This question came from a busy professional.
How Can We Get an Interview When We’re Under-Qualified?
Some people may be interested in a job, but they don’t apply for the job because they don’t meet all the qualifications or have the specified experience. Why should they apply anyway?
If a candidate is under-qualified–as per the job requirements–what are three things he or she can do to still stand out on his or her application and snag an interview
anyway?
This question came from a busy professional.
I’m searching for career experts who can tell me the biggest mistakes people make
when making a presentation at work.
Most everyone has heard of the more common mistakes of not making eye contact with the audience and relying too heavily on note cards. But here are some of the bigger mistakes that you may not be aware you are making.
We will go through each in detail, explain why it’s such a big
mistake and then give advice on how a presenter can avoid making the mistake.
This question came from a busy professional.
What are career path options in the digital marketing industry?
There are several career options in digital marketing because there are several outlets within digital marketing.
A busy professional asks a question regarding career advancement.
When do you need a new career vs. just a new job?
When you’re burned out in your current job, how do you know if it’s time for a new career vs. just a new job? What questions should you ask yourself? What criteria should you be thinking about?
This is a question that everyone should ask – even before “burn out”. But, as you pointed out, many don’t consider it until they are “done” with their current job.
To avoid burn – have a career development plan (3, 5, 10-year plan) and regularly do a career assessment against that plan.
Some steps to get you on that path:
If you don’t have a career development plan, create one now. Decide where you want to be, do and have in 3, 5, and 10 years. Consider a 360-degree view of your life in 3, 5 and 10 years. To assist you in this, feel free to download this Dream Sculpting Worksheet.
Once you have your career development plan, it is critical that you regularly evaluate it. As you gain new experiences, skills and interests, you are changing. The career path that you defined 3 years ago may not fit the person that you are today. Take the time to reassess your professional and personal desires. Make sure you are not only staying on target – but that this target is still what you want.
The Next Career Step Challenge Worksheet may also help you with deciding if you need a new career or just the next logical step in your current career development path.
I know your situation is different. If you would like additional information on this topic, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
I am a business coach and this is what I do professionally. It’s easy to sign up for a complimentary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ
With enough notice, it would be my honor to guest-speak at no cost to your group organization.
Hello, this is Laura Lee Rose – author of the business and time management books TimePeace: Making peace with time – the The Book of Answers: 105 Career Critical Situations – and I am a business and efficiency coach that specializes in time management, project management and work-life balance strategies.
Today’s question comes from a busy professional:
When does marketing meet customer service?
If your marketing and customer service strategies do not meet somewhere, your customers will fall through the gap. Having an understanding of how these two departments come together for the customer experience is critical to delighting your customer throughout their relationship with your company. After all, the customer will look at these functions as coming from the company as a whole, and as independent departments.
With marketing’s job being the first contact with a customer and customer service happening much further down the customer life cycle, these two departments seemingly have no overlapping strategy. But, we know this is simply not true based on research which indicates that the customer expectations set by marketing in the beginning have a significant impact on customer service’s ability to please a customer later on.
Thank you so much for your well-thought out question. Although the answer may be slightly different depending upon the specific market or industry, a good market plan normally starts with two pieces:
The market plan begins with the target customer in mind.
So – in essence, the entire market campaign is centered on attracting that perfect client.
You also need to keep your product or service in mind while marketing. You very well cannot market an automobile when you are selling a cat. At the same time, some marketing campaigns over sell the product to get that signature on that dotted line.
This is the situation that sets the improper customer expectations. This is the situations that will impact your over customer satisfaction ratings and increase your customer service calls.
Customer and Company satisfaction occurs when customer and marketing expectations match.
If marketing consistently over-promises to make a “sell”, they run the risk of eventually:
Even if the sales and marketing teams do succeed in this client contract, it’s unlikely that the client will return.
To ensure balance, the marketing sales account manager work together with their production or creating services teams, from the start.
Once the contract or SOW is signed by the client, the product team can get started on the product or service.
It is also important to note that the account manager owns that customer relationship. Therefore, once the product or service is completed, the account manager meets with the client to deliver the product, review the changes, explain its usage, review the original contract to illustrate all commitments have been met and get a feel for the client’s satisfaction.
Keeping both the company and client expectations in mind – upfront – can lead you to a successful conclusion. A sell isn’t the main event. The company is in the business of making money. Therefore, you must always consider the cost of making that sell.
I know your situation is different. If you would like additional information on this topic, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
I am a business coach and this is what I do professionally. It’s easy to sign up for a complementary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ
With enough notice, it would be my honor to guest-speak at no cost to your group organization.
What do you look for when you’re building an all-star team of employees?
Do you seek out those who fit into your company culture, focus on skill sets, or look for enthusiasm? (Or maybe all of the above!) We’re a small business and entrepreneurs looking for tips when hiring team players.
Executives discussing documents at meeting
What makes this a difficult situation is that you are a small business. You don’t have the time to invest in training someone green. At the same time, you may not have the money to match the salary requirements of the more experienced candidates.
I’ve met with several entrepreneurs that focused on enthusiasm and personalities, with the hope that the new hire would grow into the position. The problem is that as busy entrepreneurs and small business owners – you don’t have the time to train the new hire. What eventually happens is that the new hire never meets expectations, because they are never given the training that they were expecting.
There are a few ways to break this cycle.
The advantage of hiring contract or freelance talent is that you only hire when you need that particular talent or task completed. It depends on the task that is required, of course.
For simple administration and executive assistant duties, you can call upon Virtual Assistants services. This is great if your needs are a few hours or days a week.
There are also several freelance services for graphics, audio, video, copy-writing, social media and marketing.
The assumption with these contract services is that there is little training required, and if you are not satisfied with their work, you can change resources at the end of the short-term contract.
If you need full-time, in-house staff consider hiring a training consultant to create your orientation materials, your employee handbooks, document your desired procedures and then train your new hires.
This allows you to hire younger, less experienced staff (at lower rates), give them the training and orientation attention they deserve, without adding to your already overflowing plate.
The last possibility is to look at experienced but older candidates. Often times, older candidates have less expenses. Their children are grown; they own their own home with no mortgage; and they have little debt. They may even understand the difficult situation of the small business owner.
Therefore; they may be open to sliding salary scale (a lower starting salary with regular review for increases based on the success of the company).
I know your situation is different. If you would like additional information on this topic, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
I am a business coach and this is what I do professionally. It’s easy to sign up for a complementary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ
With enough notice, it would be my honor to guest-speak at no cost to your group organization.
A busy professional has this question regarding employee performance reviews.
She asked:
These are very good questions. Before we answer each of them, lets review some reasons employees need constructive feedback.
As you can see, the need for employee feedback isn’t isolated to those that are not performing as expected. Exceptional, Above Average, and Average employees all need constructive feedback.
Giving an effective feedback starts with understanding your employees’ goals and career objectives. Once you understand the “why” the employee comes to work – the better you can connect the feedback to their goals.
For example, if they want to eventually lead the team or become a manager, then focus on the skill sets that will help them achieve those goals.
These business commitments or goals need to be agreed upon at the start of the performance review year. These documented PBC (Personal Business Commitments) tie the individuals role/responsibilities to the company goals. Everyone understands how they can individually contribute to the company’s success. These PBCs can then be reviewed several times during the year and before the official performance review. Setting the stage in this manner makes feedback easier, because everyone involved understands both the employer and employee expectations.
These business goals need to be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable, Relevant and Time bound). With SMART goals, it’s very easy for both the employee and manager to agree whether the goals were met or exceeded.
The most prevalent barrier to hearing and understanding feedback is our mindset. The moment your supervisor releases a perceived negative comment, we automatically go into defensive mode. Our brain immediately will find situations that negative what was just been said or provide detailed reasons/excuses for the events.
Best advice is to continually focus on the SMART goals or commitments set at the start of the year. Use the agreed upon PBCs as your starting point. Since your PBCs will have specific metrics and goals in place for each performance commitment, it will be easy to determine if the criteria has been met.
For example, If one of the PBC goals was to standardize code reviews in the development team to reduce delivered defects to test group by 30% – and the employee (team leader) still does not conduct regular code reviews and the defect rates to test group are on the rise – all you need to do is share the past defect rate and current defect rates.
Then simply ask the employee if he/she feels if they have met that particular goal.
Repeat this until all the PBC goals are reviewed.
Once you and the employee have agreed upon the status of the PBC goal, ask their opinion on where to go from here.
For instance, if the employee agrees that the team did not meet the defect rate goals – he/she also agrees that standardized code reviews would have caught a number of these defects by simple review – and therefore would have been fixed prior to sending to the test team, you can now start a discussion on where to go from here.
The discussion is focused on working on a solution together. Perhaps it’s unrealistic for the team to take the time to gather and code-review each other’s work. Perhaps there isn’t enough time in the schedule to detail code review. Therefore perhaps the next assignment is for the team leader to investigate and recommend a development tools that automatically code reviews. The mandate then becomes 80% of all the code review defects are fixed before handing to the test group. Perhaps the new PBC is to automate the unit tests going forward such that a set of automated acceptance tests are run before handing off to the test group. Then the development teams continually add to the unit tests as they go along.
As you can see – these discussions then become the foundation of their next PBC SMART goals.
At the end of the day, keeping your employees involved and engaged in their own career development is key. Although the above examples were technical, this method also works on soft or people skills.
A busy professional has this question regarding time management:
How to set the right priorities?
I have a lot on my to-do list and I tend to focus on the day to day tasks I have. I am finding it hard to find time to focus on some of my strategic goals because the rest of my to-do items take up all of my time. I am thinking I need to do a better job at setting priorities. How do others tackle their strategic goals while getting all of their pressing daily tasks done?
Every successful person will have their own system. And I believe that the best system is the one that works best for you. Having said that upfront, here is what I recommend.
I applaud you for having your strategic goals clearly defined. Often people go through life without a strategic plan for their personal, professional, social and career lives. It is these same folks that wonder where time has gone and why they haven’t accomplished more with the time they were given.
Outlining a simple mission statement for your personal, professional, social and career purpose will help keep you on track. After all, how can you stay on course if you haven’t plotted a destination? If you don’t know where you are going, you deserve anywhere you end up.
So – get a 360° mission statement which includes all significant aspects of your life.
Once you have your 360° mission statement, carve out the imperative things that need to be accomplished to support those statements. Imperatives are those things that – if everything else were to disappear from your live – your life would still be happy and fulfilled.
For instance, perhaps one of your personal mission statements/desires is to be closer to your family and increase quality time with them. You then realize that your family is an imperative. That’s something that – if everything else were to disappear – you would still be very happy.
So you now have prioritized your family as one of your imperatives.
Some other imperatives might be your health, working on things that you are passionate about, getting great satisfaction by helping others or the community, be recognized and accomplished in your career – whatever creates joy in you. Nothing is wrong – it’s just your individual imperative list.
Once you have your imperative list, create realistic actions/activities to accomplish those goals. Create them in the form of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).
For example: To accomplish getting closer to your family, commit to a block of time each week for quality time with family members (sans electronics and distractions).
To be recognized and accomplished in your career, commit to working with a mentor or business coach to identify your career road-map and subsequent skill gaps.
To give back, commit to volunteer your talents to a non-profit organization. I would also recommend volunteer to a position that also supports and enhances your career. For instance, if you wanted to improve your skill set in web-design, offer to design the website for a non-profit. Combining the two imperatives will be of greater benefit to you.
Once you have your SMART goals identified, take out your calendar and block the time out in your calendar. Treat these assignments as imperative, and allow the day-to-day activities fill the gaps around them (instead of the other way around).
Every day activities will always fill in the gaps. So, if you don’t deliberately and mindfully create the space (schedule it in your calendar with a “DO NOT DISTURB”), you will never have the time to accomplish your most important activities.
A busy professional has this question regarding project management:
How can I manage multiple web projects with a deadline without outsourcing?
I don’t have money to invest in outsourcing. Beside outsourcing, what is the most effective way of complete 20 website design projects that are fully monetized and traffic generation optimized on or before December 2017? I fell into the folly of pursuing many site projects at the same time and I don’t want to give up. I strongly believe nothing is impossible to him who believes. I’m in dire need of an expert’s advice please.
Without understanding the full scope of each project, there are a few things to consider and try.
In order to keep your clients – you need to be realistic and transparent about your talents and delivery schedule. Tell your clients your current situation and give them a chance to either work with you or find another website developer. This is the only way to keep your clients welfare and business in good standing.
At best – it would be selfish and unprofessional to jeopardize your clients’ business and income – because your mismanaged your business. At worst, knowingly taking money for projects that you cannot deliver is fraud.
Please, share your plans with your clients and give them the opportunity to decide what they want to do.
Have a list of other website developers that you can refer them to – as an option. Work with affiliated referral partners to create a referral program – for cases such as this (more information on this below).
Work with each client to minimize the requirements and delivery timeline. By this I mean, identify exactly what needs to be delivered and when. This may allow you to interlace your deliverables in phases to each of your clients. Although this may extend the delivery to the entire projects past December 2017 – it may allow a working version of all the sites by December 2017. This may allow all your clients to accomplish their goals, even though the full contract hasn’t been delivered in the original time schedule.
In either way – please be transparent to your clients regarding your schedule dilemma.
Investigate using routings or pre-tested functions/packages that do the required tasks (versus coding manually yourself). This is different from outsourcing because you are doing a one-time purchase of the features or functions that you are interested in. Your task would be to successfully integrate them into your various websites. You can often purchase functionality at low costs or even free on open source sites.
The negative is the maintenance of such routines. It might take you longer to fix any issues found in that code.
Although your contract may promise a December 2017 delivery date, some of your clients may agree to extend the deadline. Offer discounts or additional free months of maintenance to their contract in order to extend the deadline. Create a new contract that outlines exactly what will be delivered in each phases, what the clients will be able to do with their website and when it will be finalized. These changes in the statement of work needs to be documented and signed to afford problems in the future.
Actually give away some of the projects to other website developers that you hold in high regards. This allows you to keep your promises to your clients and refer business to other website developers. This also opens the door for those same website developers to hand-off business to your when they are over-loaded. Discuss some type of referral fee when you and your referral partners exchange business as a way to motivate referrals.
As you mentioned earlier – this is your folly to schedule so many website projects in the same project schedule. Don’t let your clients suffer for your mismanagement. Your foremost goals is to keep your client’s welfare in mind at all time – even if that means you not making the profit.
Sometimes you can best serve your clients by referring them to someone else.
If you need additional help on this, just let me know.
A busy professional has this question regarding branding and marketing:
What is the best way to advertise a forum on a niche topic?
I have a forum on a niche topic. I am advertising the forum via ads (Although some of the keywords have low quality scores, they are all very specific to this niche).
Now, do I directly link the ad to the forum home page, or add some high quality article/posts around the ads? Does this matter?
Thanks in advance for any help. I didn’t find the right answer from searching the internet.
Whether you are marketing your forum, book, website, product or service, you can use similar marketing strategies. But a successful marketing strategy has lots of moving parts and tools. I recommend doing a combination of things:
It will take time to create a following from scratch. Therefore, investigate or go where your target marketing is already. For instance, if your target market is parents, you might want to visit or guest speak at forums for single parents, divorced dads, and other topics that interest your same target group.
As you can see – there’s no 1 thing that you do. There’s a never-ending list of things you can do to market and expose your forum.
To help narrow your focus, clearly describe your target audience or personas. By deciding the age group, interests, income, hobbies, and lifestyle – you can better focus your marketing strategies to get the bigger bang for your time and budget.