. It's called employer branding. Companies will tell their stories on social media platforms like TikTok so that those stories fatefully, naturally, and organically show up in your feed. But it's not fate, right? It's the algorithm at work—and before you know it, you'll start to see companies that feel like a fit. Then you'll go over and check them out. You'll see that there's a job posted that you're fit for. And this is how this matching process will start to fine-tune itself.
Right now, yes, you're right. Those online job postings don't work. They don't work for either side. We need a better system. And storytelling is the key. So go learn how to conduct a proactive job search today so you can finally land a job and work for an employer you actually like!
If you want to be an effective leader in your industry, you need to know how to use technology—specifically, the types of technology that are relevant to your job. Nobody wants to work for a manager who isn't tech savvy. Not knowing how to use technology is the surest way to become irrelevant in your career. For executives, the need to stay up to date on technology is greater, since there is always a younger, more relevant leader moving up the ranks who knows how to use the technology that could take your company to the next level.
We recently asked our successful leaders what they think is the technology every executive should know how to use right now.
Here are their responses...
In finance/accounting, the Microsoft Office Timeline is a handy tool for what I do. It is easy to understand how multiple possibilities for creating a timeline are. With them, we can better understand the relationship between important events, analyze the evolution of individual stories, understand turning points, and, ultimately, visualize how one event influences, or does not influence, the other. Timelines can show not only current data but I can also create a visual history of multiple years.
Timelines can take on many different displays. You can design linear timelines with flags of important dates or deadlines.
You can also create a vertical timeline to show top-down or bottom-up data.
What I like most about timelines is the visual way I can tell a compelling story.
I can quantify these stories with visual effects.
Lastly, timelines in Microsoft keep expanding its reach in all types of visual possibilities. The possibilities are endless!
Michael Willis has 18+ years of experience working with accounting & sports organizations and has managed P&Ls of $10M - $125M+ with budgets of $3M-$50M+. He worked for the NFL for 22 1/2 years, mainly with the game officials working on the financial/accounting side of the business.
As an educator and administrator, I enjoy helping young adults as well as adult learners with their academic journey. In my role, I oversee policies and procedures that help support student learning and success. Therefore, I implement multiple innovation projects to support students and meet them where they are.
My solution is Monday.com. The Work OS work management platform helps my team manage projects and workflows more efficiently. The project management includes the scope, time, and budget. What I like about Monday.com is that is a very easy and intuitive all-in-one work platform that uses apps and integrations to create a custom workflow for the project. Its versatility helps me (as well as my team) stay on track and the integrations with apps such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Excel, allow me to easily continue working with my favorite tools from within the platform.
Since I work on several projects, Monday.com software allows me to assign tasks and prioritize what's most important for the team to execute. To do this, I break down the components by color and timeline. For example, our digital badge project had a short implementation timeline, milestones, and deliverables. The platform allowed me to manage the entire workload all in one space.
My biggest takeaway: the platform fosters creative collaboration with my team and other departments. More importantly, the collaboration is seamless and provides visibility into the progress of our work. It saves time and money. You may want to give it a try!
Maria Grandone is dedicated to student access and success, particularly of underrepresented students in higher education. She loves to wake up early to meditate, go for an early morning run, and meet people from all walks of life.
Sales and field engineering have in common that they both are customer-facing positions. You get to meet lots of people in customer meetings.
If you are an executive in these types of occupations, you also must recruit at times. That means even more meetings—aka interviews.
Add necessary internal meetings to the mix, and it makes for a busy calendar.
Clients get priority, and I negotiate mutually agreeable timings. But for interviews, I go with Calendly.
There is simply no way I can spend valuable time negotiating interview timings piecemeal. Instead, I send candidates links. They pick and choose their own time. Problem solved!
Calendly integrates with my Google calendar, meaning it won't double-book me. It will also enforce time zones when I am not available (4 am is a tough sell for me!) and not let candidates book time over "focus time."
I wouldn't say that this tech is all-purpose. I would not dream to ask clients to pick a time on my Calendly link. But if you need to recruit folks into your team, it can be a lifesaver.
Steve Barriault is a multilingual presales, sales, and business development management professional with 20+ years of experience in the sales and marketing of software & technological solutions worldwide. He's built sales infrastructure from the ground up, going from $0 to millions of $ through both direct sales and distributors.
Reporting and analytics. The primary means of gaining insight into your business. The challenge is, it’s easier for them to be wrong than right. Incomplete data, stale data, the wrong data source, the list goes on.
How might you “trust but verify” that the information you are making business decisions on is correct? Taking a dump of the raw data and creating a pivot table in Microsoft Excel is a simple way to gain insight.
There are added benefits too. For example, you see firsthand the quality of the underlying data. You might unearth assumptions that were made when the reports were initially created that are now incorrect. Again, the list goes on.
Sixty minutes of pivot table creation and analysis every reporting cycle seems like a small price to pay for the sense of security that comes from knowing that key business decisions are based on firm data foundations.
Mark Taylor has 20+ years of risk, technology, and product management experience working in global and regional financial services firms in the UK and the U.S. He's managed teams of 40+, successfully addressed 100+ regulatory issues, and has saved companies $15M+.
Executives need to ensure they are operating at a strategic level and avoid getting buried in day-to-day details. To do this well requires a clear understanding of your company's rhythm of business (ROB). It is therefore imperative that executives have a good ROB technology tool to help them easily see the “big picture.”
TeamUp is a free, easy-to-use tool that allows for easy displaying of ROB events of various durations and frequencies throughout the year. For executives, they are strategic and include things like annual planning, budgeting, product releases, financial reporting, shareholder meetings, significant company events, etc. Events are color-coded by function, type, team, etc., making them easy to see in aggregate and giving executives a quick, easy-to-digest understanding of key events over the next month, quarter, or year. It is very easy to turn events on or off to simplify or add to a display as needed. We used TeamUp to manage a midsize company's ROB very effectively.
Rhythm Systems is a more complex and robust tool. It takes a greater time investment up front to get data in and to build proficiency. Although we reviewed it but, ultimately, did not implement it, I know of others that swear by its value.
The primary point here is that all businesses need to effectively manage their ROB and a good technology tool is key to doing it well.
Don Schulz is a 25+ year commercial real estate executive & COO. On the personal side, he likes to ski, hike, golf, and run, and is an occasional homebrewer.
Every executive needs to know how to post on social media platforms, as well as use their unique features.
With the amount of information being exchanged publicly, as well as within an organization, having a good understanding of how social media platforms work is essential.
Whether it's short messages, longer articles, infographics, or even a video message, knowing how to post it yourself will save time. No need to work with the marketing team or some other tech-savvy individual. Your message can be posted to make an immediate impact on your audience.
In addition, knowing how to set up a new group, start a video chat, record a video chat, and share from any of those features will make your life and those that work with you much easier.
Externally, you'll want to learn how to post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and even Tiktok. Internally, Slack, Yammer, Workplace Facebook, and Microsoft Teams. Once you get familiar with a couple of platforms, the learning curve isn't so fierce, and before you know it, others are coming to you for advice.
Melodie Turk is a learning experience executive with a unique background in the learning and development arena as well as change management. She is passionate about bringing change to the workplace—change that is meaningful and change that will last.
The global augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market is expected to grow to $209 billion by 2023. Consumers currently own 26 million VR headsets globally. VR and AR is the technology that marketing executives need to consider to drive innovation, consumer engagement, and relationship building.
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated real-world experience that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way using special electronic equipment. VR is an excellent opportunity for businesses to create an immersive experience that promotes engagement through:
Augmented reality (AR) augments your experience of the real world, enhancing it with sound, touch, and smell. AR is designed to add to the things you already do, like work, play, shop, explore, and have fun.
The potential is enormous. Are you prepared for the future?
Lisa Perry helps companies build leadership brands, driving loyal customers & delivering profitability. She does this through a process that builds brands consumers love. Her goal is to help companies develop, monetize, and grow their brands.
What technology do you think every executive needs to know how to use right now? Join the conversation inside Work It Daily's Executive Program.
Failure is a negative word. No one wants to fail. Many of us do all we can to avoid the risk of becoming "failures." But have you ever considered what "failure" actually is?
Let's think about it from a different perspective—as another step in life that takes us towards whatever we do next. Not everything we do is going to work out exactly as intended. But if you are failing, you must be the kind of person who is prepared to take some risks. And that means you are far more likely to ultimately reach your potential.
Failure isn't the problem. Fear of failure is. You need to change your perspective and recognize failing can be the key to achieving success.
"Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement." —C.S. Lewis
It's easier to learn from failure than from success. It gives you the chance to analyze what's not working and do something about it.
Even if some factors seem to be out of your control, think through what they are. Can you do anything to reduce their impact? Or is there a way of gaining greater control of them?
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." —Thomas A. Edison
By failing and then using what you've learned from the experience, you have the potential to become more resilient and more persistent. The more persistent you become, the less likely it is that you'll be emotionally affected by not getting the outcome you hoped for. And that gives you a better perspective for analyzing what needs to be done to move you toward success.
Every "failed attempt" simply becomes a new learning experience to fine-tune your efforts.
"I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying." —Jeff Bezos
If something is worthwhile, it's probably going to take quite a bit of work to achieve. So, build into your plans the expectation that it could require significant effort. But until you try, you will never know. And even if it doesn't work out, you've given it a go and will have learned from the experience.
If you're so busy worrying about failing that you never find the impetus to move forward, then visualize yourself in 12 months' time dealing with a sense of regret for never even attempting it. Which feels worse?
If you're not afraid to fail, it will give you another valuable ability. And that is being able to recognize when giving up on a particular goal is the right course of action.
Perseverance is important and you should never become the type of person who gives up simply because something is harder than you'd expected or taking longer than you'd hoped. But maybe you or your situation has changed and your goal is no longer relevant. Maybe your skills and talents are better off applied elsewhere now that time has moved on. Or perhaps you're doing the same thing over and over again in the vain hope of a different result.
If you've given it your very best shot and it still isn't working, it's time to change your approach. Would you call that failing? Or just applying some common sense about where to direct your energy?
Think about your past and you'll probably be able to spot times when making a choice that wasn't successful helped refine your approach and eventually took you toward a better outcome.
Start viewing failure as a learning opportunity, use the lessons you gain from it, and take the first steps to setting yourself up for success.
Are you looking for a new job but not hearing back from employers? Have you been applying to countless jobs online with little to no success? If so, does this drain all of your energy, and are you curious about what other tips you can incorporate?
Well, we're going to share a big secret with you… the number one way to get a job is by circumventing the applicant tracking system!
In this training, you’ll learn how to:
Join our CEO, J.T. O'Donnell, and Director of Training Development & Coaching, Christina Burgio, for this live event on Wednesday, November 30th at 12 pm ET.
CAN'T ATTEND LIVE? That's okay. You'll have access to the recording and the workbook after the session!
Roadmaps are beautiful. Not just because they are aesthetically pleasing but because of what they represent. Roadmaps clearly show what you want to achieve and how you will get there. You can create excitement for a big idea and package it in a way that others can understand. But a roadmap is still just a visualization. You need to have a vision and strategy behind the plan.
You need to understand the purpose of each to build something lasting deeply. All three are clearly defined on successful product and project teams.
A Simple Analogy — Making a Case for All Three
Think of a skyscraper.
1. Vision is the initial thought about what kind of place it will be and why it will matter.
2. Strategy is the blueprint for the foundation and framing.
3. The roadmap builds upon the blueprint with a detailed plan for erecting a fully functioning structure.
No matter where you work or how your organization approaches strategic planning, it is essential to have a firm grasp on each term and what it is not. Here is a helpful way to think about vision, strategy, and roadmapping.
Vision
Vision is about the future and, hopefully, a better world. It is the essence of what you hope to achieve and forms the beginning of your strategy. For example, our vision at the National Football League was to deliver a great fan experience.
Vision is not a statement that you define once and forget about it. Vision is a living and breathing thing. And it should not be overly complex or challenging to parse—everyone in the company needs to know and deeply understand it.
Strategy
Strategy defines the direction you will take to achieve your vision. The plan aligns the entire organization around what you want to accomplish and guides how to turn the idea into reality. It lays out your goals and the key strategic initiatives to be successful.
Strategy is not the tactical work you will do. But it is not in the background either; it informs every decision about which activities to invest in. Strategy is cross functional for significant efforts. Every team needs to understand how their work is related to their part in achieving critical objectives.
Strategic Roadmaps
A strategy roadmap is a tool that helps you visualize your strategic plan. Strategic roadmaps capture activities you will complete within a given time frame and communicate upcoming work in one view. You can use a roadmap to drive conversations. It can guide prioritizing work, allocating resources, and tracking dependencies.
A roadmap is not static. You can adjust as plans change, show progress as you complete work, and create tailored views for different audiences. A roadmap should be exciting. It is a visual guide that defines the work required for the team to be its best.
Keep a Clear Vision
A vision statement provides much value, even just a few sentences. Not only does it outline the company’s desired outcome, but it can communicate intentions and hopes for the future. The best part is that a vision statement changes with your organization. When a vision is reached or updated, it’s time to create a new vision statement. This encourages everyone toward more meaningful goals and opens your company to more possibilities.
Step 1: Clarify Your Purpose
Why does your organization/unit/function exist? What need must be met? What opportunities can be addressed?
Be clear about the purpose and continually use this purpose to center and re-center your efforts while guiding your constituents in seeing the long-term vision you are creating.
Step 2: Become the King of Information
Stay constantly informed and up to date about your industry and competitors, as well as what’s happening right within your company.
Step 3: Embrace an Innovative Mindset
Innovative organizations are usually more profitable, retain higher caliber employees, and lead by example.
Step 4: Translate Your Ideas Into Specific Actions
The best ideas are worthless unless they are acted upon effectively.
Step 5: Communicate Effectively
The best vision and strategy can only succeed if communicated well.
It can be difficult to stay focused, positive, and proactive when you get laid off, but that is exactly what you need to do if you want to get a new job!
If you're laid off and looking, check out these eight simple tips to get you out of the house and back to work.
It may not seem important, but it is. Changing your clothes can change your mindset.
Just as it is important to have a designated area to "work" on your job search, you should have a job search wardrobe. You never know when you might interact with someone who might have a job opportunity for you. Put your best foot forward at all times.
Leaving the house every day will increase your chances of meeting others with job opportunities or even interview opportunities. Even beyond the simple act of reminding people you exist by presenting yourself in public, you get human acknowledgment.
Sitting at home, alone, in front of a computer can result in feeling like you don't exist after a while. Making eye contact with others and receiving acknowledgment can really improve your confidence and self-esteem.
Feed your mind! Keep up to date with your industry so you can continuously know what skills are in demand. Reading job search and career-related articles can also give you some tips and tricks from which you might benefit, and help you stay connected to the working world.
Not only is sitting in front of the computer applying for jobs day after day boring, but it is also ineffective! You will rarely get a response, and if you do, it is often a rejection letter.
The easiest and most effective way to land a new job is by networking your way into the company. Also be sure to follow up on your applications and resume submissions with any connections you may have at the company, to try to go around the ATS and get your job application in the hands of the hiring manager.
Changing up your job search will keep you engaged, fresh, and motivated.
I am always so surprised when a new client contacts me to practice for an interview a day or two before the main event. Ideally, you should practice with a career coach or other professional several times before you are even called for an interview.
Mock interviews can be extremely helpful, especially if you're nervous. Have a trusted colleague ask you behavioral interview questions so you can practice your answers. Once the mock interview is over, listen to their feedback to see what you should work on before the real thing.
Paper or electronic—it doesn't matter. Map out your week ahead and review your schedule daily. This will ensure you don't miss any application deadlines or opportunities to follow up or network. You also won't forget to keep your word to call an employer back "next Tuesday."
Job search is your business right now...unless you want to continue being unemployed.
Your resume, LinkedIn profile, and cover letter should all be considered living documents. You should also review and update them regularly so you're always ready for your next career move, no matter if you get laid off or simply decide you want to look for a new job. Even small improvements or corrections can make a surprising difference.
Additionally, it is easy to overlook things you take for granted like the same link that has been on your LinkedIn profile for ages but now happens to be broken. Try to use an objective eye when reviewing these documents. If it's been a while since you've updated them, and you don't know where to start, a career coach can help!
You may not think you have time to volunteer, but you do. Not only will the organization or individual receiving your time and effort appreciate it, but you will benefit as well.
There is no way for me to describe how good it can make you feel to be able to contribute your time and energy a few hours a week to a good cause. It is good for your self-confidence, builds feelings of relevance, and can be another networking opportunity as well.
You just never know what will lead you to your next job opportunity! While this is by no means a complete list of things that you can do if you are laid off and looking, it is a good start.
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