Free Money Finance

Second-Act Career: Work for a Nonprofit Organization

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Second-Act Careers: 50+ Ways to Profit from Your Passions During Semi-Retirement by Nancy Collamer, MS, copyright © 2013. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

This book is a great resource for those looking to earn a second income, potentially in a new field, during retirement or early semi-retirement. Today's post is about how to make money by working for a non-profit, something I will consider when I get to semi-retirement.

Having just insisted that you don’t need to work for a nonprofit organization in order to make a difference, I present this option first because it is the one most people think of when they consider doing good works. The nonprofit world is vast and diverse; it includes charities, advocacy groups, foundations, religious institutions, arts groups, universities, hospitals, associations, and unions. According to Independent Sector, a leadership network for the nonprofit and philanthropic communities, nonprofits and foundations play a major role in our economy; they employ 9 percent of the American workforce and account for 5 percent of our gross domestic product.

Whether you want to work for a museum, a charity, or an advocacy group, it is likely you will find the experience of working at a nonprofit somewhat different from your experience in the for-profit sector. On the positive side, nonprofits are generally regarded as nice places to work: kindness, passion, and purpose are more highly valued than in profit-driven companies, work schedules tend be more flexible, and the joy of working for a mission-driven organization is a welcome change for people 
accustomed to putting profits before people. That said, working at a nonprofit is not always an ideal situation. Most organizations still have their share of office politics (people are people, after all), and the realities of working with a limited budget, a volunteer staff, and a dependency on erratic funding sources can prove problematic and stressful.

Consequently, if you think you want to work for a nonprofit, take the time to consider your options before applying for work. Carefully assess your skills, experience, and interests, and then begin to explore ways you can best use your skills in organizations that appeal to you. It can be helpful to first volunteer or serve on a nonprofit board as a way to become familiar with an organization and its culture before committing to a more permanent employment relationship.

To help you gain a better understanding of what your transition into the nonprofit world might involve, I interviewed Barbara Salop, age fifty-eight, a career IBM executive who recently made her own transition into the nonprofit world.

From IBM Executive to Nonprofit Consultant

“People think there aren’t many good business people in the nonprofit world, but there are wonderful people—they just have a whole lot less to work with than people in the corporate world.” — Barbara Salop, nonprofit consultant

Barbara Salop, a former client of mine from Riverside, Connecticut, has long been a strong supporter of organizations that benefit people with developmental disabilities. But because she was a full-time working mother of two, the number of hours Barbara was able to devote to volunteer activities was restricted by the demands of work and family. So in 2010, when she was able to retire with full benefits from IBM, Barbara decided to take her executive expertise and apply it to the nonprofit sector. Recognizing that she needed to get some serious nonprofit experience in order to strengthen her credentials and her familiarity with the nonprofit world, Barbara spent eighteen months working as a pro bono consultant for several local nonprofits. She then applied for and was accepted into the Hartford Encore Fellows program, a workforce development program that helps seasoned professionals transition into the nonprofit sector. That program gave her an opportunity to immerse herself in the nonprofit world through classroom training, job shadowing, and a two-month internship experience. It also gave her a chance to get to know people actively working in the sector, as well as build a peer group of other executives who were also actively transitioning into the nonprofit sector. At the time I interviewed Barbara, she was starting her first paid consulting assignment with an organization she had originally worked for as a volunteer. I asked Barbara for her impressions of the nonprofit arena:

What are the most striking differences between life at IBM and the nonprofit world?

B.S: There are lots of similarities, but also plenty of differences. In corporate, it is all about making money, but in nonprofits, the focus is on the mission. Nonprofits sometimes make decisions that seem nonbusiness-like to the rest of us, but they represent tradeoffs that reflect their determination to put the mission before the money. It takes great discipline to make those tough choices, especially when funding is scarce. I have the deepest admiration for that level of commitment to a cause.

Did you notice a difference in the types of people who work for profit versus nonprofit?

B.S: I was very impressed by how happy most of the nonprofit executives seem to be. I don’t mean to make it sound like it is always perfect in a Pollyanna-like way, but there was a real sense of mission, purpose, and fulfillment among the people I met. Even when they were having a tough day, it was clear that they have an underlying sense of happiness about what they are doing. Although I had many good days at IBM, and was proud of what my team accomplished, I rarely experienced that same sense of deep fulfillment from my corporate work.

How did the nonprofits where you volunteered react to you being a “corporate” person?

B.S: That was interesting. On one hand, there seemed to be some trepidation about a corporate person walking into a nonprofit. Their perception is that corporate types are only about the numbers, and we make decisions based on measurements and profits alone. On the other hand, some people are almost awestruck by people from corporate and [practically] treat us like we are from a different planet. I found it to be so important to take the time to listen to what they had to say, learn from them, and respect their expertise.

There are so many ways to volunteer. How did you decide which organizations to approach about volunteering?

B.S: I knew that I wanted to focus on working with organizations that support people with developmental disabilities, so I targeted those types of opportunities. In terms of what you choose to do for them, there are essentially two ways to help. One is to do the easy, hands-on things like stuffing envelopes or serving at a soup kitchen. It is needed work, and they will appreciate your time. But if you are an experienced businessperson, I think you owe it to the nonprofit to find a way to leverage your professional expertise. They are so grateful when you can help them do the things they can’t do or don’t have the time to do, like project management, facilitation, or strategic planning.

After being a long-term volunteer, how did you broach the subject of getting paid for your work?

B.S: I hung around long enough for them to really value my business expertise! When you can get them to see your value proposition and understand the business case for your fees, it is a much easier sell. Even once I was done with projects, I checked in with my volunteer sites to follow up with them about their implementation plans. Over time they realized that it would pay to keep me around. I think it also is helpful to offer your services as an independent contractor instead of expecting the organization to hire you. In this economy, if they have the option of bringing in a variable worker, it makes sense for them to do that. It may cost them a bit more in the short term, but it gives them greater long-term flexibility.

How did you know what to charge?

B.S: Quite honestly, it was difficult to know what to charge. I asked my friends in nonprofits who had previously hired consultants for their suggestions. I was willing to start with a low rate because I knew I still had a lot to learn and I needed to get some more experience in the sector. I suspect that as I continue to contribute and add value, there will be opportunities for me to raise my rates.

What suggestions do you have regarding the nonprofit job search?

B.S: Like any job search, networking is critically important, and I spent a lot of time on that. Sometimes I felt like I was just going for endless cups of coffee, but it paid off in the end. In terms of resources, LinkedIn is an invaluable tool that I used to identify board members and volunteers at organizations that appealed to me.

Do you have any additional thoughts for people considering making a switch to nonprofits?

B.S: Take your time in determining the types of organizations you want to work for. You are going to get paid a lot less than you earned in corporate, so find a sector that really speaks to you. This transition can take longer than you anticipate, but have faith that it will be worth the effort.

Here are five excellent resources to help you make the transition into the nonprofit sector:

1. Encore.org (www.encore.org). If you are over forty and want to get involved in helping to make the world a better place, you owe it to yourself to get familiar with both Civic Ventures and Encore.org. 
Civic Ventures funds a number of initiatives, fellowships, and programs designed to help boomers solve serious social problems (including the fellowship program Barbara attended). The Encore.org 
website, published by Civic Ventures, is the single most comprehensive resource for boomers interested in careers that combine personal meaning, social impact, and continued income. Their outstanding guide to encore careers can be downloaded for free at www.encore.org/files/PDFs/guide/encore_guide.pdf. Marc Freedman, 
the CEO and founder of Civic Ventures, wrote the book Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life (PublicAffairs, 2008)—it is a compelling read for anyone interested in this subject.

2. Bridgestar (www.bridgestar.org). Bridgestar.org is a site for seasoned executives who want to transition from the for-profit sector into nonprofits. They have an extensive career center and a job board that lists both staff jobs and nonprofit board positions.

3. Idealist (www.idealist.org). Idealist.org is a must-visit for anyone interested in exploring the world of nonprofits. The site features career advice, a job board, and information about events, fellowships, internships, volunteer opportunities, and educational programs in the nonprofit world.

4. The Foundation Center (www.foundationcenter.org). Whether you want to establish a foundation, learn how to write a grant, or secure funds for research, this is the right site for you. The Foundation Center is the leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide, with a site that lists training programs, job openings, and other useful resources.

5. National Council of Nonprofit Associations (www.councilof
nonprofits.org). The National Council of Nonprofit Associations is the network of state and regional nonprofit associations serving more than twenty thousand member organizations. Although this site is geared toward nonprofit administrators, their resources will help educate you about key issues relevant to smaller nonprofit organizations.

Finally, if you want to stay up-to-date on the latest news in the world of philanthropy, a great resource is the Chronicle of Philanthropy (philanthropy.com). It is both in print and online, and it is like the New York Times of the philanthropy world.

How to Make an Interviewer Like You

We have previously discussed the fact that being likeable can do as much to advance your career as being a good performer can. But it's also true that being likeable BEFORE you are hired is important as well -- so the interviewer decides to make you an offer.

The January 7 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek lists six ways to befriend an interviewer as follows (along with my brief summary and thoughts):

• Stalk your interviewer online -- Look at their LinkedIn profile and use that info as a conversation starter or what the magazine calls "lighthearted filler." Don't get too creepy (and act like a true stalker) with information. General rule: "Stay away from Facebook revelations but anything found on LinkedIn is fair game."


• Ace the basic questions - Simple: prepare for the interview questions in advance.


• Be mindful of your surroundings - Free feel to use the simple cues in the office to make a connection with the interviewer. Trophies, pictures, awards, degrees, etc. can all establish a common connection that can make you more likeable.


• Crack a smile - Look them in the eye, smile, and open your body language. All of these help to establish both trust and likeability.


• Don't make it all about you - Let them talk! And when they do, try to find "me too" moments (areas where you and they agree, have the same experiences, etc.)


• Hold the high fives - Use a firm, professional handshake. This is not the time to be cute with a fist bump or something similar. And certainly don't be rude and refuse to shake hands/greet them.

A few extra thoughts on these from me:

• I would agree about the "creep" factor in searching for them online, so I would be very careful. Something like "I noticed your kids play soccer every Thursday night at the Fulton Street stadium" seems a bit over the line to me unless that's something you found on a professional site like LinkedIn (and if you did, I would question the interviewer's judgment on what he posts.) I would much rather use online research just for knowledge/background, but would not use it for conversation starters. I would use in-office items like photos and stuff on desks to do that.


• I once asked a guy about a tennis plaque he had on his wall and we ended up talking about tennis for 10 minutes or so (I played in high school.) By the time I left his office an hour later, I was his new best buddy. :)


• Some of my best interviews have been the ones where I talked only half the time. You know it's a successful interview when they stop asking you questions and start selling you on why the company is such a great one to work for.


• To that end, I agree 100% that you should say only what needs to be said to seal the deal. Anything more and you could only hurt yourself. That's another reason there's value in practicing and rehearsing interview questions/answers -- you are sure you cover the main topics and use appropriate examples, but you don't cover a bit more.

That's it for my take. Anyone have anything else to add? 

Second-Act Career: Pet Care Services

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Second-Act Careers: 50+ Ways to Profit from Your Passions During Semi-Retirement by Nancy Collamer, MS, copyright © 2013. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

This book is a great resource for those looking to earn a second income, potentially in a new field, during retirement or early semi-retirement. Today's post is about how to make money with pet care services, a topic I've written about several times. For more information, see Dog Walking, Pet Sitting, and the Money You Can Make, Earn Extra Money as a Pet Sitter, and Make Six-Figures Walking and Watching Pets.

People love their pets, sometimes as much as or more than they love their own children! According to the National Pet Owners Survey sponsored by the American Pet Products Association, Americans spent over $50 billion on their beloved pets in 2011. Although much of that money was spent on food and healthcare, there is still plenty being spent on pet pampering and pet care services. If you’re a die-hard pet lover, here are some lifestyle-friendly career choices to explore:

• Doggie daycare. At a time when so many people are working long hours, the demand for doggie daycare services is on the rise. As a daycare provider, you will be responsible for feeding, walking, and playing with the dogs while their owners are busy at work. Whether you choose to run a daycare service out of your home, through a franchise, or at a leased business location, you’ll likely find plenty of customers eager to use your services, although you should be aware that the demand for your services is likely to be greatest during the summer months and peak vacation times, so this could put a crimp in your personal travel plans. For more information about careers in doggie daycare, consult Pet Sitters International at www.petsit.com.


• Dog walking. Dog walking is an easy business to start, a great excuse to get exercise, and a surprisingly lucrative enterprise for people who work in major cities (some New York City–based dog walkers earn in excess of six figures annually, although they are admittedly a rarity). Start-up costs are minimal, and it can be relatively easy to build up a steady stream of clients after you establish yourself as a caring, trustworthy, and reliable provider. Believe it or not, you can even get certified in this line of work by attending the Dog Walking Academy, a four-day intensive training workshop designed to equip you to start your own dog walking business. You can learn more about the Academy and other dog-related business opportunities at www.dogtec.org.


• Pet photography. Pets are an integral part of the family, so it’s no surprise that an increasing number of people are willing to pay for professional portraits of their four-legged friends. And it’s not just dogs and cats who are posing for portraits. Equine photography is a growing subset of the pet photography business, with opportunities to find business at horse shows, race tracks, and equestrian centers. To learn more about business opportunities as a photographer, check out Virtual Photography Studio at virtualphotographystudio.com.


• Pet paraphernalia. From Halloween outfits to gourmet biscuits to eco-friendly bath products, pet owners are eager to indulge their furry friends with special toys and treats. You can sell your goodies at craft shows and local pet stores or on the Internet. If you don’t want to create your own products, consider becoming an independent sales rep for one of the direct sales/home party companies that specialize in pet-related products (check the Direct Selling Association at www.dsa.org for listings).


• Grooming services. Nothing spruces up a pet’s appearance quite like a good shower and shave—so to speak. Pet grooming services can be operated in stores, private homes, salons, and in mobile pet grooming vans. If you are leery about creating a pet grooming business of your own, investigate the options for buying into a pet grooming franchise (for listings, check www.entrepreneur.com).

To learn more about careers and business opportunities in the pet arena, consult these websites:

• The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals offers a wealth of information at www.aspca.org/about-us/faq/animal-careers.aspx.


• DogTec.org: This site has a number of excellent articles and training resources for people interested in starting a pet business.

As you can see, the options for turning your passion for animals into profits are many and varied. And if this niche intrigues you, I can think of no better way to demonstrate how you can turn your love of pets into a full-fledged business than to introduce you to Sharon Sakson. I spoke with Sharon right before Thanksgiving 2011 and was delighted to discover that among her many different income streams, she helps coproduce the televised broadcast of the Kennel Club of Philadelphia dog show on Thanksgiving Day, the most viewed dog show of the year. As you’ll soon learn, Sharon has turned her lifelong passion for dogs into a robust and multifaceted income portfolio.

Portrait of a Dog Lover Extraordinaire

“I absolutely love my work. It is the most wonderful thing in the world.” —Sharon Sakson

Many of us love our dogs. But Sharon Sakson doesn’t just love dogs; she has built an impressive career around that passion. As was the case for many of the second-act stories featured in this book, it took a while before Sharon was able to craft a career around her passion. After graduating from college, she settled into the broadcast news world with jobs that included a field production assignment with ABC Nightly News anchor Peter Jennings. Life in the news world was hectic, but even with her packed schedule, Sharon always found a way to spend time with her dogs. In addition to keeping dogs as pets, she worked as a breeder, participated in dog shows, and studied to become an accredited American Kennel Club (AKC) dog show judge.

All went well until the economic downturn of 2008 when Sharon lost her job. At the time, she was just fifty-six years old, and at a point when she was neither financially nor emotionally ready to retire. Fortunately it didn’t take Sharon long to reconfigure her dog-related hobbies into work that generated a full-time income—a multipronged career that takes advantage of her passion in a variety of interesting ways. Although the transition was a difficult one, Sharon says she now finds herself busier and happier then ever.

Today she travels the world as an AKC international dog show judge and has visited numerous countries including Canada, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Finland, and Taiwan. She also works as a breeder of champion whippets and Brussels griffons, and although the income she earns as a breeder is relatively low, it helps to offset the considerable costs of caring for and showing her dogs in competitions. While at those competitions, she is able to network with other judges and handlers, and just as with any other profession, the more people she meets, the more opportunities for judging come her way.

In addition to her breeding and judging activities, Sharon writes about dogs. She is a contributing columnist to Dog News magazine and the author of several books about dogs, including: Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs (Spiegel & Grau, 2009), Paws to Protect: Dogs Saving Lives and Restoring Hope (Alyson Publications, 2008) and Paws & Reflect: The Special Bond Between Man and Dog (Alyson Publications, 2008). Her books feature heartwarming stories about dogs as healers, rescuers, and faithful companions. But unlike so many other books in this genre, hers are more than just feel-good stories; Sharon includes scientific studies and research to substantiate her claims about the human-like qualities of the featured dogs. Sharon also earns income from speaking engagements and offering private consulting services to help dog owners with their dog-related behavioral issues and questions.

In between juggling her many income-generating activities, Sharon always makes time to relax and enjoy her household full of dogs. At the time we spoke, she was caring for eight dogs and a litter of six puppies, a task that some would consider a full-time job all its own. (Not surprisingly, our interview was interrupted several times by the sound of dogs barking in the background!) She is also involved with Xolos for Chronic Pain Relief, a nonprofit organization that matches Xolo puppies, a unique therapeutic dog breed, with patients suffering from chronic pain conditions. And finally, as if that was not enough to keep her busy, Sharon continues to do television production work on a freelance basis whenever time allows.

Sharon’s Top Three Tips to Profit from Your Pet Passions

1. Familiarize yourself with the American Kennel Club’s offerings. The AKC website www.akc.org, is an outstanding resource for breeders and dog lovers.

2. Be prepared to work hard (and long) to train as an AKC judge. Although dog judging may seem simple to the untrained eye, judges have to meet the exceedingly rigorous standards set by the American Kennel Club. These include a minimum of twelve years’ involvement in the diverse field of dog competitions, breeding of at least five litters of champion dogs, and successful completion of a series of examinations. To learn more, consult www.akc.org.

3. Network. Networking is as important in the dog world as it is in the business world. Sharon’s diverse income streams provide her with opportunities to attend different events where she can continually make new acquaintances, and that, in turn, has helped expand her income potential.

Second-Act Career: Teacher/Trainer

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Second-Act Careers: 50+ Ways to Profit from Your Passions During Semi-Retirement by Nancy Collamer, MS, copyright © 2013. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

This book is a great resource for those looking to earn a second income, potentially in a new field, during retirement or early semi-retirement. Today's post is about how to make money teaching, an idea I've listed previously as one of the best ways to earn extra cash.

Are you a natural teacher? Do you enjoy explaining concepts, theories, and the mechanics of how to do things? Would you like to share the wealth of experiences you’ve accumulated with others and pass on your knowledge to future generations?

If the prospect of empowering people with the skills, resources, and expertise needed for success in both their personal and professional lives excites you, then you might want to consider sharing your expertise either as a classroom teacher or a “how-to” trainer who instructs via webinars, workshops, or seminars. For people who are outgoing and enjoy an audience, teaching can be a great way to earn an income. Here are some interesting options to consider:

• Adjunct professor. Adjunct-level professors are hired on a contractual, nontenured basis to teach at universities, community colleges, vocational schools, and colleges. Some institutions require that their adjuncts meet the same degree requirements as their full-time faculty (meaning you may need a doctorate degree to be hired), whereas at other schools a bachelor’s or master’s degree is sufficient. Prior teaching experience is always advantageous, but the combination of an advanced degree plus work experience is often sufficient to make you an attractive teaching candidate, especially if you want to teach at a community college or smaller school. Adjuncts don’t earn a lot (typically anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand per course), but adding the word “professor” to your resume or bio can be a great way to enhance your reputation, reach, and marketability.


• Online instructor. The world of online education is rapidly gaining traction, credibility, and prestige. Although brick-and-mortar universities tend to use their in-house faculty for online assignments, online institutions hire outside applicants who offer strong subject-related work experience. A master’s degree can make you more marketable, but schools will consider applicants who hold a bachelor’s degree along with relevant work experience. To find an online teaching position, apply directly to the online institution, or search on one of the many online job boards—for example, Simplyhired.com, Indeed.com, or the jobs listed on the Chronicle of Higher Education site (chronicle.com), using keywords such as “online teacher” or “virtual instructor.”


• Corporate trainer. Few companies still maintain in-house training departments, and as a result, many have increased their use of outside vendors to train their employees on topics ranging from sales to business etiquette to leadership. To learn more about these opportunities, and to find vendors who might be interested in contracting with you as a freelance trainer, consult the website of the American Society for Training and Development (www.astd.org).


• Adult education instructor. Continuing education programs are always in need of new programs, workshops, and classes to fill their catalogs. Although most programs will pay only a small stipend for your services, teaching in one of these programs is an easy and cost-effective way to market and advertise your services. In addition to teaching opportunities at local community colleges, vocational programs, or town continuing education programs, you can teach at privately run adult education programs such as the Learning Annex (www.learningannex.com) or the Gotham Writers’ Workshop (www.writingclasses.com).


• Online trainer. Thousands of entrepreneurs are generating significant income by creating their own brand of online training programs, formatted as videos, webinars, and multisession “universities.” Although many online courses focus on teaching business development and internet marketing, the possibilities for packaging your expertise into your own program to deliver a virtual learning experience are limited only by your imagination. And once you develop a course, you can sell it in multiple formats (downloadable manual, video, podcast, and so on) for as long as the information remains relevant and timely. You can learn more about this option in the next chapter.


• School owner-director. As a child, I attended a ballet school taught by one of the neighborhood moms in the attic of her home. It was a simple studio that catered to the needs of the local tutu-lovers while providing a steady income stream for my neighbor while she stayed home to raise her children. This spirit of homegrown entrepreneurship is still alive and well, in the form of home-based cooking schools, language programs for toddlers, and acting classes. Of course, before opening any school in your home, be sure to check with your town and state government for applicable zoning and licensing requirements, especially since your neighbors might protest if your business increases traffic in the neighborhood.


• One-to-one tutor. The demand for tutors is always strong, especially for people who can help children improve their grades, study habits, and SAT scores (tutors in affluent neighborhoods can command upward of $150 per hour for their services). If you’d prefer working with adults, consider offering your expertise as a computer and technology tutor. Although most tutors run their own businesses, you can opt to work for one of the big tutoring services, such as Kaplan or Kumon, if you don’t want to go it alone.


• Private teacher. Would you like to teach people on a one-to-one basis or in a small group setting? The opportunities to profit as a private instructor are limited only by your imagination—people will gladly pay for personalized instruction in any number of interest areas, including yoga, painting, video-editing, and photography.

To learn more about teaching jobs and the training field, consult:

• Chronicle of Higher Education (chronicle.com). An online resource for jobs and information related to colleges and universities.


• American Society for Training and Development (www.astd.org). The professional organization for people involved in corporate and business-related training and development. Their website is an excellent resource for people interested in all aspects of the training world.


• HigherEdJobs (www.higheredjobs.com). Lists openings in academia.

Rediscover Your Various Income Streams & Save Like Crazy!

The following is an excerpt from How to Engineer Your Layoff. If you're interested in quitting your job and profiting from it, this book is for you! Today's post gives ideas on how to save and create income so you can quit your job.

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

For most of us, our day job income is our primary income source. No wonder we are so reluctant to leave our jobs in the first place. If only we had enough side income to make up for our day job income loss, we’d be out of there faster than our manager can say, “Need you to stay the weekend to finish the project by Monday!”

You’ll be surprised to find a whole host of other income generating assets at your disposal other than your day job income. You just have spend the time to look.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is something I’m good at that I can teach someone else to do?
• What is my annual interest income from savings and CDs?
• What are my income producing assets?
• What are my spouse’s income producing assets?
• Which of my hobbies are in the highest demand?
• How are my investments positioned in the current economy i.e. aggressive, defensive, diversified?
• Is there a common problem your skills to solve?
• Do I have extra time in the day to hatch a business?
• If my day job income went to zero, what income streams are left?

I’m confident every one of you has something you are good at that can be put to commercial use. More concerning is the accumulation of passive income producing assets. In an environment of low interest rates, generating income is proving to be quite difficult.

It is vital that you have a runway of at least 6 months worth of savings, excluding your severance package before you decide to take off. Your runway will help you make rational decisions that will lead to better long-term outcomes. If you have created a perpetual runway with recurring passive income, all the better. If not, there is no time like the present to start saving aggressively.

In “Achieving Financial Freedom One Income Slice At A Time,” I highlight three of my passive income sources totaling around $6,800 a month plus up to eight other sources of other income.

It was only after I sat down and redid my budget that I realized what kind of income stream I was actually earning. For the past decade, I had no idea how much I was actually earning outside of my former day job since all of the proceeds were either automatically reinvested into the funds or saved. The power of time really makes a big difference.

Summary Of My Various Income Sources:

Passive Income Sources

• CD Interest Income
• Dividend Income
• Rental Property Income

Active Income Sources

• Tennis Instructor Income
• Online Advertising Income
• Online or Offline Consulting Income
• Trading Portfolio Income

Potential Bonus Income Sources

• Private Equity Investment Payout
• Private Real Estate Investments
• Primary House Rental
• A Working Spouse

Details Of My Various Income Sources

The first step towards financial security is to save aggressively. I’ve been saving 50%-75% of my after tax income every year for the past 13 years. I try not to be a miser by spending on things I enjoy, e.g. vacations, food, a home, and tennis. Where I did “sacrifice” was avoiding higher-end new cars (all but one were secondhand and under $20K) and exotic vacations.

I’ve predominantly invested my savings in long-term CDs that return 5% all the way down to 1.7%. Currently, my risk free return is averaging about 3.75% a year. These aren’t sexy returns by any means, but I sleep well at night and have also never lost money in this portion of my wealth for the past 13 years. A small portion of my savings goes into my trading account.

Passive Income

• CD Interest Income: ~$2,800/month. CD interest income will keep coming automatically for another 4-5 years and I don’t have to do anything except renew come expiration. It’s a sad fact that interest income has come down so drastically over the past 10 years however, nothing operates in a vacuum. Low interest rates also means low borrowing rates, and everybody who is able to refinance their mortgage should. For example, I refinanced in April 2012 for 2.625% from 3.125% for a 5/1 ARM, which helps make up for my declining interest income.


• Dividend Income: ~$1,200/month. Dividend income is mercurial at best. I have not focused on dividend income because: 1) the underlying values of dividend stocks have fluctuated so much over the past five years, and 2) I never withdraw any of the proceeds because I don’t need the income right now. Instead, I’ve focused more on capital preservation and growth. To preserve cash, companies have been cutting their dividends aggressively since 2008. Only now in 2012 are we seeing signs of companies raising their dividends, e.g., Wal-Mart and American Express. To be clear, all of my dividend income comes from active investments. None of my dividend income comes from my 401K because it can’t be touched until age 59.5.


• Rental Property Income: ~$1,500-$3,500/month after expenses. The range in income property has to do with a vacation rental, which has huge upswings during the summer and winter months, and fades during the months of May, October, and November. My city rental income is fixed every year and is very reliable given its location and the fact that there is another internet boom in San Francisco.

Active Income

• Tennis Teacher: I can teach tennis for about $40/hour. In fact, I’ve often toyed with starting my own tennis instruction website and supplement my passive income with 80 hours of teaching a month ($3,200). I’ve also fantasized about being a tennis instructor at the Four Seasons Resort in Bora Bora, but that’s just a dream right now as I establish my business. Tennis lessons at private clubs are around $80-100 an hour, so in a way, I feel like I’m doing a public service.


• Trading Portfolio: I have a $50,000 trading portfolio that I like to play around with on Etrade. Investing is in my blood and I’ve been doing it for the past 15 years when Ameritrade and Charles Schwab first went online. In the beginning, I had some major successes and epic failures. Nowadays, I’m more conservative, because I can still just as easily lose money as I can make money. Keeping up with the markets helps keep your mind present with what’s going on in the world.


• Online: Online income could potentially become one of my largest income sources now that I am no longer employed. Up until now and for the foreseeable future all income has been either donated or retained by Kansei incorporated. Given the low overhead costs, online income is by far the most efficient of all income streams. Online income can be broken down into affiliate income, banner advertisement, contextual advertisement, and product promotions.


• Consulting: In the spring of 2012, I launched Financial Samurai Consulting Services (FSOS) to help bloggers “Get On The Map.” Over the past three years, I’ve spent 30+ hours a week amassing over 5,000 hours worth of online knowledge. Financial Samurai has grown into one of the most widely read blogs in the personal finance space with ~170,000 pageviews a month and growing. I leverage my platform and help other bloggers get noticed and build their readership, authority, links, and long-term viability. Furthermore, I offer financial, career, and MBA admissions consulting.

Potential Bonus Income Sources

• Sugar Mama: One of the secrets to early retirement is having a working spouse. The secret to a happier early retirement is to therefore find a hot, rich spouse! You can do jack doo doo and tell the world how you retired early, so long as your spouse continues to come home with the bacon, pay the rent, and provide for healthcare. I’ve yet to find my sugar mama, so in the meantime, I’ll be working like a mad man!


• Private Equity: I’ve written off my one and only private equity invest to zero because so rarely do these private equity companies exit with a profit. At times, I really wish I had that $75,000 invested back! However, the company has been around for six years and survived the financial crisis. Hence, perhaps there is a chance I will not only get my money back, but also get a solid rate of return down the road. I’m not holding my breath!


• Private Real Estate: During the financial vomiting period of 2008-2009, I invested $50,000 into a distressed global real estate fund that was buying property at 15-30 cents on the dollar. The fund was a private offering made to a certain group of accredited investors. It is up about 120% in three years and spits out a reasonable 4-6% dividend yield. Once the fund is liquidated in several years, I calculate a roughly 25% internal rate of return. Looking back, of course I wish I had invested more. It’s just hard to drop dimes when things are blowing up left and right. This is a potential bonus income source I’m counting on.


• The Federal Reserve: If the economy really starts growing gangbusters again, the Fed could start raising interest rates sometime after 2013. This would cause a commensurate jump in US treasury yields, which would lead to higher savings interest, CD interest, and dividend yield payout ratios. The problem with this scenario is that the price for goods and services will have also gone up, offsetting increased interest/dividend income. Those who save more than they consume will still be net winners. In a rising economic environment you want to own real assets.


• Book Writing: Everybody should know that writing a book is not a lucrative business. After you account for your time spent writing and the money used to hire an editor, agent, and publicist to help make your book a success, you aren’t left with much! There’s a reason why you see so many writers wait tables and live with multiple roommates in dingy apartments. Even so, I plan to write a series of books because I love to write. There are so many books about how to get a job, but there are no books about how to profitably quit a job. I plan to fill these anomalies with my writing.

Adding up all forms of income, potentially leads to $25,000 a month in non day job income streams of which, $6,800 is guaranteed. With $6,800 a month, I knew I wouldn’t be starving on the streets, even in an expensive city like San Francisco.

Given my conservative nature, I only calculated my base case scenario of $6,800 when I engineered my layoff to become an entrepreneur. I didn’t want to spend money I might not have, because that is the root of all bad personal finance decisions. As a result, I constructed a budget around $6,800/month with the escape hatch of moving to a cheaper location if money started feeling tight. It feels good knowing that $25,000 a month is a possibility if everything falls into place.

I bet you can find additional income sources that you either forgot, or had no idea you could generate if you spend the time to analyze. When your back is against the wall, you will find ways to generate more income. Calculate your upper and lower income limits of additional income sources and be conservative.

More On Starting A Business

After starting an online business, I cannot fathom ever starting a traditional bricks and mortar business with commensurate high overhead costs. A top of the line dedicated server costs $250 a month whereas my favorite cupcake store has to pay $7,000 a month in rent. Talk about a huge operating cost differential!

It is very common for online businesses to have 60%+ operating profit margins and 35%+ net profit margins. According to a January 2012 study of 5,891 companies of all industries conducted by Aswath Damodaron of NYU, the average operating margin and net profit margin is 17.24% and 8.32%, respectively.

If you are going to start a business, think online business first. The potential demand is practically unlimited with the growth of internet penetration. Over 2.1 billion people are using the internet, up from just 1.3 billion six years ago. With a world population of 7 billion, all you need is 1/10th of 1% to get 7 million customers! Whenever you think about starting a business, think about scale and operating leverage.

My Personal Finance Blog

I never started Financial Samurai, my personal blog to make money. It is but an unexpected consequence of consistent writing and connecting with the community that I’m able to support my life solely from my site three years later. The main purpose of starting Financial Samurai was to keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. My immediate family lives 3,000 miles away and my friends in Asia and Europe are even farther. Sure, there is Facebook and LinkedIn to keep in touch. However, these platforms aren’t your own and have a limited ability to showcase who you are.

After leaving your job, you should spend a whole day connecting with all your professional contacts through LinkedIn and decide whether or not to include your closest relationships on Facebook. So long as you have a repository for where your contacts are held, even if you go for a year without speaking to them, you’ll always be connected online. The better way is to reach out to your business contacts once a month however, to make sure these relationships don’t go stale.

I recommend everybody start a personal blog on Blogger or Wordpress with their name as the URL e.g. johndoe.blogspot.com. Once you’ve set up your free blog, make sure to include a feature where readers can subscribe via e-mail or RSS. Then send a blast e-mail to your old contact list highlighting your blog to keep in touch. Those who care about you will sign up, and those who don’t have time will at least know that they can go to your blog to see what you’re up to. Just remember to abide by the rules in your separation agreement before you publish anything so you don’t blow yourself up.

If you are out of sight, you are out of mind. Your updates should be professional and non offensive. Make sure you are aware that anybody can read your blog, unless you adjust the settings to keep all or some of it private, so always review your posts before hitting publish. Use your blog to share your interests, personality, and your strengths. And think of it as a running resume. The easier you make it for people to reach you, the higher your chances are to make an impression.

It All Starts With Saving

In order to get money to work for you, you’ve got to accumulate money first! Thanks to a rough first job on Wall Street, I swore to always save at least 50% of my after-tax income if I ever wanted a chance to be free. I didn’t want to be somebody’s whipping boy forever!

It was painful to save such a large percentage in an expensive city like New York. However, I knew that all good things come with sacrifice. Instead of spending my year-end bonus on fancy toys or luxurious vacations, I either invested the proceeds in the stock market or in conservative Certificate of Deposits. By the time my third year of work came around, I was saving 100% of every other paycheck and 100% of my year-end bonus which sometimes accounted for up to 50% of my total income.

When you pay yourself first, you protect yourself from going overboard with your spending habits. If you always deposit 20% of your after tax income into a savings account before doing anything else, even if you spend the rest of your income, you will still have saved 20%. The key is to make reaching your savings somewhat difficult. By investing in CDs, I realized there would be an early withdrawal penalty. As a result, I have never touched my savings in 13 years.

Go Broke To Win Big Strategy

The key is to protect yourself, from yourself, and create that renewed sense of urgency to forge ahead and stay disciplined in your finances. You may laugh at the concept of protecting yourself from yourself, but everyone of us has the means of blowing ourselves up financially every single day. We are bombarded with temptations and we have collectively taken down the economy with overspending in recent years.

My advice is to open three separate bank accounts with the following labels:

1) The Go Broke Bank. The first bank account is for working capital needs, namely where your paycheck goes, and where you pay all your bills. This bank is your operationally efficient bank which has the best tools for bill pay with the most branches for accessibility. Citibank is a good example, a ubiquitous bank with good online tools, but provides ridiculously low savings rates and horrible credit card rates. Bank #1 is where you are constantly “Going Broke.” Your paycheck must be managed so that it lasts to cover all your expenses. But before you pay all you expenses, you must pay yourself first by transferring your target savings automatically to a Bank #2.

2) The Freedom Bank. The second bank is strictly for long term savings via money markets and CDs. This bank may not have as big of a footprint, but it doesn’t matter because you don’t need to access money from this bank. That’s what bank #1 is for. Due to lower overhead, Bank #2 provides better long term savings rates. Online banks such as Ally Bank, and boutique banks such as First Republic provide fantastic rates, often 500-100bps higher than the competition. Do not tempt yourself by creating a checking account. You want money to easily come in (ever notice tellers don’t require IDs when depositing?), but be very difficult to go out.

3) The Lockdown Bank. The third and final bank is for your debt, namely mortgages, personal loans, and car loans (horror!). By loading the majority of your debt with one bank, you compartmentalize your debt which may relieve you of any mental stress related to this debt. It’s easier to tackle your debt at one bank and employ the “Snowball Method.” Furthermore, from the bank’s point of view, you may get better rates given you are such a good debtor customer. You’re buying debt in bulk from Costco if you will, and in normal times, they want your business and will give you discounts. During crisis times, it’s also good to have all your debt in one place because your bank doesn’t want you to cause a default cascade and will do their best to work with you.

If the amount you’re saving doesn’t hurt a little, then you aren’t saving enough. Gradually increase your savings percentage so that you’ve got to make adjustments to your life. You’ll discover that after a while, you’ll become used to living within your more streamlined budget and will revert to your normal happiness level.

Savings Rates

If you save only 10% of your after tax income a year, you have to work roughly five years to accumulate one year of retirement savings equaling 50% of after tax income! Hence, after 25 years of savings you will only have 5 years left before your savings go to zero!

If you save 50% of your after tax income a year, you only have to work one year to accumulate a year of retirement savings. If you keep saving at this rate for 15 years, you will logically accumulate 15 years of retirement savings.

If you save 70% of your after tax income a year for 20 years, you will have at least 28 years of savings to likely last for the rest of your life!

Example. Use a simple $100,000 after tax disposable income figure, and a $50,000 yearly living expense target for retirement to work the math yourself. Save half of $100,000 = $50,000 = one year of retirement. Save only 10% of $100,000 = $10,000. You need to save $10,000 for five years to accumulate your $50,000 annual living expense!

The base case assumption is that one can live off 50% of after-tax income, whatever your income is. Some can certainly live off less, but for how long, and at what sacrifice? You can save 90% of your after tax income by eating cereal all day and live in a trailer, but who wants that lifestyle for the next nine years? You’ve got to figure out your own healthy balance between saving and spending.

If possible, I recommend everybody max out their 401K AND save 20% or more of your after-tax income after 401K contribution. It will be hard to do in the first several years of your career, but once again, nothing good comes easy.

Key Points

• Generate a list of your current and potential income sources.
• If you want to start your own business, think about scale and costs.
• Consider starting your own blog to keep in touch with old colleagues and clients.
• Pay yourself first and utilize separate bank accounts.
• If the amount you’re saving doesn’t hurt a little, then you aren’t saving enough.
• Aim to max out your 401K and save 20% or more of your after-tax income
• Create a budget based on your lower end of income estimates.

Reasons Why You Should Engineer Your Layoff

The following is an excerpt from How to Engineer Your Layoff. If you're interested in quitting your job and profiting from it, this book is for you! Today's post gives several reasons you should consider quitting your job.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

If the previous chapter scared you out of engineering your layoff, let me give you some reasons why engineering your layoff is a brilliant plan.

• You’re Financially Secure. If you’ve saved up at least six months of living expenses, have a regular stream of side income to hold you over, and a good business idea, then you’re probably ready to make the jump. Of course it doesn’t hurt if you’ve got rich parents. By saving 50-75% of my after tax income for 13 years, I was able to save 15-18 years worth of living expenses if I did nothing to change my living standard. If I sold my primary residence and moved back to Hawaii, I could probably live off my savings and investments for the rest of my life and do nothing.


• You Have A Tested Business Model. You’ve introduced your business model to the world and have shown a profit after 12 consecutive months. You’ve carefully surveyed the competition and strongly believe your business has staying power. I “tested” my business model for three years and didn’t take the leap until it started generating at least $100,000 in revenue and $75,000 in operating profits across all my income streams. I figured if I could dedicate 100% of my time on my side businesses instead of just 20% of my time, because of my day job, I could increase profits. So far, so good as I’ve introduced a consulting service and financial products such as this book.


• You’ve Got No Dependents. If your financial safety net is in order and you have no dependents, now is the best time to take some risks--before the little ones arrive. I’ve interview about a hundred parents who’ve all said either, 1) Take risks before you have kids because once they come your mindset changes completely, or 2) I wish I took more risks before parenthood. I don’t have kids at the moment, and therefore don’t have anybody depending on me to survive. I would like to have kids someday soon, but only if I know with absolute certainty that I can take care of them. With over 140 million orphans in the world today, it would be irresponsible for me not to have the time and financial means to take care of them before going forward. Don’t have kids if you can’t take care of yourself dear readers!


• You Believe You Can Always Come Back. If you are able to keep in touch with your colleagues, competitors, and clients, you should be able to go back to the industry you left within two years of departure. Every year beyond two years gets harder given managers will have a choice of selecting those with the most up-to-date skills. One of the best ways to keep in touch is through LinkedIn and Facebook. Connect with everybody you can and send them regular updates once a quarter. An even better way to keep touch is to start your own personal blog where your industry friends can subscribe. It’s now easier than ever to stay in touch, but you still have to make the effort. At age 35, I strongly believe that if I want to go back to the financial services industry at 37, I can.


• You Don’t Want To Have Any Regrets. Time whizzed by for me from ages 21 to 35, and I know that time will continue to accelerate. In a moving post by a palliative nurse who took care of the dying in their last moments, I learned that the number one regret her patients gave was the following: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” To live a life true to oneself means different things to different people. For many, a truer life doesn’t mean working harder at a job just for the paycheck. If you happen to be so fortunate as to live in a developed country such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and many countries in Europe, life is a comparative cakewalk to the lives of those in India, Somalia, or Ethiopia. In the developed world, it doesn’t take much to survive and be happy. Most of our fears are blown out of proportion. Look at my example of having 15-18 years worth of living expenses saved and a rent-free home in Hawaii, yet I still have fears. But I am gradually overcoming my fears through doing.


• The Ability To Double Dip or Triple Dip Your Income. If you engineer your layoff, you may have the ability to double dip your income by finding a job soon after your negotiated severance runs out as long as you don’t violate the terms of your gardening leave. For example, let’s say you negotiate a six month severance package. If you are focused on finding another job, there is a good chance you will be able to find one by month three, thereby double dipping your income for three months! Meanwhile, if you were able to negotiate deferred compensation, a common form of compensation for higher ranking employees to prevent them from leaving, you can triple dip your income by collecting severance, collecting a new day job income, and collecting your unemployment income! That’s right. If your separation package includes receiving your deferred income over a number of years, you are still allowed to collect unemployment benefits because 1) The deferred income is part of your severance, and 2) You are unemployed!

Harness Your Fears

Everything always seems scarier than it really is. Remember when you turned 20, 30, 40, or 50? I had a serious case of depression for a few days before my 30th birthday. I couldn’t believe I would no longer frolic in my 20s! I feared I would get gray hair, no longer be able to move as nimbly on the tennis courts, and be perceived as an old man to friends and family. When my birthday came, it wasn’t so bad at all. My mind was just playing tricks on me. In fact, I’ve lost 10 pounds and am the same weight I was in high school.

For all the reasons I stated above, I decided to take a leap of faith and go out on my own. My biggest fear was looking back and regretting not making the jump.

Regret is one of the worst feelings and learning how to harness your fears will help you avoid disappointments in life.

Here are some of my regrets and optimisms:

• “Why didn’t I ask that girl out?” – Thank goodness I didn’t ask her out or else I might never have met the love of my life.


• “Why didn’t I just study harder and get better grades and SAT scores so I could go to a better school?” - I’m proud of my alma mater and happy I didn’t pay a small fortune to attend.


• “Why didn’t I invest all my money in Google during its IPO?” – At least I invested in my career.


• “Why didn’t I start Financial Samurai in 2003 when my father first suggested the idea?” – Better late than never.


• “Why didn’t I negotiate my separation package and dedicate all my effort to my online business in my 30s?” – I’m going for it now!

There are always ways to make money. However, there won’t always be time when we’ll have the energy to execute on our dreams. I know that if things don’t work out for me as an entrepreneur, at the very worst, I can sell my house in San Francisco and move to Hawaii and live off my passive income.

There are plenty of legitimate and oftentimes lucrative reasons why you should engineer your own layoff. One of the greatest misconceptions is that working for someone is more stable. Don’t get lulled into complacency!

The biggest regrets will be the things you don’t do rather than the things you do.

Key Points

Reasons why you should engineer your layoff

• You’re financially secure.
• You have a tested business model.
• You don’t have any dependents.
• You believe you can always go back.
• You don’t want to have any regrets.
• The ability to double dip or triple dip your income.

Reasons Why You Should Not Engineer Your Own Layoff

The following is an excerpt from How to Engineer Your Layoff. If you're interested in quitting your job and profiting from it, this book is for you! Today's post gives reasons you should NOT quit your job. Tomorrow's post will tell why you should.

“If you fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail.” – Mark Spitz

Before getting too excited about jumping off the deep end, it’s always good to play devil’s advocate and study what’s in the water below. There might be a large boulder just underneath the water’s surface, ready to break your bones upon landing. Patience is a virtue under such circumstances as you wait for the tide to recede.

It took me two years (from 2010) to muster up the courage to jump off my cliff because of the following reasons:

• Didn’t Hate My Job. What other job in the world allows you to talk to bright people everyday about what’s going on in the world? Not a day went by that something interesting didn’t happen. It might be a large IPO like Facebook, or a Greece recall election, or an earthquake in a manufacturing hub in China. Something always affects something else. I still enjoyed my job when I left. I just didn’t love my job like I once did when I first started and needed to take a break. Interests always fade after a while and I was fortunate enough to stay motivated for my 13 years.


• Not Enough Viable Income. Making several thousand a month in passive/side income is nice, but it was still way less than what I was making at my day job. I needed time to aggressively build my various income streams up to at least 30% of my day job income before I could feel comfortable leaving. I used 30% as a target because for the past three years I’ve been saving 70% of my after-tax income. Replicating 30% of my day job income would allow me to at least maintain my current living standards.


• Responsibility. I felt it was my duty to work for as long and as hard as possible to maximize my savings, because goodness knows not everybody gets the chance to make six figures. To quit so soon would be to take my opportunity for granted, which is something I never want to do.


• Tremendous Energy. When I first started my career in New York City, I regularly worked 14 hour days and 80 hour weeks. Even after taking on more responsibility, during my last four years of work, I “only” worked 50 hour weeks, with perhaps 10 of those hours spent entertaining clients, e.g., tennis, golf, meals, concerts, sporting events. As a result, spending an extra 4-5 hours a day after work writing blog posts was a piece of cake. There was no need to quit my job in order to dedicate more hours to my hobby. Only as time went on did I discover I was turning down things I would have preferred doing.


• Unforeseen Expenses. There will always be unforeseen expenses that arise when least expected. My car died the other week and cost $400 to repair due to a faulty alternator. My water heater exploded last year, taking a nice $1,200 bite out of my savings. And what if I have children? College tuition now costs $15,000-$40,000 a year depending on whether one attends a public or private institution. It’s scary to forecast what tuition will be in 20 years and it’s better to have more money saved than less.

Many people have asked me whether or not they should quit their jobs. Most of the time, I tell them “no” because their plan for what to do next is so poorly laid out. When I ask them to go through their finances, they are embarrassed. When I ask them if they’ve created a budget for the decline in income, they have not. When I ask them what they plan to do next, they aren’t even sure! Don’t wake up one day and just decide to quit your job. You need a solid plan first!

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Quit Your Job

• You think being an entrepreneur is easy.
• You have no savings.
• You have no experience.
• You think getting rich is easy.
• You still live in your mom’s basement.
• You don’t want to die alone.
• You don’t understand the significance of taxes.

You Think Being An Entrepreneur Is Easy

There’s probably no harder thing to do than be a successful entrepreneur. Sure, anybody can say he is an entrepreneur, but real entrepreneurs are successful. If after three years you aren’t making at least the per capita income of your state, then you are not a real entrepreneur. You are just a hobbyist.

Being an entrepreneur means not only coming up with an idea, it means being the secretary, accountant, marketer, salesman, HR manager, and engineer. Nobody is good at everything, which means that you will surely have weaknesses in some or many parts of your business. If you don’t have the discipline to focus on your work for hours at a time, then you will not succeed. If you do not have the patience to see things through from start to finish, you will not succeed. If you are used to only working 40 hours a week at your day job and think that’s hard, then I suggest you keep on working at your day job.

There are too many fantasies floating around about the benefits of being your own boss. They are all true, but only for those who have made it! The good thing about being your own boss is you will care less about all the hours you work, because you are working solely for yourself. Just don’t kid yourself into thinking entrepreneurship is easy, because it is not. For three consecutive days, I worked from 7:30 am to 1 am nonstop without food or water because I had so much to do.

The lack of sustenance did not phase me until I tried to get up and couldn’t. I was exhausted and needed a break.

You Have No Savings

If you have no savings, you better have some financial backing from family and friends if you are planning to leave your day job. If you have neither, then you are shit out of luck and need to start saving like a mad person before taking the leap of faith.

I suggest savings of at least one year of annual operating expenses before you make your move. A year buffer should give you enough time to figure out whether your idea will be a success or a complete failure. You might point to the fabulous success stories of people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who started Microsoft and Facebook respectively without any savings, but you’d be wrong. Mark Zuckerberg’s father was a dentist, and his mother was a psychiatrist. Bill Gates’ father, William H. Gates, Senior was a prominent lawyer, while Bill’s mother served on the board of First Interstate BancSystem. Yes, Mark and Bill both came from wealthy families who could support their sons for the rest of their lives!

Sure, there are many examples of people who somehow strike it rich without any safety net, but guess what? There are even more who fail and end up with nothing. You can say you don’t care about your safety net, but if you fail, you will have nothing. If rich people fail, they get to go home to filet mignon and caviar and try again!

You Have No Experience

One of the most perplexing things I see time and time again are inexperienced people telling others what to do. It’s as if every one of these quacks stayed at The Holiday Inn Express one evening and woke up the next day as gurus!

Can you imagine getting advice on how to buy property from someone who has been a renter all his life? Or getting financial advice on how to be a millionaire from someone who has a negative net worth? This kind of crap happens all the time online, and I implore you not to join the ranks of fakers.

There’s a growing saying that in order to become an expert you need 10,000 hours of practice. If you practice 40 hours a week, you can become an expert in five years. As such, try and put in at least several years of time in the workforce before going out on your own. During this time, you’ll build your savings, learn how to play nice with others, and most of all, mature as a person. Nobody is going to give you any respect as a 25-year-old CEO with no experience unless you are incredibly intelligent and have a deep Rolodex thanks to mommy and daddy.

Spending five years in the work force, ideally with the same employer, also makes you a prime candidate for engineering your own layoff.

The things you think you know, but don’t actually know are dangerous. If you jump too soon, you’ll end up leading a life of delusion, wondering why things don’t work the way they are supposed to. With five or more years of hands-on work experience, you’ll gain perspective and begin to see things differently. And you’ll also realize how little you really knew when you graduated from college.

You Think Getting Rich Is Easy

I know a woman who kept telling me, “I’m going to build a $100 million dollar company.” She was 24 years old and just started a business connecting virtual assistants with busy people who needed to get things done on the cheap. When I asked her how she planned to get to the $100 million valuation mark, she shrugged and said with great determination, “I will find a way.” As a financial guy, I cringed, but I enjoyed her company and didn’t want to spoil her mood.

In order to sell her company for $100 million dollars, she’d need at least $10 million a year in net profits and another company willing to pay a 10X multiple. During this time frame, she would also need to survive amongst well-funded competitors and vicious economic down cycles. Could she make it? Absolutely. But chances are, she will fall far short of her goal. Good looks alone aren’t enough to create an empire.

We’ve kept in touch for years and I’m proud to say that she has built her business into a profitable company. She told me recently she’s “no longer seeking to sell for $100 million.” Instead, she’s looking to create as much value as possible, presumably, because she’s run the numbers, and realized $100 million is not as easy as it once seemed.

It took me six years to amass my first million dollars. I worked 70-80 hour weeks and saved 50-75% of my after tax income while taking some big risks in stocks and the real estate market. I could have very easily lost several hundred thousand dollars if my timing was off. In fact, I did lose several hundred thousand dollars in the 2008-2010 downturn! But by this time, I had accumulated another million dollars in net worth to weather the onslaught.

Getting rich is not easy. It takes congruent thinking, discipline, and persistence. I believe everybody will become rich if they have the right personal finance fundamentals and are given enough time. It’s delusional people who think getting rich is easy who are most unlikely to ever get rich themselves.

You Still Live In Your Mom’s Basement

It’s become cliché to start a company in your garage or mom’s basement. Unfortunately, these Hewlett Packard success stories are few and far between. If you still live at home with mom and dad and are over the age of 21, you need to shape up and get the hell out!

Your parents didn’t raise you for 21 years to be a deadbeat. At 21, you’re old enough to drive, drink, smoke, copulate, and run for Congress. Give your parents a break and get out of their hair, unless they really, really want you to stay with them.

Sure, you can save money for a down payment by staying at home for a couple of years after college. However, just make sure the two years don’t become five years, or goodness forbid 10 years. If you can’t make it on your own, how on earth can you run a successful business on your own?

At some point, you’ve got to take a leap of faith and do your own laundry. Cooking your mom’s meatloaf isn’t that hard. Your meatloaf might taste like urine soaked rubber tires, but at least you’ve learned the recipe and are eating your own poison.

Besides, if you want a love life, you’re never going to get any if you have to tell the girl you are wooing that you’ve got to sneak her in through the window. If you are a girl who lives at home with her parents, your challenge is less daunting because guys don’t really care, unless you have an overprotective father who has you on 24 hour surveillance.

You Don’t Want To Die Alone

There’s nothing worse than being alone. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have someone to share your wealth with, you might as well be poor. In the financial services industry, I see many women who are at the top of their game. They are high-powered executives making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, a good majority of them have nobody to go home to. I’m not sure whether it’s because they’ve dedicated so much time to their careers, or men are just wussies for not wanting to be with high powered women. Whichever the case may be, deep down, I suspect these women would give up everything if they had someone to share their lives with.

If you quit your job with no financial safety net and an untested model, you will likely end up alone. After all, if there’s a choice between a good looking, funny, rich guy and a good looking, funny, but poor guy, the rich guy will always win. It’s all about survival of the species!

It is likely that during your time of occupational transition, you will feel nervous and insecure. Being nervous and insecure is not conducive to finding a soulmate. With your back against the wall, you might lock yourself in a room and go into overdrive, working on your business or finding a new job. Again, your laserlike focus will also cut into your chances of meeting someone special.

To overcome this potential relationship downfall, you must plan and plan some more. Better yet, you might consider finding your mate and develop a strong relationship before you leave your job because you will need the moral support.

You Don’t Understand Taxes

If you go the entrepreneur route, you will start to see exactly how much you are paying in taxes thanks to the quarterly taxation payment system. Unlike paying taxes with your steady W2 job, an entrepreneur must cut four separate estimated tax checks to the government a year. Because each tax bill is for three months worth of estimated taxes, the bill is large. The act of sending such a large payment to Big Brother becomes excruciatingly painful.

You know the sickening feeling you get when you do your taxes once a year as a W2 employee? Just multiply that feeling by four times. Count on taxes taking up around 30% of your revenue. If you need $5,000 a month to survive, you must make around $7,150 in revenue! Whatever your monthly net income requirement is, multiply it by 1.5X to get your operating income hurdle.

Not all is bad when running a business. You get to deduct a long list of things that go into making your business work. These are your operating expenses, such as your computer, monthly phone bill, and so forth. Each operating expense lowers your operating income, which therefore lowers your tax bill. Just be careful not to go overboard and use your business as your personal party vehicle.

A list of small business taxes:

• Franchise Tax
• Self-Employment Tax
• Payroll Tax
• Property Tax
• Sales Tax
• Business Income Tax
• Excise Tax
• Gross Receipts Tax

Looking at the list of taxes makes you wonder whether the government wants you to succeed at all. Any person who is in favor of tax increases should try and start his/her own business. Only then, when he is cutting checks for so many different taxes will he realize how much red tape and pain there is in running a company and paying taxes.

Take the time to learn basic accounting definitions and statements. The US SEC even has a beginner’s guide to financial statements. It’s important to compare your day job gross income to your own business’s operating income. Operating income is income after cost of goods sold, and operating expenses are everything that goes into running your business except for taxes. Do not make the mistake of comparing your day job’s gross income to your business’s revenue. Unless you have 100% net profit margins, you will be in for the financial shock of your life.

Recap Key Points

You shouldn’t give up your day job if:

• You think being an entrepreneur is easy.
• You have no savings.
• You have no experience.
• You have no plans for what to do next.
• You think getting rich is easy.
• You live in your mom’s basement.
• You are still under a mountain of debt.
• You don’t want to die alone.
• You underestimate the cost of taxes and don’t understand accounting.

Did You Get a Bonus Last Year?

Now that 2012 is completely over and businesses/organizations all across the country have had the chance to calculate annual bonuses, I wanted to ask you all:

Did you get a bonus from work for your efforts last year? And if so, what did you do with it?

I received a bonus and did two things with it:

1. We gave away a portion of it to a couple of our favorite charities.

2. Saved/invested the rest of it. Specifically I put it into my real estate LLC's account to cover some expenses as well as prepare for the next purchase.

How about you? Did you happen to get a bonus (or do you expect to get one) and what did (will) you do with it?

Want Better Pay? Hit the Gym

Here's a piece from CNN Money that says working out can pay off big-time. Their thoughts:

Exercising three or more times a week leads to 6% higher pay for men, on average, and 10% for women, Cleveland State researcher Vasilios Kosteas reported recently.

The hike is due to exercise-induced productivity boosts, he says, and is separate from the well-established link between obesity and lower earnings.

6% is a nice chunk of change over the course of a career. Let's take two guys, each starting their careers at age 22 earning $30,000. One works out and thus his salary is 6% higher than the other's. They each average annual raises of 3%. At age 65, the guy who works out has earned $160k more, plus likely has all the added benefits of better health and lower costs (medical bills, life insurance, etc.) that those who work out get. Pretty sweet, huh?

Of course there's more money in simply growing your career a "meager" 1% a year, but why not do both -- grow your career PLUS workout for an extra 6%? It all adds up, right?

Case Studies Of People Who Have Successfully Quit

The following is an excerpt from How to Engineer Your Layoff. If you're interested in quitting your job and profiting from it, this book is for you! Today's post details how the author successfully walked two different people through quitting their jobs and leaving with decent severence packages.

“An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.” – Emil Zatopek

Over the past several years, I have coached roughly a dozen people through their layoff process. The 2009 downturn was brutal and caused a wave of disatisfaction across various industries, particularly those which are highly cyclical.

In the following chapter, I share with you five examples (two in this excerpt) of people who have successfully quit their jobs with a severance package. Names have been changed for privacy purposes.

What’s important to note is not so much the dollar amount of each example’s severance package, but how many months of living expenses are covered in each severance package. Our living expenses vary because we all are in different stages of our lives and live in different areas of the world. US$15,000 a year is plenty for someone living in Beijing, but below poverty level for someone living in Des Moines. Meanwhile, $60,000 a year is good living for a single person practically anywhere, but could be considered lower middle class for a family looking to raise a family in New York City or San Francisco!

Lana The Bartender / Artist

I first met Lana in 2007 at a lounge in San Francisco. She had just graduated from San Diego State with a major in English literature. When she overheard me talking to my friend about a book project, she couldn’t help but interject and ask what I was writing about.

Never to ignore a beautiful lady, I told Lana that I was writing a book about the incestuous start-up community in Silicon Valley. The book would be filled with juicy stories of arrogant, newly rich brats who threw their money around like confetti. Included in the book would of course be a steamy love triangle between the rich protagonist, a bartender, and a poor, but gorgeous immigrant woman.

Lana was sufficiently intrigued to put down her tray and share her story with us! You see, even though she was the waitress for our section of the lounge, she hadn’t given us the time of day up until then, even though we arrived 10 minutes prior. Lana told us that she decided to move to San Francisco’s Mission District to be an artist. She was just temporarily waiting tables so that she could pay the rent and afford to take art classes part-time during the day.

Lana recommended I get a copy of the classic writing book by Strunk & White, Elements Of Style, and came back with two frosty Sierra Nevadas on the house.

We gave her a $10 dollar tip, exchanged contact information and wished her good luck.

We traded a couple e-mails over the years, encouraging each other to keep up our respective arts. With daytime classes and a night job, Lana struggled for time and energy. Meanwhile, with my 12-14 hour job in finance, all I wanted to do was grab a beer after work, watch some TV, and sleep!

In the summer of 2011, I ran into Lana again in The Mission district. Instead of waiting tables, she was now the bar manager at one of the most popular locales in the neigborhood. I asked her how her artwork was going and she said she was actually making decent money selling her paintings! She admitted to only making $1,000 a month after three years, but she absolutely loved it. She just wished she had more time to paint because she knew that if she could just dedicate five more hours a day to her work, she was sure she’d be happier and could earn at least $2,000 a month in income, which would be more than enough for her.

By this time, I had already coached four of my friends from various occupations how to engineer their layoffs. Lana’s case was slightly trickier because even though she was the bar manager, she was still only making about $20 dollars an hour and didn’t have that big of a financial safety net. I didn’t want to help her engineer her layoff only for her to run out of money.

We talked in depth about the following points:

• How serious is she about leaving her job? She confided in me that she was tired of standing all day, being nice to customers while hardly making anything, and wanted out. She was getting depressed that after four years of college, she was still working at a bar four years later.


• How big is her financial safety net? Lana told me she’d saved up about $10,000 after putting away roughly $2,500 a year for four years. She didn’t have a 401K or an IRA, but she did have a liquid money market account. Lana basically paid her savings account $200 a month first before spending money on anything else.


• How much income will she be giving up? For the first two years out of college, Lana made about $25,000 a year waiting tables. For the last two years, she started making about $40,000 a year, but her hours were just killing her to the point where she was sleeping until noon, going to lunch, and then running straight to work.


• What is her monthly operating nut? At the time, Lana lived very humbly in a three-bedroom house with two other roommates. Her portion of the rent was $800 a month, which left her with roughly $1,600 a month in disposable income after her $200 a month in savings. The $1,600 would be used for food, clothing, travel, nightlife, and art supplies. In fact, Lana was spending as much on art supplies as she was on food!


• How many months of living expenses can she cover with no income? With $10,000 saved up, Lana can live for roughly four months at her current rate of expenditure. If she cut down on her art supplies, travel, and nightlife, her savings could last her six months. Six months is the minimum amount of savings I recommend one should have before taking a leap of faith if one cannot negotiate severance.

Time to get to work.

With the above information in hand, I suggested Lana go through her budget, pretend she suddenly lost her income and had to cut down on all expenses except for the essentials. If after two weeks she was still OK, then she should consider making her move. With two years of experience at the existing bar and a good rapport with Larry the bar owner, who loves her, severance of 1-3 months was not out of the question.

According to patrons of Lana’s bar, she was by far the most popular bartender/bar manager around. She was friendly, attentive, and very attractive. Some of the guys there said that the only reason they came to the bar was because of Lana! For the past two years, she generated over 10X her $20 hourly wage for Larry, and he didn’t want to see her go. At the same time, he knew that Lana’s art was getting more and more popular among the local community and didn’t have the heart to hold her back.

Larry had always wanted to be a musician, but couldn’t make ends meet, so he took over his father’s bar when he died ten years ago. Every now and again, Larry would bust out his guitar and play for the crowd. Oh how stiff his fingers are at 58 years old.

Lana spoke to Larry about her dreams to be a full-time artist ever since she was in grade school. Her job at the bar was never meant to be full-time, but she loved working with him and the community so much that she didn’t want to leave. When she got to $1,000 a month in art income for five straight months, she felt comfortable about finally making the move. Lana never mentioned to the owner how much she was making from her art. Instead, she mentioned to Larry how she was so excited to see people slowly take an interest in her work. Lana knew that Larry had always wanted to be a musician and knew he would be able to relate.

Lana promised to always come back to spend time as a patron and hang out with the customers she got to know so well. Furthermore, as a favor to Larry, she said she’d be willing to paint an abstract scene of the bar for free. Maybe Larry would even hang up her artwork proudly above the top shelf.

Larry was so touched by Lana’s generosity that he told her to follow her dreams, even though he hated to see her go. With his encouragement, he provided her with a 360-hour severance that totaled roughly $3,800 as a parting gift. It was the least Larry could do for having such a wonderful employee.

With $13,800 saved up, Lana gave it a go as a full-time artist. Last I heard, she moved into a one-bedroom apartment with a new boyfriend and is happily enjoying painting all day long. Every other week, Lana still stops by the bar where she used to work to say hello to her old colleagues and clients. They all love her and are reminded of her every time they see her painting above the entryway.

Lana’s Severance Package

• Severance (Three weeks per year, 22 weeks): $3,800
• Cobra: None
• Unused Vacation (5): $540
• Gardening Leave: None
• Total Severance Value: $4,340

Lyndon The Management Consultant

The luckiest people on earth are those who don't make a lot of money. They've got very little downside and can really pursue their childhood dreams. Imagine that upon graduating from college, you landed a plum corporate job that paid just enough to keep you motivated, but not enough to let you enjoy your freedom. The longer you worked, the more you realized there was really no escape, because there was simply too much at stake. This is the problem that plagued my friend, Lyndon.

Lyndon had a mid-life crisis. At 33, he’d worked for 11 straight years at one of the foremost management consultant firms in the world, and made roughly $300,000 as an "Engagement Manager.” Obama says he's rich, but Lyndon wasn’t buying it because his 1,200 square foot, two-bedroom apartment in New York City cost $4,000/month. If he bought the condo, he'd have to shell out over $1,000,000, even in today's market. To add further insult, $300,000 is really only $180,000 or so after federal (33%), state (7%), and city (4%) taxes!

All Lyndon ever thought about is being a National Geographic nature photographer. Every single vacation was planned around some remote destination that takes two days to reach, and therefore another two days to return. Yet as a consultant, Lyndon was at the mercy of his clients. Instead of traveling to Mt. Kilimanjaro, he was on a plane to Minneapolis in the middle of winter.

In several years, Lyndon knew he’d probably continue to make more money and perhaps make millions as a partner in his 40's. But what was the point if he was not completely happy? The 65-hour workweeks and minutiae were grinding his soul raw. He wanted out. Yet, how does a 33 year old, who's on a path to seven figures remuneration, rationally decide to quit his job and try and to make it as a nature photographer?

I know, an ant is playing the world's smallest violin somewhere underground. While thousands are unemployed, Lyndon is on a path to financial freedom, works at one of the world’s most prestigious companies, yet he's unhappy! He doesn't feel the plight of the less fortunate whom in his eyes are just in transition. To Lyndon, everything is logical. When markets crumble, people get dislocated, but eventually get relocated when the markets rebound. Oh, how Lyndon wishes for dislocation.

Unfortunately, nobody will give Lyndon much sympathy, except his fellow well-todo friends. Ironically, it is the sympathy that Lyndon seeks, which makes him only hang out with people of his same socio-economic class. He understands most of America won't understand him, so he shuns most people.

I first met Lyndon in NYC when I was getting my face ripped off working from 5:30am to 8pm everyday downtown. We met at an apartment party and instantly connected because of our love of tennis. Every now and again we’d catch up for a drink in SF or NYC and pontificate on what a screwed up world we live in.

Both of us had been thinking about engineering our own layoffs ever since we first started working! New York City is an absolute grind, but it makes everybody who survives the place that much stronger. I only lasted from 1999-2001 before I had to get the hell out. I had debilitating allergies, a backbreaking work schedule, and gained almost 20 pounds in my two, long years there. I literally felt I would die young if I stayed much longer.

Once I got out of New York City, I was able to survive another 11 years in the financial world before exiting. I kept in touch with Lyndon after leaving NY and I remember when we specifically discussed in 2009 the idea of starting our own blogs. A few weeks later I decided what the hell I’ll give it a go, and he decided, “What the hell? You have time to write a blog?!” Three years later, thanks to my online endeavors, I no longer need to work. But, the good thing for Lyndon is that in these three years, he’s made and saved plenty of income and has me to give him advice!

The last thing his firm wants is more bad press since they’ve been dragged through the mud since 2011 due to an insider trading scandal. The company’s once pristine reputation is now tarnished like dog diarrhea on a gum filled New York sidewalk.

As an Associate Principal (one level below Partner), with 11 years tenure, Lyndon was respected by his peers. He wasn’t on the fast track, but Lyndon made enough and didn’t complain when the world around him seemed to be imploding. I told Lyndon that anybody who had at least 10 years of work experience was in the “protected class” of employees. Firms like his employer must treat long tenured performers gingerly when letting them go if they want new blood to join their organization.

With a combination of 11 years of service and the negative scepter of the insider trading case, Lyndon went to work implementing his separation package strategy. Over the years, Lyndon had developed a good relationship with his manager over squash, the only affordable indoor sport New Yorkers can play!

Lyndon talked to his manager about his desire to do something new. “It’s not about the money or my career progression,” Lyndon said. He told his manager about his love for photography and his desire to travel the world, despite traveling constantly already for his job. With business still lagging due to tightened corporate client budgets, Lyndon made his case that his departure would save the firm money, and perhaps save the job of another colleague who had a family (Lyndon has no children).

Lyndon emphasized how he loved working for his boss and for the company, otherwise, he would not have lasted 11 years. And part of that was the love he received from his bosses who had taken care of him for all this time. Lyndon mentioned he would always speak highly of the firm, regardless of case’s verdict. Eventually, he also planned to work for one of their largest clients. Commenting on the lawsuit was a strategic mention to remind his superiors that the last thing the firm needed was more negative press. Working as an eventual client sealed the deal.

After about a month of discussion, Lyndon successfully negotiated his separation package and invited me to Rio to eat Brazilian Churrascaria, hike the favelas, and lay out on Ipanema beach.

Lyndon’s Severance Package

• WARN Act (Three months salary): $56,250
• Severance (Two weeks per year, 22 weeks): $95,192
• Cobra: $2,400, six months at $400 a month.
• Unused Vacation (28 days): $17,260
• Gardening Leave: Three months
• Total Severance Value: $171,102 (20 months of expenses in NYC, 50 months of expenses anywhere in South America)

Know and Exceed Expectations

FMF readers know that I'm a big believer in knowing the expectations associated with your job and working to over-deliver against those expectations. Here are a few posts where I have discussed this topic:

• You Must Over-Perform in Your Job If You Want to Maximize Your Pay


• How to Demonstrate that You Deserve a Raise


• 30 Steps to Great Finances: Steps 3 and 4


• How to Get a Raise in the Worst of Times

This issue was recently covered in a US News piece on how to get a great performance review and I wanted to share it with all of you. Their thoughts:

Understand expectations and exceed them. Always make a point to ask clarifying questions to be sure you understand the task at hand—and then over-deliver. "Know when the work product is expected so that you can properly prioritize your tasks," says Brockdorf. "If your boss asks you to complete your monthly report by the close of business on the first Friday of the month, send it on Thursday." When you provide something unexpected, you will leave a positive and lasting impression.

I love it!

A few comments on their suggestions:

• I don't think this applies to projects only, but to your job in general. Sit down with your boss and understand all aspects of what the job entails.


• Try to get a quantifiable objective for each task (which is harder to debate when you achieve it). For example, "grow sales 8%" is better than "grow sales."


• Get it in writing. Otherwise, it could turn into your word versus his. Or maybe there is a legitimate miscommunication. Writing it down will clear this up. Or perhaps your boss leaves the company. If you write down the expectations, you still have a documented roadmap of what's expected (though you'll need to review it with your new boss to be sure it's still legitimate).


• Once you have the overall job detailed, then you can update the expectations as new projects are added -- as US News suggests.


• BTW, I don't think getting something done a day early is really "over-delivering". It's just being early. You need to over-deliver on the important stuff (like sales growth, cost savings, turnover reduction, on-time delivery, and so on.) Reports and things of that nature need to be delivered on time -- and consistently on time -- but I don't think you'll move up the ladder by getting basic administrative tasks completed early (unless, of course, that's all you do -- then it's a major part of your job).

The piece also mentions another one of my favorite career-growth tips -- networking. Unfortunately it leaves out a BIG factor in growing your career -- being likeable. Ooops!

Build Your Skills Score by Volunteering

The following is an excerpt, reprinted with permission, from 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College, Revised: The Skills You Need to Succeed by Bill Coplin, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. This piece talks about the value of volunteering as a college student and how it can help a graduate stand out (and thus get the job he wants.)

It might seem harsh to say, but the truth is that nonprofit organizations usually have no choice but to give you experiences before you are really ready for them. For example, a local community center might like to have a monthly newsletter to distribute but does not have the funds to hire a professional. If you have some basic skills in Microsoft Publisher or have taken an introductory public relations course but have no real experience in producing a newsletter, the center might be willing to give you a shot. From someone with no experience, you now have an opportunity to be a newsletter designer, an editor, a writer, and a publisher. If you do a reasonably good job, you could have a product to put in a portfolio when you seek a paying job with a private organization.

One of my students did a study for a local nonprofit on how members of the organization liked the organization’s newsletter. He conducted a phone survey and wrote up the results for this organization. The study was helpful to the organization but even more helpful to the student. He brought a copy of his study to a job interview with a national association in the construction business. One of the major jobs they wanted him to do was conduct yearly surveys on their publications. My student said, “Well, I just happen to have a study I did for an organization in Syracuse on its newsletter, and here it is.” He was hired on the spot and never looked back.

Summer and semester internships are easier to get at nonprofits than businesses for the same reasons that they provide viable sites during the semester—namely, lack of skilled staff. Businesses are likely to have paid internships, except in areas of high student interest like TV stations and law firms. Many nonprofits may not be able to offer a salary or a lump sum stipend, but some do.

Volunteering will teach you the entire Skill Set of chapter 1, Taking Responsibility. You will meet the typical joiners who overcommit to too many volunteer activities and forget to go to meetings. You will see the devastating effect of poorly managed meetings that start late and end later. Many of these volunteer organizations struggle to keep track of money in an accurately and timely way. You will also see how good intentions lead to perks enjoyed by the leaders of the group at the expense of the rank-and-file members or clients. All of these negative lessons can be learned just about anywhere, but they are most abundant in organizations dependent upon volunteers.

But not all nonprofits are so poorly managed, especially those that have a national affiliation. Teach for America, for example, is one of the best-run nonprofits. It has created a recruitment machine that competes with the biggest companies in the country.1 TFA trains college graduates so they perform as well if not better in the classroom as students with master’s degrees in education. The leaders of many nonprofits use modern business practices and at the same time maintain a deep commitment to the public good. These organizations are likely to have well-developed programs to manage volunteers. You can learn a lot no matter what type of organization you work for—nonprofit, government, or business.

Value Volunteer Activities -- Employers Do

Volunteering and working in nonprofit internships can give you critical experience that will enable you to build your Skills Score. For that reason alone, it is valuable to prospective employers. You can grow from someone who has little experience with Excel or Access to one with substantial experience. It is one thing to say to an employer, “I took a course where I learned Excel” and quite another to say “I worked for the Salvation Army creating Excel spreadsheets to generate graphs for a grant proposal.”

Doing good without a credit or monetary payoff is viewed by many employers as valuable for another reason. Such work can mean that you are the type of person who can work for something bigger than yourself. The step from good citizen in the volunteer sector to being a team player within the business world is small.

Most companies want to hire someone who is both competitive and a team player. If you can do both, you are more likely to get the job and more likely to excel on the job. They want to see students who helped their college host applicants, served on the residence hall council, participated in student government, or tutored kids in a community center. They know that fitting such activities into your busy schedule shows good time-management skills and a good heart.

A word of warning is in order, however. Employers become concerned if they see a lot of scattered activities, especially if it comes with a weak GPA. You need to focus on a few do-good activities and still maintain a respectable GPA. Don’t become a community service junkie!

Explore and Network for Careers

Working as a volunteer for a nonprofit or government agency will expand your contacts for future job exploration. Nonprofits have boards of directors from all over the community. You can meet them at social functions or meetings, and talk to them about your future. Adults love to play Daddy or Mommy to college students, and they frequently have very good advice. If you are sitting next to the right person at a dinner, you can conduct an informational interview before dessert. Contacts make through volunteer activities can build your professional network, which is described in chapter 20.

If you undertake volunteer activities and internships with government and nonprofit organizations during your college years, you may find a career that you want to pursue. You may discover you want to teach, do police work, work as a district attorney, or run a community center. You may learn that you do not want to sit in front of a computer all day or that you do not like the chaos of a small, underfunded organization. Even if you don’t go into nonprofit work, you may find the skills you exercise as a volunteer are the type of thing you like to do. If you enjoy performing statistical analysis for a nonprofit in the summer, you may want to think about a position in market research when you graduate. If you enjoy meeting people and explaining the mission of your nonprofit, you might want to explore a sales position after you graduate.

On the other hand, from your experience with a nonprofit, you may decide that you want to work for one when you graduate. More than 20 percent of the American workforce is employed by nonprofit organizations or federal, state, and local governments.2 Every job you can do in the business world, you can do in the nonprofit and government world. By volunteering during your college years and then taking internships, you can explore the advantages and disadvantages of employment outside of business.

The yearly salary of people working in these positions ranges from the low teens to the high six figures. People who help others or work in public service are not necessarily going to be poor. It depends on their talents and on what they want to do with their lives.

But the truth of the matter is that a person performing the same duties as someone in a for-profit business will receive less money working either for the government or for the nonprofit sector. Accountants working for the government make less than those who work for private firms. But there are other advantages. Government positions sometimes carry lucrative pensions. For example, some teachers in New York State who retire after twenty-five years of service receive close to 100 percent of what they were paid when working. Even where the pensions are not as generous, government workers can retire at fifty, get a pension, and take on a new career. These pensions are likely to become smaller in the future as a result of the pressures to lower government costs, but they will continue to be part of government employment. Nonprofits do not usually have strong pension programs, but they are much more generous about vacations and family-friendly policies.

The bottom line is that the money is not as good as it is in the business sector, but the perks may offset it. Moreover, if you work in a field in which you help others, you can be happy that you are making a difference. A feeling of doing something good for others can be another bonus to a rewarding job.

You should also see volunteer activities as an opportunity to build your career network, as we will discuss in chapter 20. You probably have a better chance of bonding with someone with whom you volunteer than some random social acquaintance or someone in one of your classes. In addition, you will share similar challenges that you can talk about after the experience, which is a powerful source of bonding. Also, some of the professionals who supervise you could also become part of your network, especially if you perform at your best.

Make the Best of Your Investment in College

The following is an excerpt, reprinted with permission, from 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College, Revised: The Skills You Need to Succeed by Bill Coplin, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. I liked this book because it's designed to help college students graduate with the job they want.

Your college years can be some of the best years of your life. College is a place and time to make your family proud, party, get a credential, find a significant other, or grow up so people will take you seriously. College helps you discover yourself, learn your likes and dislikes, develop your mind and your love of learning, and build an undergraduate record so you can get into a professional school, if that’s what you want to do.

But college should also prepare you for finding a good job and a rewarding career. Your college years can be a training period in which you develop your general skills in order both to get a great job right out of college or graduate school and to succeed in the workplace. By taking advantage of the opportunities that college offers, you can build the base of skills you need not only to land your first job but also to excel at it. Once that happens, you will be on your way to a lifetime of rewarding work.

College can be a truly significant time in your life. That’s why it’s important to use this time well, including preparing yourself for a good job after you finish. Use your college years to gain and polish the skills necessary for a successful career. You’ll be glad you did—and your employer will be, too.

You may be thinking, “Well, skills may be nice, but won’t prospective employers be looking at my GPA?” Prospective employers look at your grade point average (GPA) as a measure of your persistence and your basic intelligence. However, the list below, which was published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) in 2010, indicates that employers are really looking for skills. At the top of the list are communication skills, strong work ethic, initiative, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving skills.

Employers Rate the Importance of Candidate Qualities/Skills

• Communication skills
• Strong work ethic
• Initiative
• Interpersonal skills (relates well to others)
• Problem-solving skills
• Teamwork skills (works well with others)
• Analytical skills
• Flexibility/adaptability
• Computer skills
• Detail-oriented
• Leadership skills
• Technical skills
• Organizational skills
• Self-confidence
• Tactfulness
• Friendly/outgoing personality
• Creativity
• Strategic planning skills
• Entrepreneurial skills/risk taker
• Sense of humor

What’s not on this list? A high GPA. In a previous NACE survey, it was listed as 17 out of 20. I bring this up because some students think a high GPA is the most important achievement they can have in college. It may be important for graduate schools and some employers, but it is not as important as being able to demonstrate that you have the skills employers want.

A respectable GPA reflects some of the skills discussed in this book. It also measures how well you play the system by figuring out what your professors want and then delivering the goods. In some ways, meeting the standards of professors is similar to pleasing your boss. Your boss is not likely to ask you to fill up a blue book or take a multiple-choice test, but she or he will expect you to follow directions. For these reasons, you want to have a respectable GPA. A 3.0 is respectable in architecture, the physical sciences, and engineering, but a 3.2 is the bottom line in the social sciences, humanities, and some professional schools. However, while the GPA provides some information to employers, it is not nearly enough for them to make a judgment about your job potential. This was true before the days of grade inflation; it is doubly true today.

Your GPA alone is not a reliable indicator of your potential as an employee because your course grades do not reflect the range of skills that today’s employers need. A very strong recommendation from your internship supervisor at a respected corporation about your people and problem-solving skills is much more important than a high GPA. But a high GPA may get you the interview.

Demonstration of good word-processing and spreadsheet skills will get you your first job faster than a GPA of 3.6 and even a master’s degree. Just as college admissions officers look beyond SAT scores when they make their admissions decisions, employers look for qualities beyond your GPA to make hiring decisions. One of my students was hired over several students who had master’s degrees in the department of education from a northeastern state. Why? She knew how to use spreadsheets. The interviewer, who was looking for the spreadsheet skills, asked about pivot tables. The other applicants had no clue what those were, even though they listed Microsoft Excel on their resumes. They may have taken an introductory course, but they clearly did not have extensive experience using Excel. (Taking a course is like being told where the swimming pool is. It does not mean you know how to swim.) The spreadsheet maven was hired; she worked her way up the ladder and eventually did policy work for the organization (and directed others to do the spreadsheet work for her). She is now a senior manager in a charter school.

The emphasis on skills may seem like common sense to you, but when you get to college you will find that courses rarely focus primarily on skill development. In fact, employers have long complained about the poor preparation of most college students. According to a New York Times article, a “1999 report by the Business–Higher Education Forum condemned graduates for lack of skills in problem solving, time management, analytical thinking, and basic writing and speaking.”

It is not that colleges don’t provide opportunities for students to develop problem-solving, time-management, analytical thinking, and basic written and verbal communication skills. Rather, most college students do not know how to take advantage of those opportunities. This book will show you how to use your courses to build your skills in what I refer to as the ten “Skill Sets.” Let’s take a brief look at those ten sets now. (Each of the next ten chapters will focus on one Skill Set.)

Master the Skills that Matter

On the basis of forty-five years of advising experience as well as extensive discussions and interviews with recruiters, successful alumni, and a variety of employers and human resources specialists, I developed ten basic categories of skills. The ten basic Skill Sets are like the five food groups. Just as you need to eat enough from each of the food groups to be healthy, you also need to develop enough of the skills within the ten Skill Sets by the time you graduate to be successful.

The Ten Skill Sets

1. Taking Responsibility
2. Developing Physical Skills
3. Communicating Verbally
4. Communicating in Writing
5. Working Directly with People
6. Influencing People
7. Gathering Information
8. Using Quantitative Tools
9. Asking and Answering the Right Questions
10. Solving Problems

Although lists provided by experts and employers may use different terms and groupings, the ten Skill Sets reflect a broad consensus concerning the skills necessary to succeed in today’s workplace.

The Career Pros and Cons of Social Media Postings

When I posted A Real-Life Example of Why You Need to Be Careful What You Put on Social Media Sites somewhere around half of the commenters felt that I was making a mountain out of a molehill -- that employers don't really look at social media sites when they consider hiring new workers (to be clear, some people argued that employers shouldn't do this -- they sometimes weren't clear on whether or not they thought employers did do it.) I had stated that it was my experience that employers can and do use public postings on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as they hire new employees (and to a lesser degree when checking out current employees for one reason or another.) As such, I advised readers to be careful what they post since anything "can and will be used against them."

Now there are some numbers associated with my advice. Here's what Moneyland reports as social media website use by employment recruiters:

What you post or Tweet can have positive or negative impact on what recruiters think of you. Four out of five recruiters liked to see memberships and affiliations with professional organizations on a candidate’s profile, and another 66% react positively when a profile mentions volunteerism efforts. On the other hand, references to illicit drugs, posts of a sexual nature, and mentions of alcohol consumption were likely to be viewed negatively by 78%, 67%, and 47% of recruiters. Interestingly enough, poor grammar and spelling mistakes are worse social networking sins than writing about your latest binge-drinking adventure: 54% of recruiters had a negative reaction to grammar and spelling mistakes, compared to 47% of recruiters negative reaction to alcohol references.

So given the above I repeat my advice -- be careful what you post online. It is public knowledge (if everyone can see it) and could impact your career negatively.

On the positive side, the same study shows that using social media can be a big win to your career if done correctly and on purpose. Specifically the piece had high praise for LinkedIn:

Nearly all (93%) of recruiters are using LinkedIn to discover talent. Furthermore, 89% of recruiters have hired through LinkedIn. The smart advice is to fully utilize LinkedIn in your job search. It’s essential to have to have a flawless (and completely filled-out) profile so that recruiters take you seriously. You should also optimize your profile by adding specialty keywords into your headline, summary, and throughout the rest of your profile so that when recruiters search for candidates with certain skills, you come up. I also recommend that you join industry groups to connect with recruiters that are looking for industry-specific candidates.

For more thoughts on how to use LinkedIn to benefit your career, check out the following:

• LinkedIn Best Practices


• Four Ways LinkedIn Can Help Your Career


• Three Tips to Make LinkedIn Work Harder


• Three Tips to Make the Most of LinkedIn

I haven't yet joined LinkedIn because I'm not looking for a new job, but certainly a case can be made for other benefits (like networking) for those who are not in the job market. Anyone have thoughts one way or the other on the value of LinkedIn for non-job hunters? Or perhaps you've found a job through the site. If so, please share your experiences with the rest of us.

Do You Take a Lunch Break at Work?

Here's a Moneyland piece that contrasts two views of taking a lunch at work:

• It's just another office task to cram into some portion of an already too busy workday.


• It's a midday break that can be mentally rejuvenating and, in some ways, more productive than staying glued to your chair.

I actually believe both are right. :)

Here's what I do on most days: I get in early, work, then leave around 10:15 am for my "lunch." I go and swim at a nearby pool, both for the exercise as well as the physical and mental break of sitting so long. When I get back to work I then eat my actual lunch at my desk while working.

Every once in a while (maybe once every other week) I have an actual lunch meeting where I meet someone for lunch to network, discuss business, catch up personally, or something similar.

Throughout my career I've done taken both of the paths above -- taken breaks almost every day and worked at my desk for lunch almost every day (it depended on the job, time of year, and a few other factors.)

How about you? What's your philosophy of lunch at your desk versus lunch out?

Interview Questionnaire: True or False?

The following is an excerpt, reprinted with permission of the publisher, from Competency-Based Interviews: Master the Tough New Interview Style and Give Them the Answers That Will Win You the Job; © 2012 Robin Kessler. Published by Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ.  800-227-3371.  All rights reserved.

I thought this was an interesting and easy way to get some good, solid interview concepts across.

1. The best-qualified candidate always gets the job.

False. Interviewers consider other things in addition to qualifications. They try to assess how willing you are to work hard and how well you’ll fit into their department and organization. In competency-based organizations, interviewers also assesses how strong you are in the competencies needed to be successful in the job. In addition, interviewers may be persuaded to make an offer to someone who can benefit them politically—say, the nephew of the CEO.

2. It’s a good idea to schedule your first interviews for the positions you are the most interested in.

False. Most interviewees don’t do as well in their first interviews as they will in later interviews, when they are more comfortable with the process. So try to have a “practice” interview (or work with a coach or career consultant) before you have one that really matters to you.

3. The first few minutes of the interview are the most important.

True. Most interviewers make up their minds quickly.

4. You should wear conservative clothes to an interview.

True. But make sure what you wear is considered conservative for your professional area or industry—not someone else’s. It is important to wear conservative clothes because you want the interviewer to remember you for your professionalism and your intelligence and the quality of your answers—not for the clothes you wore. If the interviewer remembers you for your clothes, that is not a good thing.

5. Take a planner and a notepad to the interview.

Trick question. Take them with you but don’t take notes during the interview. If you do take notes, the interviewer may perceive you as having a poor memory, as inattentive (less eye contact), or perhaps even as interested in getting him/her into trouble (think of a potential discrimination charge or lawsuit). Take some notes on your notepad or in your planner immediately after the interview so that you can write more effective thank-you notes.

6. It’s always good to arrive 20 to 30 minutes early for the interview.

False. In most cases, you should plan to arrive about five minutes early. If you arrive earlier, you may actually inconvenience the interviewer, who will not be expecting you a half hour early. Although it is always better to be early rather than late, too early isn’t good, either. Get to the location early but wait in your car, downstairs, or across the street in a coffee shop until it’s the right time to go to the interview. As you wait, review your resume and check to make sure you are still looking as professional as you did after you got ready that morning.

7. When asked to talk about your background, you should plan to keep your response to about two minutes.

True.  Don’t be too brief—or too wordy. Watch the interviewer’s nonverbal communication; if he or she looks bored, pick up the pace of your answer and finish talking. Emphasize the competencies that are critical for the position.

8. During an interview, avoid making too much eye contact to help the interviewer feel less nervous.

False. Maintaining good eye contact is perceived positively in interviews in the United States. Just don’t stare! Remember, also, that the rules for eye contact may be different in other parts of the world, especially parts of Africa and Asia. So make sure you’ve done your research and know what’s expected.

9. It is best to be honest and tell the interviewer exactly how you felt about previous supervisors if you are asked for your opinion.

False. Remember that diplomatic honesty is better than brutal honesty. If you talk negatively about a former supervisor, the interviewer will think that you will be talking negatively about him or her in the future. So be professional and discreet.

10. Don’t answer questions about race, sex, age, national origin, marital status, or number of children.

Trick question. It depends. Put the question in context and respond considering the underlying reason for the question.

11. What you say counts for more than the interviewer’s perception.

False. Perception is reality. The interviewer will make a decision based on his/her perception of how successful you will be in the job as compared to other candidates. So it is up to you to communicate what you mean as clearly as you can so that you increase the chance that the interviewer will perceive you accurately.

12. Exaggerate your accomplishments, because the interviewer won’t be able to tell that you’re not telling the whole, exact truth.

False. A perceptive interviewer will be able to tell when you are not telling the truth based on your nonverbal and verbal communication. Make your best case but make sure you stay honest.

13. Your job in the interview is to sell yourself.

True. Your whole job in the interview is to persuade the interviewer that you deserve a second interview or a job offer.

14. Preparing for an interview is a waste of time.

False! Preparing for an interview is the best use of your time—if you care about being seriously considered for the opportunity.

5 Perks to Negotiate When a Raise Isn't an Option

Let's face it, you may be the best employee in the world and deserve the biggest pay increase possible, but sometimes for company, political (like so and so isn't advancing so no one else is), and a whole host of other non-performance-related reasons, your boss may not be able to give you a raise. Assuming you decide you want to stay at your company and not jump ship to someone who will pay you what you're worth, you can ask for perks over a pay raise. To this end, US News lists five perks to negotiate when a raise isn't an option as follows:

1. Working from home some days.
2. Classes or training.
3. Attendance at conferences.
4. More vacation days.
5. A higher-ranked title.

I like all of these (especially #1 and #4). To them I would add:

• Flexible work schedule. For instance, you may want to come in at 6 am and leave at 3 pm. Or perhaps you'd be willing to work four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days.


• Perks that others have but you don't have access to. Some I've seen in my career: employer-paid life insurance, club memberships, stock options, stock bonuses, company paid car, and employment contract (guaranteeing you X months of pay if they fire you).


• Better office. I was never one to want a huge office, but I've had ones as big as my living room (including its own conference area). Then again, I've had a cubical office too (in a company where the CEO had a cube as well.) But if you're the sort who likes this, why not ask for it?


• Travel perks. If you travel a lot, you know what a difference flight upgrades, membership in an airport club, upgraded cars, and better choice of hotels can make. In one company and "upgraded" travel perk was that you were able to get a hotel room by yourself. Ugh, I hated rooming with people from work.


• Plum assignments. Perhaps there's a project you really want to be involved in. Maybe in lieu of a raise you can get put on that task!

I'm sure many of you reading this have some ideas of what else could be requested (perhaps you've even gotten these perks yourselves). If so, please share your thoughts with the rest of us.

You Must Over-Perform in Your Job If You Want to Maximize Your Pay

U.S. News lists several reasons you are not earning the salary you want, but the one that stuck out to me was reason #4. It reads:

You think doing your job adequately is enough. Doing a merely adequate job isn't enough to merit a significant salary increase. Big raises go to people who go well beyond the minimum expected.

Exactly. You get big raises, big promotions, big bonuses, and so on by doing MORE than your job requires.

Look at it this way. Let's say your company pays you $50,000 a year to do "A, B, and C". You do A, B, and C. You get paid $50,000. Seems fair, right?

But what if you want to earn more than $50k? Well, then you need to do more than A, B, and C.

This is what I said almost four years ago when I wrote How to Demonstrate that You Deserve a Raise. If you want more money, you need to do more. If you don't do more, you won't get more money.

So how do you know that you're doing more than what your job requires? You sit down with your boss and detail (in writing) what is required in your job. Then you over-perform against those expectations. If you are expected to deliver 5% sales increases, deliver 7% (or more!) instead. If you are supposed to identify $75,000 in cost savings, find $100k (or more!) instead. If you are supposed to increase production capacity by 3%, increase it by 5% (or more!) Then when time comes for promotions, salary increases, or bonuses, you will be identified as an over-performer. And over-performers get the promotions, salary increases, and bonuses!

Of course over-performing isn't the only thing you need to do (as I noted in How to 80-20 Your Career), but it's the first on the list. Get it right and (assuming you're not a complete jerk) you'll be well on your way to maximizing your earnings. And believe me, it's worth the effort. People who take these steps and apply them regularly to their careers end up making significantly more than those who don't -- sometimes MILLIONS more.

How to Get Your Resume Read

Business Insider details a recent study that used "eye tracking" technology to see where recruiters look at resumes (during the estimated six seconds they look at each one.) The results:

In the short time that they spend with your resume, the study showed recruiters will look at your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education.

In other words, they just look at the basic facts. Perhaps a few of your highest-level accomplishments (the ones at the top near your title, company, etc.) But that's it.

Then the piece highlights two different resumes -- one with basic formatting and in big blocks of text and one that is formatted to make reading easier (clear headings, bullet-point accomplishments, good use of bold to emphasize specific text.) It will come as no surprise that the latter resume got looked at longer as well as more completely (for instance, the recruiters looked at EVERY job section as well as the education detail.)

Here is Business Insider's summary of these results:

With such critical time constraints, you should make it easier for recruiters to find pertinent information by creating a resume with a clear visual hierarchy and don't include distracting visuals since "such visual elements reduced recruiters’ analytical capability and hampered decision-making" and kept them from "locating the most relevant information, like skills and experience."

A few thoughts on these results:

• I thought my resume was nicely formatted, but the "good" example they show is very, very nice. If/when I need a resume again (I haven't had one in eight years or so) I think I will use that one as my model.


• One thing the good resume does that I have always done is feature bullet-point accomplishments (versus paragraph-length sections). Getting powerful accomplishments across quickly is VITAL for resume success. If you need help in this area, see Making a Great Resume, Writing Powerful Accomplishments, The Importance of Accomplishments, and How to Track Your Accomplishments.


• It's interesting how it seems like the recruiters jumped from one spot on the resume to another -- like they weren't reading it but skimming it.


• Of course, just because recruiters looked at one resume more than the other doesn't mean more of the good resume people will get interviews, but that's the implication. After all, assuming the same information and that the information presented is attractive to the reader, then more time would likely lead to more interview offers, wouldn't it?

Anyone have anything else to add?

The Power of Likability Demonstrated Again

We've talked several times about how being likable is a powerful career asset. In fact, some experts say that being likable is as important as -- or even more important than -- doing a great job.

Whether or not likability is as important as how you perform isn't an issue we can probably ever resolve. But what we all likely can agree to is the fact that being likable does have significant, positive career implications.

CNN Money agrees with this line of thinking.  In fact, they say that if you want a promotion then you should make friends at work. Their thoughts:

Are you too busy to stop by your colleague's office to chat or go to lunch? Or are you someone who keeps work relationships strictly business? Be warned: If you're not reaching out to make and nurture friendships at work, you're probably hurting your career.

Recent research finds that people who initiate office friendships, pick up slack for their co-workers, and organize workplace social activities are 40% more likely to get a promotion in the subsequent two years. "How much you give at work directly affects how much you get at work," says Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work.

So why are these friendly people so much more likely to get a promotion? Because people like them! And in a world where there are so many decent workers, managers and executives would rather promote good workers they like than good workers (or even great workers) they don't like.

And while being likable can advance your career, being unlikable can kill it.

I was having lunch with a friend a couple weeks ago and he told me he had just fired one of his top performers. She did an excellent job, but there was just one problem -- everyone hated her. Her personality was toxic and had turned an otherwise great work environment sour (this is a small office of 15 people or so.) Eventually my friend had to let her go. Even though she did such a great job, her personality and actions were dragging down everyone else's results, and that was something his business just couldn't take.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, like the guy people hate but who gets promoted because he can sell like a fiend. Or the person who gets fired even though he's the greatest guy in the world -- because he's a poor performer (I actually had to fire a guy like this once because he wasn't pulling his weight and my staff was suffering.) So I am NOT saying that being likable is all you need to do to get ahead in your career. But I am saying that it's an important factor in your career success, so you should strive to be as likable as possible.

Besides, it's a much better way to go through life IMO.

Highest Paid Careers in America

In my post listing the highest paid jobs that don't require an advanced degree. I asked what the list would look like if graduate degrees were included. Well wouldn't you know it -- a couple days later and I found this list of the highest paid careers in America. Here’s the list of jobs as well as their average annual salaries (in countdown order):

15. Pharmacist: $112,160
14. Air traffic controller: $114,460
13. Sales manager: $116,860
12. Airline pilots, co-pilots and flight engineers: $118,070
11. Financial manager: $120,450
10. Industrial-organizational psychologist: $124,160
9. Computer and information systems manager: $125,660
8. Marketing manager: $126,190
7. Natural science manager: $128,230
6. Architectural and engineering managers: $129,350
5. Lawyer: $130,490
4. Petroleum engineer: $138,980
3. Chief executive officer: $176,550
2. Orthodontists and dentists: $161,750 - $204,670
1. Doctors and surgeons: $168,650-$234,950

Several thoughts here:

1. For the record, this list and the one I published previously are not only different because the first one only considered bachelor's degrees. They also differ in that the first list was based on lifetime earnings and this one is based on average annual salary.

2. See how much difference a graduate degree makes? (or at least the right graduate degree) Most of these require education above and beyond a bachelor's degree.

3. It's hard to tell how many from the first list made this group -- the titles are somewhat different and the order looks scrambled. Petroleum engineer, the highest on the other list, is clearly listed as #4 here. Others that may or may not be the same as the other list include marketing manager at #8 and financial manager at #11. The reason it's not clear is that the titles are a bit different and the orders are reversed on the two lists.

4. My job comes in at #8. :)

5. There must be some really lowly paid CEOs out there for the average salary to "only" be $177k. Just think of all the people making millions in that job. I would think they would bring the average waaaaaaay up.

6. I knew dentists were high, but wasn't aware they were that high up.

7. Interesting to see lawyers still so high on the list. I thought that the glut of them over the past decade or so may have hit average salaries hard. Apparently not.

Anyone else have thoughts on this list?

Jobs with High Lifetime Earnings

Monster lists 10 jobs with high lifetime earnings. These aren't the ten jobs that earn the most (they exclude advanced degrees) but are simply occupations that do not require graduate degrees, where workers commonly move into management, and where the work stays relatively the same over a career. In other words, they are (supposedly) easy to get into and easier than many jobs to advance in -- thus they are great for making a ton of money over a 45-yer career.

The article gives career earnings, starting pay, and average pay at 20 years, but I'm simply going to list the jobs and the 45-year (a complete career) earnings. They are:

1. Petroleum Engineer: $6,290,000
2. Landman/Senior Landman: $5,380,000
3. Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer: $4,360,000
4. Electrical Engineer/Senior Electrical Engineer: $4,170,000
5. Mechanical Engineer/Senior Mechanical Engineer: $3,900,000
6. Software Developer/Senior Software Developer: $3,830,000
7. Financial Analyst/Senior Financial Analyst: $3,440,000
8. Communications Coordinator/Communications Manager: $3,320,000
9. Marketing Coordinator/Marketing Manager: $3,310,000
10. Certified Public Accountant (CPA): $3,200,000

A few thoughts on this information:

1. Those are some big numbers, huh? $6 million over a lifetime is not too shabby at all.

2. The fact that the piece suggests these are "easy" fields to get into is rather comical IMO. Not just anyone can be an engineer. That said, #2, #7, #8, and #9 seem relatively accessible careers for the masses.

3. Again, this list does not include doctors, lawyers, MBAs, and so on who, I'm guessing, would all be on this list if they were included.

4. These are the AVERAGE pay levels. Just think what would happen if one of these workers would take steps to maximize his lifetime earnings. He could earn millions more on top of these numbers. In addition, if they took steps to make even more money (on the side) -- WOW!!!!

5. Not only are engineers high earners, but as a group they are also great at turning those earnings into net worth. Conversely, high-earners like physicians, attorneys, and managers of public corporations make a boatload, but spend much of it at a rapid rate and thus have lower-than-expected net worths. (For details, see What Professions are Likely to Have High and Low Net Worths?)

6. I haven't calculated my lifetime earnings exactly, but a rough estimate confirms what I wrote several years ago -- I made a great $5,000 investment when I got my MBA.

I'm guessing there are some of you reading this who hold these jobs (any landmen out there?) Are these numbers reasonable? Too high? Too low?

Why Conventional Wisdom Isn't Always the Best Advice

US News has a post on what to do if you receive multiple job offers. At least that's the title. The REAL issue they address is what to do if you get an offer from a company you like, but have one pending/in the works with a company you like better. How do you keep one offer "warm" while trying to get an official offer from the company you most want to work for?

Their advice is spot on IMO: contact the second company and tell them you love them but have another offer. Then ask them if they can speed up their process so you will know whether or not they will offer you a job. Good strategy.

Unfortunately, this plan doesn't always work out smoothly. In those cases, here's what US News suggests:

Company B might tell you that they can't speed up their timeline. If that happens, then you have a difficult decision to make: Are you willing to turn down Company A's offer without any guarantee that you'd get an offer from Company B in the future? Your answer probably depends on your financial situation and how confident you feel about other prospects coming along.

But what you shouldn't do is accept Company A's offer with the intention of backing out of it later if Company B comes through. Company A will have turned their other candidates loose by that point, as well as invested time and money in preparing for your arrival, so reneging on your acceptance would burn that bridge to a crisp. You'd also risk damaging your reputation in your industry, because people talk and you never know when that will come back to haunt you. Assume that once you accept an offer, you'll need to keep your word.

In other words, do what you can to expedite things, but know that you might need to decide if you're willing to end up without any job offers to see the process through with your favored company.

To me, that's good, standard, basic advice. But it's also advice I ignored once in my career and the decision has been one of the best I've ever made.

I won't completely re-hash the situation again (if you want details, read My Jobs, I Get My Dream Job and What to do When You Have a Job Offer but Are Waiting for Another One). But for those wanting the abridged version, here's what happened:

• I got an offer from Company A.


• I loved Company B and contacted them, asking if they could speed things up. They couldn't (for a few reasons.)


• So I accepted the offer from Company A.


• Two weeks later, Company B called and the new division president asked me to fly down to meet him.


• I told him I had already accepted a job, but he said he was paying for the trip, so what could it hurt?


• I took the trip. I still loved the company.


• They made me an offer.


• Then the agonizing began...

The conventional wisdom above would be to tell Company B that I'm sorry, but that I made a commitment to Company A. In fact the standard advice would have told me not to have even gone down to see Company B that last time (I tried that, but the president was persuasive.) But in the end, I took the job with Company B and called Company A to withdraw my commitment.

Let's review my situation in light of the advice above:

• Are you willing to turn down Company A's offer without any guarantee that you'd get an offer from Company B in the future? I wasn't. After all, I never knew if Company B would ever have a position for me (I actually lost out on the first job opportunity at Company B and didn't even know a similar job would be available.) And my current work situation was horrible (people were fleeing like rats off a sinking ship) and I had to get out of there. Company A was an "ok" alternative (not great, but good.)


• But what you shouldn't do is accept Company A's offer with the intention of backing out of it later if Company B comes through. I didn't have this intention. My intention was to go work for Company A.


• Company A will have turned their other candidates loose by that point, as well as invested time and money in preparing for your arrival, so reneging on your acceptance would burn that bridge to a crisp. Kind of. They told me they didn't want anyone else but me (who knows if that was true), so they would have had to keep on looking even if I had said "no." However, I certainly did burn that bridge -- both with the employer as well as with the executive recruiter (who I had worked for at another company.) Ouch!


• You'd also risk damaging your reputation in your industry, because people talk and you never know when that will come back to haunt you. I knew this was a risk and knew it had the potential to come back and bite me. This was one of the factors I had to weigh heavily before I decided what to do.


• Assume that once you accept an offer, you'll need to keep your word. This was my biggest question. I had given "my word" that I would take the job. Company A wanted me to sign a sheet of paper saying I accepted the offer officially, but I had not done that yet. But did I owe them anything by saying I'd take the job? Or is it every man for himself in the corporate world? I have lost people to other companies as a hiring manager and I know it can be painful (in many ways.) What exactly was I committed to doing (if anything?)

Here's what I did: I worked my network. I called several people I admired as either bosses or colleagues. I talked to them via phone or in person, presented my situation, and asked them for their point of view. Every single one of them said I should take the offer from Company B. The most compelling piece of advice was from my pastor. He told me of how he was once in a very similar situation (he had accepted a job from one church when another offered him one.) He had agonized over it for quite some time, then eventually took the second (preferred) job. The decision had turned out very well for him.

After all this advice, my wife and I decided to take the position at Company B. To this day, calling my manager at Company A and telling him I was not going to accept his job after all was one of the hardest things I have ever done from a business perspective (it's right up there with firing someone.) But he was very cool about it. He told me that it sounded like a job that was fit for me (we had discussed it during the interview process) and that I should take it. It was a totally unexpected response because he was actually a pretty rough sort of guy. I had expected him to start yelling at me.

It's difficult to know 15 years later whether this was a good or bad decision (as we've discussed, any specific move can have unexpected results), but here's what happened in both the near and long term:

• A year after I went to Company B, Company A fired the executive I was going to report to. They were in a turn-around situation (which I knew) and things went from bad to worse -- much worse. I would have gone from a difficult work situation to likely an unbearable one. I could have even found myself fired as part of the team that didn't turn things around.


• A year after I went to Company B, I was loving life. Over the next few years I had a (generally) great experience. And while there were some bumps in the road, my career thrived in both responsibility and compensation. That post at Company B eventually led me to another company and from there I found my current job -- the best job I've had at any point in my career.

So this post is a long-winded way of saying the following: Often conventional wisdom (or rule-of-thumb if you prefer) is good and solid. But there are always exceptions to the rule. And when you're dealing with an asset as big as your career, you need to consider ALL alternatives before you make any major decision.

The same holds true for almost all financial "rules". In many (most?) cases they point you in the right direction. But in some specific situations, it's actually better to go against the flow and make an opposite decision.

How about you? Have you ever made a financial decision that went against conventional wisdom? How did it turn out for you?

Your Money or Your Life, Track Income and Expenses Monthly, Then Work on Lowering Expenses and Increasing Income

Today we're going to cover steps #5 through #7 from Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century.

In the past we've covered one step at a time, but to be honest I don't see enough "meat" in the next three steps to warrant a post on any one of them alone.

Last time in this series we evaluated our spending, looking at each spending category and determining whether or not the amount spent on that item was worth it for us or not. Today's steps follow along this line of thinking and evaluation as well.

Here's step #5:

Make and keep up-to-date a chart of your total monthly income and your total monthly expenses.

The book has you create a hand-written chart with dollars on the vertical axis and time (broken into months) on the horizontal axis. Then for each month you make a mark for your actual income and your actual expenses. You then draw lines between the marks for each so they form a line -- and you can see your gap (the difference between your income and expenses) each month.

I used to keep my finances by hand (in a ledger book) back in the "olden days." Then I got Quicken and have never looked back. I could create the chart they are talking about above in roughly 15 seconds (and include the past 15 years or so) using my computer and that software. Very easy.

From this information, they want you to then start concentrating on expenses -- and how you can cut them. There isn't anything about increasing income at this point (that's coming), it's all about eliminating costly things that you get no pleasure from. This spirit is evident in step #6 which is as follows:

Lower your total monthly expenses by valuing your life energy and increasing your consciousness in spending. Learn to choose quality of life over standard of living.

I'm all for cutting needless expenses (as regular readers are aware) and for spending on quality of life rather than standard of living. But was there really a need to go through all of this "life energy" stuff and 195 pages to get us to the point where we simply are concentrating on "cutting expenses"? Seems like a bit of overkill to me.

Anyway, the book continues with step #7 as follows:

Increase your income by valuing the life energy you invest in your job, exchanging it for the highest pay consistent with your health and integrity.

I'm going to say it now: I hate all this "life energy" mumbo jumbo. It's too touchy-feely for me. Why can't they simply say something like "time is money, so work to make more money in less time." I know, those aren't the right words, but you get the idea. All this "life energy" stuff makes me think this is a long lost book from the Starship Enterprise.

And at the end of step #7, we're now at page 233. Yes, 233 pages to say:

• Create a budget


• Evaluate what you can cut based on what you don't like/need


• Work to grow your income

Didn't I just recently say all of this in one post? I think I did.

And if you're looking for a short-list of ideas you can use to grow your income, check out 80-20 Your Career. These are the career-related tips that will give you the most results for your time and effort.

It's not going to be a surprise to those of you who are reading along, but I don't really care for this book. I Know that so many people have LOVED it, but it's too "out there" for me. Perhaps if I had read it when I knew less about managing money, then I would have liked it. Perhaps. But I don't think so.

So far, I haven't learned much from this book and it's been (almost) a waste of my time reading it. But there's a concept coming up in the next step that I do like (yes, I read ahead a bit), so stay tuned to see what that is...

Update: Click here to read the next post in this series.

Your Money or Your Life, Computing Your Real Hourly Wage

A week ago I noted that I am reading through the book Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century. I have read many posts from other bloggers saying this was the one personal finance book that changed their lives the most. So I thought I should read it, list the nine steps the book recommends, and give you my thoughts.

Last time we discussed calculating your lifetime savings percentage, a concept I wasn't really that impressed by. But I'm reserving judgment because I think they are leading us down a careful path. And today's step is another move along that journey.

Step #2 actually has two parts as follows:

• Establish the actual costs in time and money required to maintain your Job (yes, they capitalize "job"), and compute your real hourly wage.


• Keep track of every cent that comes into and goes out of your life.

Your Real Hourly Wage

One of the main thoughts preceding step #2 is the following:

Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.

In other words, we all only have so much time (life) here on earth. Someone (or more than one) in each family trades part of his/her time in exchange for money, so the family can survive. They are literally giving up their lives to get money.

So, how much money are you getting in exchange for your life? It's a lot less than you think -- which is the exact point of computing your real hourly wage.

Why is it a lot less than you think? Because there are a myriad of costs associated with you working -- commuting costs, clothing costs, meals, and on and on. The book even assigns costs to things like "daily decompression" and "escape entertainment" as expenses associated with working. In addition, there is time associated with each of these, making the time devoted to work much more than most people assume. The net impact is that you're actually making less than you think while spending more time to do it.

Once all costs are deducted from the amount you're paid and hours added in for other job-related tasks, you only bring home a fraction of your paycheck while working much more than you think. When you divide the net amount earned by the total hours work requires, it's a rather sobering experience. You see your net proceeds for giving up an hour of your life, and the result isn't encouraging. This is exactly what the book wants you to realize -- that you're getting far less than you think in exchange for your life energy.

I realize that this process might be a bit confusing when described in words, so here's a chart from the book that may add some clarity:

Basic Job (before adjustments): 40 hours/week; $680 dollars/week; $17 dollars/hour

Adjustments

• Commuting: 7 1/2 hours/week; $100 dollars/week
• Costuming: 1 1/2 hours/week; $23 dollars/week
• Meals: 5 hours/week; $40 dollars/week
• Decompression: 5 hours/week; $30 dollars/week
• Escape entertainment: 5 hours/week; $40 dollars/week
• Vacation: 5 hours/week; $30 dollars/week
• Job-related illness: 1 hours/week; $22 dollars/week

Time and money spent on maintaining a Job (total adjustments): 30 hours/week; $285 dollars/week

Job with adjustments (actual total): 70 hours/week; $420 dollars/week; $6 dollars/hour

So the point is that while you think you're earning $17 per hour, your job is actually delivering $6 per hour. It's a big wake-up call, huh?

I have two responses to this exercise:

• Yes, there are extra costs and time associated with working that most of us don't take into account when we think about how much money (and for what time) our jobs deliver. This is why it's often easier than most people think to go from two incomes to one.


• The information above might be a bit over-board. After all, you're going to have to eat even if you don't have a job, right? So is that time really gained if you don't have a job? I actually spend less time eating when I'm at work (I usually eat at my desk) than I do when I'm home with my family.

This said, they have a good point. There are costs associated with working -- in both time and money. And it might be (I'm not sold on it yet) worth the effort to figure out just how much you really make per hour.

Track Every Penny

I'm in 100% agreement with their second point -- that we should keep track of every cent that comes into and goes out of our lives. In fact, this is the second step in my 30 steps to great finances.

Here's how the book describes the purpose of this part:

It's the best way to become conscious of how money actually comes and goes in your life as opposed to how you think it comes and goes.

I agree. I've had people do this exercise time and time again (as part of counseling I'm done) and they are ALWAYS surprised in one way or another. They discover places they never knew where money was leaking out of their lives -- and it all added up to a pretty good sum over time. Without tracking spending by the penny they would have never known this.

The book doesn't give a time period for tracking your money by the cent and I'm thinking they mean for it to become a life-long habit. This is a bit over-board for me to recommend as a widespread practice (even though our family tracks pretty close to every penny -- through Quicken -- that we spend). I suggest people track every cent they spend for 30 days as a step toward developing an accurate cash flow plan. From there they may want to repeat a 30-day tracking once or twice a year, though a regular tracking system (like using Quicken or Mint) will handle much of what you'll find by writing down every penny spent in a notebook.

So, that's my take on the book's step #2. What's your take on it?

Update: Click here to read part 3 of this series.

Work and Life: Be Better at Both

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life by Patty Azzarello, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

Work and Life Do Not Have to Compete as Much as You Think

It’s important to step back and really think about what you want—not just your next job or your next house or your next trip. If you fast-forward twenty years and then look back, what will make you feel good about how you spent those twenty years? Real success is personal. It’s not what anyone else wants for or expects from you.

Often people have trouble coming up with the answer to the question, “What does success really mean to you?” They don’t have a particular goal. If you want to be a CEO by a certain age, or have a particular amount of money in the bank by a certain date, those are fairly concrete goals. But if you don’t have really clear goals, how do you answer the question?

Your True Desired Outcome

Try thinking more generally about what you want to make come true in your life. Do you want to have adventures? Do you want to pass your values on to your children? Do you want to spend lots of time in nature? Do you want to be with really smart people? Really think about what you want to make sure happens in your life. That is the root of your true desired outcome.

Your true desired outcome is true to you. It’s not what it is “supposed to be.” It’s not what your family or your colleagues think you should be doing. It is not all about work. It is about work and life and what you really want to make happen overall in your life.

Why is this useful? Because plans don’t work. It is impossible to plan a sequence of steps in your career over ten or twenty years. But establishing a true desired outcome for your career and life is really helpful. Here’s why.

You Avoid Wasting Time

The more clear you can be about your true desired outcome, the more clear you can be in the moment about whether or not you are wasting your time. You can ask, “Is my role building capital to achieve my desired outcome or degrading it?” It lets you make judgments at different points to see if what you are doing in the moment is helpful, neutral, or damaging to achieving your desired outcome in life.

The great benefit of having this defined is not that it prescribes a specific plan, but that, in tough and confusing times, it gives you a picture to fall back on—a vision of what all this effort and activity is supposed to amount to.

As an example, I once left a job that I loved. I loved my boss; my boss loved me. I loved my team; my team loved me. We were doing great. But one morning I woke up and thought to myself, “Damn! I am starting to waste time here. If I spend any more time in this lovely job, I am missing an opportunity to build the career capital and the experience I need to become a CEO.”

I ended up going after what turned out to be the worst job I’ve ever had. It was a turnaround situation in a failing business where everyone was angry. For the first six months I was completely miserable, but because this job required me to be in charge of strategy, marketing, and sales generation globally, it was exactly the kind of experience I needed to become a CEO.

So, as hard as it was, I made the tradeoff between a happy, fun job, and the experience I needed to attain my desired outcome. I felt good about it because I made the choice on purpose, and it helped me survive the low points.

We ultimately turned the business around and it became a great job—in fact, it was my last job before becoming a general manager. But I never would have left my happy job if I had not had a desired outcome defined, causing me to assess my situation and question it.

This choice to move from a happy but safe to an ugly but high-impact job serves as a great example of how having defined my big desired outcome allowed me to make decisive and effective choices and tradeoffs in my career. The CEO outcome served me very well for many years. Ultimately, after achieving that goal, I decided to incorporate more life-oriented goals into my big-picture desired outcome. I realized that I had a broader desired outcome than operating as the head of a single company.

The Hard Part—There Is Conflict

There is inherent conflict in fitting your job into your life. Say you want to have a big career and make a lot of money, or make a difference in the world, but you want to spend time with your family and enjoy your life outside of work too. You feel like these are in conflict.

Or you really don’t enjoy your work and really just want to be spending your time doing other things.

Both of these situations result in constantly questioning: Am I doing the right thing?

I know people who second-guess themselves for years and years, either feeling guilty about working a lot, feeling resentful that their success is limited by their family obligations, or feeling depressed that their job is sapping all the life out of their life.

Unless you are already independently wealthy, you need to be earning an income to pay the bills and fund your fun. But you don’t need to let the fact that you need to earn money ruin your whole life.

Many people feel unhappy because they try to optimize everything at once, and the resulting failure to do so feels bad. In reality, having a desired outcome defined is not magically going to eliminate the need for a paycheck or give you double the time to do what you want to do in work and life. But it does let you make decisions and tradeoffs on purpose. And that not only makes it feel a lot better and less stressful, but also helps you to

Make much better judgments about how you are spending your time and whether it is amounting to anything—so you can proactively avoid wasting time, stuck in a job that is not helping you.

Make some tradeoffs on purpose, so you feel like you are more in control of the outcome and not questioning yourself all the time.

Make Tradeoffs on Purpose

The clearer you can be about what you really want in your work and your family life, the more easily you can make tradeoffs on purpose. And you can make different tradeoffs at different times.

Let’s face it. There will be times in your career that you will cancel your vacation to deal with a launch or a customer issue, and other times that you won’t. If you are clear about your outcome, you can make those choices on purpose—different priorities at different times.

You can sometimes work “too much” for good reasons, and at other times you can pass up work opportunities in favor of family. And along the way you can prioritize small things that keep you connected with your family, even if you can’t spend as much time as you want with them sometimes. When you make choices for reasons that serve your desired outcome, you feel much more in control and much more satisfied.

You can also recruit your family to be on your side if you share your thoughts about what all this work and money is for. What is it amounting to? This shared understanding of your true desired outcome can relieve you of huge amounts of stress.

Balance, No—Purpose, Yes

I’m sorry, but balance just doesn’t work. Particularly if you are ambitious. You are going to work very hard and focus on your career at the expense of the rest of your life from time to time.

However, building your career and letting your life go to hell does not work either. The trick is, if you want to do better at either work or life, you need to get better at both.

If this seems impossible, just think about it this way. If your work is making you miserable, you won’t be good to your family, and if your family is making you miserable, you won’t be as good at your work. The only way out of this is to force yourself to get incrementally better at both.

If your family is a source of strength, you can apply even more energy to your work. And if you are handling your job with ease and grace, you will have more energy to be good to your family.

Don’t Make It Such a Competition

Try to think of work and life as mutually reinforcing instead of in competition.
If you are doing great in your career but your family is unhappy or your life has no life in it, you have the constant stress of causing disappointment, or outright arguing, and feeling guilty about your family and time outside of work. That energy drain is keeping you from fully optimizing your career.

One of my favorite stories is about a colleague, a very ambitious hard-working woman in her thirties. Her husband is a gifted school teacher. She is investing a lot of time and energy in building her career, and her husband is doing good in the world with his teaching and supporting her every step of the way.

On the day when a new blockbuster movie came out, he called her at work around noon and said, “I’d really like to go see the movie today on opening day.” She looked at her workload and said, “Sorry, I have to work late.” Instead of being disappointed, getting upset, and giving her a hard time, here is what he did. He said, “The last showing is at 9:30 p.m. If we meet at the movie theater, can you make it?” After she agreed, here is what he did: He cleaned the whole house and packed her a dinner. He put it in a fancy shopping bag with a silk scarf over it, so the movie theater would not see that it was food and would let her bring it in.

That is a picture of a couple whose life and work are both working!

Don’t Zero Out

There is finite time in the day, week, and month. Even if you are optimizing for work, it is important to not let the rest of your life zero out completely.

KEY INSIGHT:  There is a much bigger difference between doing nothing and doing something small, than between doing something small and something big.

If there is something you want to be doing and you’re not doing it at all, the feeling of zero feels really bad. But the feeling of something, even if it’s small, stops that really bad feeling of zero.

People tend to set themselves up to think if they can’t do the big thing, then life is bad. If you love to travel the world, but your work or family prevents it, then you are miserable. But why not go away for a weekend somewhere once or twice a year?

Or if you really crave some peace and quiet and time to think, but can’t get away, go sit in your car for fifteen minutes every day.

There is a huge difference between zero and something. You can always do something.

I was talking to a very senior consultant whose job kept him on the road virtually all the time, including weekends, when he would travel to and from clients. He felt like he was getting no time at all with his family. The big thing he wanted was to spend lots of evenings and weekends with his family. That was just not going to happen in this job. So he told his firm that one weekend a quarter would be his. The difference between zero and something makes a big psychological difference for you and your family.

Later he made another career choice, to optimize the time he spent with his family.

You can’t optimize everything all at once, but you can make sure you don’t zero out.

You can easily trade off some work time for some life time. These days, for an increasing number of people, it is very easy to work outside the office. Tell your boss that you are going to come it at 11:00 on Wednesday, and take your partner out to breakfast. Trade a weekday to go on a school trip, then do some work on a weekend.

It’s Up to You to Be OK

Part of your job is to figure out how to not be fully consumed and burned out. The better you get at your job, the more you can get done in a shorter amount of time with less effort and energy. You’ll then have more time and energy to do things outside of work.

You need to take responsibility to make time to do the things over and above your job description that will make you successful, including claiming some time to get better at your home life. Your company wants you to have a good life that you enjoy. They know they will get more out of you at work if you are happy outside of work.

Enhance Your Career by Writing Articles

Dr. Thomas Stanley says you can enhance your career by writing articles. He talks about an investment advisor who was published (of all things) in Medical Economics.  His thoughts:

Once you are published in a prestige journal you are no longer just one of the more than 200,000 registered representatives in America.  No longer are you just Roger or Bill or Barbara.  You are now Roger, the writer.  One of the great advantages of being a writer is that more and more prospective clients will take the initiative of calling you instead of the other way around.  Writers tend to be viewed as experts, and by definition experts have high credibility.

Mr. Balser's article is indeed an implied endorsement from Medical Economics.  Endorsements from highly credible, prestigious third parties can make one's career. In my career, I have conducted research for more than half of the top 50 financial institutions in America. Yet I never initially made contact with them.  As a professor, to get promoted and obtain tenure, one had to write a lot, and I did.  Prospective clients called me and asked me to do research.   Eventually I turned much of this research into more articles and a series of books.

Is it difficult to get published?  As discussed in my first book, Marketing to the Affluent, it depends upon which of the more than 10,000 trade and professional journals, including newsletters, you target.

I love this idea! It's a way an employee can show expertise, credibility, and influence -- three things that employers LOVE. And when employers love something about an employee it tends to help out that employee's bottom line significantly. ;-)

I've previously shared how I turned my hobby of writing into an income. It started with a chance request where I was asked to write my thoughts on our industry for a top trade magazine. When I found out they actually paid for it, I wrote business pieces for two different trade publications (I actually had a monthly column in one) for several years as well as expanded my writing to personal finances in other periodicals. I made a very nice side income those years doing something I enjoyed.

But what I haven't shared is the impact writing those pieces had on my career. Because I was writing for trusted industry publications and did a decent job with my pieces, I was viewed as an industry expert. As a result, I was invited to speak at industry events. I was asked to visit many of our customers and they sought my advice. I was invited to sit on several industry committees where I networked with even more of our customers. And the more I wrote, the more these opportunities presented themselves.

The climax of these events was when I was given an award (at the annual convention) for the person who most impacted the industry in a given year (note: this was not an award I applied for, like I suggested we all do in trying to get a career award, but one I was selected for.) In addition, my company was named the industry's "Supplier of the Year" two years in a row -- the first time our company had received this award ONCE, not to mention twice. Getting the company award was not only because of my efforts (there were other factors, of course), but it was certainly part of the equation.

The writing benefited my career and compensation as well. A couple years into this process, I actually had part of my bonus tied to writing a certain number of industry trade articles. So I not only got paid from the publications for writing the pieces, but also received a nice bonus once I reached the required number of articles. In addition, I was ultimately hired for a higher-level (and better paying) position by our top customer and ended up working for them for five years. Overall, writing articles for trade publications was a win all the way around.

But it wasn't easy. I had to network to get them to take the initial articles. I had to write most of the pieces on my own time -- at nights or on the weekends. And I had to continually have interesting ideas/topics that the readers would enjoy/use -- otherwise they would stop reading. And I was ALWAYS on a deadline. So don't get me wrong, it was a lot of hard work. But was it worth the effort? It sure was!

I know that this idea is not for everyone. Not everyone is a writer. Not everyone has trade publications they can write for. Not everyone works in a field where others are seeking advice (I wrote on marketing, which was highly sought after advice, but "accounting" might not have had the same appeal.)

But for those who do like to write, have an area of expertise where people want ideas, have trade journals that cover those ideas, and are willing to do the extra work required, writing articles is a GREAT way to both earn and extra income as well as grow your career as an industry expert.

My Repeatable Approach for Success

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life by Patty Azzarello, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. Based on my 80-20 list for careers, these tips look pretty spot on.

It’s not that the unspoken rules of success are any big secret; it’s just that most executives never bother to talk about them or share them in a way that is useful to and doable by others. That’s where this book and the model I have developed come in.

I want to give you big insights that will shape how you think about your work for the rest of your life, and practical ideas for things you can start doing right now that will make a big difference in your success.

In this book I have gathered all the ideas, insights, and necessary actions and provided the context for how it all works together. Success doesn’t come from being good at just one thing. It comes from doing a combination of things on purpose, over time, that all build on each other to create remarkable outcomes. But you have to understand the whole picture to know why each part of it matters.

My approach for success has three parts. I am a pretty plainspoken person, so I call them

• DO Better


• LOOK Better


• CONNECT Better

Big success requires all three—not in isolation or in sequence, but in combination. Missing any one of them is what causes most career stalls or washouts. Without taking some care to make progress on all three, you fall behind—you get stuck.

Here is where you can begin to see why hard work alone doesn’t cut it. The work is only in the DO Better category. If you burn up all your time and energy doing excellent work, you may fail to get recognized (LOOK Better) and fail to build a network of support (CONNECT Better). So your career stalls. You are doing an excellent job of everything that is asked of you but you still get stuck.

Remember, it’s not just about the work.

To add real value to the business, you need to understand what is truly valuable to the business and you need to build a broad network of support so you can deliver significant results in a big and far-reaching enough way.

DO Better

DO Better is about producing exceptional results. DO Better is about working on the right things in the right ways. It’s about rising above the work. DO Better is about freeing yourself from your overwhelming tactical workload and identifying and delivering on the few most critical outcomes—the ones that really count. DO Better is about tuning your job, knowing yourself really well, and putting yourself in situations where you can thrive in your work and accomplish exceptional things. It’s also about how you lead, build trust, delegate, make more time, and build up your energy. Successful people are not burned out and used up. And they are not the ones who were less busy along the way. They deliver remarkable results and leave room to DO even better after that.

LOOK Better

LOOK Better is about standing out. Successful people do their work and produce their results in a way that is meaningful and visible to people that count. They understand which audiences matter most and they communicate with the right people at the right times, in a compelling way.

LOOK Better is about building personal and professional credibility and becoming more relevant with your key stakeholders. People with high credibility get more done because they face fewer obstacles. Successful people are widely known not just for doing their jobs really well, but for the extra value they contribute to the business. They have risen above the work and proven their greater, wider-reaching value to their companies.

CONNECT Better

The most successful people get a lot of help. CONNECT Better is about building a broad base of support for yourself, your team, and your work. As you advance, your focus needs to broaden, not deepen.

Successful people are not isolated in their own world. They build the right networks of mentors, partners, and supporters. They know how to get on “the List” of people who get access to the best opportunities.

It’s not about politics; it’s about effectiveness. Successful people build an “extra team” around them and accomplish big things by working with and through others. The higher you go, the more your value is associated with your network.

It’s Never Too Early to Begin or Too Late to Start

There are no prerequisites, hurdles, or qualifications to using the model. Set your sights on adding more value to the business and start from where you are today.

You Have More Control Than You Think

You need to recognize that it is up to you to make things happen in your career, without counting on standard company and management processes. These days, if anything, the standard company and management processes are set against you!

My approach is all about the things you can control—how to see them and how to act on them. You need to do specific things on purpose in all three areas of DO Better, LOOK Better, and CONNECT Better over time.

For example, working really hard won’t get you anywhere if no one sees what you are doing or if they think it’s irrelevant. Creating a publicity campaign without the results to back it up will backfire. (We all know those people who are managing their publicity instead of doing their jobs, and it’s hard not to wish bad things for them.)

You can’t build a strong network if you are not credible, and you won’t know how to use contributions from your network if you are not focused on doing the most critical few things to move the business forward. It all works together to add value and grow success in your business and career.

The real payoff comes over time—once you feel like you have mastered all three, you set the bar higher—and do them all again. That’s where the “better” comes in.

10 Steps to Writing a Great Resume

The book The Damn Good Resume Guide, Fifth Edition: A Crash Course in Resume Writing lists 10 steps to writing a great resume as follows:

• Choose a job objective


• Find out what skills, knowledge, and experience are needed


• Choose a resume format


• Make a list of past jobs


• List your skills and accomplishments


• Create action statements


• Arrange your action statements


• List your education, training, and professional development


• Summarize your key points


• Polish and proof

Here's my take on these:

• I absolutely hate having a job objective for three main reasons: 1) It serves no purpose. The objective is already understood -- you want this job. You know that and the employer knows that. 2) It takes up prime selling space -- it's often the first thing a reviewer sees. Do you want to waste the valuable few seconds he looks over your resume on an objective? No! You want that time to be selling how great you are. 3) It's about you: your wants and desires. But a job application is not about you (at least about what you want). It's about the employer -- what HE wants. The only concern for you is whether you fit what he wants or not.


• The book suggests you find out what skills, knowledge, and experience are needed so you know how to tailor your resume. In general this sounds like a decent suggestion, but I'm not so sure it's really practical or has much use. If you are in one field and looking to stay in that field, it's likely your resume will be the same no matter what position you apply for (mine has been). Now if you're looking to change careers, perhaps you need a bit more tailoring, but for my entire career I've developed and used one standard resume and it's worked quite well.


• As for format, I recommend the chronological resume. I would guess (correct me if I'm wrong) that the vast majority of reviewers expect and prefer this format, so why go against the flow and use something else? Do you want the reviewer to spend the six seconds he looks at your resume trying to figure out the format (and, as a result, what the resume is saying)? I thought not.


• I agree with their point #4 -- to list past jobs. BTW, they say in the book to list them in chronological order (with the most recent at the top -- some would call this reverse chronological order). Of course. :)


• I also agree with the listing of the skills and accomplishments of each job and describing them in action statements (their points #5 and #6). I try to combine skills and accomplishments as much as possible. For instance, "Led multi-function team to deliver 18% costs savings to new product launch." This statement contains both skills (leadership ability as well as great people skills -- you'd have to have the latter to lead a team from different departments to this much success) as well as an accomplishment (you saved the company 18%!) If you can fill your resume with bullet points like this (my last resume had 5 to 7 of these per job), you've got a winning document.


• Steps #7 and #8 are formatting/filler steps IMO. Yes, you need to arrange your statements for maximum impact (for each job I've held I list the accomplishment statements in descending order -- from most important to least). And yes, you need to list education and meaningful training experiences. But these will seldom get you hired, so be concise with them.


• I am 50/50 on the summary statement. As a reviewer, I personally prefer to get into the resume and develop my own conclusions about the candidate. But there is probably no harm with a short and sweet (a few bullet points at most) summary of your best accomplishments at the top of your resume. If the reviewer sees nothing else, he will get the main points you want to make, and that's about all you can hope for. That said, if I was looking for a job these days, I wouldn't use one.


• The best way to "polish and proof" is to send your resume to several people (trusted colleagues work the best IMO) and have them review it. I've both done this for others and had others do it for me and there is ALWAYS something that can be improved upon.

There you have it. Overall, I think the book is "decent" and it's certainly concise, well-formatted, and contains plenty of great examples of resumes (if you overlook the objective statements). Even though I have some disagreements with their recommendations, I would certainly look at it as one of the resources I'd consult if I was looking at writing a new resume. In particular, their section on how to write powerful action statements for your accomplishments is great.

So, what's your take on the list -- and my thoughts on it?

Do You Have "Summer Hours" at Work?

This piece from US News got me to thinking of all the times I've had "summer hours" during my career. The piece defines summer hours as some sort of special work arrangement during the summer -- like being able to come in early and leave early too. My current company doesn't have any special summer work offering, but here are ones I've had in other companies over my career:

• We got every other Friday off during the summer. That was nice. :)


• We got the afternoon off every Friday for the summer. I actually liked this better. It made every Friday special.


• We got to dress casually on Friday. This was when we were all dressing up every day. You know, way back in the olden days -- like the late 80's and early 90's. Oh, and "casual" then was dressier than what I wear to work on a daily basis now.

I may be forgetting some, but I think this is a complete list of my "summer hours" options. Needless to say, I really enjoyed having them all and appreciated the casualness and special feeling they brought to the summers.

How about you? Have you ever had summer hours (or do you have them now) where you worked?

Tips for Making the Most of Your Internship

The following is reprinted with permission from All Work, No Pay: Finding an Internship, Building Your Resume, Making Connections, and Gaining Job Experience by Lauren Berger, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

Sometimes it may feel like you are jumping through hurdles to land the actual internship and once you start, you lose momentum. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and you must constantly ask yourself, “Am I making the most out of this situation?” You want to constantly evaluate and reevaluate your own performance at your internship: “Am I doing the very best I can? What else can I do?” In my experience, this is the difference between an average intern and a stand-out intern. The sections below provide tips to help you stand out. I titled each heading with what the employer should be saying about you (the intern).

“They are always the first to volunteer!”

We know to volunteer for everything. But do you actually follow that rule? At your internship, one student will be the first to volunteer. Make sure that individual is you. This is a quick and easy way to show that you take initiative and don’t rely on others to get things done. It also shows that you don’t mind doing the less glamorous tasks. If you are interning at an interior design firm and want to sit in on a client meeting—that’s super normal. Everyone wants to sit in on a client meeting. However, if you volunteer to set up the meeting space or make copies of the materials the client needs (tasks that aren’t the coolest), that’s what will stand out to the employer.

“They are always alert!”

When the employer calls your name, you should give your undivided attention. Unless you are preoccupied with another assignment, you should go right over to him or her, look alive, friendly, attentive, and even excited—and have a pen and paper with you. To show your dedication, take notes on everything the employer says. Never roll your eyes or look frustrated when an employer asks you to do a task.

“I’ve never seen them just sitting around.”

Find work for yourself. The second you complete a task or have nothing to do, get out of your seat and ask the internship coordinator if he or she needs anything. If that person doesn’t need anything, ask who else in the department needs help. I mentioned this earlier in the networking section. If no one has work for you, read anything you can get your hands on. Every industry has a variety of trade publications associated with it. For example, in publishing, you should be reading Publishers Weekly every week, and you should also sign up for daily industry news emails such as PWDaily, Shelf Awareness, and Publishers Lunch. Take advantage of the resources at your company and build your knowledge of the news and events taking place in your industry of choice.

“When I give them tasks, they take me seriously.”

Any time an employer assigns you work, you take notes, listen to everything he or she has to say, and then ask questions. Take pride in your work and go the extra mile to let the employer know this is a priority for you and something you take very seriously.

“I trust them.”

Trust is a big issue at an internship. As an intern, you handle paperwork and overhear confidential matters. You won’t always be told what is private and what is public information. Just to be safe, keep all of the company information private. Don’t gossip to friends or family about who that company represents, badmouth any clients, or talk about financial information. Every company has some sort of sensitive information associated with it. Keep everything you hear or learn in-house. Once the people in an organization feel they cannot trust you, they will let you go from your internship. Keep in mind that trust isn’t always associated with confidential information or paperwork—it applies to all of your actions.

“They know what they’ve accomplished.”

Write out what you’ve accomplished. Keep track of all of the tasks that you’ve done during your internship. If you communicate with your boss through emails, checking sent emails is a great way to do this. Make a quick list of the majority of tasks you’ve accomplished and next to each, write down the learning objective. In chapter 5, we discussed how every task has a learning objective tied to it. As an example, let’s take a look at my task list from my newspaper internship:

• Fact-Checking for Special Issues. Learning Objective(s): cold-calling, communicating with different types of people, the importance of printing accurate information, learning how frequently information changes, how to stay organized when putting in several outgoing calls, phone etiquette


• Proofreading. Learning Objective(s): editing experience, strategies for editing, what editors look for during the proofreading process, the value of a proofreader to a writer


• Managing Contributor Deadlines. Learning Objective(s): networking with writers/contributors, the importance of deadlines, communicating with unique personalities


• Writing for Publication. Learning Objective(s): helping develop writing style, providing constant feedback from editorial team, publishing for one of the first times


• Assisting Production Team. Learning Objective(s): understanding value of entire team working together, watching the process from the producer’s and designer’s perspectives, communicating one part of a project to another team involved in the process, relationship management in the workplace, how an entire newspaper is put together on a weekly basis

Going through and actually writing out the learning objectives will help you understand the full benefit of the opportunity. As the internship goes on, you tend to forget the real value of what you’re doing.

How to Make Your Resume Last Longer than Six Seconds

Moneyland highlights a recent study that says recruiters spend an average of six seconds reviewing an individual resume. The study used a scientific technique to analyze how long professional recruiters reviewed candidate profiles and resumes. It found that recruiters scan quickly for education requirements and career progression. Based on whether or not they see these in six seconds, the resume either gets moved ahead or rejected.

Obviously this has great implications for job hunters. Your resume needs to make an impression and make it quickly. Here are six steps Moneyland suggests to help you accomplish this goal:

1. Don’t be Creative
2. Put Your Expertise and Skills at the Top
3. Don’t Make it Too Long
4. Ditch the Photos
5. Don’t Focus on Your Personal Achievements
6. Have it Professionally Made

Here's my take on these:

1. You have SIX SECONDS to make an impression. You can help the reader out a bit by following a standard format -- one where he doesn't have to spend four of the six seconds figuring out what's going on in the resume (and where the key information is.) This is why you should use a standard resume format (I prefer a chronological format -- with the most recent job first) and not get too "out there."

2. The top of the page is your most valuable space. That's why I don't like to see an objective there -- it wastes space on something the employer doesn't care about: what YOU want out of life. All he wants to know is what you can do for HIM. This said, you could make an argument for putting an "experience summary" at the top -- something a reviewer can read in six seconds (maybe bullet points) that contains your most compelling successes/accomplishments.

3. I prefer one page for those with 10 years or less experience and two pages for those working longer if needed. From there the resume can get longer if you're applying for top-level jobs. Of course these are general rules and can be adjusted for special circumstances. But you have to be SURE that special circumstances apply to you. (Also, if they really only take six seconds, probably only stuff at the top of page #1 is vital. This is not to say the rest is not useful, but if the first six seconds impress, it may not matter much how long the resume is.)

4. NO PHOTOS!!!!! (Unless you're in an industry that requires them -- like on-air personality for a TV show or modeling.) Do you really want your six seconds spent on someone looking at your photo?

5. You don't need any sort of personal information on your resume unless it helps you get the job. For instance, the fact that Joe is a marathoner might help him get a job designing running shoes at Nike, so he'd have to think through whether or not this was more important than something else. But if Joe was applying for a job as a teacher, there's probably better info to include than his running pursuits.

6. I am NOT in favor of paying someone to write your resume. It's like personal finance -- if you take time to learn what works and what doesn't, you can do a great job yourself. Then again, if you're totally clueless and/or don't have the time to learn, it may be worth a $100 investment to get a job that pays $50,000 a year.

So those are my thoughts. Do you agree or disagree?

Internships: Let’s Get Legal

The following is reprinted with permission from All Work, No Pay: Finding an Internship, Building Your Resume, Making Connections, and Gaining Job Experience by Lauren Berger, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

One of my favorite internships was at a national television morning show called the Daily Buzz. The show tapes out of Orlando, where I spent my junior year at University of Central Florida. That year, the Daily Buzz brought on eight interns, and we had a slew of duties: maintaining the greenroom, welcoming guests, working closely under the show’s directors and producers, assisting with segments, prepping the hosts, coordinating segments, and even appearing on the show. Before my internship, I knew nothing about television shows and how they were actually produced. This internship was especially challenging because I had to be in by 4 a.m. three days per week. I stayed from 4 a.m. until 10 a.m. while they filmed the show. My roommates would be going to sleep, and I’d be waking up for my internship. It was quite the experience!

One morning I was instructed to make coffee for the guests in the greenroom. It’s a task some would call menial, but someone does need to make the coffee for the guests and keep them comfortable on a morning show. I walked into the break room that the Daily Buzz shared with a few other offices in the building. I looked at the coffee machine, honestly hav-ing no idea how to use it. I wasn’t a coffee drinker at the time. The coffee machine was huge and had buttons everywhere, so I pressed one, not really knowing what would happen. Unfortunately I pressed the wrong button and coffee started spewing everywhere and flooding the break room floor. No one else was in the room. I started to panic and sprinted down the hallway to find someone who could help me. Clayton, an anchor of the show, was standing in the hallway and came to my rescue. We went back into the break room where people were standing and saying, “Who flooded the break room?” Clayton took the blame and helped me fix the coffee machine, clean up, and make a fresh pot for our guests. An internship is a time for you to learn, make mistakes, and fix them. If I started my first job at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and didn’t know how to make coffee, I would have been in trouble. Since I learned at my internship, I was prepared.

One of the reasons internships are controversial is because critics clas-sify intern duties as mindless tasks. As you can see, everything has its place and even fetching coffee can be beneficial for students as long as that isn’t what they spend the bulk of their time doing. Last year the New York Times published an article called “Unpaid Interns—Legal or Not?” that further explored the controversy within the internship space. Are unpaid internships illegal? What can students do to protect themselves at their internships? This article spurred debates among everyone involved with the internship equation—students, professors, parents, employers, and career coaches. Everyone took free rein to blast their opinions on internships.

Each year I visit colleges and universities worldwide and meet thousands of students energized by the subject of internships. They are driven, passionate, hard-working, and resilient in the face of any negative talk around the topic. They understand the value of real-world experience and building professional contacts—whether or not the work pays or is considered glamorous. They hear what critics say about internships being exploitative and termed “slave labor.” But they keep going. They keep looking for opportunities. Although criticized for being part of a trophy generation and acting entitled, these students want to succeed and they want it bad. But until everyone shares this viewpoint on the power and importance of an internship, the controversy will continue.

The purpose of this book is not to pick sides or place blame, but to point out the guidelines that do exist. I teach students to walk into any situation prepared. To be prepared for an internship means understanding the rules in place to protect interns. I know you might consider this the boring chapter, but it’s actually one of the most important. As a student, you should pride yourself on being informed. This will help you navigate your way through any unfair or uncomfortable situations that could potentially occur. I rarely hear about problems at internships, but they do pop up every so often. The best thing that you, the student, can do is be prepared. I’m calling this the cautious approach.

The majority of students and employers are unaware of the guidelines associated with internships. In this chapter, I aim to fix that and clearly explain each of the six criteria that legally define an unpaid internship. I also discuss issues involving sexual harassment in regard to paid and unpaid interns. The end of the chapter contains a list called “Your Rights as an Intern,” which provides clarity and justification to students who are scared to speak up for themselves. To maintain a sense of transparency with my readers, I want to reiterate that I am not and will never claim to be a legal expert. Everything in this chapter is pulled from the US Department of Labor and EEOC’s resources. The explanations provided are my translations of each rule to help students better understand what the guidelines say. And of course, laws change and different situations lead to different issues to consider, so if you have concerns or questions, you can always consult with a lawyer or human resources specialist. Knowing that, let’s proceed and I’ll walk you through exactly what you need to know to ensure you walk into every situation an informed intern.

Understanding the Fair Labor Standards Act

The US Department of Labor (USDOL) created the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Fact Sheet #71 to protect students from employers taking advantage of them and using them to substitute for actual employees. Keep in mind, the entire FLSA covers youth employment issues and is not limited to internships. The Fact Sheet # 71 that I will be referencing throughout this chapter is titled Internship Programs Under the Fair Labor Standards Act. (If you want to refer to the complete document, you can view it here. To find a link and pull up the FLSA, go to the United States Department of Labor website at dol.gov.)

To make sense of this document, I broke it down into sections and bulleted all of the important points that you should note. Before we begin, I want to explain that there is a distinct difference legally between the word employ and the word intern. Here is how those terms are defined in the FLSA Fact Sheet #71:

Employ: To employ means to suffer or permit to work. Covered and nonexempt individuals who are suffered or permitted to work must be compensated under the law for the services they perform for an employer.

Intern: Internships in the “for-profit” private sector will most often be viewed as employment, unless the test described below relating to trainees is met.

The “test” they refer to in the above definition of the word intern are the six criteria we are about to explore. For an unpaid internship to be legal, the opportunity must meet all six criteria. Just to clarify, these criteria are for unpaid interns. Paid internships do not need to abide by these.

FLSA Point #1: The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment.

The internship must be a learning experience. Students should learn how a specific company is run and how to work in many capacities within that industry by listening, observing, and actually executing entry-level tasks. Each of those tasks must come with clear instruction and consistent supervision. Does this imply that you need to be watched like a hawk at all times? I should hope not, but employers must train you to complete tasks before assigning them.

Additionally each task must have a benefit for you, the student. Determine if the task you are given has a learning objective attached by constantly asking yourself, “What am I learning from this?” and “What will I get out of doing this task in the long run?” You can also ask yourself, “When might I use this skill in the future?” Writing down some of the tasks at your internship and what you are personally gaining from them will remind you what to include when updating resumes and preparing for interviews. I will explain this technique and how to write down learning objectives in chapter 8.

Let’s say an internship coordinator is having you set up a Facebook page for their business. This helps you take what you already know about social media and apply it in a professional manner. Setting up and running a Facebook page is definitely something you could be asked to do as an entry-level employee, and knowing how to do this efficiently will help you with future career plans. If the Facebook page is successful, this will give you a success story to speak of during future interviews and will also give you social media experience to talk up in your cover letter.

FLSA Point #2: The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern.

Notice this says the benefit of the intern and not the benefit of the employer. Unfortunately employers don’t always understand this and use interns to do tasks directly related to generating revenue. Commonly this happens when interns act as salespeople and sell directly to clients. There is a big difference between an intern running a social media campaign that indirectly grows a brand and an intern selling directly to a client. To prevent this from happening, read over internship postings very closely. Be cautious of words like sales, commissions, and making money. Go with your gut instinct. Do you feel that your efforts alone are generating income for the employer? If yes, speak with your career center and get their opinion. Let them guide you on how to deal with this situation.

FLSA Point #3: The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff.

Point #3 also relates to an intern acting as an employee and generating revenue for the employer. Since 2009, we’ve seen an increase in layoffs nationwide. We must make sure that extra interns aren’t brought on board to replace actual employees.

Mark Cuban, a famous businessman and controversial blogger, wrote a blog post where he expressed his frustration with the roadblocks he encountered when wanting to start a new organization within an existing company that was solely run by interns. He thought it would be a great learning opportunity for students to create a brand. He ran this by his human resources department, and they told him he was not allowed to do that. Interns must be supervised, they cannot generate revenue, and they cannot replace actual employees. Mark Cuban’s intentions were to provide students with an experience like none other, but this is where the FLSA rules come into play. Ask yourself, could the company run without me? If the answer is no, you have a problem you need to discuss with your career center as soon as possible.

FLSA Point #4: The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.

The intern should be learning from the employer and assisting them, not doing their job for them. This point reiterates what we already covered and again says the intern shouldn’t be directly generating revenue or participating in unsupervised activity. It also tells the employer that their operations might actually be “impeded” or slowed down because training an intern to do a task can be time consuming. You will notice many of the criteria are saying the same thing in different ways to protect the student.

FLSA Point #5: The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship.

Periodically, Bloomberg Businessweek ranks their top fifty internship programs and lists their retention rates from intern to employee. Companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers retain close to 89 percent of their interns each year. IBM retains approximately 40 percent of their interns. Several paid internships report retention rates, where the majority of unpaid internships do not report this information. Interns must understand that an internship in no way implies that a full-time job will be offered at the end. The internship should have a start date and an end date to show that it’s not an open-ended opportunity. In chapter 9, I’ll provide strategies for turning the internship into a full-time job. But it is important to walk into the internship knowing there might not be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—or, in this case, a job.

FLSA Point #6: The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

An internship is a two-way street, and when students start unpaid internships, they must completely understand that they are not entitled to any money under any circumstances at this position. During an interview, it is appropriate for a student to ask about wages or potential travel reimbursement. Once employers state that the internship is unpaid or paid and what they will or will not reimburse, the discussion is closed.

I want to be clear. If all of the six criteria mentioned above are met, the minimum wages and overtime laws do not apply and the position is therefore considered a legal unpaid internship. On the other hand, if you do feel that you should be paid, here is a link to information from the Wage and Hour Division on how to file a complaint. You can also call their toll-free line for additional information at 1-866-487-9243.

10 Things You Can Give Your Network

One of the keys to making the most of your career is to develop and grow a healthy network. But when some people hear the word "networking", they think of the old-time, sleazy definition of the word -- the "using" others in a what's-in-it-for-me fashion. That's not the sort of networking that moves your career ahead. The sort of networking that does work is one that's mutually beneficial -- where you give/help as much as you get.

So where does the process start? It begins with being a giver -- with helping out others and staying in positive contact with them. The book Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life offers ideas on how to do this. It lists 10 things you can give your network as follows:

1. Hello: Just say hello or give people a quick update when something interesting happens.

2. Remember things: Listen [when they share personal stories]. Then follow up later [to ask how it all went].

3. Offer to help: Ask "What is your challenge right now? How can I help you?"

4. Positive feedback: When you [give positive feedback], it stands out, is appreciated, and is memorable.

5. Say thank you: Thank people a lot and often.

6. Follow up: When you ask someone in your network for something and she follows through, let her know what happened.

7. Make an introduction: Be astute about helpful introductions you can make.

8. A point of interest or enjoyment: If you remember what is important to people and what they like, it gives you an opportunity to point them to great stuff that you run across like articles, movies, books, music, and events.

9. Photos: Use photos of things you've seen and done, yourself, your family.

10. Video mail: It is a personal and standout way to say hello to someone.

These are great, great tips IMO. And they all seem to come back to one thing: they make you likeable and helpful. And people want to help likeable and helpful people!

I've talked about likability a lot on FMF. If you'd like to read more on it, check out Merit Alone May Not Get You that Promotion and The 11 Laws of Likability.

As for the tips above, I have some specific thoughts on some of them. I'll give these thoughts with the number that corresponds to the tip above. Here goes:

5. I know a guy who ALWAYS thanks people a lot -- for helping, for volunteering, for almost anything -- and people LOVE him. People like to be appreciated and those who show appreciation grow and develop their networks.

6. I love it when I can be helpful to someone, but in most cases I never hear anything back unless I make the effort to contact someone. If that person would instead get back to me, it would make me much more willing to help him in the future.

8. I do this quite often. For example, I have a casual acquaintance who has an interest in bed bugs (he was looking at investing in a company that killed them.) Every article I see on bed bugs (and there are many more than you'd think -- I find a new one every few months or so) I send to him -- just the link and a short note. It keeps us in touch and communicating and is fun for us both.

And while we're on the subject of networking, here are my main ways of networking with others:

• Volunteering. I serve on committees for two charitable organizations and am the president of the board for a third. I make a lot of contacts through each of them while doing work I love and helping out others. I plan to write more about my experiences volunteering in future posts.


• Lunches. Once a week I take out someone to lunch. We catch up, talk about what's going on in our lives, etc. It's a good way to connect on a deeper level.

In addition to these, my plan is to add a profile to LinkedIn this year. We'll see if I get to it or not -- it's been on my list for a while -- but I'm hopeful 2012 will be the year it happens.

How about you? What are you doing to develop and grow your network?

The Truth About Internships

The following is reprinted with permission from All Work, No Pay: Finding an Internship, Building Your Resume, Making Connections, and Gaining Job Experience by Lauren Berger, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

No matter what the common perception of internships might be, they are, inarguably, the most valuable experience for today’s college student. And the statistics are there to back it up. In 2010, students with internships on their resume received a greater number of job offers than students without internships. Additionally, students with internship experience received higher salary offers for their first jobs than students without internships. The internship remains the only proven way to provide students with the entry-level job experience, training, and relationships necessary to better prepare them for their career path.

Perhaps the strongest argument for internships stems from those who started as interns and have gone on to be successful. I point you to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, who started as an intern for a local CBS affiliate in Nashville; award-winning journalist Brian Williams, who started as an intern for the Jimmy Carter administration; and fashion designer extraordinaire Betsy Johnson, who started as an intern for Mademoiselle magazine. Despite these facts, statistics, and examples, many students across America remain unconvinced and unwilling to consider internships. They don’t want to focus their attention on gaining the practical workplace experience usually needed to land a job after college. These students have not experienced their click moment.

I begin my internship presentations at universities by asking students to raise their hands if they’ve had an internship. Approximately 20 percent raise their hands. Those 20 percent are on the right track. The other 80 percent will be on the right track soon—they just need a bit of encouragement. But why does this happen? What is the disconnect between Gen Y and the concept of internships?

Many call this a generational issue, but I say it’s the difference between knowing and doing. I argue that students do know where they want to go and how they want their life to end up—at least in a general sense. What they do not know is how they are going to arrive at their chosen destination. People tend to focus on the end result and overlook the roadmap that shows students how to get from point A to point B. When I was younger, I was constantly asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This question forced me to think about my career goals but failed to show me how I could achieve them. Students understand the importance of landing a job after college. I don’t doubt that. However, they often have a lack of guidance for the time in between.

I, too, ask students what they want to be when they grow up. The difference is that I follow up the question by asking how they are going to get there. How will you achieve your goal? What internship can you get to further your understanding of a specific industry?

Before we dive into the current internship space and explore internship trends, I want to explain why an internship is a necessary tool for one’s future. Below I’ve outlined five key components of an internship that are crucial to lifelong career success: hands-on education, networking, resume building, gaining references, and pursuit or elimination. To be clear, these five components apply to both paid and unpaid internships.

Hands-On Education

A hands-on education is something that can’t be achieved in the classroom. Your internship not only teaches you what goes on within a company but also provides you with the opportunity to execute and perform these tasks while under the proper mentorship or supervision. As an intern, you handle administrative tasks, sit in on meetings, and develop a clear understanding of how executives do what they do. You will make mistakes because you are learning. In fact, you are expected to make mistakes. These mistakes help prepare you to excel postcollege, when you are on the company’s dime. This knowledge and practice will place you above your competition and ahead of the crowd for job interviews. Mary Mahoney, assistant director of Career Services at the University of Tennessee says, “If you were an employer, who would you rather hire: the student with no previous experience or the student who’s had intense training and experience in your field and is familiar with your processes, software, and materials?”

Remember, according to a 2010 Student Survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 51 percent of students have had internships by the time they graduate from college. It would be disappointing to miss out on a job postcollege because the person you are up against had had an internship and you hadn’t.

Networking

As an intern, your job is to meet all the people in the office and give them a reason to remember you. Potential contacts hear about job openings within their personal and professional networks, and you must be able to tap into those networks as an intern. Your ability to keep in touch with and nurture these contacts will be crucial to your long-term career goals. Do you know how I landed my first job out of college at Creative Artists Agency, the largest talent agency in the world? I called up a contact that I met at my FOX internship and asked him to put in a call for me. One week after moving to Los Angeles, I lined up an interview and landed the job. In chapters 8 and 9, I’ll provide tons of networking tips to ensure you are able to properly leverage your new contacts.

Resume Building

Employers judge candidates by this one piece of paper. If it doesn’t list an internship and speak to the candidate’s professionalism, experience, and capabilities, there is a strong chance it will get thrown away or deleted. I’ve termed these resumes “trash can resumes” and will continue to define what qualifies (and how to avoid) them in chapter 3. Employers spot an internship on a resume and they instantly see dedication, a strong work ethic, and a sense of focus from the student. Internships say to an employer, “I care about my future. I dedicated time to hone my skills and work on my craft in order to excel in my future.”

My first out-of-state internship was in New York City at Backstage, a theatre trade newspaper. The day I phoned the company to ask about internship openings, the editor-in-chief, Sherry Eaker, answered the phone. Her first question was “Have you ever had an internship?” She was pleased when I answered, “Yes!” When a student’s resume says “internship,” it speaks to experience.

References

You should already know how to properly sell yourself—but do you have professionals willing to sell you? Are there executives who can speak intelligently and truthfully about your professional skills, attitude, and how you function in the workplace? Internships provide a place to gain these references and continuously prove yourself to a variety of professionals. Each task you perform has multiple purposes and will affect multiple people. Make sure each person you assist can speak to your capabilities. By doing this, you turn a contact into a reference. Jennifer Rupert, assistant director of Career Development at the New School in New York City explains, “People get to see you in action. They experience your work ethic and enthusiasm. In short, they get a chance to know you and become personally invested.”

These references will write you glowing letters of recommendation in the future. In other words, your relationships with internship coordinators and executives can drastically affect your future. Keep this in mind from day one of your internship.

Pursuit or Elimination

The last component of an internship is my favorite: pursuit or elimination. Students worry their internship experience might not be successful. But here’s the thing, even less-than-stellar internships are beneficial. They establish what you like and what you don’t like, what you want to pursue and what should be eliminated in terms of your future. Spend one semester interning at a company and determine if that’s the right fit. Don’t waste time doing this postcollege. Remember that experience—whether positive or negative—is still a valuable resume builder. No matter what the outcome, you will leave an internship more informed than when you walked in. You will gain knowledge of that industry, learn how the specific office is run, understand administrative tasks, and leave with contacts.

In 2005, I accepted an internship at NBC Universal in their on-air promotions department. The entertainment industry interested me, but I knew nothing about this specific part of the business. The internship provided a full education on the marketing and editing side of the television business. I spent my internship archiving old tapes, assisting in the edit bay, and helping the promotional spots go from idea to on the air. The entire process intrigued me but ultimately was not appealing enough to pursue after graduation. My internship allowed me to make great contacts in the marketing and on-air promotional space, learn a new side of the industry, and eventually decide that I didn’t want to do this on a daily basis. I was grateful to learn that lesson as an intern for ten weeks instead of as an entry-level employee.

10 Things Savvy Job-Seekers Always Leave Off Their Resume

US News lists 10 things savvy job-seekers always leave off their resume as follows:

1. A title.

2. Personal information and a photo.

3. Stock templates.

4. An objective.

5. Months of employment.

6. Irrelevant content.

7. Infographics.

8. Hobbies.

9. Potentially polarizing political views.

10. "References upon request."

My take on these:

1. Does anyone really title their resume as "resume" or "job history"? Yikes!

2. Personal information on a resume can lead to ID theft. And a photo screams "amateur" unless you're in a field like acting or modeling where it's a generally accepted practice.

3. I agree that you don't necessarily want to use the template that your word processing program offers. That said, I do prefer a more traditional layout, so perhaps that could be considered as "stock."

4. I hate objectives too. Waste of PRIME space (at the head of your resume.) Employers know what your objective is -- it's to get a job with them. After that, they don't really care for the most part.

5. US News doesn't like to use months of employment like "May 2006 to June 2008." They prefer simply "2006 to 2008." I actually prefer the former since it gives more detail/perspective.

6. DO NOT waste space. Your resume space is limited as it is, so you don't want to include anything that doesn't help "sell" you as an employee.

7. Same comment as #1. Really?

8. I would only include hobbies if they applied to the job. For instance, if you had a marketing blog that was highly respected in the industry and you were applying for a marketing position, I would include it. Why? Because it helps "sell" you as an employee.

9.  Yes! Don't take any sort of stance on anything controversial!

10. Everyone in the world knows/assumes that references are available upon request. Saying it wastes selling space and makes you look like an amateur.

What do you think of this list? Do you see any they missed or any of my responses you'd change?

ProfessionaliBranding Levels

The following is reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from The Panic Free Job Search: Unleash the Power of the Web and Social Networking to Get Hired © 2012 Paul Hill. Published by Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. All rights reserved. In this section the author lists how to create a "ProfessionaliBrand" -- your personal "brand" online -- to get the job you want.

Level 1: The Must Level

• Discover your Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)—your unique you. Build your profile.


• Discover your keywords—the words that represent your profession.


• Write your competency-based resume.


• Google your name and/or find any traces of you on the Internet. Determine if damage control is needed. Correct if you can.


• Use your resume to develop your LinkedIn profile.


• Develop a keyword-rich LinkedIn profile.


• Use “Internet crumbs” to your advantage. Include your job title and place of work, and a Web-based e-mail address in all places where your name will show up on the Internet, conferences, professional directories, associations, sports event participation, and so forth.

Level 2: Irresistible Branding Level

• Select your keyword-rich domain name.


• Build a VisualCV.


• Develop your resume Website (iResumePro) with your online competency-based resume.


• Develop an “e-mail resume button” and add it to your e-mail signature.


• Search engine optimize your iResumePro.


• Develop your iVideoResumePro and post it on your Website.


• Institute iBlitz17 (see the section later in chapter) social media strategy: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.


• Create back links to your iResumePro by commenting on blog entries and leaving your iResumePro’s URL to increase search engine ranking.


• Set up a CRM system and/or use JibberJobber, or categorize your networks. Tag your connections in LinkedIn or create Google circles. Provide compelling information directly to your networks through e-mail marketing, newsletters, white papers, or industry trends.


• Export your network contact lists from LinkedIn, Facebook, and so forth, and contact them through e-mail with compelling information/content.


• Set up a professional blog on your iResumePro Website. Tell the world what your SCA is by blogging.


• Set up your YouTube channel and post your resume video. Also post your iVideoResumePro on your Website without a YouTube link, because some employers do not have access to YouTube at work.


• Consider using TubeMogul to distribute your videos across different sites and increase your search engine findability.


• Join Web-based communities relevant to your profession or the job you are interested in and become an active commenter or poster (not a pest).

At a minimum, every professional must attain a Level 1 ProfessionaliBrand. You reach the irresistible level once you complete Level 2. Do not be surprised if you begin to get offers before you complete Level 2.

I identify an additional level that is beyond the scope of this book as Level 3. It is what I call the Key Opinion Leader. If you would like to find out more go to www.transitiontohired.com. Of course there are many more initiatives at each level you can take because new sites and tools are mushrooming every day. Evaluate and use those that offer advantages to your ProfessionaliBranding strategy.

The Importance of Accomplishments

The following is reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from The Panic Free Job Search: Unleash the Power of the Web and Social Networking to Get Hired © 2012 Paul Hill. Published by Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. All rights reserved.

The resume is not a story about your responsibilities or duties. It is not just a job description. It is about the facts: What did you do? What did you accomplish? In today’s job market competencies supported by accomplishments are the focus. Simply listing a bunch of competencies on a resume without any supporting accomplishments just does not cut it.

An accomplishment is defined using metrics, such as dollars, percentages, and time saved. For the most puritan competency evangelists, if an accomplishment can’t be measured it does not exist.

Usually the words and keywords that will get your resume selected by the HR software are related to the job-specific competencies—the functional parts of your job—and, as previously stated, sometimes these are still represented under headings such as technical skills and qualifications.

In order to get an interview you need to impress a person. You impress a person with your accomplishments.

It is also good to know that this work will help you with interviews because in a competency-based interview system the key selection factor is how well you can demonstrate or prove your competencies with supporting accomplishments.

Use the following structure when formulating your accomplishment state¬ments or bullet points. The result is impactful.

PAR

• Problem: What was the problem (situation)?
• Action: What action did you take?
• Result: What was the result?

You can vary this approach. If you want to grab the employer’s attention, state the result first and use the Results-Action-Problem (RAP) format.

Examples:

• Delivered an 80% ROI on new memberships by hiring an independent telephone marketing company to reverse declining memberships and increase membership growth. Marketing drive increased paid memberships from 200 to 533 within 3 months of taking leadership of the department—setting a company record. Note: The accomplishment statement above could be used to demonstrate the following competencies: initiative, results orientation, and problem-solving. Note: Begin each accomplishment statement with an action verb and make sure it is a powerful action verb.

 

• Contributed technical input to the railway signalling project that increased traffic flow capacity by 22%.

Write a list of accomplishment statements related to each job you have had. Jot them down for now and make a comprehensive list. Make sure that you quantify the accomplishment using dollars, percentages, and time.

Bringing it All Together: Writing Your Masterpiece

Your resume needs to answer the following:

1. What is your Sustainable Competitive Advantage over your competition?

2. What are your competencies?

a. What are your skills?

i. Present your functional skills: instruments, machines, processes, and/or software you have used.

ii. Provide your industry keywords, lingo, and buzzwords.

b. What is your knowledge?

i. Remember it encompasses everything: information you have gathered, understanding of cultures, languages, challenges, activities, places, ideas, and anything else you can think of that may be remotely valuable. It includes special knowledge of industries, competitive knowledge, product positioning, ability to call on your network for help, ability as a speaker, presenter, or trainer.

ii. Education and training: consider all that is relevant to the dream job you seek.

c. What is your style?

i. Consider your strengths, work style, thinking style, stamina/resilience, communication style, and management style or subordinate style (whichever is appropriate).

3. What accomplishments have you achieved that will prove that you have the right stuff for the job?

a. In answering this question, consider PAR. We are not talking about golf here but rather Problem-Action-Results. What problems have you been given or have you identified? What action did you take? What were the results? You need to quan-tify these results where possible.

4. What have you done with respect to influencing the bottom line?

a. Consider that everyone is hired in a business to do one of three things: to make money, to save money, or to do both for their employer. You need to point out what, where, and how you have done this. Again, you need to quantify these results.

5. What is your work history?

a. Dates: include month and year.
b. Employer: name and one-line description about the company or division if not well known.
c. Job Title: Make sure you use a universally recognized job title, not something obtuse such as “talent acquisition” (instead use “recruiter”).

College Degree Worth an Extra $550k

CNN Money says a college degree can still pay off big -- to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. A summary of their thoughts from a new Pew Research Center analysis:

Typical college grads earn about $650,000 more than their peers who just have a high school diploma over the course of a 40-year career.

A worker with a bachelor's degree earns about $1.4 million, on average, while a high school grad makes about $770,000.

After accounting for the time and cost of higher education, the gain is about $550,000 -- assuming one went to a four-year public university in one's home state.

Earnings, however, vary widely by major and field.

A few thoughts here:

• IMO, for the average person in the "average" field, a college education is still a good deal. That said, it's not as good as it once was.


• There are a whole lot of caveats to that first statement. Major selected and field entered are two of the biggest.


• The gap is narrowing, probably because the cost of college is getting out of control and yet incomes aren't going up as fast.


• What matters WAY MORE than whether or not you get a college degree is how you manage your career during your 40+ working years. What you do or don't do during that time can meant the difference of MILLIONS of dollars.


• If you want to make as much money as possible, you need to do it all: get a lucrative college degree (like an undergrad engineering degree or an MBA) in a lucrative industry (where pay is generally higher than other industries -- think "oil versus education") in a lucrative field (doing something your industry values -- marketing, finance, etc. -- varies by industry) and then work as hard as you can to maximize that earning potential over the course of your career.


• This isn't to say that you can't earn a high salary in almost any field. You can. It's just easier to do in some than in others.


• Someone will probably make the "a career isn't all about money" statement. This is true. There are many non-financial issues associated with working. But the "do what you love and the money will follow" is a bunch of bunk as well. IMO, do what you like is a better balance.

The whole issue of college, the value of it, and so on is in my mind a lot these days as my kids are in the first years of high school. It won't be long until they choose their paths and there's a lot to consider between now and then.

Get Your Name and Numbers Right

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Resume 101: A Student and Recent-Grad Guide to Crafting Resumes and Cover Letters that Land Jobs. Copyright © 2012 by Quentin J. Schultze, PhD. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, Berkeley, CA. While the book is targeted towards new graduates, much of the information in it is useful for anyone wanting a great resume.

Now that you know how to use a great résumé, let’s examine how to write one—starting with spelling your name correctly. No kidding. I’ve seen names misspelled because résumé writers just assumed they had typed their names correctly and never checked to make sure. I’ve done it myself on letters and emails. Hardly anything is more embarrassing on a résumé. Imagine that you’re the employer and you find that an applicant’s name is spelled differently on the résumé than in the cover letter. How would you feel about that applicant?

• Avoid chummy nicknames. “Jack” is okay for John. “Pete” is fine for Peter. But don’t use “Natster” for Nate or Nathaniel. Even if you want all of your friends and coworkers to call you “Butch” or “Sammy” (for Samantha), use your formal, given name on your résumé. My legal name is Quentin, so I always use it on résumés, applications, and business cards, even though friends call me “Quin,” “Q,” or “Dr. Q.” Informalities are great for hanging out, but not for writing résumés. Respect your formal name. Employers will respect you for using it. When you meet potential employers, you can invite them to use your nickname if it’s appropriate for a professional setting: “Glad to meet you. I’m Cynthia Smith, but please call me ‘Cindy.’”


• Use a middle initial, especially if your first and last names are relatively common. A middle initial helps to individualize your résumé as your own life story. It also says that you respect formalities and legalities. If your first and last names are extremely common (for example, James Smith or Susan Jones), you should use your full middle name. Think about it this way: What name would you use on a business card that you hope to still be using ten years from now? Think distinguished future career, not present friends. Think business card, not Facebook. Be sure to use the same full name on LinkedIn.com.


• Include other personal designations or titles only if they are necessarily distinctive or professionally important because you have used them in the past or intend to use them in the nonimmediate future. These include such designations as “Jr.,” “II,” “Hon.,” certification or credential designations, and significant educational degrees that are not always necessary in a field and thus set you apart (such as “BSN” for Bachelor of Science in Nursing). If your parent has the same first and last names as you do and they live in the area where you are applying for positions, it is essential to distinguish yourself in some way, such as by using “Jr.” or perhaps spelling out your full middle name—assuming it is different from your parent’s middle name.

Don’t overdo your name! Here’s the ultimate in mind-numbing, résumé-hyping madness:

Mr. Lawrence E. J. “Mac” MacArthur Jr. III, Esq., BS

This kind of nuttiness screams “ARROGANT!” Keep your name simple, straightforward, and appropriate rather than excessively formal.

After putting your name at the top of the résumé, list your contact information—the “numbers” interested parties will need in order to get and stay in touch with you, even if they don’t respond to your résumé immediately. You never know how long your past résumés will be floating around various offices and sitting in digital databases awaiting retrieval. Therefore, you need to specify where you’ll be and how you can be tracked down in both the near and not-so-immediate future.

This is especially important in seasonal hiring and in economically sensitive careers. For instance, if a teacher leaves midyear, a school principal or superintendent will review on-file résumés in the hope of making a fairly quick hiring decision. In advertising, jobs tend to come and go with the economy. Similarly, sales opportunities can rise and fall with the fortunes of particular companies and product lines. My point is that employers often maintain files of possible candidate résumés to review as needed. This is why it’s essential to include long-term as well as short-term contact information on your résumé.

In most cases you’ll need to submit your résumé along with a cover letter (more on this later) explaining how you heard about the position and why you’re the ideal candidate for it. Even though you include contact information in the letter, you should add it to your résumé as well. Cover letters and résumés sometimes get separated in offices and on computers. If you decide to use a header with your name on the top of a two-page résumé, don’t include the header on the first page (just like for page numbers).

If you’re currently a student, chances are you don’t know for certain where you’ll be living, let alone working, in a year or two. So you have two options: (1) Create semipermanent contact information, such as a longer-term email address, phone number, and postal address (usually a stable relative’s location), or (2) create a new kind of résumé to self-destruct in both paper and digital formats, leaving no trace of your existence. While the second option might be great if you’re trying to replace the latest James Bond actor, the first option is more realistic. And it’s simple to accomplish: Use your parents’, mature siblings’, or in-laws’ postal address, a Web-based email address (for example, a “Gmail” account) that you check daily or that forwards to your changing work or school email accounts, and, if possible, telephone and fax numbers that will be maintained longer by professional-sounding friends or family-related businesses.

Be sure to avoid the following kinds of email addresses:

• Nonprofessional-sounding ones (for example, “coolstud@” and “hotchick@”)


• Cryptic, anonymous ones (for example, “17648he” and “sJgB2O”)


• Confusing zero with the letter O (for example, “JamesO” vs. “James0”) and vice versa

Here are some additional problems to avoid:

• PO boxes or private rental boxes that suggest impermanency


• International postal addresses that might not be reliable or might have excessively slow delivery (most military addresses with domestic addresses are exceptions)


• Incomplete phone numbers (such as numbers that lack area codes, direct office extensions, or full international dialing codes)


• Fax numbers that require someone to call ahead to ask the fax operator to turn on the fax machine (unprofessional)


• Phone numbers that lead to silly or inappropriate voice-mail messages (“I’m not here right now because I’m out partying….”)


• Business phone numbers or email addresses for places where you currently work—unless you have the permission of your current employer(s)

Consider including the following in your résumé:

• A phonetic spelling of your last name if it isn’t easy to pronounce correctly. I include this on my résumé and website: “The ‘e’ in ‘Schultze’ is silent.” This puts at ease those who have to call me on the phone or introduce me to others. I, too, feel awkward phoning someone who has a last name I’m unsure about pronouncing correctly.


• A more permanent, dedicated fax number from one of the online services that provides a fax-only phone number (these businesses convert the incoming fax to a computer image file—usually a PDF—and immediately send it to your email address as an attachment) so that you don’t need to have a landline phone in order to receive a fax. Fax machines are an old-fashioned technology in the age of computer scanning and email attachments, but some businesses and nonprofit organizations still use them extensively. By the way, some of the online fax services will also provide a voice-mail option for the fax telephone number they issue you. That might be a fitting option if you would like to provide a super-professional-sounding voice-mail message just for that one, dedicated phone line.

“Sells” Your Potential: Skills, Knowledge, and Personal Traits

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Resume 101: A Student and Recent-Grad Guide to Crafting Resumes and Cover Letters that Land Jobs. Copyright © 2012 by Quentin J. Schultze, PhD. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, Berkeley, CA. While the book is targeted towards new graduates, much of the information in it is useful for anyone wanting a great resume.

A great résumé “sells” your potential, based on your past experiences and achievements. Remember that employers usually have to consider the likely future benefits of hiring you over any other applicant. What’s in it for them if they hire you over someone else? Your résumé gives you a chance to leverage your life experiences, to highlight what you can contribute to an organization’s (and your supervisor’s) success. Employers who review your résumé are looking for the kind of person who will make them look good. They care about the whole you, not just about one or another skill you may possess. If they don’t, you might not want to work for them anyway. Their company is probably not the kind of place that will help you transform a job into a career.

The secret behind every great career seeker’s résumé is relevant persuasiveness. Both knowing what to include in a résumé and how to express it are critically important. Your job is to include those entries that will highlight three relevant things about you. These are what I call the “big three.” Memorize them now. If you need a memory aid, try “SKiT.” These are your “lines” for your own résumé skit:

1. Your skills (what you can do)

2. Your knowledge (what you know)

3. Your traits (your personality, the kind of person you are)

Throughout this book I’ll show you how to develop a terrific résumé based on these three foundational elements. For now, remember that skills, knowledge, and traits are distinct, though related. Avoid thinking only in terms of the first category, skills. A dozen job applicants might have the same skills, but only one of them might know why and when to use a given skill—the latter person’s knowledge is a critical advantage. Moreover, perhaps only one applicant possesses the right traits to apply the skills and knowledge while working with particular kinds of people in a specific type of organization. Combined with even basic skills or knowledge, personal traits can be especially relevant and particularly persuasive.

The big three aspects of your life story—your skills, knowledge, and traits—are the keys to transforming your life experience into a standout, interview-generating, career-opening résumé. Why? Because every employee is a person, not just a worker. And because employers seek employees who have the right combinations of skill, knowledge, and personality. Employers ask themselves: “What can this person do for us?” “What does he or she know?” “Is this the type of person we want to work with—or who will interact well with our clients or customers?” “Does this applicant offer life knowledge and a winning -attitude—not just the desired skills?”

While I’m writing this book, one of my closest mentors is trying to decide what to do about two of her highly skilled but hopelessly critical employees. She’s been dealing with these two naysayers for over a year. They’re continuously bad--mouthing colleagues, gossiping about office politics, and challenging their supervisors’ decisions. Yet they are really talented at -working with customers. Yesterday my mentor became my mentee; she asked me for advice about what to do with these two misguided employees, even though I know very little about her business and even less about the skills required for doing the work well. I do, however, have experience working with people with all kinds of personality traits. My advice? Kindly show those two employees the door so that they can apply their skills and employ their vast store of knowledge in the right kind of setting. Help them find a more fitting career position. Then everyone will be happier. Square pegs can never be retrofitted for round holes.

Both the organization and the two employees are being poorly served by the current matchup. The employees gossip about colleagues and undermine the company because they’re unhappy, frustrated, and stressed out. They feel as though they have to make others look bad so they can look good—even though they’re remarkably talented. They would probably flourish in a setting with less stress and less emphasis on teamwork. Well, that was my advice about these troubled and troubling employees—again, even though I wasn’t qualified to address their career-specific skills and knowledge.

Most organizations today recognize that the big three are all critically important in the interviewing, hiring, and employee-review processes. Résumé writers who persuasively address all three stand a much greater chance of being taken seriously as viable candidates. We all serve others with our whole selves, not just with our skills or our knowledge or our traits.

All else being equal, these three keys, when matched with the right organization, will open the door for interviews. There are simply too many “equals” out there for you to ignore the reality of “whole person” (holistic) hiring. Imagine all of the college students who have similar degrees from similar schools, where they have lived in similar dorms, sipped similar types of coffee in order to stay awake in similar classes, earned credit for similar internships, joined similar student organizations, and achieved similar grades. As a career seeker, whether or not you’re a college student, you need to set yourself apart from the “similar” pack with an outstanding, personal, life experience–based résumé. You need to persuade via your knowledge and traits as well as your skills.

In some situations, knowing how to gain skills is more important than already possessing specific skills. Why? Because organizations occasionally assume that it will take more time and effort to retrain a new employee than to train them from scratch in particular ways to use those skills. For years, I helped former students shift from newspaper advertising copywriting to broadcast media copywriting. It was almost always the same issue for radio and TV media: could someone trained in print writing also write for the TV “eye” or for the radio “ear” (the “theater of the mind”)? Some accomplished newspaper writers could make the shift. Others never could.

Then the Internet came along and created some wonderfully mind-expanding, skill-transferring, career-building opportunities for people from all of these media (including skilled writers who were also closet “techies” with a love for computer programming).

A skill is never just one skill. It never has been. Economies and jobs change. Skilled people adapt. Wise employers know which skill sets to look for that might transfer well to emerging positions in new types of work. Skills morph.

But one essential skill in almost all of work and life is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes—to see reality through another person’s eyes, to become skilled at one specific character trait: empathy. In fact, writing a career-launching or career-changing résumé is partly an act of empathizing with potential employers. From the very top of the résumé, the very first line, you need to demonstrate your ability and desire to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will be receiving your résumé. So it’s important to know who those people might be, from those helping you with networking to potential employers.

Don't Waste Space on Your Resume

US News tells how to enhance your resume and in doing so gives some great advice (IMO) about wasting space on your resume. Their thoughts:

Axe the objective and reference sections. The simple act of submitting your resume makes your objective very clear: You want the job. Resumes should be kept as concise as possible, and writing an objective wastes prime real estate on the page. If you do feel like stating an objective, save it for your cover letter.

The same is true when you end the page with "References available upon request." Yes, let's hope they are. It's much more helpful to bring along a separate page with references and contact information already listed, so that in the case your interview goes well, you can provide it on the spot.

A few thoughts from me:

• Can't agree more.


• Your resume is a selling document (selling you and your skills in hopes that you'll get an interview). Any space that does not help sell is wasted.


• An objective does not sell. It tells what YOU want to do. As an employer, I don't really care (that much) about what you want to do, I want to know if you can do the job I have. Even worse, it takes up the most valuable selling space you have -- the very first part of the resume! If the average resume gets 30 seconds or so of review, do you really want 10 seconds of that wasted on a non-selling statement?


• You do not want to say anything that's already generally accepted. It wastes space and makes you look silly (which, in case you were wondering, is not a good thing when you're looking for a job.) As US News says, the objective statement (which is already understood -- you want the job) and reference statement (for course you'll provide references when they are requested) both waste space. Hence, they do not belong on your resume.


• Personally, I don't bring a list of references with me to an interview and have never had a problem because of this -- no one expects you to have them. You usually get reference requests well after the interview anyway, like when you have been home a few days after the meeting.

Anything I missed? Anyone disagree with my thoughts?

How to Handle a Bad Job Reference

US News lists five steps that you can take to combat a bad job reference as follows:

1. Call your former boss and ask if you can reach an agreement about what she'll say to future reference calls.

2. If the reference is factually inaccurate, skip your former boss and go straight to your old company's Human Resources department.

3. If steps 1 and 2 fail, warn prospective employers that this reference won't be a good one.

4. Consider offering up counter points of view.

5. If you're not sure what kind of reference someone is giving you, consider finding out by having someone call on your behalf.

Here are my thoughts on this issue:

• You shouldn't ask just anyone to be a reference for you. You should contact people and ask them if they can give you a GOOD reference. See the difference? Don't ask them to simply give you a reference (any old reference) but be sure they can make it a good one. If they say they can't, move on to the next person. If they can, then you're set.


• That said, it doesn't hurt to check up on them anyway. Have a friend call and pose as a potential hiring manager and see what your references say. Eliminate the ones you think don't quite perform to your expectations.


• Be sure to give your references some guidelines on what you want them to say. Tell them what you've shared with the potential employer as well as what the employer is looking for. You can also suggest some things they can highlight from your past work interaction with them.


• I'm not sure how anyone ever gets into a situation where they have a bad reference. Perhaps it's because the potential employer insists on talking to a former employer and that relationship didn't end so well? If I was forced to give the information of a former employer and I knew it wasn't going to go well, I'd level with the new employer upfront -- as US News suggests.


• I've never had to offer up a reference I thought was bad. Often employers will take anyone you've worked with -- not just bosses but co-workers, vendors, agencies you've dealt with, and so on. If there isn't at least a small set of good references for you among these large groups of people, you probably have more problems than just finding a good reference.

Anyone ever been forced into a situation where you had to give a reference you thought would be less than stellar? What did you do?

Five Secrets of a Rewarding Career

US News lists the five secrets of a rewarding career as follows:

1. It's better to take home less money, and enjoy what you're doing, than hate your job and live for the weekend.

2. Don't be afraid to move around and try different jobs.

3. Make the best of a bad situation.

4. No matter how brilliant you are, you need interpersonal skills.

5. Everyone needs some autonomy and the ability to direct their own work load.

Here's my take on these:

1. I call this "doing what you like." very few people can make a decent living doing what they love. For instance, I love sleeping in late, watching old movies, and playing video games, but those don't pay much. Instead I do what I like and generally enjoy (work in business) and am also able to make a good salary.

2. I have moved around a bit in my career as follows:

• Company #1 -- lasted 2 years in the same job
• Company #2 -- lasted 5 years in five different jobs
• Company #3 -- lasted 5 years in three different jobs
• Company #4 -- lasted 5 years in two different jobs
• Company #5 -- so far has lasted 8 years in the same job (and it's my favorite so far!)

That said, all of my jobs were in the same area of business so they were fairly similar. The differences were in the fact that they were with a variety of products and in different business situations.

3. Twice I've had a job that I HATED. And I mean REALLY, REALLY HATED. In each case I suffered through until I found a suitable replacement. I did NOT quit my job before I had another one since it could have derailed my most valuable asset.

4. Everyone has seen the guy who is a great performer but has no people skills and thus he gets nowhere in his career. Why? Because he has no interpersonal skills and people don't like him -- and being likeable is as important to career success as performance is.

5. Said another way, no one likes someone else breathing over their shoulders every day and telling them what to do every minute.

IMO, this is a pretty good list. What's your take on it?

Thoughts from a Human Resource VP on Education and Experience

I had lunch with a friend recently. He's the vice president of Human Resources for a 300-store retail chain and responsible for hiring hundreds of workers each year at various levels within the organization.

We hadn't seen each other in a couple of years, so as we were getting caught up, he told me about his daughter. She was in college but had been offered a full-time job in her chosen field (though she is only one year into her schooling.) As we discussed what she was going to do, he made two comments that we've touched on here at FMF that I thought were worthwhile sharing with you all. They were:

• Experience trumps education in almost every case. He said that in today's work environment his company would always hire experience over education. He wasn't saying that education was unnecessary, but that it's generally over-rated, and he'll take someone who's "been there and done that" over someone with a better level of education but with little to no experience. For related FMF thoughts on this topic, see Experience or Education: Which One Is More Valuable?


• Where you go to college is less important than the individual (the skills, abilities, drive, determination, etc. of the person.) He would much rather hire a go-getter from po-dunk college than a tentative Harvard grad. This is almost exactly what was said in my post titled The Student Makes the Difference, Not the College.

Obviously these comments come from his perspective, his company's goals, etc. and are not absolutes for everyone (or perhaps even most people.) And there are a whole bundle of associated issues (such as the fact that college is not just about education but also about "growing up" for some kids) with each of these comments. However just to hear an HR professional say these things blew me away. They are so contrary to much of what has been accepted as "conventional wisdom" for so many years that I was taken aback a bit. Not that I disagree with what he said, I just didn't expect him to be saying it.

He also told me that he knew of four or five families who had taken money they saved for college and instead of sending their kids to school, they purchased businesses for them (I think he said they were all franchises, but I can't be sure.) He said that the children were running them (with supervision) and all were doing quite well financially (he said they were making $100k to $125k per year, but that seems very high to me.)

Anyway, I thought that was an interesting alternative to the traditional route of sending your kids to college.

Eight Signs You Should Look for a New Job

US News lists eight signs you should look for a new job as follows:

1. Your company or division is struggling financially.

2. You notice that you're getting a lot more feedback in writing.

3. You've been miserable, angry, or bitter for months.

4. It feels like your boss is always hassling you about something.

5. Your aspirations for your job don't match up with the reality.

6. You imply that you're looking at other jobs and your boss doesn't seem to care.

7. Your boss shows no interest in your problems.

8. Your boss tells you.

My take on these:

1. A company in trouble can be a potential upside (if you help turn it around you could win big) but is also risky. It's especially risky if people start to get let go.

2. ANYTIME there's negative feedback in writing, it's a HUGE sign that things are not going right. I had this happen to me one time early in my career by a woman a couple levels up who just didn't like me (and who became my boss when the people between us left). I saw the handwriting on the wall and left the company. I've also had to give negative feedback in writing a couple times as an employer. The company was creating a paper trail to show we had problems for some time before firing someone. Luckily, the employees wisely left before it got to that point.

3. I've had jobs two times were I wasn't happy and knew I had to leave, but it took me a couple years to find a suitable replacement. Boy were those long years.

4. In my last job, my boss was hassling me about something all the time. Then again, he hassled everyone. I think that's why the board hired him -- he was a professional hassler. Three years after he arrived, only one of his direct reports was still at the company.

5. I'm not sure aspirations ever match up with reality. Maybe it's better to say "reality is nowhere near what you hoped the job would be."

6-8. All of these are basically the same to me in that your boss is telling you (in one way for another) that you're on your way out or on your way down. I've seen this happen time and time again to people across many organizations and once it starts, it's almost impossible to reverse course. It's almost always the right move in these cases to start looking for a different job asap.

Anyone ever personally experience or see any of these happen in your work environment? How did you handle it?

Five Professional Habits to Adopt

Ask Men lists five professional habits to adopt as follows:

• Create and follow daily task lists
• Show up 10 minutes early
• Read one industry article a week
• Keep your desktop organized
• Organize your e-mail daily

Here's my take on these:

• Early in my career I worked for a Fortune 500 company (a company that was in the top 30 or so, really). They sent me to a Day Planner class which taught me the value of creating and tracking daily, weekly, and annual goals. I was already an organized person and took to the system to a fish takes to water. I made and followed paper lists for years (and my career and personal life benefitted because of it) until I eventually went electronic with an early version of the Palm Pilot. I now keep and follow lists for various tasks on my smartphone. Of any single discipline, this one has probably accounted for more of my success than any other.


• I am almost always early or on time. I hate being late. I'd rather arrive early and wait than be late (and since I always have my phone with me, I can always make "down time" waiting into productive time.) My watch is set three minutes early for a reason -- so I'm always a bit early and no one ever has to wait on me. I think others appreciate this, especially those who I have reported to over the years.


• I like the "read one article per week" idea because it's specific but easily achievable. I don't read many industry articles these days, but I do read articles on my area of expertise (marketing.) I am also a regular audio book and podcast listener, making my drive times into productive times.


• I have NEVER had an organized desk. And personally I see no correlation between a desk and the person's success. I have seen stars with clean desks and stars with messy desks. And I've seen bums with clean desks and bums with messy desks.


• I organize my email weekly, not daily. There's too much variation and email to deal with in any given day, so on Friday's I do a review of the week and plan for the next week -- part of which is a cleanup of that week's emails. Of course I respond to anything more urgent during the week as needed.

How about you? Do any of these tips stand out to you? Or perhaps you have your own that have worked for you?

Did You Get a Bonus Last Year?

Now that 2011 is completely over and businesses/organizations all across the country have had the chance to close their books on the year (assuming that their fiscal years match the calendar year), I wanted to ask you all:

Did you get a bonus from work for your efforts last year? And if so, what did you do with it?

I received a bonus and did two things with it:

1. Part of it went to pay for part of our January cruise (the rest of the cruise was already paid for through savings.)

2. Saved/invested the rest of it.

How about you? Did you happen to get a bonus (or do you expect to get one) and what did (will) you do with it?

Four Steps to a Resume that Gets Noticed

How would you like resume advice from someone who actually reviews resumes as part of their job? Well, look no further because that's exactly what I have for you today.

On my post titled Five Commonly Asked Resume Questions, a reader left this comment:

I haven't prepared a resume in almost 20 years, but I receive several every week. The ones that I pause to look at are those that:

1) are very relevant to what we do and what we are looking for

2) are clear and concise, not filled with puffery

3) are well formatted and presented 

4) ones that were referred to me by a colleague

Good advice, huh?

Here are my comments on these:

• Of course you have to have experience relevant for the job. Otherwise, they aren't going to look at you twice. And why should they? (and for that matter, why would you even want the job -- you would likely fail at it?)


• What's "clear and concise": accomplishments, backed up with numbers/facts, in a bullet-point format (starting with action words).


• What's "puffery": All sorts of stuff that doesn't make a case for why you should be hired. For example: that you were on the chess team in high school, that you hold the city record in the 5k run, and that you're actively involved in your church and the Boy Scouts. I'd also lump "objective statements" in this group, but I know others would disagree.


• In addition to having good content, your resume needs to look good and have a logical flow -- like it comes from an organized, competent mind.


• Yes, we all know the power of networking, and here it is in item #4. Let's face it, a resume that's handed to a hiring manager from a co-worker, friend, etc. has a MUCH better chance of being looked at and, as a result, a much better chance of getting you an interview. Hence the importance of having a strong and growing network.

Anyone have anything else to add to this list?

How to Get a Promotion

US News lists four ways to get a promotion in 2012, but it's the first option that is the most important IMO. It reads:

Focus on achievements. No one gets a promotion without being valuable to a company, and the best way to show your value is by focusing on your achievements. Rather than describing your day-to-day duties, focus on things you accomplished at your current position, namely, specific results.

Using numbers is a great strategy. For example, "increased profits by 40 percent" or "doubled sales in the first quarter" give tangible, measurable amounts of value you provided your company. When talking to your manager about a promotion, make sure to convey your value in the form of your achievements.

Here's my take:

• If you want to grow your career, you need to do more than what your job requires. If your job requires you to grow sales by 3%, you need to grow it more than 3% (the more the better). If your job requires you to make 30 widgets a day, you need to make more than 30 widgets a day. And so on.


• How do you know what your job requires? You ask your boss. Then you write it down and give it to him to verify that you understand correctly.


• Then you perform. And you keep track of your accomplishments as noted above.


• Some time later, you go back to your boss, show him the required tasks you agreed upon, then show him how you over-delivered on each of these. At this point, you're well-positioned to have a conversation on how you should get a raise and/or a promotion.

And if he won't give you what you'd like, you can always cash these accomplishments in by moving to a company that will. Believe me, organizations want to hire performers and if you can demonstrate that you've down much more than required, you'll be a hot commodity.