Promote Yourself (6 page)

What a powerful example of the need to make absolutely sure that your managers and coworkers know about your skills.

 

Acquiring Hard Skills

As I mentioned earlier, the goal of developing hard skills is to become a subject matter expert and proficient at specific functions that relate to your job. The best way to identify the skill or skills to focus on first is to sit down with your manager and ask which are important for your profession and which you'll need to have if you want to move up. (If you want to dig a little deeper, ask the same questions of an industry mentor or a colleague with more experience than you.) Make sure your manager helps you list them in order of importance. Then, select the skills that you want to develop and become an expert at. Ideally, you'll start with one or two that in some way play to your strengths, the ones that will allow you to distinguish yourself relative to others in your company and your industry. When you're doing something you're already pretty good at, it's natural to want to spend more time doing it. As a result, you'll get better even faster. If the top skills on your list don't play to your strengths, go down the list until you reach one that does. This doesn't mean that you should ignore all the skills that don't utilize your strengths. Not at all. I'm just saying that it's a lot easier to become an expert at one thing at a time. That said, there is often overlap between skills, so working on more than one at a time—as long as they complement each other—is fine. Ultimately, anything you do and any skill you develop will help you get ahead faster. It's just a question of getting the most bang for your buck. If you try to do too much you'll spread yourself too thin and might get distracted and not get anywhere.

There are many different ways to acquire hard skills, but for the most part they all fall into one of two broad categories: skills you learn through your company and skills you learn on your own. Let's look at each of these in detail.

 

Company-Sponsored Education

Smart companies have learned that in order to attract and retain young people, they have to provide opportunities for advancement. Otherwise, young workers are going to move on to an employer that values them more. Many large companies offer in-house courses—sometimes with instructors in the room, sometimes via webinar or some other technology. Sonie Guseh, an Account Manager at Google, takes advantage of every learning opportunity the company offers. “Workshops, webinars, and conferences are some of my favorite ways to continue to be knowledgeable about new innovations, creative best practices, and develop new skills that are relevant for current and future roles,” says Sonie. “Some of my favorites have been on developing leadership skills and on understanding the ever-changing face of media consumption.”

Other companies offer online training courses that can be taken onsite or remotely. Some employers will pay for you to take courses someplace else, say at a local college or an online university. And just about all companies will pay for you to attend professional conferences or specialized events as long as you're going to learn something that will benefit them. But you'll never know any of this unless you ask about it.

When David Roman, a Business Systems Analyst with American Express, asked he got an enthusiastic thumbs-up. David was preparing to take the PMP (project management professional) exam, and Amex paid for him to take two week-long classes to develop his project management skills. “They also allowed me to rearrange my work schedule because the classes were only taught during the day,” he adds.

Unfortunately, it's not always easy—especially if you're a relatively new employee—to find out about the kinds of company-sponsored education and training that may be available. So your first step will be to tap into your network—your manger and coworkers—to find out what they're doing to stay relevant and what they suggest that you do. They'll undoubtedly give you some great advice on opportunities that shouldn't be missed and some that you shouldn't bother with.

But don't forget about your HR department, which can be your most powerful resource. Most people have contact with HR during the hiring and orientation process, but once they're on board, they never come back. Big mistake. One of HR's primary roles is to develop talent within the company, and they'll have a good handle on in-house and outside training that would be appropriate for someone in your position.

And if your company has an active intranet, that's probably the first resource HR will suggest that you look into. In case you haven't heard of an intranet, it's a proprietary computer network that shares information among employees of a particular company internally. If you don't work for the company that owns it, you can't access it. Every company's intranet has different types of content. Some have little more than their corporate newsletter. Others may offer online, in-house training and job postings—which usually include a detailed description of the skills required. When you have some free time, spend a few minutes browsing those listings—especially positions that you think you might be interested in at some point.

Keep in mind that the quantity and quality of company-sponsored education is all over the map. Ford pays up to $5,000 per year in tuition and fees for employees pursuing degree programs. They also cover up to $200 per year for books. When I was at EMC, I took a whole bunch of courses and trainings through EMC University: writing, EMC products and technology, Six Sigma, and many more. These were not lightweight courses. Six Sigma, for example, was an intense six months and included a lot of work that I had to do on my own time. Many of the courses I took through EMC University had little to do with my job. But because I was adding to my skill set and making myself a more valuable employee, the company was completely on board, which included giving me time off if I needed it and covering all the expenses. Many other companies have similarly robust programs, while others offer considerably less. The best way to figure out where your employer is on that continuum is to ask HR and your manager what's available.

If your company is either providing education in-house or paying for you to get it elsewhere, they'll be looking at their return on that investment in you, which means that you may have to put together a convincing pitch for your manager. As with any pitch, you'll start by doing some research. If you want to attend an expensive out-of-town conference, for example, find out what other companies will be attending, who's speaking, who's sponsoring, and what specific courses or lectures will be offered. If you're considering taking a formal course—whether in-house or outside—talk to people who've taken it to make sure it actually helped them in their career. Before you make your pitch, make sure you've got strong answers to the questions your manager might ask (and that you would if you were in his place). What will you learn and how will that improve your job performance, make you a more valuable employee, and benefit the company? Essentially, you'll need to demonstrate that the benefit to the company is more than the price of the conference and the opportunity cost of having you miss a few days of work.

A few important warnings: Sometimes company-sponsored training comes with strings. For example, if they have a tuition reimbursement program, you may have to sign an agreement promising to stay at the company for a certain number of years after getting your degree (otherwise you'd have to pay back the cost of the education). And never sign up for an employer-sponsored course if you think you might drop it. Doing so will make you look like an unreliable flake (instructors almost always take attendance, and if you don't sign in, your boss will know about it, and he'll be a lot less likely to approve the next course you want to take). So, do all of your research before you sign up.

This can all be something of a balancing act. As I've said, the more you learn, the more valuable you'll be to your employer—and that will enable you to move up in your organization and command higher salaries along the way. But don't take on so much additional work that your performance on the job you were hired to do suffers.

 

Learning on Your Own

If your company doesn't provide internal or external training, you'll still need to continually upgrade your hard skills to stay relevant. The difference is that finding and taking advantage of the right resources is 100 percent up to you. The good news is that there's really no end to the number of ways you can acquire hard skills on your own.

If your company isn't paying for you to acquire hard skills, I'm also going to assume that you'll be doing it on your own time. So before you dive into something, I want you to think very carefully about two questions: How are you going to keep yourself motivated? and: How are you going to find the time to do hours of extra studying, continue to be a top performer in your job,
and
still maintain a social life? I know, I know, this is a book about your career, but there's a lot more to life than work. Letting work dominate your life is simply not healthy. Besides having fun, hanging out with friends, and going camping on the weekends, having a life outside the office will keep you from burning out on the job and will make you a more effective employee.

One more factor to consider as you think about learning skills on your own is that it can sometimes be a challenge to prove that you've actually acquired a new skill or improved an old one. One ingenious way around this problem is to check out
Acinet.org/certifications_new
, which is a one-stop shop for finding certifications in your field. You can search by name, organization, occupation, and industry. They've got exams where you can test your knowledge and your skills, and best of all, you can get a certificate that shows that you're as good as you say you are.

Consider all of these factors as you think about how to discover and refine the hard skills you'll need to advance in your career. In the next section you'll find a number of valuable resources that I've broken down by category. Because I know that money can be an issue for a lot of people who are just entering the workforce (or haven't been there that long), I've included only free resources.

FREE OR LOW-COST EDUCATIONAL TOOLS.
   Okay, you've got a pretty solid idea of the skills you want to develop. Of course, it's always nice if your company will pick up the tab, but that's not always going to happen. In this section I want to give you some great resources—most of which you can access from home or pretty close by—where you can learn new skills or improve those you already have. I'm focusing here on resources that are free or very inexpensive. So whether you want to find out how many keywords you need to have in a blog post to maximize its SEO effectiveness or how to pass the CPA exam, start the process here.

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
   are great places to acquire skills and network. You'll learn the latest information from people who are successful in your field, and you'll have a chance to meet other people who share the same interests. We'll talk more about networking later in the book, but for now, just remember that the more contacts you have, the more people you'll have available to ask for help if you need it and the further you'll be able to advance your career.

 

• Check with
Eventbrite.com
to see what's available in your area.
Eventbrite.com
is a Web site that lists events of all types. Search by industry and location to find the ones closest to you. You can even register online.

 

• Check with
Conferencealerts.com
. They've got searchable lists of conferences all over the world by topic. If you find one that's relevant to your job or the job you're eyeing, ask your manager if the company will pay for it.

EDUCATIONAL WEB SITES.
   Here are just a few of the many sites that offer free or low-cost courses in any subject you can think of:

 

•
Skillshare.com
is a community education marketplace where you can learn from subject matter experts. If you're an expert in another area, you might be able to barter by teaching someone what you know in exchange for what he or she knows.

 

• Udemy has free and low-cost courses on a variety of topics, including operations management, product development, and even Twitter. You can also find my courses on personal branding and the companion course for this book on how to get ahead at
Udemy.com/u/danschawbel
.

 

•
KahnAcademy.org
is a not-for-profit company whose mission is to change education for the better. They have a library of over 4,000 world-class educational videos on a wide range of topics, which are available to anyone anywhere for free.

 

• Quora is a Q&A site where you can ask questions and get answers from a large community of experts in a wide variety of fields. Information is organized by interest area (math, finance, marketing, and so on), and you can search their extensive archives for questions other people have asked or ask your own.

 

• Big think (
Bigthink.com
) is a great source of big ideas from a network of 2,000 experts on a huge variety of topics from around the globe.

 

• iTunes U (
Apple.com/education/itunes-u/
) is the world's largest digital catalog of free education content. You'll be able to take complete courses created and taught by instructors from leading schools, see assignments and updates from instructors, take notes and highlight text in iBooks, and access multimedia course materials.

 

•
TED.com
. Every year there are two TED conferences which bring together the world's most inspiring and creative minds. Many of the TED sessions are available online either at
Ted.com/talks
or on YouTube. Explore the site and discover your own favorites. Unlike the other options in this section which offer ongoing courses,
Ted.com
offers individual lectures.