Be the captain of your career - stc14
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Be The Captain of Your Career!
Jack Molisani
Twitter: @JackMolisani
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About the Speaker
• President, ProSpring Technical Staffing
• Executive Director, The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and User Experience
• Author, Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement
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In this Session
• Advancing your Career Using Branding and Positioning
• Five Steps to Financial Stress Reduction
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• I recently went to a conference where attendees’ name tags included the phrase, “Ask me about… [then an answer we provided when registering].”
• From this came a major career realization:
Introduction
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The whole concept of personal branding can be summarized by that simple phrase, “Ask me about…”
Introduction
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• Before we look at some examples, let’s define some terms.
Introduction
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Branding vs. Positioning
• A brand is: “a unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors.” BusinessDictionary.com
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Branding vs. Positioning
• Companies spend billions of dollars advertising and building brand recognition.
• Why?
• So people will remember and buy their products.
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Branding vs. Positioning
• Often a name-brand product and a no-name (or store brand) generic product are the same product produced by the same manufacture
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Branding vs. Positioning
• What matters is that consumers perceive that a brand is better and therefore buy it (usually at a higher price than a non-branded generic equivalent)
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Positioning
• Positioning: to communicate about a product or service by comparing it to a better-known product or service
• “Stronger than steel,” “Faster than FedEx,” “Cheaper than Walmart”
• Each phase above identifies what makes the product different (quality, speed, price) and then a better-known product (or company) against which the item is positioned
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Personal Branding
• Branding and positioning obviously apply to selling shoes or laundry soap, but what do they have to do with you, the technical communicator?
• That’s where personal branding comes in.
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Personal Branding
Just as a company creates a brand and promotes why people should buy the product or service, so should you create a personal brand and promote why people should buy your product or service.
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Personal Branding
In Tech Comm 2.0: Reinventing Our Relevance in the 2000s (Intercom, Feb 2012) I asserted that technical communicators are in danger of becoming a commodity, a product or service to be acquired for the lowest possible price given an acceptable level of quality.
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Personal Branding
• Why? • Because many companies do not
perceive the value that individual technical communicators bring to their organizations
• And why not? • Lack of personal branding!
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Personal Branding
• Personal branding and proper positioning communicate why companies should buy your services and pay the rate or salary you want to be paid.
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Personal Branding
• Example:
• STC fellow Andrea Ames, when asked what she does for a living, answers, “I solve business problems.”
• Not, “I’m a technical writer.”
• Not, “I write release notes.”
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Personal Branding
• While she may actually do those things as part of her job, they’re not the way she approaches her job, and they’re certainly not how she defines her corporate mission.
• “I solve business problems.”
• What a great personal brand! It instantly communicates what she does and why she is valuable!
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Responding to Market Changes
• In their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, James Collins and Jerry Porras state that of the visionary companies they studied, all had a history of responding to market changes while staying true to their core values.
• Content Strategist Sharon Burton’s rebranding story illustrates this beautifully.
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Responding to Market Changes
• “The whole reason I got into tech comm was not because I loved to write, it was because I loved being at the crossroads of people and technology and I could make a difference. That’s why I do what I do.
• When the recession hit and I got laid off, it forced me to reexamine what drives me in this field, what excites me. I realized what was true when I started is just as true today: I love being at the intersection of people and technology.
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Responding to Market Changes
• Unfortunately, writing online help topics just doesn’t excite me anymore. But helping companies adopt a content strategy that gives people the information they need so they can go out and change the world?
• That excites me!
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Responding to Market Changes
• Our industry is changing. We’re in a content development revolution. Companies don’t need just user manuals anymore, they need social media and webinars, YouTube videos and multi-channel publishing.
• These are the areas on which companies are spending money, and they need help to do it right.
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Responding to Market Changes
• So the process of rebranding wasn’t just calling myself by a new title, it included reeducating myself and repositioning myself so I could effectively offer the services that companies need as the very ground beneath them changes.”
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Responding to Market Changes
• Alvin Toffler, an American writer known for his works discussing the digital revolution, takes the concept of reeducation a step further:
“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
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Ask Me About…
• How can you respond to market changes while staying true to your core values?
• What can you do well that you can promote as a specialized service for which you should be handsomely paid?
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Ask Me About…
• Are you expert in content management systems? A specialist in Simplified English? A wiz at creating cascading style sheets?
• Or perhaps you make software easier to use through embedded user assistance, or increase sales though better marketing collateral?
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Ask Me About…
• What should people ask you about?”
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Five Steps to Financial Stress Reduction
• Chellie Campbell in her book The Wealthy Spirit says there are five step to achieving financial stress reduction:– Think positive– Send out ships– Count your money– Survive the storms – Seek balance and enlightenment
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• Mind over matter
• Do daily positive money affirmations:– “People love to give me money!”– “I win often, and I win big!”– “Money flows to me like water from a faucet!”
• I believe you don’t only choose the path you walk in life, you create the path you walk
Think Positive
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Send Out Ships
• Most people have heard the phrase, “When my ship comes in”
• Do you know where that term originated?
• Back in the 19th century, merchants in Europe would mortgage everything they owned to build clipper ships and send them off to the New World.
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• When (if) they returned loaded with rum and furs and spices, and the owner would become rich beyond their imagination.
• But there were no ship-to-shore radios in the 19th century, so merchants would never know exactly when their ship would return.
• They were literally waiting for their ship to come in.
Send Out Ships
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• I know plenty of people who are waiting for their ship to come in.
• The problem is, they’re not sending out any ships!
• You have to send out ships!
Send Out Ships
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• Create a ships log
• Run basic financial reports, create graphs
• In the game Making Money, that’s how you keep score
Count Your Money
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• There will be ups and downs in the economy
• Companies are bought and sold and people get laid off
• Put money away so you can survive the lean times
Survive the Storms
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• All work and no play is no way to live
• Neither is having no money to pay the rent
• Seek a balance – Work vs. family time– Saving money vs. splurging a little– Don’t neglect your physical, mental or spiritual
health
Seek Balance and Enlightenment
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• Think positive• Send out ships• Count your money• Survive the storms • Seek balance and enlightenment
Recap
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Recommended Reading
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Reach the Speaker
– Twitter: JackMolisani
– The LavaCon Conference: www.lavacon.org