Career Space E-zine

I have been doing a lot of reading lately on career development and career searches and I’ve found a few interesting titles of note. For those that peruse the resume and career development section at your local bookstore you might be overlooking some gems that are hiding in the business section. Here are a few:

• U R a Brand: How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, by Catherine Kaputa (Davies-Black Publishing, 2005) - This piece details how to create a notable brand for yourself and use it as a marketing tool for career development, job search and networking opportunities. It gives the reader some prescribed strategies to realize what is unique about themselves and how to utilize this in their careers. There are some useful ideas here, in particular how to network and get yourself noticed. It does touch on how to use your resume as a strategic marketing tool but I would have preferred to see some more concrete examples of before and after resume revisions as opposed to the brief descriptives offered. I was happy to discover that our local library has this available online as an ebook.
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio, Penguin Books 2006) - While this text aims to be a lively description of how business has changed due to new distruptive technologies (and it does succeed in this goal) it also serves as a good survey of how careers and employment opportunities have changed in reaction to mass collaboration innovations. There have been notable shifts in employment in industries and this is due in part to the adaption of new technologies and the restructuring of companies in reponse of the adaptation thereof. Perceptions of employment have also changed and the number of free agents are on the rise. There are more instances of freelancing and individual doing consulting. One cited example is the website InnoCentive which solicites freelance scientists to create solutions for problems and offers a set fee for a solution used. I mostly appreciated the concrete examples of where collaboration has created cultural changes within businesses. This one is definitely worth a read.
• The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, by Michael Watkins (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) - This text provides a very readable description about the initial period as one progresses into a new leadership role in business. In particular I liked the first chapter “Promote Yourself” in which it effectively gives advice on breaking your old habits (from your previous role) so that you can succeed in your new position. The most difficult issue in this situation is the adjustment to a new “culture” which more often than not determines if you are a good “fit” for your company. This title is also available as an ebook.

Question: Has anyone else read any other books or articles that are useful for career development?

Last night I attended a meeting of the HTCE (High Tech Communicators Exchange) with a presentation by Tim Bramwell called “Changing the Mindset: What You Need to Know About Marketing Intelligence To Give You a Competitive Edge.” From the HTCE website:

“About the Speaker: Tim Bramwell is a professional business and market intelligence consultant with a significant record of achievement gained from a 20+ year successful sales, operations and senior management expertise gained over a career spanning Microsoft Corp., Ericsson Canada, AT&T Canada and building his own companies. Tim has been a member of, and has led, sales and marketing delivery teams promoting a variety of technology, consumer and business-to-business products and services.”

I’ve been asking myself the questions lately: how does an organization create innovation and maintain it? How does it lead the way? The key is to go beyond marketing research, which is at times too narrow in scope and is time sensitive to that of marketing intelligence which can predict the behavioural triggers in the marketplace.

Some of the “nuggets” I took away from the talk:

• 30-80% of the an organizations inner workings and communications exist in the heads of the employees.
• email was never intended to be used for complex communications - it was never structured that way and stays contained within the email account.
• Marketing research and focus groups are not broad enough, they are time sensitive and aren’t necessarily adequate predictors of behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
• Marketing Intelligence is a set of tools used to create actionable items.
• Good places to gather intel is at trade shows as well as with vendors and suppliers of your competitors.
• Your own company’s salespeople and customer support are a good source of marketing intelligence.
• There are technology platforms that can gather and scrape data from websites using filters for specific information. Some of the information can be gathered from websites, weblogs and podcasts.
• The big question is “what do you do with the data once you have gathered it?”