Being ahead of the career curve is essential to ensure you're protected in the long and short term. Rhymer Rigby explains how to embrace change, rather than fear it
Rhymer Rigby shares his advice on how to ensure you are ready for whatever the future has in store for your career. Photograph: Joe Pepler / Rex Features
Future proofing your career and being ahead of the curve are two sides of the same coin. If you're doing one correctly, you should also be doing the other. But they're not quite the same thing.
Future-proofing your career means ensuring you are as employable in the future as you are now. You need to stand back and think about your job strategically, rather than just letting it happen to you. Look at the bigger picture: what's happening in your sector; where's the growth; which jobs are vulnerable; how do you measure up?
Think about what you know
As the world speeds up, your technical skills will have an ever shorter lifespan and you need to learn constantly. Don't just confine yourself to your field, either. Read up on fields adjacent to yours, the idea being that if your role disappears, you have other options. You don't want to be the workplace equivalent of an animal that can live only in one species of tree. Rewrite your CV every year; if you can't think of something new to put on it, you need to think about where you're going.
Look at your sector and organisation
You should be working in an organisation that's facing the future head on rather than one whose best years are behind it. The same is true of your sector. You want an industry which is driving change, rather than one that is being pummelled by it.
Work on your relationships
People often view building working relationships as a luxury when times are tough. But being liked and trusted can be more of a differentiator than being competent. Keep in touch with your network and ensure you're visible and easy to find. A network that extends beyond your workplace and includes clients, headhunters and competitors is a good insurance policy if things go bad.
Aim to be agile and adaptable
Rather than having the mindset of someone who is happy to serve out their time, be psychologically ready to move and the kind of person who lands on their feet; a realistic idea of your abilities and what they're worth will help. Focus on the positives be optimistic; when companies look at making redundancies, those who have an upbeat, can-do attitude are very rarely first in line.
If future proofing your career is dealing with bigger picture and long term, staying ahead of the curve is more immediate. It's the kind of thing you can work on when you have 15 minutes to spare.
Broadly speaking there are two aspects to being ahead of the curve. One is informational. At its most basic, this is simply keeping up with the news that affects your industry. But those who truly want to be ahead will also keep abreast of areas that are either general or tangentially affect their industry. Being up to speed on general current affairs and areas beyond your immediate role is a good thing in itself, but is also likely to give you greater insights and vision.
The internet has made this far easier to do this. Look up TED talks that interest you, set up Google alerts for yourself and customers and follow influential people on Twitter. You do need to be selective, though.
The personal side involves identifying who and what can help you move forward in your career and working on these relationships; an example might be knowing what is important to not just your boss, but also your boss's boss. Don't forget office gossip either: it is often a better guide to what will be happening in three months time than the official channels.
Of course, there's no point in being ahead of the curve, if you're the only one who knows it. Demonstrate what you know, for example by emailing your boss interesting articles you've come cross across. Make yourself the go-to person in the office for your area and speak up in meetings. Put yourself forward, rather than hanging back. And spend some time around the watercooler immersing yourself in the organisation's less formal sources of news.
Although all this might seem a lot, the trick is to make many of these actions habitual – and this is really where staying ahead of the curve segues seamlessly into future-proofing. On one hand, you read The Economist every week on the train and on the other, you do a gap-analysis on your career every six months. It's about covering yourself in both the long and the short term and ensuring you're the kind of person who looks forward to change, rather than fearing it.
Rhymer Rigby is the author of a new book, The Careerist
Being visible to headhunters is a great way of ensuring you don't miss out on the best career opportunities. Here are three top tips on how to ensure you're firmly on their radar
Even when you’re not looking for a job, it's important to be contactable. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
The mechanics of headhunting are more firmly based in the prosaic than the clandestine. More often than not, a successful headhunt project will be founded upon the use of internet search engines, network recommendations and candidate databases.
Because of this, ambitious professionals can take a number of practical steps to ensure that they are firmly on the radar of headhunters and don't miss the best career opportunities as they come on to the market.
Here are three top tips on how to be headhunted:
Be visibly good at your job
Companies don't hire headhunters to find them also-rans; they want a shortlist of the very best talent available. Thhe first step to being headhunted is being good at your job; but just as importantly is that you need to be seen to being doing a good job too.
Headhunters will often ask reliable industry sources for recommendations of who's good, who's a rising star and who's being talked about, so hiding your light under a bushel is a no-no.
Build a credible reputation in your sector, find some industry awards you can win and get someone to nominate you. Always ensure you push yourself forward when it comes to profile in the company and industry journals; shy bairns get nowt, as they say in the north.
Be connected
The old maxim, "it's not what you know but who you know" needs updating. In today's market "it's what you know and who you know", or rather who you tweet, like, poke or follow as social media plays a massive role in how headhunters operate.
Sites such as Linkedin is a boon for our researchers as they can mine the data according to industry, qualifications, seniority, company names etc and create useful lists of potential targets extremely quickly depending upon the client brief. But researchers will also use less formal sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and FourSquare to locate candidates with specific skills and knowledge, or discussing certain topics.
It's also important that you combine this online networking with more traditional networking activity such as attending conferences, industry forums and working groups. Headhunters will often buy attendance lists or search meeting minutes to see who has been to specific meetings or events and cross reference this with other data to build target lists.
Be contactable
It's all well and good that you're the best in the business and everyone knows it, but if the headhunter can't get to you then you run the risk of being passed over for a more contactable candidate.
Even when you're not looking for a job, take time out to have a regular coffee or two with the best headhunters in the sector. This helps you place yourself on their radar for future opportunities, find out what's happening in the market (ie specific skills or qualifications seen as must-haves) and swap contact details.
Having an online profile is also a useful way to make yourself contactable. Use the social networks mentioned above and perhaps start a blog to give headhunters a way of seeing who you are, what you do and how they can contact you.
Also, if you have a secretary or PA that screens your calls and emails (what the industry call a gatekeeper), make sure you brief them on the types of approaches you are willing to accept. For example, if the email or call is professional, relevant and specific in what it requires as an action (e.g. email reply or scheduled telephone call) you may want to take note. Also explain the approaches you are not willing to consider, ie rude, aggressive, sly, irrelevant, vague or spammy.
In conclusion, when the headhunters call and the approach feels right, take time out to respond positively and professionally. Note what the headhunter is hoping to discuss and schedule a time to properly assess the opportunity being offered. Sometimes the approach will go no further as one or both parties will conclude this isn't going to be the right fit, but at least a connection has been made and can be of use in the future. Of course, it may well also transpire that the approach is the right one, at the right time and an unlooked for opportunity presents itself and leads to a new chapter in your career.
Robert Wright is a recruitment consultant for NRG Executive. You can follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter
Get yourself a boost up the greasy pole with these 10 career-enhancing tips
1 Ask questions...
Even if you’re just an intern and it’s your first day in the studio, ask a lot of questions. If you can demonstrate a good, positive attitude while doing so, then you’ll be showing interest in the work and an eagerness to learn. Just be careful not to annoy people with your curiosity.
2 ...And keep asking
Whether you’re a bright-eyed junior or a more experienced designer who is already established in the studio, questioning and wanting to learn makes a good impression at any level. Although make sure that you listen well, as at some point there will need to be evidence of you actually having learnt something.
3 Don’t be a job snob
You may feel that your talents are wasted at the bottom of the studio pecking order, but be careful to avoid giving people the idea that you’re above working on certain tasks. Your managers need to see that you are willing to work on anything – how else are you going to learn?
4 Try and see the bigger picture
As a junior designer, demonstrate an ability to think beyond your particular part of the process and understand a project as a whole. If your bosses think that you’re ready to handle different parts of a project, they’ll be happy to give you some extra responsibility.
5 You’re the presentation
Creative directors need to know that the designers they take to client presentations can be relied upon to explain ideas effectively. Making improvements to how you talk about your own creative work within the studio is the first step to demonstrating that you’re capable of communicating at this level.
6 Expand your skills
To advance within a studio, you’ll need to develop a range of new skills, including budgeting, collaboration and management. In a larger studio, management skills are important if you want to move up, whilst a smaller studio calls for a broader range of capabilities. In either case, you should always show an interest in learning these skills with each new project.
7 Let others excel
To get better at managing other people you have to accept – and relish – the fact that they will do things differently to you. Instead of asking someone else to do a task then redoing it yourself because it’s not good enough, you have to be able to get them to think about the task in a different way, to make mistakes and to learn from them.
8 Invite feedback
Use appraisal sessions with your manager as a chance to find out which areas you need to develop in and what extra skills you’ll need in order to be given more responsibility. If you can identify the areas where you’re lacking and can gain those extra skills under your own initiative, that’s even better.
9 Ask your boss
Be clear to your manager about your aims for promotion, as it’s his or her job to tell you how you can develop and to give you the opportunity to show what you can do. Similarly, if you feel that colleagues are being promoted past you, ask your boss what the reason might be.
10 Don’t be afraid to be ambitious
Don’t be worried that showing ambition will cause bad feeling with the rest of your team: a bit of competition is a healthy thing. You can be ambitious without upsetting people as long as you treat them with respect, and if people are getting upset, it might not be you that’s the cause of the problem.
Running a startup is like a rollercoaster, both fun and terrifying. Ryan Carson of Treehouse shows you how to get your startup on track
This article first appeared in issue 224 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.
So you want to launch a startup company? First you need a good idea. Where do entrepreneurs get their inspiration from? Well, most great ideas are born out of pain: you’ve got a problem and so look for a way to fix it.
Once you’ve got your idea, stop and ask yourself this: do I really care about solving this problem? Am I willing to spend the next five to 10 years helping people who have this problem?
Bear in mind that it takes a long time to build, launch and run a successful company. It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, with thousands of hours of boring and frustrating work. Yes, there are some tremendously exciting moments as well but they’re short and infrequent. If you’re tackling a problem that you don’t understand or don’t truly care about, then stop right now. You’ll save yourself years of pointless labour and piles of cash.
However, if you are excited about solving a problem and have intimate knowledge of the area, then you’re on to something exciting. If you’re successful you can have a positive effect on the world while making a healthy living along the way.
Programs such as Mockingbird allow you to mock up a simple version of your site and create your minimum viable product (MVP)
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Testing your idea
So you’ve got a burning passion to fix a problem and you’re ready to quit your nine to five. The next step is to test your idea with potential customers:
Mock-up your homepage and the most important product page. You don’t need to be a designer to do this.
Ask strangers in your target market to have a look at the home and product pages, and ask them two questions: a) What is it? b) Would they pay for it? If so, how much?
If the majority of people you ask understand what the product is, and say they’d pay for it, then you’re on to a winner.
A great way to find strangers to test your idea is through Twitter. Ask for folks who fit your target market and have 10 minutes to spare to give their opinion on your startup idea. If you don’t have enough followers to do this, you might have to spend a little cash on a service such as usertesting.com.
If you go down this route, you can pick your rough target demographic and give them the two tasks mentioned earlier. Once you’ve got some evidence that you’re on to a winning idea, it’s time to move on to the minimum viable product (MVP).
Services such as usertesting.com give you access to your rough target demographic
MVP
Now that you’ve got a solid idea, it’s time to build your MVP. This is a simple version of your product that solves the most basic needs. All the bells and whistles have been cut and it’s the absolute minimum you can offer your potential customers in order to get them to part with their cash.
It shouldn’t really be an application at all, more a hacked-together app that appears to be functional. It doesn’t have an ecommerce backend, a CMS, or even dynamic content. It could literally be flat HTML with hard-wired content.
Groupon did a great job getting its MVP live. The company may be valued in the billions now, but it started with a simple WordPress installation and a PayPal button.
So how did they do it? They asked the pizza place downstairs if they’d be willing to do a buy-1- get-1-free deal to generate more business. After the pizzeria agreed, the Groupon team installed WordPress and published a ‘Buy 1 Pizza, Get 1 Free’ post with a PayPal button. They emailed the folks in their building about the deal and quickly sold 20 coupons. That is a perfect example of an MVP.
The goal of your MVP is to test whether people will part with their hard-earned cash for your idea. If you get any traction, then you’re on to a winner.
Now that you’ve got your MVP deployed and real customers paying you some cash, it’s time to start building your team.
Groupon’s MVP was an excellent example of how to get started: a simple WordPress post with a 2-for-1 pizza offer and a PayPal button
Who should you hire?
At a minimum, you’ll need a designer and a developer; ideally you’re one (or both) of those people. If you’re not, then you’ll need to go out and find them. You have the choice of bringing the other person on as a co-founder or employee.
Employees will expect to be paid £30,000- £50,000 depending on ability; co-founders will expect to be paid less until you break even, but then they’ll expect to get 30-50 per cent of the company. The primary benefit of a co-founder is that you have someone to share the load and take the journey with you. The obvious downsides are the dilution in equity and the potential relational problems that can break up your company. If you choose a co-founder, it’s just as serious as dating. Make sure you want to work with this person, for better or worse, for the next five to 10 years.
Burning up the cash
Once you’ve decided how big your team is going to be, you need to calculate what your monthly costs will be, or your ‘burn rate’. Here are the costs you need to consider:
Salaries (the biggest cost)
Bookkeeping
Rent
Marketing
Internet
Hosting
Benefits
Recruiting talent
Once you’ve nailed down your monthly costs, it’s time to start recruiting. The best possible source here is trusted referrals: ask your friends and contacts if they know of anyone who’s looking for work that has the right skill set.
The other route is to place ads on sites that your potential hires might frequent. You’ll have to live with your choices, so be picky and take your time.
Pricing your product
The next thing you need to decide is the initial pricing of your product. Freemium is all the rage these days: offering a free product and encouraging people to upgrade to a paying account.
However, I would highly recommend charging for your product from day one. This forces you to deliver a product that has value for your customers, and makes customers commit to you and invest emotionally in the product. If they’re not paying for your product, it’s easy to walk away.
The primary goal is to experiment with prices and see what works. You can always launch with one price and then change it later. You will need to keep your current customers on their pricing structure, but you can sign up all your new customers at another price, to test conversion rates and overall profitability.
Funding: bootstrapped and proud?
There are three primary funding options available to you: bootstrap, debt and equity.
Before we discuss those, you need to create a cashflow spreadsheet so you know how much money you need to launch your startup.
Start by estimating how many months it will take you to reach break-even. This is the point where your company is bringing in the same amount of money that you are spending each month.
At this point, however, we are not talking about turning a profit. There are plenty of legal accounting tricks you can use to make your company profitable, but there is only one way to measure if you’re break-even: when cash coming in is the same as your expenditure.
I’d recommend that you have at least six to 12 months’ operating expenses in the bank before you start. This will give you enough time to create your MVP (one month) and then properly test the market and gain traction.
It’s hard to guess how many months it will take to reach break-even because there are two factors, only one of which you can control:
How long it takes to build the product.
How quickly customers will sign up.
Initially, you should focus on the first point, while having a solid plan for how you plan to create demand to drive paid sign-ups.
Treehouse used funds from a previous venture to fund the company’s startup
Bootstrap
Bootstrapping is the practice of funding your startup yourself. A lot of people do this by saving the cash from their day job or using their life savings.
The benefits of bootstrapping are that you don’t have to give away any of the company’s equity or spend time pitching your idea to the bank.
The obvious downside is that, if your startup doesn’t work out, you lose your own personal cash and are left without a savings cushion. We bootstrapped Treehouse with profit from our events company.
Debt
If you don’t bootstrap, then the second funding option is raising debt. There are two primary ways to do this: with a bank loan or by borrowing from friends and family.
With either of these options, you’ll need to prepare a presentation that explains your idea, why you think it will work and how much money you’ll need to get cash flow to break-even.
If you’ve launched an MVP and have some traction, your bank will be slightly more accommodating, but the brutal truth is that it’s very hard to get a bank loan in the current economic climate. If you’re in the UK, your best bet is the Enterprise Finance Guarantee.
One major disadvantage of debt is that you’ll have to factor chunky monthly loan repayments in to your cashflow as well as signing a personal guarantee for the bank, which will put you (and any other directors) on the hook personally if the company can’t repay the loan.
Equity
Raising equity finance means selling a portion of your company’s shares in return for cash. The primary sources of equity financing are angel investors and venture capitalists.
Benefits of equity financing:
No loan to repay
Investors can be a valuable source of help and advice
Drawbacks of equity financing:
You have to give away part of the company.
Time consuming to sort out (and may not happen at all).
It introduces another level of complexity into the business.
There are a lot of pitfalls to avoid that could be catastrophic to your business. Make sure that you understand all of the term sheet before you enter into any financing deals.
Key metrics
Arm yourself with knowledge before you look at the possible financing options for your startup
There are several vital numbers that you need to measure when running a software as a service (SAAS) company. To make process easier, you should build a simple dashboard that displays all these numbers so you can keep an eye on them.
Knowing these numbers will allow you to measure the health of your startup. The key metrics are lifetime value, cost per acquisition, churn, conversion rate and happiness index.
Lifetime value (LTV): LTV is calculated like this: the monthly revenue per month per customer multiplied by the average number of months customers use your service. This gives you a basic idea of how much value a customer will give you over the time they stay with you. For example, if you charge £25 per month for your service and the average length of time a customer stays with you is 10 months, then your LTV would be £250.
Cost per acquisition: Cost per acquisition (CPA) is simple to calculate: it’s the amount of money that you spend when acquiring a new customer. For example, if you pay £0.10 per click on Google AdWords and it takes you 100 clicks in order to get one customer, your CPA would be £10.
Churn: Churn is the percentage of customers who cancel each month. For example, if you have 100 customers and 10 cancel in a month, then you have a 10 per cent churn.
Once you know your churn rate, you can calculate the average number of months a customers stays with you (their ‘lifetime’). Simply take the number of customers and divide it by your churn rate. In this example that would be 100/10, which equals 10, so your average customer stays with you for 10 months.
Conversion rate: Conversion rate is calculated like this: the number of people who sign up to your service divided by the unique number of visitors to your site, multiplied by 100. For example, if you have 10,000 unique visitors to your site this month, and 75 sign up as customers, you have a conversion rate of 0.75 per cent.
We’d advise using Google Analytics to measure conversions and unique visitors. Measuring conversions is pretty technical and is beyond the scope of this article, but a bit of Googling will give you everything you need to know.
Happiness index: Understanding your happiness index will help you understand why people cancel or leave your service, which in turn will help you decrease your churn. As you can imagine, churn is the most destructive force on a startup so it’s important to keep it as low as possible.
Each startup will have different metrics that will be used to calculate their happiness index. We calculate this at Treehouse like so: the number of videos watched this month multiplied by the number of badges unlocked this month, multiplied by the number of times the site has been visited.
We used our happiness index to help decrease the churn at Treehouse like this: we calculate the happiness index of all customers who are 90 per cent of the way through the average lifetime (in the example given above, that would be customers who are in month nine out of 10 months). If the number is below a certain value then we know that customer is likely to cancel, so we will send them a special email asking if they’re happy with the service and if there’s anything we can do to help.
The key to reducing churn is to be proactive: try to figure out why people cancel and then do something to fix it before they leave.
Launching a startup means you’re creating a business, not a side project. It takes an enormous amount of hard work, focus and commitment. But the rewards can be enormous too, and we’re lucky enough to live in an era when there’s absolutely nothing to stop us. So what are you waiting for?
Social media and the always-on devices sitting in your pocket make self-destruction so much simpler these days – and on an infinitely larger scale, explains Gary Marshall
This article first appeared in issue 233 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.
Chances are, at some point today or tomorrow you’ll think of something terrible. It might happen when you’re standing on a subway platform, waiting for a train, and suddenly a little voice in your head is telling you to jump. It might pop up in the office midway through a meeting, with your clients or colleagues unaware you’re imagining stabbing them in the eyes with a Sharpie.
You might be in the supermarket, seized by the notion of putting something extremely unexpected in the bagging area. Or it might happen at home, during dinner, when the sudden urge to say something unspeakable to your partner puts you right off your spuds.
You’re not alone. Edgar Allan Poe named it ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, the thought that “chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror.” It’s perfectly normal, and it seems we’ve all got it. According to psychology professor Dan Wegner, “knowing the worst that could happen is essential for control.” If we didn’t know what could go wrong, we wouldn’t know to avoid it – so our subconscious minds come up with worst-case scenarios and our conscious minds ensure we don’t let them occur.
Our conscious minds, then, are essentially watchmen, keeping an eye on us to make sure that we don’t do anything too perilously silly. Unfortunately, sometimes they let their guard down – and when they do, the imp escapes. The reasons are legion. For some it’s because they’ve had too much to drink, for others because they’ve had a few disco biscuits, for many it’s because they’re stressed, or sick, or sad. But the result is the same: what Wegner calls “errors of thought, speech and action” that can make us “think, say or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.”
Blurring the lines
Thankfully for most of us, such “ironic processes” lead to minor indiscretions, not major meltdowns, but thanks to the computers in our pockets, their effects can be amplified. In the wrong or chemically altered frame of mind, a post, tweet, update or upload button can be a big red self-destruct one.
The problem, I think, is that two kinds of line have blurred. Our constantly connected smartphones and other digital devices have smudged the line between work time and free time, and social networks have merged professional and personal. Time zones aside, there’s little difference between my social media feeds during working hours and in the evenings: it’s the same mix of personal and professional contacts, posting the same mix of personal and professional content.
The mix of friends, family, colleagues and clients can be great fun, but it also means that if the imp gets out, it can cause carnage: where the fall-out from inappropriate or inebriated behaviour would previously be limited to a single circle – for example, if you’d said something appalling or insensitive to your friends in the pub – it can now spread across your network to offend colleagues and clients too. An imp with access to the internet can be a very dangerous imp indeed.
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