It’s Time To Claim Your Employer Story For FREE!

It’s Time To Claim Your Employer Story For FREE!

We get that.

Sites just like Glassdoor and Indeed include hijacked your company’s plot online.

Just enter “working at_____” or “working for ____” while inserting your company’s name and there’s a lot more than a good opportunity that Glassdoor/Indeed (who, BY THE WAY, are owned by this same company) rank increased in the search engine results compared to your own company’s career page.

Well, here’s some very good news…

Young woman (Gen Z) is found in a job

Job searchers today (especially millennials plus Gen Z) are today “job shoppers. ” Elevated on social media, these people skip the review websites, and even your very own website, to be able to consume tales about what it’s similar to to work for your own personal company from credible, thirdparty sites—like Work It Every day.

Work That Daily? Hey, that’s all of us!

Work The device Daily

Work The idea Daily is really a trusted, highly regarded advisor to millions involving job shoppers. Since 08, we’ve been an recommend for the worker, providing timely advice and sources designed to help all of them get ahead within their professions. And now, with more than 1. 5M visitors in order to our site monthly, in addition to an incredible number of followers on internet sites like TikTok and LinkedIn, we want to expose them to YOUR ORGANIZATION}.

CLAIM YOUR OWN COMPANY’S STORY & GET BACK THE NARRATIVE!

Group within happy professionals

Let us explain to you the power of getting your employer story upon our site. Fill away the shape below and we all will be in contact having a draft of your personal story. You’ll be capable to adjust it and even we’ll only make the idea public when you point out so.

And then, watch the wonder happen!

Here’s what you can assume from the free employer account on Work It Everyday:

  1. Google ranking inside 48 hours of publishing.
  2. Distribution about our social networking channels regarding added exposure.
  3. Multiple bits of content a person can use to advertise your story.
  4. Chance to leverage your active recruiting technologies to improve the ROI on your individual existing investments. (i. electronic. link to your OBTAIN THE, etc. )

Check out often the Incredible Companies that currently have already claimed their boss story!

Prepared to get started?

Total this Google form together with we’ll be in feel with next steps:

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Why You Need A Data Strategy Before Data Governance (Part 2)

Why You Need A Data Strategy Before Data Governance (Part 2)

Part Two: The Steps Toward Achieving Data Governance

  1. Data Strategy
  2. Stand up the Data Governance Committee (Choose the Sponsors Early on)
  3. Data Management Framework (What, How, Who)
  4. Business Case for Data Governance
  5. Stand up Data Management/Governance Teams

I have seen organizations stand up tactical teams before a data strategy was defined, with the identified pain points and opportunities. The results were mixed at best. Data strategy should drive all subsequent steps.

Standing Up The Data Governance Committee

Data governance

To get organizational buy-in to treat data as a strategic organizational asset and value driver, a committee should be formed to guide the data governance tactical program(s), including the day-to-day management of data. It is vital to obtain C-level top management support to ensure that the program achieves the proper funding and enterprise support levels.

The C-level executives sitting on this data governance committee should include functional and user base leaders: the chief data officer (or the chief data analytics officer), chief risk officer, chief financial officer, and depending on the size of the firm, the chief operating officer, and the CEO. Leaders from heavy data user groups, such as marketing, digital, and operations, should also be part of this group. While this group will tackle enterprise issues, sub-committees can be formed to address specific business line needs. Committee participants should be engaged, data literate, contribute best practices, and challenge the team to uplift and mature capabilities.

Designing The Data Management Framework

Data management on laptop

Once the committee is set, we can progress governance by setting up a data management framework. This playbook defines the people, processes, and technologies related to governing data.

So far, so good—most organizations get to this point…but ignore the overall business case. A business case spells out the success metrics and ROI of investing in and governing data.

Ok, now to set up the framework and the function:

  1. Data management is a living, breathing framework, not a one-off project focusing only on one aspect, such as regulatory compliance. I’ve seen organizations get so focused on one part of data management that they lose the forest for the trees and never get to the vision laid out in their data strategy. This often keeps data management and data governance in the organization’s basement only to meet specific near-term needs. If we don’t think about data holistically and the broader use cases, leadership will eventually ask about unfunded data that can be monetized. This conundrum boomerangs on the CDO, who is then faulted for not taking a broader view of data when they were only funded for a limited scope.
  2. Formulating the data management framework: The first step after completing the data strategy, which requires business input, is to lay out a policy document that spells out how and who will govern data. You can then lay out the elements of the data management framework. Right now, many firms have an enterprise data management framework, but it may have been drawn up quickly with only one or two data domains, such as risk or finance.

The Elements Of An Exemplary Data Management Framework (In No Particular Order)

Woman on laptop looking at data

  1. Restate the data strategy to codify it into the DNA of the organization.
  2. The guiding principles, policies, and standards for managing data in your organization. Every organization will have a different slant depending on the business model.
  3. Identify to whom and to what the framework applies.
  4. Ensure compliance with risk governance and set the policy for compliance and controls.
  5. Monitoring data (including its quality) throughout its lifecycle.
  6. Ensures consistent data definitions, standards, and policies.
  7. Secured and classified data by its risk level and the type of information—typically aligned to an information security policy.
  8. Data governance must align with privacy policies and regulations.
  9. Specifies the roles needed to govern data within a data management organization and businesspeople’s function through stewardship and ownership.
  10. Identify the need for data controls and enforcement policies.
  11. Provides for a data governance literacy program: includes standard definitions.
  12. Creates master data: the relationships between data elements and entities in the firm.
  13. Creates a metadata repository: data about data, the definition of a data element, and where it comes from.
  14. Creates reference data: detailed data about each data element. Values and attributes.
  15. Creates a data catalog: all data is documented in terms of what sources it comes from.

Once again, it is time for a sanity check: Are all of these elements tied back to an enterprise data strategy? What are your thoughts about data governance and management? What has been your experience? Let me know!

Next Post: Standing Up For Data Management And Data Governance Teams

5 Brand Pillars That Are The Foundation Of Your Brand

5 Brand Pillars That Are The Foundation Of Your Brand

Brand pillars are the foundation of your brand and contribute to your overall brand DNA. There are five pillars: purpose, positioning, perception, personality, and promotion. Brand pillars help you define your unique characteristics and experiences, driving every consumer touchpoint to differentiate you from your competitors.

Let’s review the five brand pillars and how to implement them within your organization.

Purpose

Brand purpose is “why” you exist. It’s the reason for being beyond making a profit. A great brand purpose will always put the consumers first and manifest itself in everything it does.

Knowing the deeper “why” your company or brand exists provides the foundation on which to build everything else.

Simon Sinek, author of the book Start with Why, introduced the idea of defining brand purpose to a global audience in his 2009 TED talk.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”—Simon Sinek, How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself to get at the “why” when developing your brand purpose:

  • Why does our company exist?
  • What drives our brand?
  • What is unique about our business? What is our secret sauce that no one else has?
  • What problem are we trying to solve?
  • Why would our ideal customer choose our product/service?
  • What are we exceptional at?
  • What inspires us day in, day out?
  • What do we want our legacy to be?
  • What are we most proud of as an organization?
  • Where do we want to be a year from now? Five years? Ten years?

Brand purpose is critical in today’s market as it shows your customers, employees, and competitors that you’re bigger than just turning a profit.

Positioning

Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers based on your brand purpose and values that gives you a competitive advantage.

What do you think of when you hear “search engine”? Did Google come to mind? This product is positioned to dominate its category. What about a company that provides “overnight shipping”? FedEx owns the transportation category even though other companies provide overnight shipping.

A well-developed and implemented brand position provides a sustainable competitive advantage, communicates value to customers, is a vehicle to help manage brand consistency, and impacts the bottom line.

Here are five steps to consider when creating your brand positioning.

  • Evaluate Current Standing: Evaluate your current brand positioning. Is it working? Does it reach your target audience? Is it helping to achieve your business goals? If not, you may need to look at repositioning your brand.
  • Research Your Competitors: You can’t stand out from the crowd if you don’t know what the crowd is doing. Conduct a competitive analysis to evaluate your competitor’s brand position by looking at their social media feeds, company websites, marketing & advertising materials, and customer service. Look at who they’re targeting, what their messaging is, their unique selling proposition, and their positioning strategies. For more information on how to gather competitive research, check out my article.
  • Identify Your Target Audience: Understanding your target audience is critical as this information will define every strategy you execute. Your goal is to define your target audience into a simple statement: Our target market is (gender) aged (age range), who live in (place or type of place) and like to (activity). For more information on how to develop your target audience, check out my article.
  • Identify Your Differentiators: Just like everyone is unique and different, so is your brand. It’s your job to find those characteristics and differentiators that will make your brand stand out from the competitive crowd. List all the things that your competitors do well. List all of the things you do well. List what your customers want. Now start comparing your most unique angles against your audience’s needs. Are there any needs that haven’t been filled? Is there anything that you provide that your competitors can’t easily copy or reproduce? Check out my article on how to develop your unique differentiators
  • Craft Brand Positioning Statement: Here is a template to follow when crafting your brand positioning statement.

Personality

A brand personality can be defined as the set of human characteristics associated with your brand. It’s communicated through tone of voice, visuals, and even policies. They’re expressed as adjectives that convey how you want people to perceive your brand. For example, is your brand cheerful, funny, friendly, youthful, innovative, spirited, dependable, responsible, credible, sophisticated, rebellious, cunning, powerful, honest, and so on? Here is a list of 200+ adjectives to get you started.

Let’s look at an example: Coca-Cola is considered real and authentic while Pepsi tends to be young, spirited, and exciting, and Dr. Pepper is seen as nonconforming, unique, and fun. Source.

A brand can also be described by demographics (age, gender, social class, and race), lifestyle (activities, interests, and opinions), or human personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, and dependability). Source.

There are three approaches on how to find your brand personality.

  • Jennifer Aaker’s Dimensions of Brand Personality framework contains 15 traits organized into five factors (Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness).
  • Carl Jung’s Brand Archetypes Framework believes that archetypes are models of people, behaviors, or personalities, thus making them more recognizable and relatable to target audiences. Jung identified 12 archetypes. The idea is that any brand can relate to one of the 12 archetypes that help define the brand.
  • There is the Combo Brand Archetypes & Brand Personality Framework. This model combines the Brand Archetypes and the Dimensions of Brand Personality frameworks mentioned above.

Perception

The first three brand pillars, purpose, positioning, and personality, are driven by the brand through targeting, messaging, and execution. The fourth brand pillar, perception, is owned by your customers. It’s how they view and experience your brand. Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

When you’re starting your business, list out the traits and characteristics that you want your customers to associate your brand with. If you have an established brand and want information on how your brand is perceived, gather customer, employee, and/or vendor feedback:

  • Online reviews/ratings
  • Testimonials
  • Social media listening
  • Live chats
  • Emails
  • Customer service calls
  • Research (polls, surveys, focus groups)

You can also gain further insights into your brand perceptions by asking customers, employees, and/or vendors questions through various research tools (i.e. polls, surveys, focus groups, etc.):

  • How do you perceive our brand? How would you describe it?
  • What do you perceive our value to be?
  • What terms or adjectives would you use to describe our brand?
  • What do you consider to be our brand strength?
  • What problems or challenges does our brand solve?
  • What do you think of our competitor’s products (list them)? Have you used them?

Your goal is to evaluate customers’ perceptions to see if you need to make changes to your brand strategy. It’s important to create a positive perception of your brand that aligns with your mission, vision, and purpose.

Promotion

Brand promotion is a way to inform, persuade, convince, and influence consumers by driving their decision-making process towards purchasing your brand.

A strong brand promotion strategy places your brand in the right place, at the right time, and in the right context for your customers and prospects.

The goal of brand promotion is to increase brand awareness in order to drive revenue and convert consumers to loyal customers, building long-term, lasting relationships.

To start identifying how to promote your brand, consider asking the following questions:

  • What is your current brand awareness?
  • How are you currently promoting your brand?
  • Where do your customers expect to find you or your competitors?
  • How are customers interacting with you online and offline?
  • When do your customers need you?
  • What kind of experience do you want your customers to have with your brand?
  • How do you handle bad experiences?
  • Who are your greatest brand ambassadors?

Final Thoughts

Brand pillars are the foundation of your brand. They help you define your brand for your internal and external customers, ensuring you capture your audience and convert them to brand loyalists. Start building your brand leadership today. You’ve got this!

6 Ways To Show Your Value (Without Being A Jerk)

6 Ways To Show Your Value (Without Being A Jerk)

Team dynamics can often be difficult to negotiate. At work, generally speaking, you are on a team and you contribute. The problem is that you also want to elevate your career and stand out to your boss. So, how can you do that without the rest of the team feeling like you are a jerk (or worse)?

I’ve had the gift of working in amazing environments on rock star teams. I have also had the (ahem) opposite experience. I’ve managed teams, been part of teams, as well as been an individual contributor, and through these years, I’ve found there are a few surefire ways to show you’re an asset without being a show-off.

Here’s how you can effectively show your value at work (without being a jerk):

1. Do What You Say

My favorite direct reports were good for their word. They were trustworthy. You could truly count on them to deliver, and not just for me. I would see these team members and teammates always doing what they said they would. People notice. It might not seem like it, but when you do what you say always, you will get the important assignments. Being the one that does the important stuff is viewed as valuable, and you’re valuable without being a jerk—you’re the good guy that people can count on to get stuff done.

2. Solve Problems

Woman talks to her coworkers

The people who come to me with solutions stand out. Problem solvers who are actively working on solutions to organizational challenges stand out for obvious reasons. They care about the problems of the company and are taking the time to solve them. There is a BIG difference between people who solve problems and people who try not to create them. The problem solvers stand out. And when they include others in the solution, all the better, because they are showing me that they are leaders who can activate others to join the cause of solving the big problems we’re facing.

3. Share In Victory

Excited employees celebrate at work

Further, managers know that a team builds a victory and solves a problem together. Good managers also can see who’s doing the lion’s share of the work and really contributing to the victory. If it’s you, be sure you are gracious in sharing that victory with the team—that stands out to good managers and to the team.

4. Focus On The Mission

Coworkers work together on a project

Be monomaniacal about achieving the goals of the company and the team. When you see the team headed down a rabbit hole, gently guide them back to land. Be the one who is focused on achieving the goals and you will stand out. You might be considered a jerk for being the one who asks for focus by the ones who are unfocused, but they will forgive you when you achieve the goals, solve the problems, and share the victory (see above).

5. Be A Trusted Resource

Woman talks during a work meeting

I frequently advocate being a student of your industry. This is applicable to standing out without being perceived as a jerk when you are sharing information with your teammates about the industry and the business. When you are the go-to for information and insights, you are going to stand out. However, if you do this in a smarty-pants spirit, you are on a slippery slope to Jerktown, population: 1.

Being a trusted resource means you are sharing information in the spirit of continuous learning and development. Share that you saw something interesting in the media about the company, competitor, or industry. And when you share this information, offer an insight and an initiation to hear what the recipient of this information thinks.

6. No Brag, Just Fact

Man talks to his coworker

If you do awesome work, it’s ok to privately share what you’re proud of with your manager—key word, privately. Schedule time to share your excitement with your manager. You should try to have monthly check-ins with your manager so that you can gather feedback and continue to advance your career. Keep in mind when you are privately sharing your work with your manager, do it from a place of excitement and pride, not from a place of ego and bragger-y. Excitement is contagious. Your manager may also be able to help you take the work even further.

Need more help showing your value at work?

We’d love it if you joined our FREE community. It’s a private, online platform where workers, just like you, are coming together to learn and grow into powerful Workplace Renegades. More importantly, we have tons of resources inside our community that can help you advance your career.

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This article was originally published at an earlier date.

Who Should Own the ERP System? Hint: It’s Not IT.

Who Should Own the ERP System? Hint: It’s Not IT.

Besides payroll, one of your organization’s largest spends is probably on technology. You spent thousands of dollars to implement your new ERP system. Years later you’re still using the same version with manual compliance-related workarounds. The ERP system needs to be kept current. What do you do?

As the business continued to grow, you struggled to make the ERP system work for you. There was no written documentation for the end-users, and you created manual workarounds. Training was done verbally so end-users weren’t trained consistently, and they ended up having a lot of dirty data. In the end, the business was expending extraordinary time and effort muscling to use the ERP system, and only getting a small fraction of value.

How did this situation happen? Individuals thought the small IT group should be responsible for all technology including the ERP system. So, the business wasn’t involved as much as it should have been.

ERP stands for enterprise resource planning—the entire enterprise should be involved including finance, information security, internal audit, regulatory compliance, and legal.

ERP System Responsibilities For Each Department

Although the ERP is a system (with a significant investment), the sole responsibility cannot be put on IT. Instead, the business needs to take the lead and own the system. The ERP consists of multiple modules and those “owner” departments have a vested interest to keep the system current and to maximize using the features and functionality.

IT is responsible for understanding how the system is intended to be used.

The business is responsible for deciding what to use.

One way to break out the responsibilities is as follows:

Dept

Sample Responsibilities

IT
  1. Obtains release notes for bug fixes, patches, and upgrades; explains features/functionality to the business
  2. Configures settings and security based on business decisions
  3. Recreates any issues reported and works with vendor on issues, bugs, custom code
  4. Creates and maintains testing documents (test plans and scripts) and performs unit, integration, and system testing
  5. Loads tested code into production environment – change management

Business

Departments “own” their respective modules (e.g. finance, human resources, operations), which includes the internal control system

  1. Decides which features/functionality to use
  2. Creates and maintains master data records
  3. Creates end-user documentation (workflows and procedures), and updates documentation when code is updated
    • If you’re using the system out-of-the-box and following the vendor’s best practices, the vendor should be able to give you standard end-user documentation for the basic workflows, procedures, and training materials. Then the business just needs to customize the standard documentation, and then create any outstanding end-user documentation.
  4. Creates and maintains user acceptance testing (UAT) documents, and performs user acceptance testing
  5. Reports issues to IT

Training
  1. Maintains training documents, videos, and cheat sheets per business, and updates documentation when code is updated
  2. Offers ongoing training classes (for new employees, refreshers)

If there isn’t a separate training department, then this responsibility reverts to the business.

Summary

In the end, the business has the most to gain (or lose) by utilizing the ERP to align with the business needs and growth. Similar to the idiom it takes a village, the entire enterprise should be involved to keep the ERP and other major systems current and maximize their use.

For more information on system ownership, follow me on LinkedIn!


How To Cancel An Interview (Email Samples Included)

How To Cancel An Interview (Email Samples Included)

Learning how to cancel an interview will likely come in handy at some point in your professional career. However, it’s important to go about things the right way! This guide will teach you how to cancel a job interview, and give you some great email samples to get you started. Table of contents Reasons to […]

The post How To Cancel An Interview (Email Samples Included) appeared first on Career Sherpa.

What To Do When Your PTO Request Gets Denied

What To Do When Your PTO Request Gets Denied

Do your PTO request obtain denied? Because of restructurings, layoffs, and crunches, companies are usually now buckling upon workers and their PTO. Here is my concern…

Quitting is not going to help the situation .

If you quit due to the fact your PTO request has been denied, that will, inside fact, hurt your probabilities of getting hired. Plus if our economy storage containers, there will be less jobs, and then it can going to be some sort of lot harder to acquire a reference or explain las vegas dui attorney give up .

Just what You Should Do When Your PTO Request Will be Denied

@j. t. odonnell when your PTO obtain gets denied… @workitdaily @j. t. odonnell #joblife #worklife #pto #careeradvice #careerhacks #careertiktok #edutok #learnontiktok ♬ original audio – J. T. O’Donnell

When your own personal PTO request is dissmissed off, you would like to ask why.

  • Exactly why is this happening?
  • What can I actually do to make this kind of timeslot work?
  • What would I have got to do before or maybe after?
  • Exactly how can I get to be able to the point where this might be approved?

Maybe your employer cannot approve the entire period off that you have been requesting, yet they could approve portion of it. Or might be your boss is simply worried about a few coverage, however, you could aid in getting that protection. The goal would be to attempt to work with all of them on that.

But if you take action like you don’t find your requested PTO, I had created be really careful with getting that time off anyhow or quitting, because this could hurt you together with your career.

Helping you browsing through other workplace issues?

I’d really like it if you joined up with my FREE community where professionals just like you are learning just how to become empowered within their careers so they can easily finally find career joy and satisfaction. Moreover, My partner and i have tons of sources inside this community of which can help you get ready for your next job search.

Subscribe to my FREE neighborhood and turn out to be a Workplace Renegade nowadays! My group and I are searching forwards to working with anyone soon.

How to Chart the Best Career Path for You

How to Chart the Best Career Path for You

Essentially, career planning is your guide towards your professional goals. It involves considering the potential jobs and roles you might take on in specific industries, which can help you build your dream career. When you know your career path, it helps you stay motivated at work because you have a clear vision of what you […]

The post How to Chart the Best Career Path for You appeared first on Jobacle.com.

Weird Advice For Young Designers

Weird Advice For Young Designers

I recently worked on a pro bono project for a friend, and it reminded me of a time early in my career and how lucky I was then to get such great advice from the more seasoned pros around me. Advice that ultimately saved me from some major pitfalls. I made mistakes here and there over the course of nearly 20 years of projects, but with each hiccup came a lesson. Here are some takeaways from my lessons learned and all that sage advice.

Questions Equal Clarity

Clients come to us designers for our expertise, and it is our job to guide them through the process. We are helping them find clarity about their vision and goals for their project. To do that well means asking questions! It is important to remember that not all clients are going to be good at communicating their vision—and that’s okay. You can still work with them and get amazing results by asking them lots of questions and following up on those answers with more questions until you’re both on the same page. This dialogue will help set clear expectations for project scope, deliverables, and everything in between while avoiding frustration for both parties.

Think about the word ‘classic.’ Now think of five things that could be described as ‘classic’—it probably varies wildly, right? So, which version does your client imagine? You could guess… or you could clarify with more questions like “Can you show me an example of what ‘classic’ looks like to you?” or “What makes this classic?” And so on. It’s a silly example, but it illustrates just how subjective descriptions can be and how necessary it is to have good communication between you and the client. Remember that your clients don’t do this for a living, so asking questions will help you get to the root of any issue quickly with less time spent guessing. And no, it won’t look unprofessional if you ask a lot of questions, but it will make you a better creative.

Collaboration For The Win

On one side of the table, you have a designer with knowledge and experience. On the other side of the table, you have the client who knows their business, audience, and goals. As creatives, we have to remember that we are on the same team as our clients and aim at collaboration over confrontation. Design should be a collaborative process: both parties are at the table with different perspectives and different knowledge to contribute. It is this diversity of viewpoints that will make the creative stronger and your client ultimately happier.

When you work collaboratively with your clients, they’ll often tell you what they need before even realizing it themselves—and sometimes, those needs are things that they didn’t even realize they wanted until after having talked it through with someone else! This is because people often have trouble articulating what they need out loud (even if they think they know exactly what they want), so getting clients involved in the process can help ensure that everyone’s needs and project goals are met.

It all boils down to communication. Everyone at the table, both clients and designers, want to feel heard and respected. Good communication and listening skills are a way to ensure that clients understand that they don’t need to be designers themselves, but they are still contributing meaningfully to the project. This helps keep them fully invested in a great outcome.

Contracts Are Your Friend

Contracts can help you set clear expectations for both parties. The best way to protect your business and make sure you don’t get burned by a client is to have a signed contract before doing any design work. If you’ve ever been burned by a client (or had to fire one) it’s probably because you didn’t have a contract in place when you started the project with them.

As a designer, it can feel a little awkward to send a contract and you may be tempted to just dive right into the work even when a client hasn’t signed a contract. But there are several reasons why you should always, ALWAYS get a contract signed before doing any design work.

First, this will help you protect yourself from scope creep. Clearly defining the project scope is essential. If the client wants to add extra elements or changes their mind four times about what they need to be designed, it’s much easier when you have a contract and clearly defined deliverables to say, “Sorry, but we have to go back and renegotiate the scope of our agreement.” This way, you won’t end up doing more work than you agreed on.

Second, a contract will help your client trust you. When working with someone new, trust is everything—and they need to know that they can rely on what you say and how it will be delivered. A contract helps build that trust by setting expectations around quality and deadlines.

Third, contracts help clarify your client’s definition of “done.” If there are any questions about what constitutes acceptable deliverables for them (or if their definition changes), it’s much easier for all parties involved if those questions are answered in writing before any work begins.

Finally, if something goes wrong and you need legal help, your contract can help prove that you did what was agreed upon in the first place or at least show that there was an agreement in place.

Go With Your Gut

You were built with intuition; use it! Learn to trust your gut when working with clients. I’ve found that clients who don’t seem like they are being straight with me are often problematic. I don’t run into these issues very often these days because time and experience (and a good contract) have made me better at spotting potential issues. When I meet with clients I make mental notes of red flags and green lights. Red flags are the things that a client or potential client might do that give you a moment of pause or make you worry a little. Green lights are, of course, the opposite.

Red flag clients will push boundaries like expanding the scope of work but expecting the cost to stay the same, or delaying payment in an attempt to negotiate a lower price after the work is done despite being happy with the project results. Sometimes it is better to pass on a problematic project; it leaves you open to take on a great one. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you are first starting out because you are excited and want to take on as many paying projects as possible. I simply urge you to beware. If something doesn’t feel right about a client then it is probably your intuition throwing up a red flag.

Ultimately, it is up to you if you take on the project. Just remember, if you do decide to proceed, get a deposit to start, have a signed contract and make sure it is specific with a detailed deliverables list.

Followthrough Is Everything

Last but never least, this one seems like a no-brainer to me but I feel it is essential to call out. Deliver on everything that you say you will do for clients—and do it with a smile! I can’t stress how important it is to nurture relationships and build a reputation of being trustworthy, reliable, and awesome to work with. When clients trust you, life just gets easier. They will value your design decisions more easily, they will continue to work with you, and they will recommend you to others that need your services. I promise it is a win-win.

Flexible Scheduling Required – How to Hold a Job From One College Semester to Another

Flexible Scheduling Required – How to Hold a Job From One College Semester to Another

Everyone knows that a student’s first priority is to catch up on their coursework. However, it’s equally important for a student to learn and ensure they receive the best quality education possible—even with a job on the side. That is where flexibility in scheduling comes into play. By utilizing the flexibility of your schedule, you […]

The post Flexible Scheduling Required – How to Hold a Job From One College Semester to Another appeared first on Jobacle.com.

How To Answer “How Would Your Coworkers Describe You?”

How To Answer “How Would Your Coworkers Describe You?”

“How would your coworkers describe you?” can be a surprisingly tough question to answer without some preparation. Even though it might seem innocent, there’s a lot riding on your response! Read this guide to learn how to answer this question effectively. Table of contents Why Do Interviewers Ask This Question How To Answer What to […]

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