Badging Up

I work for AWS Training and Certification and we offer digital badges for those who successfully pass our rigorous technical exams to achieve AWS Certification. As of late, I have become a student of these badging programs and the wealth of training opportunities that exist for professionals and aspiring professionals on a wide range of topics.

I often learn about new programs by checking out the LinkedIn profiles of my contacts . Here are a few that caught my eye recently that might be of interest to you. Because of recent events and a concern for health and safety and getting people productive in the economy, so many training opportunities and many of the related certifications are available for free. These are in addition to the large catalogs of academic and continuing education offerings from companies like Coursera, edX, Udemy, Udacity, LinkedIn Learning, Salesforce Trailhead, and more.

What others would you recommend? Put them in comments or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I’ll add them here!

MARKETING

• Google Ads, Analytics Academy, and Google Marketing Platform by Google (free)

• Bing Ads Certification by Microsoft (free)

• The Conversational Marketing Certification by Drift (free)

• Video Badge from Twitter Flight School (Free)

• HubSpot Academy with topics for individual certs range from content marketing, email, inbound, social media, and sales (free)

• Social Media Analytics by Quintly (free)

• Email marketing by MailChimp Academy (available to members of their MailChimp & Co partner program for freelancers and agencies)

• Pragmatic Institute with topics including marketing, launch, and pricing (classes run $1,195)

• Adobe Analytics and Adobe Marketo Engage from Adobe (prices range from $95 to $225)

• Social Media Certification from Hootsuite Academy ($199)

• Facebook BluePrint Certification ($150)

• Digital Marketing Certification from American Marketing Association ($249 for Members)

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner ($100)
  

EVENTS

• Event Professional Certification including Virtual and Hybrid Events by Cvent (free)

• Virtual Events Institute Certified (rates vary from $975 standard to discounts for students, freelancers, and open to work)

• Certified Meeting Planner by the Events Industry Council (requires 3 years of event industry experience; $250)

• Fundraising Event Management Certificate by Event Leadership Institute ($636 member course cost)

• Inclusive Event Strategist Certificate by Meeting Professionals International ($299 for members for class)

• Certified Event Designer by Event Design Collective (on-site 3 day class, 6 months of coaching; cost of 2750 euros)
  

DESIGN THINKING

• Enterprise Design Thinking by IBM (5 tiers; free)

• Foundations in Design Thinking Certificate by IDEO ($1200)

• As you might imagine, there are a number of outstanding academic programs, beginning with Stanford University who helped pioneer the category.

MACHINE LEARNING

• AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty by AWS ($300)

• Machine Learning by Stanford University on Coursera, taught by professor and Coursera founder, Andrew Ng (audit for free or purchase course with sharable certificate for $79)

You Are Bigger Than Your Job (and other truths of job search)

There are a lot of people who are looking for their next career opportunity. Either they left their previous companies and are in transition or they have outgrown their current role and are looking for a new challenge. Possibly both. Perhaps your are one of them. Or maybe things are humming along nicely for you at work, but you don’t want to get stale or forget your own development as you grow in place or seek promotion. Thinking about this in my own experience has led to me to some insights that might be useful to you.

1.      The hiring manager has a reason they are recruiting

Chances are the hiring manager for your next role had to go to bat to get the requisition approved. They have an immediate need. They have lived without someone in the role and it is taking its toll on the remaining team and the business results. So much so, that their management has seen the gap and approved the spend. There are specific things that need to get done that are either going undone or being done poorly. The business is suffering. This is true in many cases. The hiring manager has asked the recruiter or posted a job with a very specific list of attributes for which they are searching. They don’t want to hire a generalist, just like you wouldn’t use a Swiss Army Knife to cut a sirloin, if you could use a proper steak knife. Recruiters will complain, I mean, observe that hiring managers ask for a purple unicorn steak knife with pink polka-dots, their requirements are so specific and unique. This is true. Why? Because…

2.      The hiring manager doesn’t want to look the fool

Once getting approval to hire, the manager wants to make a smart hiring choice. They know that unless you have someone in the role who is highly productive in short order, they won’t be successful. Hiring a warm body isn’t enough. They want a candidate with the elusive combination of past experience, personal motivation, and future potential that will allow them to fill their need (see #1). Anything misstep in this search and they might be stuck with a bad performer (worst case scenario), have to swap out talent (losing more time), and damage their reputation as a leader and team builder in the process. All of these things are out of the question. The stakes are high to find the steak knife (see what I did there?). So, they go on the hunt for the perfect candidate for their role and you want them to find you in their search, so let’s switch focus to you.

3.      You are bigger than the job

You are an experienced, successful professional in your field. You have done some amazing things. You have more capabilities, more raw potential, and undoubtedly more experience than your next job can fully appreciate. That is okay. It is preferred. Otherwise, you’d go into a role that would immediately bore you or to which you couldn’t apply your diverse background to make it your own. If you are not clear on what you want in your next role, you will confuse a hiring manager. They want a steak knife. You are a Swiss Army Knife. If you go on about all the things you can do (“I can uncork wine, pop bottle caps, open tin cans, and cut fingernails, and have experience cutting pork chops, cheese, and Duct Tape”), you aren’t going to jump out as the obvious choice to a would-be hiring manager. Plus, everyone describes themselves the same way. You have to stand out. 

4.      You are best in class at some things

Sure, the company probably does need a well-rounded athlete (more on that later), but they are recruiting for a runner, cyclist, or swimmer, not all three. Even the accomplished triathlete has an area of strength. So do you. If you are honest with yourself, there are parts of your past experience that have been sources of joy and energy and things you have done (perhaps even done exceptionally well) that drain you of energy and motivation. 

Only you know for sure, although others can provide some useful insight you might be too close to see yourself. You can use assessment tools (like StrengthsFinders, Insights Discovery Kolbe, DiSC, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and others) to gain insight. You can hire a career coach to ask you better questions than you are asking yourself. You can read books. You can seek counsel from networking groups or colleagues. You can take a self-discovery or professional development class. You can spend time with yourself. 

However it happens, you need to get clear about what you want and get good at describing your differentiation. What you do best. Not what you have done, but what you want to do in the future. What skills you want to use, what kind of role you want, what kind of company would suit best (by name preferably), what title would suit, and how you want to be measured and managed. This is essentially your personal marketing plan.

5.      The job is bigger than you

It is highly likely that the job requires some things you haven’t done, or done in a while, or done well. That is just the nature of the dynamic, changing nature of the workforce. Technology, competitive pressures, globalization, and other trends are causing jobs to change rapidly. Sure, you can invest in training and certifications (you should!). You keep up on your industry. You join networking groups. You do some mentoring and reverse mentoring to stay current. All those things are important, but likely you will need to make some effort, starting in an interview process and through onboarding, to translate what you have done as transferrable skills to the role. And for the rest, you and the hiring manager will need to develop a plan (more on this in a second). The manager will need to be incredibly crisp on the non-negotiables for the role; the personality traits, motivations, and skills that translate to success in the role. Notice I didn’t say “experience.” Experience may not be a measure of future performance in the role and, frankly, as a manager is a really hard to differentiate on experience since everyone who applies and makes it through initial screening seems incredibly and equally competent.

Looking at these things visually, each candidate has a certain degree of overlap with the success profile of the role they are applying for. The overlap are the familiar responsibilities, personality traits, motivations, and skills that the job requires that you can confidently accomplish. Both hiring manager and candidates are well-served by having a high degree of overlap.  

On one side of that Venn diagram will be all the skills and experiences that you don’t directly apply in your new role. Perhaps it is your experience in hardware electronics, when you take a role for a software company. Let’s say you don’t use your experience in Javascript, when you take a job as a Python developer. Perhaps it is your experience in organizational design, when you take a job as in talent acquisition. Maybe it is the fact that you play the saxophone in a jazz band, you are an accomplished jewelry designer, or you are fluent in several Asian languages, but have a sales territory in Latin America. In these cases, if you want to find an outlet for those talents you might have to look to volunteer somewhere to take them up as a hobby. In past roles that didn’t require much writing, I found myself contributing to other blogs or publications as a guest contributor. As a writer, I just couldn’t help myself. You will do the same. 

Or, ideally, you will find a way to shift the role definition itself (the edge of the job profile circle) to the left to encompass more of your skills. Let’s say you join the company as an individual contributor, but have management experience. Perhaps as the company and role grows, you can take over a team and be a people manager again to use those skills. Perhaps you can look for ways to expand the scope to cover things you are developing in yourself, like strategic thinking, new technical skills, or leadership.

On the other side of the Venn diagram are the job responsibilities that are not in your sweet spot. Perhaps you have spent years selling through channels, but now need to apply skills in direct selling models. Perhaps you have done digital demand generation using tools like marketing automation and PPC advertising and now need to add intention and analytics to your skill set in order to do account-based marketing. Perhaps you need to add cloud computing to your impressive list of IT credentials. Perhaps the job calls for other things that you are willing to do and have been wanting to do, but haven’t demonstrated yet. For these you and your manager have some choices:

• Development: you could learn and practice the skills required to be good at your new (next) job.

• Delegate: you could bring people onto your team who are experts in these areas to do the work and for you to learn from.

• Design: you and your manager could actually design these tasks out of the job itself, giving them to another person or group, shifting your role to play to your strengths.

The alternatives to these things also start with D: disappoint and disaster. Let’s try to avoid that with some frank discussion and good planning and organization design at the start. In the past, I have found that having people on my team who could help me follow-up on detailed accountability plans was a useful corollary to my strategy and idea-generating creativity. Everyone has strengths and we should use ours and allow others the opportunity to demonstrate theirs. We have all had these things in our jobs in the past that we either had to get good at or find ways to accomplish in other ways. 

Finally, if you are finding success and satisfaction in your job and want to continue to moving forward, these are still great principles to apply.  Keeping up on trends in the job market, understanding the career pathing at your company, investing in yourself with additional reading, courses, and experiences, and talking with trusted mentors and advisors can help you continue to develop your skills and capabilities to be a high degree of overlap for your next role.

And one last note: Everyone can use a good activist shareholder on their personal board of directors (don’t know what an activist investor is? See here). You should have people in your life that are asking the tough questions, making sure you are growing, and sponsoring you for stretch roles. It may be uncomfortable to invite a disrupter or agitator into your inner circle, but it is necessary to combat complacency and avoid developing blind spots around your own development. If you don’t have an activist among your career advisors, find one. 

 ______________________________________________

Special thanks to Richard Banks for introducing me to personal marketing plans, for Minh-Ha Nguyen and Teresa Caro for helping me filter my own experience more clearly, to Rebecca Larson for helping me articulate my strengths, to Kelly Kannwischer for Younique and Susan Clark for HeartSpark, to Mike Allred at TechCXO for the Enneagram-based Print Report, to Brian Scudamore and Vistage for introducing me to Kolbe,  Alyssa Gasca, Michele Sarkisian, Tanya Young Stump, Gina Riley, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Ben Clifton, and Herve Fage for being activists to me, to Sarah Carr Evans and Kevin Hickey for recently dissecting job success profiles for me, and for so many of my LinkedIn connections, friends, and colleagues for your help and encouragement in my own professional journey. So grateful for their investment in me and I hope that I have done a few things to make them proud (mistakes and opinions my own, of course).

Hear My Talk on Marketing Mob

I participated in a podcast with Marketing Mob on February 13th.  Watch the recording here.

What is the Grit in Your Oyster?

Daniel Ek, the Swedish entrepreneur and technologist best known as the co-founder of Spotify, recently tweeted “I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fueled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster. It's the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel in order to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.” 

I love the picture that paints of an oyster, wrapping an irritation in layers of protection until the pearl is created.  Without the pain, you don’t get the pearl.  Come to find out, oysters are not self-motivated.  And the same may be true for us.  It’s self-doubt, not confidence that is the essential ingredient.

Made me wonder what other seemingly negative emotions might actually motivate great success, fueling you to take action, approach problems differently, or creatively seek alternatives.  It is said that necessity (ie, need, want) is the mother of invention.  The same could be set about a great number of other negative things.  Here are several that you might agree have played a role in your own achievement, either in yourself or others:

-        Pain (as opposed to comfort)

-        People pleasing (as opposed to independence)

-        Anxiety (as opposed to calm)

-        Noise (as opposed to quiet)

-        Hunger (as opposed to being satisfied)

-        Close-mindedness (as opposed to openness)

-        Complexity (as opposed to simplicity)

-        Slowness (as opposed to speed)

-        Rigidity (as opposed to flexibility)

-        Fear (as opposed to trust)

-        Doubt (as opposed to certainty)

-        Exclusion (rather than involvement)

-        Discontent (rather than contentment)

Each of us have our own internal motivations.  The ones above are often dismissed or rejected as being entirely negative, when you encounter them in yourself or others, but they can be the grit in the oyster that helps you achieve success.  But only if you learn how to harness their lessons, with stamina and perseverance, all the way to the harvest. 

This article was originally published on LInkedIn Pulse.

Good Talk, Coach: 3 ways to inspire greatness

I overheard the half-time huddle at a soccer game this weekend.  The sweaty 11-year-olds were sitting on the grass when their coach gave them two simple pieces of advice:

1. “Girls, we always play strong in the second half,” he started.  “Let’s go out and do that.”
2. “Now that we switched sides at the half, our goal is in the shade.  So, let’s try to keep the ball in the shade.  We’ll score more and stay cool.”

“Good talk, coach,” I was thinking as I smirked at his no nonsense style and how we matched the length of his speech to the attention span of his pre-teen audience.

But later, I was thinking of the simplicity of his practical advice.  He did three things that good leaders should do in any environment, whether it be the soccer pitch or in the board room.  He gave them confidence (we always play strong in the back half), he gave them an easy-to-remember strategy to follow (stay in the shade), and he tied it to their own personal objectives (win and stay cool). 

If we could all do this in our own businesses and with our own teams, we would end up winning more often.

Motion Sickness: 3 Ways to Survive Change (without losing your head)

All of us have experienced it. The dizziness and disorientation that comes from motion sickness. Either in the backseat of a station wagon, on a boat, or spinning around the yard, there is that familiar and strange sensation of your brain swirling around in your head. Something similar happens in times of change in our professional lives as well. Whether navigating new waters, riding along on a bumpy road, or having circumstances change suddenly, some motion sickness can be hard to avoid.

So, how do you survive change, avoid light-headedness, and emerge on the other side stronger, wiser, and more capable than you began? Here are three principles to apply.

1.     Find your Focus

When I would go out boating as a kid with family friends and started to feel a little wheezy, they would encourage me to set my eyes on a fixed point like the horizon or the nearby shoreline. It helped provide perspective and settle my stomach. The same is true in our work life. In times when the business results or changing processes are like choppy seas, it is good to fix your eyes on the constants of your business: your commitment to customers, your loyalty to the mission, or your cool products. Not everything in the environment is changing and some of what is steady is extremely positive and can keep you grounded even if things are changing.

2.     Hydrate Your Interests

One of the common causes of dizziness is dehydration. To avoid dizziness, they recommend drinking enough water, eating regularly and sleeping soundly. In other words, you can’t neglect your health and expect your body to perform at its peak. Most of us have multiple interests in and beyond work. In times of change it is important to nourish your curiosities. At work, look for ways to learn new skills or expand your contributions. And in your personal life, don’t neglect the things that feed you like hobbies, time with friends, family, or time in reflection or in nature.

3.     Practice Your Flexibility

Have you ever wondered how ice skaters can perform those tight and fast spins on the ice without getting dizzy? Unlike dancers, who can fix their eyes on a single location trick their brain into thinking it is still even though their bodies are moving, ice skaters are moving too fast for that. When the spin stops, why don’t they feel overwhelmingly dizzy and fall to the ground? The answer is a little anti-climactic: they get used to it. Starting small and slow, they build their tolerance. They might still get dizzy, but not enough that the audience would know. You, too, can practice your flexibility and open-mindedness and train yourself not to get disoriented in times of change. It requires some self-awareness, perhaps some self-reflection and opportunities to practice. So, if you find yourself facing change after change, be thankful that you are getting the opportunity to practice.

The most common cause of dizziness is unintended motion. It’s something out of your control and causes your body to move when you haven’t moved it. In times of change, the first thing to go is our own sense of control and that can be disconcerting. But it need not be debilitating. Like the effects of vertigo, most times they are harmless and temporary. We just need to find our feet and proceed forward and the dizziness will pass.

The Power of Feedback

High self-awareness is a key element in business success. It can be easily overshadowed by the sexier traits of charisma or sheer intellectual genius.  A study a few years back by Green Peak Partners and Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, quantified what employees have known for a while: "Companies and their investors need to put more effort into evaluating the interpersonal strengths of potential leaders. They should focus more on how a leadership candidate does the work, and not focus exclusively on what he or she has done.” 

How one gets things done and the improvements one might make over time are rooted directly in a leader’s ability to face truth about themselves. According to the authors of Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, leaders can improve themselves. According to their Harvard Business Review article, leaders must become “more aware of what motivates them and their decision making.”

In the end, there are three characteristics of feedback that I believe capture why it is critical to our success; Feedback is a mirror, a gift, and a miracle.

Self-Awareness Requires a Mirror

I don’t mean the kind of mirror by which you check your teeth for spinach or fix your hair. I don’t mean the kind of mirror that customer service agents to make sure they are smiling when taking phone calls (however effective that might be). I am referring to a different type of mirror. The kind that tell you how you are showing up in your professional life that leads to self-awareness and reflection. That mirror is feedback.

"Although the quietest of the emotions self-awareness is an incredible predictor of emotional intelligence," writes Daniel Goleman in a study with Korn Ferry Institute. Turns out, the ability to respond to crisis, develop teams, and manage your own emotions are all skills that can be improved with better self awareness.

Every journey begins with a first step and there are a variety of assessments that you can take to improve your self-awareness. Some of my favorite are profiled here for your reference. I have used Kolbe and StrengthsFinders as team building tools, as well, to help us better understand our team mates and how to work together.

Feedback is a Gift that Isn’t Easily Given (or Received)

“Not all gifts arrive in neat packages,” said Carole Robin, director of the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program at Standard Graduate School of Business. “This is definitely true for feedback.” Leaders must be exceptional at giving feedback in order to develop their teams and achieve their goals.   Feedback delivered with candid compassion can transform businesses and relationships and most of us could improve our performance.

Leaders have a double responsibility however. They also need to make sure they are not missing out on the opportunity to receive the gift of feedback themselves. Ken Blanchard called feedback “the breakfast of champions.” And sometimes that breakfast is served is too cold, too warm, or too late, but it can be nourishing in any case.

We need to persevere and to find people who can tell us the truth.  “We all need people who can give us feedback,” said Bill Gates. “That’s how we improve.”

People are often hesitant to give pointed feedback to their boss or colleagues. The conversations are awkward and best and can be career limiting, if the leader values comfort and coddling over results and responsibility (and we have all known a few of those).

The gift of feedback must be received and given with open hands, open hearts, and open minds.  Create forums for feedback like 1:1 meetings, office hours, or surveys. In listening sessions, sit with your arms in a neutral position and try to constrain your reactions or defensive tendencies.

And just like your grandmother taught you: not all gifts are what you want, but because it is the “thought that counts” you have to treat the gift, and the giver, with graciousness. You must look for how you can best apply what you are learning. You may end up disregarding portions of what was shared, but it is in the consideration and reflection that changes occur.

Truth Telling is a Miracle (considering the obstacles)

In their book Execution, authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, talk about the seven key traits of a leader and among them are “know yourself” and “insist on realism.” That last topic was so impactful to their thinking and their business success that they went on to write Confronting Reality. Yet in order for leaders to face reality, they need to be told the truth and they need to hear it clearly.

Failure to listen is more common than head cold among senior leaders. Combine this with the difficulty of speaking truth to power and it is no wonder that leaders can live in an echo chamber of glossed-over good news and ungrounded positivity.  We criticize our culture for believing fake news, but often live in a world of fake news about ourselves and our businesses. It is a wonder hard truth is ever spoken, in fact. We are all guilty of not speaking up boldly enough or not being as open to feedback as we should have. It really is a miracle when it happens. Yet, it is a miracle that we can encourage and even facilitate with the right behaviors and attitudes.

In addition to being open to constructive criticisms, it is critical that you understand the data that indicates business success. In most environments, these include revenue and margin or market share data as backward looking indicators. It is also important to look at early or forward-looking indicators such as sales funnel analysis or engagement metrics on key tools or campaigns known to convert to sales. These business dashboards serve the same purpose as the dashboard of your car: providing you a feedback loop that indicates if you are running at speed, violating conditions of success, or if you have a crisis pending. Data reporting and analysis can be an important part of your truth telling toolkit.

With a combination of mirrors, gifts, and miracles, we can lead better businesses and lead them better.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

Restlessness: the path to innovation

On a Tuesday in 1954, H.W. Sweatt, the president of Minneapolis-Honeywell (a leading control systems company that would go on to be called Honeywell) had an important message to deliver. According to Jeffrey Rodengen, in his The Legend of Honeywell, H.W. assembled some division executives and sales people and shared some thoughts about innovation.

“To me,” he began, “one of our greatest weaknesses and one that I think is growing in this company is a failure to keep ‘a spirit of restlessness’ fully alive in our organization.” He went on to describe that he observed people in the sixty-nine year old company had gotten too comfortable with that status quo or how things exist today and lacked the time or the mental energy to do the “thinking, planning, and imaging that must be done to protect the future of the company – not next year, but in the decades that lie ahead.” In a successful business it is easy to overlook the constant change that is “inherent in every business picture,” and efficiency can not take precedence over changing and leading. To continuing to pioneer new frontiers with an entrepreneurial spirit.

“As for me, while I always want to strive for perfection and never want to be satisfied with less, if I had to choose, I would prefer to settle for a little less perfection today and a little more imagining for tomorrow.” He recognize that risk-taking would lead to mistakes, errors, and sacrifice immediate profits, but the threat of withering and dying was too real. Sweatt, who is now the namesake of Honeywell’s highest award for engineers/scientists considered this spirit of restlessness “One of our most priceless and fundamental possessions.” 

In Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation recounted a time when a proud tradition and commitment to excellence conflicted with a spirit of innovation. The team at Disney Animation was making the movie Bolt and ran into a technical challenge that was set to delay the film unacceptably by over 6 months. After a pep talk from leadership and some creative problem solving by a few team members, the problem was resolved in a few days. So, why did the larger team think it would take six months to do something that ended up taking only a few days? Why the conservatism? “The answer, I think,” Ed surmised, “lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else.” 

No one had to remind them about the legacy of the studio, the innovations and advancements that had been made under Walt Disney’s leadership, and the pressure that they faced to get things right. “Their employees knew there would be repercussions if mistakes were made, so the primary goal was never to make any.” But estimating that a problem would be solved with no errors, was absolutely the wrong choice in this situation. “Seeking to eliminate failure was in this instance – and I would argue, most instances – precisely the wrong thing to do,” he continued. It was important in the end to turn the focus “away from the notion of the ‘right’ way to fix the problem to actually fixing the problem – a subtle, but important distinction.” 

In the final tally, perfection and innovation have to be held in balance. If things are too perfect, efficiency might be high, but innovation suffers. If things are too innovative, there may be wasteful rework and abandoned short-term profits. The higher order problem to be solved might not be as obvious as the problems of yesterday that prompted the processes, procedures, and thinking prevelant today. There isn’t a warning label that exists in the world because someone wasn’t first harmed or injured. So, these “perfect” processes, documentation, and support rise up to solve yesterday’s problems. Maybe not the problems of the future. 

The spirit of restlessness, that H.W. Sweatt encouraged and was demonstrated by the small team at Disney Animation, is the attitude that keeps clever people pushing forward, with dissatisfaction to today’s constraints, imagining the future, and possibly most importantly, trading in short-term perfection along the way for the discovery of solutions to larger, more impactful, problems. It’s restlessness, in fact, that uncomfortable feeling that we have outgrown the status quo or might be missing something bigger, that puts us on the path of innovation.

This article originally posted on LInkedIn Pulse.

Your Executive MBA: what you need to know

Considering an Executive MBA or graduate school?  These tips, that I recently published on LinkedIn Pulse, will help you make the most of the experience.

Recently I have found myself consulting with professionals looking for career advancement, professional credentials, and the insight that comes from an executive MBA program.  I went through the same decision making processes myself and have been happy to share advice on how to make the most of these programs.

1.        The class is the professor.  Choose wisely.

Executive education programs appeal to working professionals who have years of experience to bring to the class discussions.  As a result, you are likely to learn as much from your classmates as you are from the reading and the lectures in class.  As a result, the constitution of the cohort is critically important to the value of the program.  So, when you are deciding on a program, ask about who else will be in the class, what businesses or industries they recruit from, and what kind of alumni programs they have for graduates. 

And don’t forget the value of the post-graduation alumni network you are building.  I decided, for a variety of logistics and timing reasons, to choose to travel out of state to attend Pepperdine University’s executive MBA program, who operated a satellite campus in Santa Clara, California.  I’d fly every three weeks down to class.  Because of the location of the program in the heart of Silicon Valley, the program had a lot of technology companies represented.  This was great for me, as I had begun a career in high tech and had intended to stay in electronics.  However, I did miss out on networking opportunities with my classmates during our program and after graduation, because I lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, instead of Mountain View or San Jose.  I have kept in touch with many of my classmates, but not as closely as I would have if I had attended a program in the Pacific Northwest instead.  Some programs have well-developed alumni networks, that host events, share a job board, and offer opportunities to network and collaborate.

2.       Don’t wait to network.  Use the alumni association before you are an alumni.

One of the reasons that you are likely considering an MBA is to build a professional network outside your current employer.  It could be to broaden your business acumen to make a larger contribution where you are or possibly to make a career change.  In any case, the network of your classmates and program alumni is critical to that effort, but you don’t have to wait until graduation.

Ask the recruiter for the school for alumni references for the program.  If you are considering a career change, ask to speak to an alumni who used the degree or certificate program as a springboard to a new career.  If you are wanting to change fields (from marketing to finance, from engineering to marketing, etc), ask to speak to an alumni who found the program useful with their own career moves.  Not only will you start building your professional network now, but it will demonstrate to the recruiter your sincerity and resourcefulness and you are likely to learn valuable insights into program.  Be sure to ask everyone you meet with for their advice on how to get the most out of the degree program.  You are paying the tuition, so get the full education!

3.       Use your capstone project to further your career

Most executive MBA programs include some sort of capstone project.  Sometimes a team is asked to start a business.  Some programs have individuals or groups do a full strategic analysis of a business, along with their recommendations.  Some have projects that are presented to a panel representing industry partners, for feedback.  In any case, I would encourage you to think about your assignment as a platform for your career development.

For instance, if you are looking to make a career change to a new industry, pitch a well-respected business in that industry the opportunity to work with you on your capstone project.  They get free business consulting and you build your network and knowledge in this field of interest. 

If you are looking to gain more responsibility at your current employer, use the capstone as an opportunity to get to know different executives and leaders at the company.  For instance, if you are looking to make a move to finance, reach out to meet with the CFO and ask their advice about what finance projects might be worth your time and energy and offer to share the results with them and their staff.  You gain instant visibility, you position yourself as a go-getter, and you get valuable resume-building experience that will serve you in your next role.

When considering my capstone, I met with several from the management team at my company to get advice about where I should focus.  Looking back, I could have done more.  I could have gone higher in the organization.  I could have reached more broadly across different functions.  I could have used the project, or any class assignment or the fact that I was in the program overall, as an excuse (and a good one) to connect across the organization. At the time I was enrolled in my MBA program I worked at Intel, who had 80,000 employees worldwide, and having a strong internal network helped you get things done and find your next opportunity.  I see now, how I could have used the program to position myself as an emerging leader in the organization, even more than I did.  My advice is don’t leave opportunities like that on the table.

Students are afforded great latitude in the business community, so if you take the risk to ask for advice or for opportunities, I have found that people are generous and will join you in your efforts to better yourself and better their business.  Remember, you are helping them, while they are helping you!

An executive education is a valuable tool in your career.  The purpose of education, especially the traditional case method format that is popular in business schools, is to benefit from the experience that others gained the hard way: through trial and error.  You have a great opportunity to gain poise, confidence, to build your business vocabulary and skills, and build your network along the way.  You will be able to measure significant personal and professional growth as you progress through your program.  Identifying your professional goals is critical. Picking the right school is the start.  The rest is up to you!

Student's Guide to LinkedIn: 4 Things to Know

The following article was recently featured on LinkedIn.

You may have heard about LinkedIn and wondered whether it was for you.  As a student, particularly a high school student or in the early years of your college journey, you might wonder if the time is right to join this network or wait until you have more experience or your diploma and are looking to start a your professional career.  Here are some thoughts to consider.

1. You are starting your career now

The skills you are learning and the relationships you are building now, will be important later as well, so don’t wait.

2. Join LinkedIn

It is the world’s largest professional social media network at 380 million users.  A new member joins every 2 seconds.  Go ahead and list your school, major activities or awards, service organizations for which you volunteer, and list your title as “Student” (unless you want to get creative and you want to be an “Academic Technician” or “An Agent of Change”).  You’re your profile professional and focused on academic or professional work, not your preference in music or your summer vacation plans (there are other networks for that).  List out your skills and experience so others can endorse you.  Don’t forget to list entrepreneurial activities as well.  Your profile is 11x more likely to get viewed with a photo and 13x more likely to be viewed when you list skills.

And remember, it is editable, so things that are important for you to highlight today might not always be, so plan to curate your profile regularly to make sure the most important things are highlighted there.

Like any social network, don’t give out your personal information too broadly.  Things like your personal email address and the like can be hidden.  You can choose to use your first name and last initial until you are more comfortable with the system.  You should include a picture, if you are comfortable, but make sure it is professional (like a school photo or one taken when you were giving a speech or working in a lab, instead of one taking on a jet ski or at the football game).  You must make wise decisions regarding your own privacy, of course, and those are very personal decisions that you should consider with your parents and trusted advisors.

3. Connect

The whole point of a social network is to, well, network.  Start by sending LinkedIn requests to your teacher or professors.  Invite fellow career-minded classmates.  Invite your mentors and adult friends that know you well.

4. Be generous

There are several features on LinkedIn that all you to participate in a generous way, as you learn the ropes.   

First off, you can read the news feed of those you follow and like or comment on their news.  Congratulate someone on a new job or major project completion.  Comment thoughtfully and supportively on a published article.

Second, you can endorse the people you are connected to for their skills.  A few endorsements per person is appropriate. 

Thirdly, you can write recommendation notes.  Read what others have written and you can add your own.  Remember that these will likely live on the site for years to come, so keep them professionally worded and highlight transferable skills.  For instance, when writing a recommendation for a friend who was the yearbook editor, you can mention that project, but then say how you appreciated their attention to details and deadlines and how they modeled teamwork.  Those are things that future employers officers might be interested in, after all.

If you start supporting, endorsing, and recommending others, you will find that they will do the same for you and your profile and network will grow.

This article was posted on the Saturday Academy website. 

Guest Editorial on rAVe HomeAV Edition

Jennifer's article on the "Five Things Everyone Should Know How to Do" was featured as a guest editorial on rAVe's HomeAV Edition on August 13th.  This email is distributed twice a month to professionals in consumer electronics, audio-visual equipment, and technology spaces.  Find the article here.

Know Thyself: The Toolbox

I must start out with a confession.  I am a self-assessment junkie.  I love analysis tools that help me better reflect on my strengths, style, and effectiveness and how I relate to the world and approach problem-solving.  I understand that not everyone does.  But even more so, not everyone even knows that tools like this exist or how to use them. This post is meant to remedy that.

Below is a round up of some of the best assessment tools that I have used in the past.  With a short description of each (not exhaustive or complete by any means) and a link to where you can learn more or take the assessment.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on your favorites (or these or others that I might not have heard of before).

They are in rough alphabetical order.  I have no professional relationships or affiliations with any of these organizations, although I have taken all of these assessments over the years.

DiSC: This personality assessment might be one of the best known.  It is administered by hundreds of consultants (chances are your own HR team might have a certified trainer) and can be accessed online for less than $40 (and there are plenty of free "knock offs" out there as well).  It identifies people's dominant dimensions (Dominance, Influence, Stable, Compliant) and graphs individuals and groups into different combination profiles like "Promoter" or "Counselor".  This is a simple tool to help people understand each other better.

EQ-i: This is a measurement of emotional intelligence, thus EQ-i stands for Emotional Quotient Inventory.  It is administered by lots of professional coaches and trainers and can be accessed online for less than $40.  It provides composites along several factors includes self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision making, and stress management.  I have been told that a high EQ score is more important than any other single factor (IQ, etc) for professional success, but I do suspect that is subject to the field and role of the individual.  However, there is no denying the impact of interpersonal relationships on success.  

The Flag Page: The Flag Page was developed in cooperation with the marriage expert, Mark Gungor (Laugh your Way).  Although it is used by organizations, it is an inexpensive tool ($10) designed first for individuals.  It uses the language of citizenship to identify which "country" is dominant in your style (Fun, Control, Peace, Perfect). This is very accessible assessment and they even have one for children to use for family dynamics.

Harrison: The Harrison Assessment is a complex tool administered by trained professionals often as part of a team workshop.  It is based on paradox theory, which illustrates how individuals can act in seemingly contradictory ways, especially under stress.  It highlights 12 paradoxes that relate to the workplace (things like diplomacy and frankness or organization and flexibility) and plots each individual in a default position and indicates what behaviors they might demonstrate when under pressure.  The resulting individual assessment is over 20 pages long and the team assessment is equally as rich.  I understand the assessment is relatively expensive (over $300 per person), but I have never personally purchased it, so I am not certain.  It is much more complex and requires more work to understand and apply the insights than the other assessments.

Kolbe: Designed based on the research of Karen Kolbe,  the Kolbe Cognition Survey looks at how individuals approach problem solving and rates them on four dimensions (Fact Finding, Follow Thru, Quick Start, and Implementor).  The individual assessment is $49 and available on their website (a Kolbe A index).  They also have a series of products for determining job fit (managers complete a Kolbe C to develop a profile for a job and the employee completes a Kolbe B to identify their perceptions of the job requirements and when compared these B and C indexes show areas of gap or opportunity).  It can be used for recruiting and job fit analysis.  There is a youth version (Kolbe Y) as well.  This assessment is easy to digest, but allows for nuance and discussion than some of the more simple tools.

Myers-Briggs:  This is probably the most popular and extensively used "personality test" given.  Myers-Briggs is administered by thousands of practioners and is available online for less than $50 (and there are a number of free knock-off versions out there as well).  The survey gives back a score along four criteria (covering interpersonal styles, structures, decision making, and information) and sorts people into one of 16 personality types based on their responses. This is used in casual and in-depth coaching settings with success.

OAD: The Organization Analysis and Design survey is administered by an independent consultant or trainer certified by the organization.  It measures individuals along several constructs including assertiveness, extroversion, pace/patience, detail orientation, versatility, emotional control, and creativity.  Doing this as a group can reveal patterns and organize individuals into four profiles (architects, builders, experts and facilitators).  I have seen this used effectiveness to identify general patterns in groups.  It can be explained fairly easily (it is more complex than Kolbe and less than Harrison).

Clifton StrengthsFinder: This survey (developed by the "father of strengths psychology" Donald O Clifton and Gallup Organization) came free with my copy of Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham.  It allows you to self-identify your top 5 strengths and identifies how we can use those talents.  

There are many other assessments that one can do individually and in facilitated conversations with executive coaches or consultants, which I can cover in future posts.  

Which are your favorites and why?

Eavesdropping on Success

You learned your native language largely through eavesdropping.  Listening in on conversations.  

The language that might be critical for your career success will likely be learned in the same way.  Whether it is insight about how work gets done in your organization or the vernacular of your industry, you will pick it up by proximity.  If you want to accelerate your learning, how can you do that?  I don't suggest spying on meetings or lurking on conference calls (who has the time anyway?), but there are ways you can get this access in other ways.  

• Reading trade publications,
• reaching out to executives at your companies and offering to take them to coffee to ask questions,
• researching your company's financial filings and analyst coverage,
• following an influential blogger in your space,
• by studying the moves of competition,
• by talking to your sales team regularly.  

These are all ways in which you can, with intention and integrity, eavesdrop on success and learn the language through immersion.

How have you accelerated your own learning?  Share your success stories here.