By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


We've previously discussed the massive impact (both opportunities and negative downside risks) of what can only be described as the inexorable march towards not just a robotic future but a future which fully and pervasively embraces the broader category of "bits and atoms" as Peter Thiel calls it.

This broader category includes not just caged robots working in a predefined space running a small set of canned routines but robots which can safely work side by side humans, robots with dexterity and the ability to utilize varied devices, pickup and wield small and varied objects and do and responds to varied tasks and situations.

Beyond that, there is the inexorable push forward with the broader space of factory automation (FA), autonomous systems and autonomous vehicles, machine vision, 3D printing and, of course, powerful, software based algorithms and expert systems.

This technology will not only fill industries and spaces where there is a shortage of labor but it will quickly and then massively erode industries, taking over any industry where there is a financial case leading to increased ROI by replacing human labor with these robots, systems and machines.

What's the impact?

Well, think: Delivery vehicles, drones, taxi's, school teachers, factory workers, cleaners, assemblers, bar tenders and on and on.

Here's a quick smattering of related news from within a few weeks time:

• Ships without crew set for the seas
  
• Robot capable of handling unfamiliar objects unveiled
  
• Japan plans robot revolution
  
• Robot Bartenders
  
• Baxter, The Robot Safe Enough to Work Near People

 

Certainly this is nothing new and is captured very nicely by William Gibson in his quote: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

And yet, this is true as well.

Since the future is unevenly distributed it is extremely easy for us to miss the short-term, mid-term and long-term impacts.

This is sometimes referred to as Amara's Law:

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
- Roy Amara 

What does all this mean?

Simple. 

Be ready for not only endless changes but be ready for earth shattering changes.

Make sure you're FutureProofed to not just survive but to thrive and then triumph.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


We hear a lot these days about the supposed value of being a "digital native" (defined as a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology;  familiarized with computers and the Internet from an early age) as though being a digital native will automatically bring value to a hiring company.

Well, I'm here to tell you that a "digital native" is most often  a flat out nothing.

What, why? How can you say that? 

Because being a "native" doesn't mean the individual competent at the skill to which they claim to be native.

Doubt that?

Well, consider how the communicative efficacy of the English speakers we all know or have heard who claim to be "native speakers".

The problem with the "digital native" moniker is that most of the folks this applies to only have experience sole as digital consumers.

They no experience or only very limited experience as digital producers.

They don't possess digital competency in general and more specifically they don't possess digital competency in a business context.

They are competent at perhaps locating an app in iTunes or Google Play, installing it and then using it among friends for fun.

But can they write production quality code? No.

Can they design, run, analyze, interpret and improve an online marketing campaign? Heck no.

Can they troubleshoot or debug a software or hardware problem? Nope.

The answer is most likely no, no, no.

The bottom line is that signing up for a twitter account to tweet your college ski trip is not the same as creating a twitter campaign for a fashion brand let alone an integrated multi-phase marketing program for said fashion brand.

There is good news, so hang tight.

The good news is that for those digital natives that do go beyond the install, that take the time to look under the hood, that actually remove the valve covers and look at the source code or to work to apply these tools in a business context to satisfy real world use cases, well, those digital natives are worth their weight in gold as they are as rare as an honest politician. They can write their own tickets and would be welcome just about anywhere.

So stop thinking being a digital native is enough. It isn't. A digital native is just a fancy word for a digital consumer.

Strive to be a digital producer. Be a digital creator. Be a digital expert.

Think about it. 

You can thank me later.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


Who do I find to be among my most appreciative clients?

Well, I've noticed that for the individual career or executive coaching clients (as opposed to group-based skills training), the most appreciative clients (based on the feedback as well as unexpected gifts and dinners I've received) fall into broad two categories.

1. The Long-term Unemployed and the Chronically Underemployed.

These are clients who often have all but given up hope or who feel that their lives and careers are now on a depressingly difficult linear path.

I find that there's nothing like working to assess their situations, take a skills inventory, develop a gap analysis and then tear down and rebuild them from the ground up, equipping them to not just land "suitable employment" but to land a job that puts them back in the "race" or to where they were supposed to be before they hit difficult times.

2. The Victims or Targets of Office Bullying and Office Politics.

There's two aspects to this.

One aspect is helping the victim to carve out some breathing room as well as develop the ability to maintain their job/income/paycheck while considering options and an action plan.  This may be to keep their job and undone the work of the bully, transfer out to a new group or division or move on to a new company.

The second aspect, and I must say my favorite aspect, is working with a client to efficiently and effectively take out the office bully or politicker. This often entails setting snares, traps and/or pitfalls whereby the bully or politicker is hanged by their own petard.

This most often resolves itself when. using the proper techniques and methods, the bully or politicker has their actions exposed and/or reputation ruined (due to their own actions). In other cases, we'll see the bully or politicker fired or, of their own accord, they will see that there is no future and promptly leave of their own accord.

I have had great success with this across industries from high-tech, startups, pharma, medical devices, banking, insurance, commercial real estate brokeragess to fashion and luxury goods as well as across countries and cultures  from the US (north, south, east, west), Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Australia, England, Germany, France and beyond.

The greatest feeling of all of this  is to enable and empower the "good guys" to win, effortlessly and completely.

After all, shouldn't the good guys win once?

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive


I had the privilege last night of talking with a large group of visiting high school students from The Harvey School of Katonah, New York on the subject of "How to Jumpstart Your Career In Japan".

We discussed quite a bit about not only developing your value and ROI as a candidate but how one can future proof themselves in the face of the impending tectonic societal and economic shifts that will occur and are occurring from the adoption and diffusion of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), expert systems, machine vision, robots, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, etc.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


There's a very pervasive and dangerous meme in the world today that suggests that businesses create jobs or are even "in the business of creating jobs".

Nothing could be further from the truth as Peter Drucker observed many years:

"The purpose of business is to create and keep customers."

That's it. Period.

"So what? Why should I care about this?", you may ask yourself. 

Simple.  

Because when one understands that job creation is not the goal of business but rather an extremely unwanted byproduct of creating, serving and retaining customers a powerful shift of mindset results.

The fact remains that if a company were able to, they would hire no one. There's absolutely no benefit in employing people unless the employees are creating value such as increasing revenues, creating assets or decreasing costs.

New jobs (in the private sector) are created only (in the vast majority of the cases) when a company finds that it can no longer create, serve and retain its customers with the existing workforce.

When you understand this and take this to heart, you can then make the mental shift to realize that any approach during a job search that views landing a job as either a lottery or an act of charity is doomed to always underperform if not flat out fail.

Conversely, by understanding how and why jobs are created and why companies are ultimately in business (and what keeps them there) as well as what they are not in business for (e.g.g, creating jobs), you'll have a major leg up on your competition by understanding you must Never, Ever Beg but Always Bring Value.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


Have you ever wondered why companies so often hire or overpay for the wrong talent? You know, talent that often is just terrible. 

All while you can't seem to land a job.

This presentation is from the HR or Hiring Authority's perspective but it would greatly behoove you to be aware of what so often goes on in the sausage factory, allowing you to better understand and leverage this reality for your own career benefit.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


Reader's Question:
I recently passed the interview stage for a Systems Engineer position, and they sent me an initial offer.

I found the proposed salary to be insufficient given my years of experience and level of education (M.Sc.), however; and I countered by asking for a substantial amount above what they offered.

In order to justify the increase, I mentioned how much my participation (in a technical capacity) may have contributed to revenues for past employers. Unfortunately, that was a mistake; but I was just expecting fairly straightforward negotiating.

Instead, they responded by telling me to come up with a business plan to make the same amount of money for their company.

However, I have no experience, nor interest, in the business end of things.

I'm obviously in a weakened bargaining position at this point, and I'm wondering how best to proceed without making it worse. Or better yet, turn the tables back in my favor.

Signed,
- Matthew

Ask The Career Coach's Reply

Dear Matthew,

First off, congratulations on successfully completing your interviews and receiving a written offer!

That's no small feat in today's continuing "uneven" economy.

With that said, you're now facing a common situation whereby you believe that what the hiring company is offering you in terms of compensation is below your market value or at least your expected salary.

Further, you're now seem to be feeling that you may have boxed yourself in and developed a weakened bargaining position. Perhaps there's also a tinge of a feeling that you may have pushed too hard, potentially straining your future working relationships should you accept the offer (or that it may even serve as an impetus for the company to even rescind the offer).

So let's get this straightened out.

First, let's back up and consider how offers are determined or calculated, what factors influence them and what can be done to generate the highest initial offer with the highest velocity of transaction or transactional velocity.

Salary negotiations begin the moment you contact the company.

That's right.

From the very first contact made by you (or your recruiter on your behalf if you are using one) or if it's inbound then it's contact made by them, you are imputing and signaling value -- whether you intend to or not.

Your task then is to position, package, promote, present, persuade, communicate and convey your value to the prospective employer.

Initially, through you resume, an online application, an online profile, an outbound phone call, outbound email or some combination thereof, you should be working to be seen as the "Must Meet Candidate". They must feel that they have to meet you. 
Sure, they may meet you anyways, even if they are not hot for you, but the idea is to get them hot for you by raising their buying temperature.

Next during the interview process, the purpose is to be seen as the "Must Hire Candidate". That is, they must feel that they need to hire you ASAP and bring you on board as both as a fully satisfied and as a fully engaged contributor. That will normally yield the strongest package and fastest delivered written offer.

That's the ideal scenario.

Now, more specifically to your case.

You feel that offer is too low. This raises several questions:

1. Why do you feel it is too low?
2. Upon what are you basing your argument?
3. How far apart is what you expect and what they have initially offered you?

There are many factors involved, and these may be reasonable (at least from the company's standpoint of cost minimization + production maximization) as to why they are offering you "less" than you think you are worth (or that the market is saying that you are worth).

Here a few of the more common factors involved:

1. The market has changed.
   
2. Your skills have aged.
   
3. They feel that you are a risky hire (job hopper, career damage, accumulated disadvantages, etc.)
   
4. They feel there is an abundance of qualified candidates.
5. They feel that your skills are fungible, that is, a commodity, like flour,  table salt, canned corn.
   
6. They do it because they can -- you're unemployed and have no other options. Therefore, your current salary is zip, zero, nada, zilch.
   
7. They have a hard budget number to meet.
   
8. many more.....
   

So rather than speculating this, let's look a little closer at their response to your push back. After pushing back (which can often be a very good thing as it also imputes and signals value), they asked you to justify your counter offer.

Hmmm.

Notice that they didn't say  "no", "nein", "nyet".... 
Nor did they say. "That's it, take it or leave it. This is our best offer"

They asked you to justify it.

This means they are open to your counteroffer but you need to prove it. 

Further it is a good sign in that by forcing you to justify it, they can still offer you the same initial amount if you can't justify it and not feel bad or look bad since even you were unable to justify the increased salary amount you had desired or requested.

Okay, so how specifically can you justify more money?

First, here's what not to do:

1. Don't push hard.
   
2. Don't give ultimatums.
   
3. Don't get whiny.
   
4. Don't try to value or give value to what they don't value. That is, you are thinking that a Masters degree has some intrinsic value, but if they don't value that, they don't want to pay for it.  Don't try to sell them a Mercedes if they only need a use pickup truck. That is a major mismatch or misalignment of talent and need.
   
5. Don't try to use "salary surveys" to justify it.
   

Alright, then what to do?

Glad you asked. :)

Look at the value that you will bring and then quantify that financial impact the best that you can.

I would start out like this:
"Look, I'm really interested in this position, I'm impressed with the company, I feel it's a really good fit for me and I know I can add value. I'm not here to roll you over, break any budgets or squeeze anything above my market value, but given what you are looking for and what I can provide, I'd like to be compensated for that."

"I'm not a financial whiz, I'm a system engineer and I think my track record shows I'm good at it, so I'll try to more clearly articulate the value I feel that I will bring you. Thank you for considering this."

The next part is where you need to take the difference of what they offered you and what you countered with and justify it.

You have two ways to justify it:
1. Revenues produced/ROI generated.
2. Costs reduced (minimized mistakes, increased productivity, higher quality, etc.).

Avoid Feature Focus and Spotlight Benefits Brought

Rather than stating that you have XXX years of experience as a Systems Engineer or that you have earned a Masters degree (primarily features but can serve as benefits), you are far better served to map out and align the actual benefits that these skills will bring to the company's needs (and their bottom line) and this position so that you can show the value and benefits you bring to increase revenues, increase productivity while reducing costs, decreasing risks and so on.

Case in point: 
Look at Heartbleed. Maybe your value is that you are good at testing both negative testing and regression testing and your enjoy trying to break your/others modules and so on. 

How much money would such a skill and talent like that save or have saved?

More examples:
1. XXX years of experience may mean that you can work more efficiently.

2. A Master in Computer Science may mean that you develop better product environments, write better software, etc.

Think along these lines.

And make it visual. Why not make a 2 or 3 slide document that shows just the difference of what you want.

Maybe it's a $10,000 USD difference.

Show that as $10,000 USD and then show what you'll produce and put a dollar figure on it. Ideally, show the incremental improvements of your skills as well, and hopefully you are producing an even greater amount of value above the total salary you would get when it matches your desired salary.

Hope that helps!

- James Santagata

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


There's a common response or reaction among both students who have just graduated and have "no luck finding a job" and among working professionals who have been routinely passed over for promotion or who are currently having  "no luck finding a job".

So what exactly is that response or reaction?

Come on, you know what it is -- These people must all be somehow lacking in something and that something is "education" or "knowledge" which can be easily be "fixed" by "going back to school".

Now, while "going back to school" sounds good on the surface (after all, we can never be too educated or too knowledgeable, right?) it ignores many factors and even presents risks and dangers to your current (or budding) career as well as your future career.

Just because you are not hired or you are passed over for promotion it doesn't mean that you are lacking any knowledge. In fact, in some cases (many cases actually) involving office politics and power you will be passed over not because you lack anything but because you are too good or too knowledgeable.

With that said, even if you do lack knowledge, there is no guarantee that pursuing a new formal education will provide you with the necessary skills or knowledge you desire or think you need.

In fact, it may be far cheaper to study or develop those skills on your own or, if you must, you can simply take some short and very  focused certification classes.

You also would be well advised to determine exactly what skills you are lacking and then ask yourself if your being passed over for a promotion or not landing a job has anything to do with a lack of skills.

In most cases, it doesn't. Instead, we can isolate the problem in areas such as:
1. Your resume -- the way your skills are packaged and productized.
2. Your interviewing skills -- how do you communicate and convey your value.
3. The way you locate or surface positions.
4. And so forth.

Collectively, I term these the "Job Search 4P's" or "4P's of Job Searches".

Going back to school can also be extremely expensive both in direct costs for tuition and out of pocket costs as well as the opportunity costs of not working (assuming you are going full time, you've forgone that salary) and in the case of taking out loans you then risk limiting your option for jobs in the future as you now have an additional fixed overhead.

In some cases you'll find that this new knowledge increases you career options but conversely and simultaneously having this new debt also reduces your options.

So what should a person do?

Well, look around. As just one example. if you are passed over for a promotion and you are told "you need an MBA", why not open your eyes and confirm if every other manager in your firm (or industry) has an MBA.

Trust me, they don't.

And you'll quickly see that not only does not everyone have an MBA (MBA as just one example, not to pick on any degree) but that, lo and behold, some managers don't even have a college degree!

There are many other factors to research and analyze beyond this but the best way to do it is to simply make the most of what you have now while tweaking and testing it in the job market.

Because the job market's response to you is all that matters. No degree, certificates or anything else matters. Are you getting invited to interviews? Are you getting written offers? That's what matters.

Specifically, you need to SWAN & tweak before you decide to "go back to school".

What is SWAN? Well, the SWAN principle is:

Sell
What's
Available
Now

Whatever skills you have now, make the most of them in your job search (and/or at your present job). This may be using them to develop a visible and provable portfolio (volunteering or working to create tie-off projects, etc.) where these skills are demonstrated and productized.

Using the SWAN principle will also force you to improve how you package, present, communicate and convey your skills and value to your current employer or prospective employer.

Forget your dreams about all the attention your shiny new degree will supposedly bring you and focus on selling what you have now and the value you can add to a prospective employer -- right now.

Once you know what you are doing it becomes like shooting fish in a barrel.

And you'll find that you don't need to go back to school, at least not "now", in almost every single case.

*Just to note, in this case, I use the term Job Search 4P's to describe a set of specialized job search skills as well as one overall process of the job search lifecycle. If you are familiar with classical marketing literature there is also the Marketing 4P's which are Product, Place (distribution), Promotion and Price.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

I had the good fortune to be invited to participate in the 2014 After JET Conference's Career Panel which was held at the Pacifico Yokohama (Yokohama, Japan) on February 21st. 

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

One of the major challenges that new or recent graduates face in landing their first professional job is not necessarily determined by what they've studied but rather by what value they can offer to a prospective employer as well as their ability to clearly communicate and convey that to the prospective employer.

It's not just that some degrees are "better" than others, it's that some degrees are either far more in demand (due to a constrained supply) OR certain degrees are
more monetizable by the firm in question.

Holding an easily or readily monetizable degree means that prospective employers don't have to spend time figuring out how to use the degree nor does the student even need to be "good" at conveying their value (of course, this is still very important and I'm speaking on a "relative" basis here).

Conversely, if a degree is not easily or readily monetizable (or it's perceived that way) and/or there is a huge supply of those particular degrees in the marketplace, then the graduate (aka job applicant) needs to turn on or develop some strong "marketing and sales" chops to ensure that they have the proper messaging and are properly packaged and presented to the employer, while clearly communicating and conveying their value.

There's more to it than that on the marketing and sales front, but these are the broad strokes that you should be thinking about and internalizing.