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The Career Lattice

Do You Own Your Work?

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Cultivate your ideas and keep developing fresh skills: that’s one of the key recommendations in The Career Lattice. But how do you know which of your ideas is yours, and which actually belongs to your employer?

It’s not as clear-cut as it seems, according to presenters at February 11’s Pen to Digital Press: DIY Publishing in the Digital Age, hosted by Lawyers for the Creative Arts.  (I spoke too, with the irrepressible Shari Stauch of Shark Marketing, which helps authors build their audiences.)

Tips from the conference:

  • You can’t copyright or trademark an idea.  You CAN copyright or trademark the specific expression of that idea. Thus: the idea of chocolate chip cookies? Uncopyrightable. My amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe with a Secret Ingredient? Copyrightable.  Just because it occurs to you doesn’t mean you own it.  But if you develop the expression of that idea on your own time, and you want to protect it, then publish it and register the copyright.
  • If you develop it at your day job, they own it. If you want to build your own portfolio of work, develop it on your own time and document it as such.

This is especially relevant if you are cultivating career skills through a side job or freelancing. Be sure to draw a bright, thick line between the material you produce for your day job employer, and that which you develop, produce and copyright on your own.

Steal This Paragraph to Show Your Skills

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Cross-posted from our New Best Friends at Giggia.com, is this bit of wisdom on how to break through the competitive scrum to get the attention of a potential employer or client.

Show a Key Skill in Action

Here’s the magic key for freelancers and part timers who are pitching clients or applying for work: show a key skill in action, accomplishing a business result. Don’t just list your skills, and especially don’t just list your skills assuming that your work and credentials will speak for itself.

It won’t.

Pull together a couple of short case studies that show how your skills deliver business results. And segue into that by showing that you understand the types of business results that this potential client or employer needs to get.

Here’s an example:

“It’s likely that you would expect your new social media manager to increase awareness that directly translates to sales. I did just that for one of my freelance clients – a retailer that wanted to stand out at an upcoming community festival. Other retailers posted on Twitter and Facebook about their specials and hours. But I crafted a campaign that alternated special events for new and existing customers. That enabled the store staff to tailor their sales strategy accordingly, and enabled the store owner to see exactly which tactic was more profitable.”

If you want the job, show them how you’ll do it. 

– Joanne Cleaver, Director of Freelance Growth, Ebyline

Giggia recommends that you adapt the graf above for your cover letter. You’ve got my blessing — go ahead!

 

Jobs Without People & People Without Jobs – How to Bridge the Skills Gap

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President Obama’s 2013 budget reportedly includes $8 billion to fund workforce training through community colleges.

That’s a start – and certainly community colleges are prime collaborators with local industry, so deserve the cash. But it’s not enough to set up workers with a toolbox of today’s skills. Employees know they need to string those skills into a coherent path so they never again end up in a career dead-end.

A study released in November by Accenture found that 55% of U.S. workers believe they need more skills to be successful at the jobs they have now, or that they want to have. And 68% of employees say it’s up to them to pursue that triaining.

Employers may complain about the skills gap, but, guess what?  They perpetuate it.  Fewer than half of employees get employer-provided formal training, according to the Accenture Skills Gap Study.

Here’s how employers invest in training, according to the types of training employees told Accenture they got:

52% – technology
31% – problem solving
26% – analytical skills
21% – management skills

Employers don’t even inventory the skills their current employees have; instead, they assume that they have to start advertising for someone with new skills.

Latticing links the people employees have with the skills they need to qualify for the jobs employers need to fill. That’s how it solves the skills gap. Community colleges can build long-term relationships with local employers by weaving career paths into their curricula. And that will bridge the skills gap.

 

With Friends Like These, You Don’t Need Resumes

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Resumes are dead!

Well, almost.  According to today’s Wall St. Journal, sorting resumes has become so tedious that recruiters and hiring managers often just turn to employees’ recommendations first.

That means that keeping your professional network fresh and engaged is paramount.  Your current and former teammates are your fastest route to a new position.

That’s why The Career Lattice explains how to use BranchOut, the professional channel for Facebook, and LinkedIn, to showcase lateral skills and how you have navigated your career path. Lateral skills don’t always fit neatly on a resume, and the standard resume format doesn’t lend itself to explaining smart lateral moves.

Use these three tips to keep your teammates in the loop about your lateral development so they can recommend you for the right job at the right time:

  • Talk about the incremental progress you’re making towards your goals. Give your teammates talking points they can call up when the time is right.
  • Ask for lateral introductions to fast-growing departments, projects or companies.
  • Recap team successes, citing who contributed to the win. This gets everybody on your team in the habit of naming the skills that added up to collective progress.  

Top Career Books of 2012? We’re One!

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Accordingly to Kelly Eggers of FINS, the Dow Jones financial news and career management channel, The Career Lattice will be one of the top ten career books to watch for 2012.

We won’t argue with that. Meanwhile, the other trends she picked up on include how millennials can gain traction early in their careers, and how to push through the crowd to stand out when you’re interviewing and jostling for promotion.

How lucky are millennials and mid-careerists? Lattice is for them, too!

Lattice or Languish

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Millennial women are graduating into some harsh career realities. Not only is unemployment high for all college grads, putting them permanently behind in their earnings, but young women are coming face-to-face with one of the most difficult career dynamics faced by all women: that their work does not speak for itself.

Women may be the majority of college grads, but they’re earning thousands less than male cohorts — right from the start. Apparently, they’re not negotiating for better starting pay.  Why should you negotiate when your grades are great, you’ve festooned your resume with nonprofit leadership and you are confident in your abilities and direction?

Because if you don’t think you’re great enough to push for top dollar, employers won’t do that for you.  As we parsed in some detail in the 2011 Accounting MOVE Report,
millennial women assume that their credentials shield them from having to engage in uncomfortable self-promotion. It’s vaguely unbecoming for women to  point out their good work.  Bosses and potential bosses should simply recognize exemplary work and recognize it.

That mistake is fatal at any point in one’s career. But in this slow-growth economy, millennial women who assume that their hard work in college will automatically translate to a good job might be permanently derailing their career prospects.

Career planning, networking and negotiation skills used to wait until you actually had a job. Not anymore. Heads up, girls: The time to cultivate critical career management skills is before  you graduate.

Is the Lattice Aspirin for Work-Life Headaches?

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Work-life balance: it conjures up the image of two polar opposites perched on opposite ends of a teeter-totter. One little breeze could upend the teeter, sending that load sliding onto the other end of the totter.

It gives me a tension headache just thinking about it. Fortunately, greater minds than mine started thinking about it earlier. Lori Long, associate professor of business administration at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, OH, researches “work-life harmony” instead.
‘Harmony’ conjures up the image of complementary strains making the whole sound better. Any one note in isolation might sound wrong..but together, the composition works.

I interviewed Lori Long for The Career Lattice, which is due out in June 2012 by McGraw Business. She has been tracking lattices even before they sprang on the scene as a solution to work-life conflict endured by consultants.

Like flexwork, the work-life version of lattices quickly was quickly marginalized as a sop to working parents, especially working mothers. And, like flexwork, lattices presented primarily in the context of work-life balance have become ‘defined down’ as a reluctant concession to What Women Must Do To Get Through Parenting Small Children.

The silver lining of the Great Recession is that it has cleared the way for repositioning career lattices as a powerful and sustainable mode of career advancement….for everyone. After all, it’s a lot easier to stay on a lattice than it is to climb off a lattice or a ladder – and then try to get back on.

Why Career Reinvention is a Dead End

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Two magazines on my coffee table insist on coaching me to career reinvention — even on the weekend.

The latest issue of Fortune tells its always-ambitious readers how to pull off the ultimate career makeover.

MORE,  geared for women of my generation (that’d be those 40 and up, and I’m not telling you how hard I have to squint see that threshold) loves to showcase ‘career reinventions’ that involve lawyers monetizing inner peace as yoga instructors and exhausted hedge fund manager channeling Gaia through organic farming.  Money, MORE likes to posit, shouldn’t get in the way of a good reinvention.

The overarching theme: you have to abandon who you were to become who you need to be to stay solvent — and to have a prayer of saving enough for retirement. Take the case of former trial lawyer and mystery novelist Paul Levine. His minor celebrity wasn’t sufficient to tide him over from print to Kindle. Now he’s coaching would-be authors in how to navigate the choppy waters of getting their books published electronically and sold through the likes of Amazon — the precise transition that he barely survived. “I didn’t have a grand plan,” Levine told Fortune. “I was fueled by fear and desperation.”

What a waste of energy, talent, and experience.

Reinvention is a false hope. As Levine’s own career illustrates, there’s no point in reinventing yourself from one dead end career to another.

Reinvention sounds great –  fresh start and all that. But it’s a reaction, not a plan.

What is a plan is the model of the career lattice — continual, incremental change. Always adding skills that complement those you already use every day; cycling into assignments that give you new experiences related to those you already handle every day; finding new uses for skills you’ve mastered.

Reinvention is reactive: it demands that a new opportunity exist before you make a wholesale jump from your old, dying career to a new career that may or may not have greater potential. Latticing positions you to prepare today for careers of tomorrow that aren’t quite invented yet. But through latticing, you can move into those careers as soon as they emerge.

Go ERG!

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In a recent webinar  on latticing I presented for Canadian Women In Communications, a participant asked how to detect good lateral opportunities within her company.   Her question is a common one;  opportunities can be opaque to rank-and-file workers, according to the most recent Accenture Skills Gap study.  While bosses presumably have a bird’s eye view of short and longer-term lateral assignments,  it’s frustrating to hear about them only after they are filled.

Here’s the silver bullet: the Employee Resource Group, or ERG.  “Affinity groups” took root about 15 years ago, mainly as a way for women and minorities to find each other in large organizations.  Smart companies realized that ERG’s were built-in focus groups. Smart employees realized that the horizontal nature of such groups meant that they had a great chance of meeting higher-ups with whom they already had something in common, as recently explained in the Wall St. Journal.

As I outline in The Career Lattice, ERG’s are a rich lode for self-promotion, especially if you need to cultivate skills that are outside your official job description.  Here’s how to aim the silver bullet that is an ERG:  look for new connections in adjacent functions or departments.  These are the folks with whom you will naturally intersect on a project at some point.  Use the ERG to get to know them before your work responsibilities collide – so you can be each other’s friends in lateral places.