Executive Coach | Author | Former Practicing Attorney
If you are on Goodreads, here’s a chance for U.S. readers to enter the giveaway for a signed copy of one of my books:
Know Yourself, Grow Your Career: The Value Proposition Workbook
Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals
To learn more about my books, you can visit my Amazon Author Page at amazon.com/author/annemariesegal.
I know many of you have been eagerly awaiting my second book. Here it is!
Know Yourself, Grow Your Career provides a framework to reconnect with and enhance your skills, talents, interests and values and construct a personal value proposition that advances your own career goals while meeting the needs of employers, clients and others who may hire or invest in you.
If you would like to know more, check out:
Twenty five percent (25%) of the profits for sales in September and October 2017 will be donated to the Houston Food Bank and Save the Children.
Anne Marie Segal is an executive coach, author, resume strategist and member of Forbes Coaches Council. She is the author of Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and through local booksellers) and Know Yourself, Grow Your Career: The Personal Value Proposition Workbook.
Image credit above: Olly/Adobe Stock.
#pvp
Know Yourself, Grow Your CareerAre you ready to create a self-guided vision for your career? Would you like help doing that?
Do you want to discover your own personal value proposition (PVP) equation and how it can help give you clarity and increase your professional worth?
WHAT IS A PVP EQUATION?
A personal value proposition equation takes into account your interests, values, preferences (collectively priorities), skills and talents (collectively strengths) and combines them with existing or potential roles that benefit from what you offer (market needs).
Here’s the equation:
Often we are hyper-focused on one set of factors, based on our current situations and outlook for our careers, such as:
without truly understanding any of these in depth or considering how they work together. Know Yourself, Grow Your Career helps you analyze and synthesize each part of the equation, so you can bring your highest personal value to the marketplace. As a bonus, Units 9 and 10 of the book show you how to take your personal value proposition and turn it into an authentic and compelling brand and elevator pitches.
Anne Marie Segal is an executive coach, author, resume strategist and member of Forbes Coaches Council. She is founder of Segal Coaching, author of Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and through local booksellers) and a frequent public speaker in New York, Connecticut and beyond.
Image credit: Adobe Images.
I was honored to speak to University of Chicago alumni last month about highlights from my recent book, Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals.
If you are currently in the job search, looking opportunistically or willing to move for the right role, you will save yourself hours in your interview preparation – mitigating stress and uncertainty in the process and increasing your chance of a job offer – by watching and listening to the discussions in this webinar.
Here are two of the many points I make that will help “frame” your preparation:
For the slides to follow along to the presentation (or speed up the learning process), please click here.
Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership development coach, author, resume strategist and member of Forbes Coaches Council. She is founder of Segal Coaching, author of Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals (available on Amazon.com) and a frequent public speaker in New York, Connecticut and beyond.
Through my work as an Advisor to the The Resume Exchange, a career development resource for University of Chicago students and alumni, I met Daniel Arking, its tireless Founder and chief Advisor.
Here’s a link to my recent interview with Dan about my new book, Master the Interview: A Guide for Working Professionals.
Click here for the link to the Resume Exchange Interview
Have you ever defined your highest “value proposition” – both to your current company and in general? It is not always a simple thing to do.
Another way to think about value propositions is to borrow a concept from the investing world. What is your personal ROI? What return on an employer’s investment do you bring? If your total compensation is $50,000, $100,000 or $500,000 a year (plus benefits), for example, is the employer’s investment worth it, and why?
Think beyond your current ROI. Focus not only on the experience you bring and what you have done in the past, but also the greater value you can offer.
We often let our job titles and duties lead our thoughts about our professional net worth, but our true value add to a company is not best expressed by what department we are in or what tasks we have completed. We need to think beyond that and take a look at what problems we solve, what we have accomplished and how we do the job differently (and better) than anyone else who could have held the same role.
Key value-proposition questions include:
1) How does my role fit into the organization’s big picture?
2) If I left my role tomorrow, what gaps would need to be filled?
3) What have I accomplished in the last 6, 12 and 24 months?
4) Where do I consistently receive positive feedback? Is the feedback meaningful to help me define my unique strengths and talents?
5) What basic needs of my employer do I meet? Providing vision, generating profit, supporting growth, managing risk or something else altogether? Be specific as to needs and how you meet them.
6) Where do I want to move next professionally and how can it benefit me and my current/future employer?
Beyond our current companies, we need to ask how our roles over time fit into our long-term vision for our careers, including our values, talents, strengths, interests, competencies and risk tolerances. Many of us lead careers that we have not fully examined, and therefore miss finding meaning in our careers, which leads to dissatisfaction and ultimately does not let us reach our potential. Defining your value proposition in this larger context helps you understand yourself and your role(s) better, so that not only do you find a better fit, but you are better able to communicate your worth.
This larger definition of value proposition takes more time than most of us are willing to invest, which is why those who do invest that time and energy have a distinct advantage. As you think about your career, what has made you stand out in each of your various roles? Can you tie these together or do you notice a trend?
Takeaway question: are you passionate about the things for which you are known, and if not, how can you become known for the things you are passionate about?
Even if you are not passionate about all aspects of your job, you can tailor it to bring the role closer to what you do find challenging, interesting and meaningful.
Anne Marie Segal is a career coach and résumé writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. She is currently completing her first book, on job interviews, which will be available in early 2017. To join her monthly mailing list and receive a preview of the chapter on value propositions, please click here and write “Book Preview” in the comments section.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.
© 2016 Anne Marie Segal. All rights reserved.
Image from Shutterstock.
Kristina has always secretly dreamed of owning a vineyard in France.
She has other dreams, too. But this one just won’t go away.
How can Kristina, from her windowless desk at a bank in New York City, figure out how to bring more of her dream life into her actual life?
Exploration is the first stage of a successful career transition, as I covered in my prior post. Stage 2 is a decision-making process that involves vetting the ideas that have been uncovered through brainstorming, research, informational interviews, networking and other means of discovery. We vet against a set of factors that we have enumerated, such as our values, talents, interests, skills, financial needs and the market.
These two first stages (exploration and vetting) work in tandem but are distinct. In fact, we do them naturally every day, but not always intentionally. More importantly, too often we rush to judgment about our ideas without fully opening ourselves to the brainstorming process, missing valuable information about ourselves and our true career goals as we try to vet while still exploring ideas. Often this rush is triggered by our own anxiety about transition, while at times it is the expediency of the situation.
In the best case scenario, we will explore and vet in a cycle, which will look a lot like the following image. We explore ideas, we vet them, and then we explore again. In other words, each time we make an interim decision about career transition that has not led us to a final conclusion, we go back to the proverbial drawing board with an open mind, returning to further vetting until we make a final decision (about one or more options to pursue in our career transition).
Here is what this might look like.
As we covered in the prior post, there are three aspects of the brainstorming phase:
Creative Mindset – Facts – Exploration
Kristina can generate ideas about her vineyard dream, conduct actual research into what it takes to own a vineyard and explore her questions with people who are already in her dream space.
As a coach, one of the points I would try to tease out from Kristina is what exactly appeals to her about this dream. Some of the appeal may be one or more of the following:
For your own dream job, I would encourage you to do the same brainstorming about what exactly is appealing about that dream. Think through what is missing in your life that this dream job would offer. Imagine what you would be doing every day and how that would support your values and vision of yourself.
Notice that we haven’t yet vetted anything. We don’t know if Kristina has the money it takes to buy a vineyard (or could get financing), the talents to do it, the stomach for the risks or the true interest in doing the day-to-day work of running a vineyard. We also don’t know if she would be any good at it – would she be able to sell any wine? There are a hundred questions she would need to answer before actually moving forward, and each of those questions (and their answers) may open more ideas to explore as well as offer good feedback to Kristina about how a successful career transition would look.
The reason for separating exploration and vetting is that we often try to make decisions with too little information. Kristina will not know why this particular dream keeps coming up if she does not explore it, without the shoulds getting in the way. (You know the shoulds, I am sure. She should be practical. She should stop wasting time with something that will never happen…. And the rest of their should cousins.)
As part of her exploration, Kristina can explore vineyards from Long Island to Provence and beyond. She can talk to people in the business. She can sign up for Alliance Francaise, if her French is a little rusty. If she feels ambitious and tentatively committed to see if this could go anywhere – or just for fun, to give it a whirl – she can create a business plan for the vineyard. In other words, Kristina can bring her dream world a bit more into her real world and recall the sensation of being carried away by an idea.
In summary, the openness and creativity resulting from Kristina’s indulgence of her dream job idea may at some point lead to the actual result of opening her own vineyard – if it passes the vetting process – or it may throw off side ideas that are a better fit.
If you are ready to move to Stage 2, here are the main points to vet:
Values – Talents – Interests – Skills – Needs – The Market
Like Kristina, once you have some ideas on the table and have done your initial exploration with an open mind (whether these ideas represent dream jobs or simply “a bit better than what I have now” jobs), you are ready to subject these ideas to the vetting process. As an overview, here are some questions to ask yourself:
To insert an example here, in Kristina’s case, does she understand the how to market wine (or could she learn it) and would she enjoy doing that? What about how to run a farm? Run a business? Manage people? Manage cash flow?
What other talents will she need, and which of these play to her strengths?
Through thoughtful exploration and careful vetting – which is not all work, it can be fun too! – you will find new ways to frame and “reframe” your ideas and decisions about career transition. Whether you are looking to make a major change like the one above or if you simply want to tweak your current role, putting structure and organization around the process helps you make better decisions. You also may, as part of the process, find a “bridge job” that will help you incorporate into your life some aspects that are missing, as you continue to explore and vet your longer vision for your career.
For example, say that Kristina decides that she does want to go for it and open a vineyard in France – not an immutable decision, but a concrete goal – and that she has or can find the means to do so. She may first move from her bank job in New York to a similar role in Paris – admittedly also a move that takes effort – as a way to get geographically closer to her goal, meet more people who can make it a reality and satisfy a number of points on her dream list that appeal to her. Alternatively, she may seek a role at a vineyard (or a service provider to vineyards) in some capacity that is closer to her current role and uses her current skills, learning the business as she goes.
Remember: neither is not a compromise, either is a bridge. As she takes smaller risks and gets closer to the life she desires, Kristina will increase her resilience, self-awareness and capacity for change.
Hungry (or thirsty) for change? What will your next move be?
Anne Marie Segal is a career coach and résumé writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. She helps clients with career exploration and other stages of the job search process. For more information, please visit her website at www.segalcoaching.com.
© 2016 Anne Marie Segal. All rights reserved.
First image above: Shutterstock.
Anne Marie Segal
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