Promote Yourself (4 page)

 

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We will work with our friends.
Millennials want work to feel more like home, and we're more likely than workers of previous generations to choose a job just to be with our friends. This is why so many of us start businesses and choose our friends as business partners. We see the lines between personal and professional blended and feel that it's easier to bring our social life with us to work that way.

 

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We will build a collaborative organization.
Millennials are big on collaboration. And if we're going to have a more collaborative workplace, the actual physical structure of the workplace has to be redesigned (individual cubicles, for example, are quite isolating). So instead of traditional office space, we will have social spaces customized to our own needs. Two examples of this are Unilever's Hamburg office and Microsoft's office in Amsterdam, where employees don't have permanent desks and are encouraged to move around and find the place they can be most productive.
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In the workplace of the not too distant future, you'll see offices designed without cubicles, more extensive use of open spaces and round tables, virtual offices, and more companies using coworking spaces instead of enormous corporate buildings with thousands of employees in them. Technology will be a major part of how employees collaborate and we're seeing this already through internal social networks and social media tools that allow for blogs, forum posts, video, and so forth. The goal in all of this is to facilitate employee-to-employee communication and interaction.

 

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We will have a positive influence over older generations.
Actually, this is already happening. For example, we were the first to adopt social networking. Older generations came on board later often because they wanted either to keep in touch with or spy on their children. Since Millennials are so different from previous generations in how they act, behave, make purchasing decisions, and see the world, they will start to change the perceptions and behavior of their elders (74 percent of Millennials already believe that they influence the purchase decisions of their peers and those in other generations).
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“We can actually see Gen X changing their perception of brands and what they expect of products and services and experiences because Millennials are raising the bar for everybody and that plays out in the workforce,” says Ross Martin, Executive Vice President at MTV Scratch at MTV Networks. Part of the issue is that Gen Yers don't just want to be marketed to, they want to be part of the branding and product creation process and engaged with online.

Gen Y's influence extends to the offline world as well. Traditional retailers such as Macy's have begun to offer completely new fashion brands—and are even redesigning their brick-and-mortar stores—to make them more attractive to younger shoppers. And in the workplace, younger workers are reverse mentoring Boomers, making them more tech-savvy, and helping them better use technology to do their jobs.

 

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We'll give corporate America a better reputation.
In many circles, corporate America is still seen as impersonal, out of touch, and driven by the bottom line. But 92 percent of Millennials believe that business should be measured by more than just profit and should focus on a societal purpose.
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Millennials are all about giving back to communities, making a positive difference in the world, and we're known to place meaning over money when it comes to making decisions about where to work. In this way, we're going to have a positive influence on the way business is done, support global charities and nonprofits, and paint a better picture of corporate America in the future.

 

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We will change the way workers are promoted.
Promotions typically come after a certain length of time on the job. But Millennials want faster promotions and often aren't willing to wait years to get to the next level at a company. We believe that promotions should be more aligned to accomplishments and results instead of based on age and years of experience. Traditionally, promotions tend to happen at the beginning of a company's fiscal or calendar year. But as our influence grows, promotions will happen anytime they're deserved. The key word here is
deserved.
You're still going to have to work hard and produce results to constantly add value to your team and your company.

By understanding the impact your generation will have on the workforce in the years to come, you can better prepare for it now and become a leader at your company. This will help you get noticed at work, make people interested in your ideas, and even give you more confidence.

Sounds pretty great, doesn't it? The future is bright and the future is you!

 

2

Hard Skills: Be More Than Your Job Description

 

In today's knowledge-based economy, what you earn depends on what you learn.

—
BILL
CLINTON

 

Stay Current to Stay Employable

As we've discussed, one thing that's certain in any organization is that change is constant—companies get sold, management teams get fired, job functions get outsourced or automated, and any number of other things could happen that are equally unexpected and beyond your control. People who adapt, survive; people who don't, don't. If you don't do everything you can to keep up with the way the world is changing, you'll soon find yourself irrelevant—and out of a job. Remember Blockbuster? They had a huge market share of the video rental business, but they didn't keep up with the growing demand to have videos delivered right to your house. But Netflix did, and they snapped up most of Blockbuster's market share. Now Netflix has to compete with the nearly endless supply of free media streamed by companies like Hulu and YouTube. Charles Darwin captured this idea perfectly when he said, “It is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Makes sense, doesn't it? A graphic designer trained in HTML, Flash, and the 2002 version of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator—but who hasn't kept up with innovations—won't be nearly as valuable as someone right out of school who has mastered the latest and greatest design software. And it's always cheaper to hire a young person who has current skills than to keep an older person whose skills aren't as up to date. Something to keep in mind, since at some point you're going to be one of those older workers and your job may be threatened by someone who's still in diapers today but who, in a few years, will be the master of skills that haven't even been invented yet.

Ultimately, you're the one who decides which skills to master and how you spend your time; the more time you invest in learning skills that are in high demand, the more valuable you become. When you master the right hard skills that relate to your profession and industry, people will notice your talents and ask you to work on projects with them. You'll become the go-to employee. But none of that is going to happen unless you're persistent in letting people know what it is you can do and where you can make the biggest contribution to your company (this is so important that I've devoted an entire chapter to self-promotion). All that added attention will earn you more respect from the people you work with, and more confidence—along with even more visibility and important projects—from the people you work for.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that by 2015, 60 percent of new jobs will require skills that only 20 percent of the population currently has. So how do you know which skills you'll need in the future? Hard to say exactly, but there are some current trends that will give you some basic direction:

THE SKILLS GAP.
   Despite some of the highest unemployment rates in fifty years, there are currently three million job openings in this country.
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In fact, a recent survey by the ManpowerGroup found that 52 percent of U.S. companies have trouble filling jobs. The most difficult jobs to fill? College-level positions in engineering, accounting and finance, and IT. According to Manpower, the biggest problem is that too many applicants lack the hard skills they need to do the job. Clearly we need more college grads in this country, but the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce projects that demand for college-educated workers will outpace supply in the U.S. by over 300,000 per year. So who's going to fill those jobs? Workers in India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, and Asia, where engineers are valued as much as doctors and where young people are flocking to acquire the skills needed to work in the new economy. To give you a sense of how important engineers are these days, in September 2009, when unemployment was nearly 10 percent—its highest level in decades—the rate for engineers was 6.4 percent.
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And as I write this, the nationwide unemployment rate is over 7 percent—but for engineers, it's under 2 percent.
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GLOBALIZATION.
   Remember the 300,000-jobs-per-year gap I mentioned just a second ago—all those jobs that are going overseas. The news only gets worse. According to Knight Frank Research, and Citi Private Bank's Wealth Report, by 2050, India will bump China out of the number one spot on the list of the world's biggest economies. By then, the U.S. will have been out of first place for thirty years.

AUTOMATION.
   All around the world and in every industry, machines are doing jobs that used to be done by people. Just think of the self-checkout lines at stores where you scan your own items, run your own credit card, and bag your stuff. That used to be someone's job, and this gets us to one of the main points of this chapter: It's not enough to simply adapt to change. You need to find a way to become invaluable, a way to ensure that you're doing things that can't be automated. That means keeping up with trends and everything else that could affect the job you're in and the one you'd like to be in. It means making yourself an expert today but always learning new skills that will make you an expert tomorrow. In some cases, you might have to change jobs—it's hard to predict which of today's seemingly essential skills will be completely unnecessary tomorrow.

AVERAGE IS OVER.
   Here's a great quote from
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman: “In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won't earn you what it used to. It can't when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius.” Being average won't get you noticed. It doesn't matter what field you're in. As I said above, you need to find a way to make a unique contribution, add value, and stand out. That's the only way to survive.

*   *   *

T
he days of working at a company for twenty years with no worries about job security and retiring with a nice pension are long gone. And so is loyalty to one's employer. Today, the trend is toward collaborative environments and hiring people who can work independently.

The message here is pretty simple: The skills you have right now might not be relevant tomorrow. So you'd better get trained for the skills you need while enhancing the ones you already have. Justin Orkin, a sales executive at AOL's
Advertising.com
, put it beautifully: “I read a lot of blogs, have weekly meetings with our team,” he says. “I'm also a council member of the advertising board. You have to do lots of reading and listening to stay fresh and current. The past is great, but everyone wants to know about the future. The future is today.”

So are you up for the task? I know that this may sound a little daunting, but the truth is that if you're willing to put in the work, you will be able to find a job in the new economy. And you will be able to keep that job from being outsourced. Of course, whether you decide to do this or not is up to you, but I can guarantee you that it's far better to be seen as someone who is actively contributing and managing their career than someone who is just sitting back and praying for something to happen. By acquiring all the necessary skills and using them to make meaningful contributions, you can't help but get ahead in your career. Management won't promote you until you promote yourself first—by acquiring the right skills and marketing them. You need to give them a reason to pay attention to you. And you'll do that by making yourself so good that they can't avoid you. Remember, the people higher up in the org chart than you are looking for all-stars like you, people whose skills can help push the company forward (and advance the manager's career in the process).

 

The Indispensable Employee: Hard Skills

Hard skills are the practical, technical skills you need to fulfill your job description; they're about getting the job done. Without them, you'd never be able to get an interview, let alone an actual job. Hard skills are measurable—how many lines of code can you write in a week? How good are you at Excel? How fast can you type? And you'll be able to use them in a variety of positions and companies. For example, if you're in accounting, generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) will apply whether you're in a bank or a bakery. Because hard skills are easy to quantify, it's often possible to earn certificates and awards for acquiring them.

Here's a quick list of hard skills, quite a few of which are technology-related, but as technology changes, so will the hard skills required. A lot of the skills that are absolutely essential to running today's businesses (coding, Web site design, and social media just to name a few) didn't exist ten years ago. And ten years from now, there will be a huge demand for people with skills no one has ever heard of today. I partnered with
oDesk.com
on a study that found that 94 percent of freelancers believe that learning new skills throughout your career is either very or extremely important. As we go through this chapter, be aware that learning hard skills isn't something you do only once. Keeping your skills current is an ongoing process.