Jun 15, 2021
Your Career Toolkit to Help Navigate A Forever Changed Job Market with Mark Herschberg
Roy talks to Mark Herschberg the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Drawing on nearly twenty years of teaching at MIT’s “career success accelerator” program and a career spanning half a dozen industries, Mark distills the key skills for a twenty-first-century career.
About Mark
From tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication systems, Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and Fortune 500s and in academia. He helped to start the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, dubbed MIT’s “career success accelerator,” where he teaches annually. At MIT, he received a B.S. in physics, a B.S. in electrical engineering & computer science, and a M.Eng. in electrical engineering & computer science, focusing on cryptography. At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many non-profits, including Techie Youth and Plant A Million Corals. He was one of the top-ranked ballroom dancers in the country and now lives in New York City, where he is known for his social gatherings, including his annual Halloween party, as well as his diverse cufflink collection.
www.thecareertoolkitbook.com
www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com
The Career Toolkit
Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You
By Mark A. Herschberg
Drawing on nearly twenty years of teaching at MIT’s “career success accelerator” program and a career spanning half a dozen industries, Mark distills the key skills for a twenty-first-century career into The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.
Section one, Career, lays out a process for constructing an actionable career plan, then guides the reader to success both in interviews and on the job to advance along the career plan.
Section two, Leadership and Management, focuses on the fundamentals of managing and leading, applicable to managers and individual contributors alike. It details the essentials of a high-performing team, how to foster a learning organization, how to reduce meetings by making them more effective, and much more. Unlike typical management books, these tools apply no matter what project management approach an organization uses.
Section three, Interpersonal Dynamics, describes how to successfully negotiate, efficiently build a network, and effectively communicate with people from any background. A final chapter on ethics in the workplace provides guidance through common challenges every employee is sure to face at some point.
The importance of these skills is well established, yet they are rarely taught in school or corporate training, leaving most people to learn only from experience. The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You fills these gaps.
Full Transcript Below
Your Job Tool Kit to Help Navigate A Forever Changed Job
Market with Mark Herschberg
00:00:01
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business
podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcast that
brings a wide variety of guests to help us talk about a lot of
diverse topics that are out there. And so today is no different. We
have an awesome guest. Mark Herschberg is with us. He is drawn. He
is the author of the career toolkit, essential skills for success
that no one taught you. He's drawn on nearly 20 years of teaching
at MIT's career success accelerator program and a career spanning
half a dozen industries, mark distills the key skills for a 21st
century career into the career toolkit, essential skills for
success that no one taught you a book that he is, I think it was
released in January if I'm correct, January of 2021.
00:00:57
Mark
So started this year.
00:01:00
Roy
Well, Mark, welcome to the show. I certainly appreciate you taking
time out of your day to be with us because it's going to be a
timely topic. I saw this week, we're recording, into February of
2021 and the jobless claims were down. With, I guess, more and more
people, getting the sh the COVID shots and, maybe people, actually
figuring out how to open up safely where we can, start doing
business again. I think this is a very timely topic because there's
going to be, I would say, I would think that there's a lot of
unemployed people that we'll be able to put this to good use, but
then there also probably a lot of people that have been hanging on
to their job for this last year, not knowing, what's going to
happen and not really any place to move. We may see a huge burst of
movement.
00:01:56
Mark
Well, thank you for having me on the show. Pleasure to be here.
You're right there is after an event like this, there's going to be
a sea change in terms of the job market. We are getting more people
going back to work. There's been estimation that the unemployment
rate, the actual rate is closer to 10%, and we know that it
certainly hasn't been uniform, right? A lot of people in
entertainment, a lot of people in, hospitality services, they've
been a lot more hard head than my peers of technology, who haven't
really felt a recession, plexus, a boom move of some. We're also
going to see a change in the type of jobs. We've heard about how
offices may not ever fully come back, right? We're going to shift
how we're being in offices that may change the demand for certain
types of jobs related to that.
00:02:45
Mark
Right? The number of receptionists we need may go down overall,
right? The number of people doing things within an office,
administrators, these might also decline, but we're also going to
see more new jobs coming up. There's a great opportunity for people
who are trying to shift their job, trying to pivot, or even go out
on their own and start their own type of entrepreneurial
efforts.
00:03:10
Roy
Yeah, exactly. That's what, we've seen a lot of people with their
side hustle that all of a sudden it became the main hustle as we go
through this. And, not that they chose to be entrepreneurs, they
were, kind of squeezed into it. We may see some of them, going back
to the, workforce, well, going back to a unemployment type
situation as well, but you bring up a good point about this whole,
what does, what are jobs going to look like in the next year or
two? Because, I wish I could recall. There's a big company I saw
yesterday that they just came out and said, they're going to allow
their workforce to work from anywhere in the world where they are,
as long as they can have a secure connection. And it was a big
company. I don't know if you read that or not, but it's neither
here nor there, but I think speaking to your point that, yeah, we
are going to see a lot of changes and I assume technology, trying
to keep everybody communicating at their home and keep, PCs working
and, Internet's up and all that.
00:04:17
Roy
That'll probably be way in demand.
00:04:21
Mark
Now, a lot of companies are talking about this shift to remote
workforces, and I've certainly worked at remote first companies in
the past prior to the pandemic and obviously have been remote for
the past year. I'm not sure companies have fully thought through
what the secondary implications are now, the primary implication.
Okay. We know we can work remotely, right? You've seen it. And
there are some great benefits. You're no longer recruiting just
from a Metro area. Now you're recruiting Watson. We are globally,
there are still some questions about what happens to salaries,
where I live in New York and other cities like San Francisco. We
obviously pay more because of our higher cost of living. What
happens if I moved to Tennessee, you adjust my salary, but then
there are some secondary effects. I don't think companies have
thought through this. We might be able to work remotely for a
while, but what happens there is some advantage to being in the
office at least some of the time.
00:05:19
Mark
That might be as simple as we're going to be in the office three
days a week or one week a month. Sure, I can now live further away
from that office, from that Metro area, because I'm going to
commuting every day. What happens if I'm on the beach in Thailand?
And I know some people who work from there, great place to be great
lifestyle, but you can't come into the office as much. Will that
impact job prospects. I can contribute the same way. Right? Think
about our networking. Where do you go after work? You grab a drink
with someone there's some embed in your city and you go get coffee
with someone. Can you do that when you're in a different time zone
are away and that's getting proper careers.
00:06:00
Roy
Yeah. You know that, of course we're a little off topic I promise.
We'll get, yeah, we'll get back to the book in a second, but it's
interesting because that whole networking aspect, I've worked at
home for probably the last 20 years and, have a lot of external
contacts that, talking on the phone every day that are scattered
all over the U S but, I would suspect for somebody that lives in a
local area, trying to find a job or make a career change that this
whole pandemic has made that worse because a lot of people get the
jobs through the job boards and stuff. I, I suspect that there
still a lot that get it through networking and a friend of a
friend, or, I heard this or just happened to run into at the
restaurant today and thinking, Hey, I've got a position for
you.
00:06:57
Roy
I guess that's going to probably impact, career seekers going
forward as well.
00:07:05
Mark
That serendipity is definitely going to be more challenging if we
live in a distributed environment. Now when we talk about
networking in the book, networking is about relationship building.
It's not just collecting cards for people so we can build that
relationship even remote, but that initial meeting of people is
much easier when you go to some industry event after work in your
city.
00:07:26
Roy
Exactly. Exactly. Well, so let's get back to the book, sorry. I
just kinda got off track cause it's just, there's just so much
going on and there's still, I think there's still a lot of unknown,
but so you wrote it, came out in January of 2021, I suppose, that
you were still riding some of this when we ride in the midst of the
pandemic, is that correct?
00:07:50
Mark
I actually finished the book. I finished the final proofreading
second week of March, 2020. I was going to originally target, late
spring. Of course, a bunch of things hit including the pandemic. I
was looking at the summer, the pandemic threw everything into
chaos, so we just delayed the release.
00:08:11
Roy
Okay. What inspired you to write this? I know that you've been,
kind of in the industry for quite some time.
00:08:21
Mark
My primary job, my day job has been as a CTO, chief technology
officer, building different startups at small traditional startups
at fortune 500 playing startup. Along the way, something happened
to me when I started to hire people, I noticed when I would ask
them a technical question and ask them about software. That gives
me the answer. I'd ask a market or some marketing question. They'd
give me the answer. I would ask a general question, like what makes
an effective leader? What do you look for in a teammate? How do you
think about building your network and I'd get these blank stares,
right? No one has thought about. The only reason I thought about it
was I realized that my own career development to become a CTO. It
wasn't simply being a really good programmer. I had to develop
these other skills. I set out to learn them, but people don't teach
them to us consider we've all heard networking is important, right?
Every one of us, since we've been kids, everyone's telling us it's
important.
00:09:17
Mark
When has someone actually sat you down and said, let me tell you
how to do this important thing. Right? You've had more training how
to tie your shoes than how to network. Right. Right. That seems
crazy. Right. I started to put together materials to train up my
own team. At the same time, MIT was looking to develop a similar
class. I heard about this, reached out, said, oh, I've been working
on this. Can I help? They said, please help us develop it and then
said, please help us teach it. I've been teaching for a past 20
years and I took a lot of what I've done in that class. I and other
people, as well as things I've done elsewhere, I put into a book
because this is not just for MIT students. Right. This is for
everyone.
00:09:59
Roy
Right. And, you know, yeah. You're so right about that on,
especially, were talking about on the networking side is that
there's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it. I think
that's the other thing we have to be cautious about is, sometimes
we can do more damage in what we think is the correct networking
process. I think that's even become a lot more sensitive in this
time when everything is, kind of an outreach through the internet
or through other apps or programs. It seems that, and I'll just
kind of say, LinkedIn, people want to network. Instead of going
through these proper channels, it's a, Hey mark. I'd like to
connect and you say, okay, let's connect. It's like, Hey, I've got
25 units of this. I'd really like to sell you at a discounted price
today. It's like, but then it's, and it's kind of soured.
00:10:57
Roy
A lot of people I've talked to you lately, they just, it's gotten
kinda like email and telephones, they screen out everything and if
they don't know you, they just don't let you in which, it kind of
damages that the ability, the cool thing about LinkedIn, for
everybody is we connect in, connect with anybody across the globe.
It's not just local anymore, but there's still a right way and a
wrong way to do that.
00:11:24
Mark
I probably take a more restrictive view than most people. I talk
about this in the book. I will not connect with someone unless it's
someone who I know and about whom I can say something positive. Now
there are people I've known for 50 years. Well, not quite 50, but
for decades where I can really recommend them. Some are maybe
students of mine, but I can say, Hey, yeah, they're smart. They're
hard working. No, that little. Everyone's someone where I can make
a positive referral because the people who just say connected to
10,000 people, what's the value of that. The value of our network
is that we can open doors for each other. Exactly. Right. If I'm
just taking any random person who knew how to click connect on
LinkedIn, then I'm sending you garbage. I'm sending you spam. You
no longer trust me to make referrals.
00:12:10
Mark
Now the good people in my network, I'm going to refer to you.
You're not going to take them either. I think of your network, like
your home. Now I have strangers in my home all the time. Other than
pandemics, I host parties. I have people over entertain at home.
They're friends of mine and they'll bring other people and okay,
stranger, you're referred in, you're welcome in my home. I'm kind
of trusting. You're not going to smash things. That's a reasonable
assumption. I'm not going to let a random person off the street
into my home unless it's a random person I met on the street I got
to know is, Hey, you're a nice guy. Yeah. Listen, why don't you
come over next week?
00:12:47
Roy
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, no, I think that's a good practice, to
have of control because the other thing too, it's like it, for,
even if you're not looking for the career, it's like, it can eat up
a big chunk of your day trying to answer or try and, be, do the
responsible thing, trying to interact with people only to find out
that their motives may not be as totally pure as trying to get to
know us. The other thing I always talk about too, is in this
networking businesses, it can't, I don't think, and I'll ask your
opinion is that this is it's give and take. It's just not about,
Hey, I'm connecting with mark or I know mark. What can I get from
him? And try to extract everything I can from you without having
any reciprocation.
00:13:39
Mark
Absolutely networking is about building a relationship. No one
wants to meet someone to say, Hey, Roy, nice to meet you. Here's
what I need. Right? Selling you something. Give me a job. Whenever
I meet someone, I think what can I do to help you? Right. Right. We
build a relationship. It takes time. I think of it like karma I
give before I get. For people like the example you gave where
they're just trying to cold call on sell, look, if your job is cold
calling, no one likes it, but I get if that's what you need to do
fine. You say, hi, I'm reaching out to sell you this. When you are
pretending it's networking, that is not networking. That's, as you
point out, it's sours it for all of us. You waste my time and yours
be upfront and say, look, I want to sell you these twenty-five
units.
00:14:26
Mark
I'll probably say no, but I'll respect that you were.
00:14:28
Roy
Yeah, exactly. So, over 20 years in the career accelerator, in
course MIT is an awesome school. Imagine you've seen a lot and
you've probably seen a lot of changes over those 20 years as well.
What are some new and unique things that you feel like you've put
out in the book?
00:14:50
Mark
Well, would say one of the more innovative things in the book, I'm
going to talk about, kind of a med the book itself, and then we'll
get to the content is actually the fact that there's a companion
app. Okay. I do not want to build this app. I thought this existed
and I can just license it. One of the challenges with any type of
book like this or any, we'll say self-help books in general, you
read the book, you say, wow, those are some great tips. And then
you just forget it. Right? Cause three, four weeks later, you're
busy with something else. The other launch, of course you read it
were sitting on the couch. Where do you actually lead? Not sitting
on your couch, maybe during a pandemic, but the rest of the time
it's in the office, the book's not with you. What I did is I took
the content from the book.
00:15:35
Mark
If you went through a book with a highlighter, where are the key
points, right? What are the memorable quotes? Put that into an app
free app from the Android and apple stores. You can go get the app.
Now each day it's going to pop up like a daily affirmation, right?
It's just going to pop it up automatically. You go, oh, right. That
was a good point. Swipe it away and nothing else to do until
tomorrow. It's going to help reinforce the lessons. It can also be
used. If you're about to go into a networking event, you're not
going to carry my book with you and say, I got to reread the
chapter. You can search for a tip, or you can quickly swipe through
just tips for that particular type of event to brush up on it. And
I really shocked. This did not exist before.
00:16:16
Mark
I think more books in the future will have things like this.
00:16:20
Roy
Yeah. That's, those steps because we hear the same thing at, the
podcast level two is like, well, that was a great talk, action
packed, information pack. Then it's like, my head's still spinning.
I didn't know really where to get started. That's great that you
can provide that affirmation that people need to, actually put it
into use, I guess would be the best thing. Cause like you said,
we're generally, I lay down in bed and read it and think, oh, that
was good. Hope to remember it, in the morning when I wake up.
00:16:53
Mark
You also asked for, let's get to, what's an actual new idea that
they haven't heard before. Not just, you can read more about the
book, let's take communication. Okay. I'm going to give a simple
example. Now there's lots of books in communication. They're all
great. One challenge for us is as we communicate changing our
communication style to match that over audience. Okay. We've
probably heard this before generally, but let me break it down into
a very concrete model. Okay. Let's just take left-brain and
right-brain people. And we knew a left-brain people. They are very
analytical. They are very organized. If I'm trying to pitch to
someone who's an extreme left brain person, my approach might be,
I'm going to have a 20 point PowerPoint slide and I'm going to go
point by point and point, to be subsection I, right. Here's the
point I'm going to lay it out logically and they're going to,
okay.
00:17:47
Mark
Yeah. This makes sense. If I was to take someone in an extreme
right-brain person and I said, I want you to sit through 20
PowerPoint slides. We're going to have this big detailed outline.
They're going to go two slides in. This is, this is nuts. I can't
focus. Right. How would I pitch them? I'm going to pitch them with
a story. I'm going to pitch them with envision what we can do here.
Right. And sell them on the idea. Okay. That's not going to work
for a left-brained person. Now this is a simple example, how I will
convey the message, same message, but I'm going to pitch it in very
different ways, different imagery, different language, even
different methodology, right. PowerPoint versus, you know, sell
them. Maybe I even do like a video, right. Showing what it could be
like. Yeah. This is a simple model in the book.
00:18:36
Mark
I talk about more complex versions of this, but it's important to
understand how each of us communicates. We have a preferential
communication style. When I want to communicate with you, it
behooves me to change my style, to match yours, to make as easy as
possible for you to receive that message and focus on the message
and not trying to understand the message in your own language.
00:18:58
Roy
Okay. Interesting. That like matching, I've heard something about
like this before community like matching the cadence and the speed
and not necessarily trying to mirror it, but like for myself, very
slow talk and lot of people are like, come on, man, let's get on
with it, spit it out. I've worked around some people that, more
amped up and talk a little faster. I kind of have to pick up my
pace to be is that generally what you're talking about as well?
00:19:31
Mark
That approach is I believe this is not my area of expertise, an NLP
neuro-linguistic programming approach and matching styles.
Certainly if one person speaks we'll take our own backgrounds,
right. A slow kind of Southern pace versus I've got a very quick
New York pace and I can talk at this pace with other new Yorkers.
It's certainly just going to be weird for the two of us to
converse. Right. It's a similar idea, but not so much with the
pacing and the tone, but about how you convey that message, right.
How you want to present it. Okay.
00:20:05
Roy
Yeah. The, one thing I was thinking about too, was the, how, I
guess this kind of gets back to the networking and keeping up is
that if there was a message that I could put out to younger people,
and I've tried to tell them this is capture as much information as
you can, you need to have a notebook and write down everybody's
name and, a little jot down about them as you go through life,
because it's amazing how sometimes things come in full circle that
we either run into them or maybe they work at a company that we're
trying to get into. Have you got any thoughts on that?
00:20:53
Mark
Yes. I mentioned this in the book. There's a great list called the
Mackey 60 students. It was created by a man named Harvey Mackie.
He's got some great books like, how to swim with sharks without
getting eaten alive and dig your well before you're thirsty and
what he had. He ran, I believe it was a paper business. He had all
his salespeople who said, here are the 66 things you need to know
about your customers. This is true, not just for salespeople. All
of us should know this about the people in our lives that you're
not going to all 66 things. What does it include? Well, some basic
information, contact information, their job title, but also things
like if they're married the date of their anniversary, where they
went to school, do they have any food allergies? What are their
hobbies? What are their kids' names?
00:21:41
Mark
This is helpful because it helps us connect. If I knew that you
were an alcoholics anonymous, I'm not going to say, let's go meet
for a drink after work. Let's meet for coffee. Right? If I know
you're a vegetarian, I'm going to make sure I pick a restaurant
where there are vegetarian options. If I want to get back in touch
with you, I haven't spoken to you for a while. Well, knowing what
university or college you went to, I can easily reach out and say,
Hey, I just saw an article about your football team. It made me
think of you, right. I can find things relevant to you because I
paid attention to you. All of us need to, as you said, learn about
the other person, right?
00:22:22
Roy
Yeah. And that's the difficult part. And, that's where I struggle
is, taking the time there's different segments in life that you
have different people. It's just, you really have to change your
mindset to set down and make that happen. It's not going to happen
easy. I can guarantee you that it's something that you do have to
work. Another thing of this is kinda talking to, I guess, about
resumes and experience. I had a guest on not long ago that he had
some pretty good jobs, took off some time in the middle to, went. I
think he was backpacking around Africa or Indonesia, somewhere down
there. And, everybody said, man, this is going to kill you when you
come back and try to get a job, but this gap and, whatever. And he
said just the opposite. He said that when he came back and rewrote
his resume, that he just, put that in there that time.
00:23:20
Roy
There was no gap, but he said when he would go, to do interviews
and I think he was in marketing at the time. It'd be like, he's
sitting there waiting for them to ask him a marketing question.
They're like, so tell me about this trip. What did you do here and
there? So I guess the point there, the question and all that is
that the external things we do outside of our job can be very
beneficial in conversation starters, but also kind of intriguing
the, I guess, the hiring managers as well.
00:23:58
Mark
Let me ask what was the age of this person?
00:24:02
Roy
I think he was in his mid thirties, maybe young 30 ish, somewhere
in there when he took off. Yes.
00:24:11
Mark
One thing when we look at this is of course we have to look at
supply and demand in my field of technology for a senior technical
leader to take time off and then come back after lips. I mean, to
make it a little bigger, two or three years away, they're going to
look and say, are you up to date on this technology? Yeah. Right.
And, but, on the other hand, they're also going to say, what, I
have trouble finding senior technical leaders. If you line up
enough, beggars can't be choosers. Right. It kind of depends on
where you are in the supply and demand. I can tell you as a, when I
was a college senior, one of the best things I had on my resume was
in addition to, okay, I'm a candidate for these degrees at MIT. I
went to the new England school of professional bartending.
00:25:01
Mark
I took a class for two weeks every night and got my bartending
certification. Now here's the thing about college recruiting. And
I've done this. I've been on campus recruiting. All the students
look the same because every one of them at this university, oh,
you're a computer science major. Like everyone else I'm
interviewing. You've all taken basically the same classes. Right,
right. Oh, you took this one. They took that one. You play
lacrosse. She does a glee club. Right. You're otherwise all the
same. Right. Even other schools, you look the same. I was the only
person probably they've ever seen who had new England school of
professional bartending on my resume. Every person asked me about
it. Everyone remembered me. This is in the days before the web.
They only had the, oh, you're the bartender. They remembered my
resume when you are a common candidate.
00:25:54
Mark
I'm guessing from when I've hired people in their mid thirties,
that level of experience in marketing, I can get hundreds of
resumes. This is going to help you stand out. This is going to help
you suddenly, oh, look, I have literally scores of people look
alike. Huh? This guy's a little different. I want to meet him.
00:26:15
Roy
Yeah. That kind of leads into the next question is, how the
importance of career planning, the sides I graduated, from school
yesterday. Now I think I'm going to send out a couple resumes and
see if I can get a job. Can you just kind of go into, the
importance of, and I guess it's not only for just new graduates,
but if, even if you're in an industry and you want to make a
change, there still needs to be some planning and preparation for
that.
00:26:49
Mark
This is true for all of us throughout our careers. This is
something that I haven't seen really addressed much elsewhere. You
asked about new things in the book, and certainly I talk about
negotiations. There's other books on negotiations. I'm not going to
say I have some secret. No one else knows, but the way I approach
career planning, I haven't seen it done elsewhere. All of us need a
career plan. If you think about anything you've ever done, right?
Any project at work, you've always had some plan. You can never say
to your boss, Hey, listen, I know you want me to work on this over
the next six months. I'm not going to waste time building a plan.
I'm just going to, I'm going to wing it. I'm just going to go week
by week. And just trust me. If I was going to say no way, get me a
plan, get me an outline.
00:27:32
Mark
Right? Right now your career, it's a lot more than six months. So
you want to create that plan. The key thing, what people don't
understand to say, well, you can't plan for life. What? You can't
stick to your plan for life. You can plan. You want to create a
plan and then you're going to revise as you go. Well, how do we
create a plan? Think about that future goal. Think about that ideal
job, not just your next job, but that job 5, 10, 20 years down the
road, or think about the company that you want to start recognize
that you probably don't have all the skills today to start that
company or take that job. Look at that skills gap, look at where
you want to be, where you are, and now you have this gap. You have
to overcome, how are you going to do it?
00:28:19
Mark
Well, you're going to say, I'm not going for that job. Next year,
I'm going to take a different job next year. I'm going to find that
path that gets me there. You can learn about this by talking to
people in that role or in other roles and understand if I want to
be here, what skills do I need? What jobs will set me up for that?
And you say, okay, for that next job, that first job I'm going to
take. I still have this skills gap, but over the next 6, 12, 24
months, I'm going to work on those skills, qualify me for this job.
Repeat step-by-step to get you where you want to go. Of course,
adjusting as you go, right? Revise your plan at least once
annually.
00:28:57
Roy
Yeah. And talking about skills. If you're fortunate enough to work
for, a major corporation that sends you to a lot of training,
another something I've told some younger people is be sure and get
you, either something electronic or a binder, keep those
certificates because it may not matter much today. You may forget
about it, but in six months, a year, two years, five years, that
certificate that you have may mean a whole lot when your job
hunting,
00:29:27
Mark
Certainly she'd do like to keep track of this stuff. Even keep
track of the notes, because you never know this training. You might
say, I don't know this isn't relevant for my job. Well, not today,
but down the road, it might be just like someone you meet today in
your network, you went to, well, I don't really see, he doesn't do
what I do today. That's okay. You never know where you're going to
be in five years. Right?
00:29:48
Roy
Exactly. Skills gaps is gonna lead to the obvious question of
ethics. I know that I know you, and I know you cover ethics in
here, but, I, and I don't even know how to phrase the question. I'm
just going to throw it out there and say, so many people, I guess
they bulk up their resume with skills. They may or may not have to
try to get hired, but that's kinda most of the time you're going to
get caught with that. I guess maybe we could just cover generally
in ethics when you're career hunting, some things that we need to
do and some lines that we definitely don't need to cross.
00:30:35
Mark
I'll first mention why I covered ethics. I'll give an example, to
what you raised ethics. The skills I have in the book, these aren't
just marks thought this was good. It comes from not only my
experience from hiring, mentoring people, but feedback. We've got
that in my team and similar feedback I've seen at other
universities of corporate America saying these are the skills we
want. We want people who are leaders. We want people to know how to
negotiate for a good teammates. They also list ethics.
Unfortunately, ethics is just never invested in by companies. I
think that's a real shortcoming. I hope that started to change. Now
let's look at a concrete example. This was, this was a question
raised me if through a different media channel and a hiring manager
was there's a candidate looking for a job and gave as a reference,
his former manager.
00:31:33
Mark
The hiring manager, Paul, this person and the former manager had
this equity issue because he looked at this guy's LinkedIn and
said, yeah, I, what, the way he describes the job, the things he
said he did, that's not right. Like this isn't, this is just kind
of spinning it. Well, this process outline, right, but he was
hesitant to call this out. I don't think I should pull it out
because this candidate, we all know what it's tough right now.
Right? We've had the pandemic. I feel really bad for this
candidate. Maybe that candidate had a spouse and children. They
didn't want to hurt that candidate. While that is noble in thought,
the mistake was thinking, it's too common, ethical mistakes. One is
we confuse the known, I know this person for the unknown, right?
All these other candidates. I didn't even think about them. I don't
know who they are and the specific for the general, because yes, if
you call out this person, you hurt his or her chances.
00:32:32
Mark
What happens if you don't, you're hurting the chances of everyone
else, everyone who was honest, everyone who might be Barrack bald
by the job, you PERT, all those candidates. You heard the hiring
company who now has an unethical, possibly unqualified person for
the role. Really we need to think of in this larger context, and
while this former manager was meaning, well, if you put in a larger
context, you can still mean well and realize you need to do the
right thing. Yeah.
00:33:02
Roy
Yeah. I guess that the other thing I thought about when you talked
about this, looking at LinkedIn is it's important to have
everything that looks, not, inflated, but have the truth across all
your media channels. Because sometimes I've looked at, applicants
and it's like, well, LinkedIn says one thing, their, resume says,
one thing, I talked to somebody that said maybe even something
else. If they have a Facebook page, it's like, it says something
totally different. It's a need to make sure I I'll let you speak to
that. Again, social media is, I don't think, I'm not sure that some
of these, like the Facebook thing, some people use it like it was
10 years ago, but I know that you just have to be careful what you
put on there. Not only, the Rez speaking to the resume side, but
also just your personal content as well.
00:34:03
Mark
Very true. Now certainly if their Facebook job title doesn't match,
why see on LinkedIn or elsewhere, I'm going to assume Facebook's
out of date. If everything else lines up and oh, I verify their
employment hooks. I find Facebook who thinks about, oh, it changed
jobs, update Facebook, right? So take that with a grain of salt,
but you're right. That look, you get evaluated. We all have a
personal brand. I briefly mentioned this in the book, other Dorie
Clark's book, I think it's reinventing you. Or the title might be,
you as a brand, Dorie Clark's book really gets into this further.
All of us have a brand. All of us have a reputation. All right. If
I look for a job, even if I don't know, the people I'm interviewing
is interviewing, even if we don't know each other, we know people
in common and they're going to ask those people about bidding.
00:34:56
Mark
I mentioned the book, we are actually all interviewing all the
time. Right now. I am interviewing, I have no idea what job it's
for, but someone out there is listening and they're thinking, oh,
mark, he makes really good points or mark, oh, this guy is boring
as hell. If our paths ever cross, you're going to have a
preconceived notion about me. This is a type of interviewing just
in a very big way. All of us are doing this quite a lot of the
time. Yeah.
00:35:24
Roy
Yeah. Not, I had a very specific incident that I'll kind of relate
about. That is, I was hiring for, it was a Jack of all trades
position marketing and doing some other things around the office.
So, I'd been interviewing and weeding through resumes for about a
week and it was like Thursday night. I said, okay, I finally made a
decision. This is the person I want. I get a call out of the blue
from somebody that knew somebody. She's like, I heard you were
looking for some, this position and I've got these skills. I look,
she sent me the resume, like, wow, that's awesome. It's just the
person I want enthusiastic. I mean, so, she's like, I'm really
desperate for the job. I'll do whatever we need to do. I said,
well, I've kind of made a decision. She's like, please just give me
a chance.
00:36:16
Roy
We met one evening, like at seven o'clock at a Starbucks talk to
her things seemed great, but I went back home that night and I
started, kind of trolling through her or, social media accounts.
Wow, there were some things that porn sites, my outlaw on her, on
these, right out in the open for anybody to find. Anyway, I was
like, saved me from making a huge mistake because I was about two
minutes from, given her phone call and given her the job. It, I
think you have to look at that both ways. It's not, it's not just
what she does in her personal life. That's her business. That's
true. If you work for me, then all of a sudden my image is, you and
you're putting whatever you're putting out there is kind of coming
back on me. Maybe I'll let you speak to that just and how that, how
employees are.
00:37:17
Roy
Well, people think I'm just an employee. That's my personal life.
It doesn't matter. Especially if you're a smaller professional, it
can really hurt the person you're working for.
00:37:28
Mark
If you're a solopreneur, if you are a small company, this really
does reflect back on you and on load at MIT, the policy has been
when we interview students, right? As, for admissions, the rule is
actually, you're explicitly told not to look at their social media
because we recognize a 16 year old is going to make bad jokes and
pres right. And not to hold it against them. For phragmites, you
said, look, students, and teenagers, we're looking at admitting.
We're not thinking about that against do. We've all done dumb
things at that age. As an adult, it very much does count against
you. And you have to recognize this. And this is your brand. If you
get super drunk one night and that makes it in the papers, people
are going to see this about you. Well, it's not the newspaper, but
Facebook and social media, it's showing something about you and
people will judge you for that.
00:38:21
Mark
Yeah.
00:38:23
Roy
Yeah. Just be careful on both sides, be careful what you put out
there. If you're hiring, especially the smaller businesses where
your reputation is really what you trade on, just be careful and
make sure that you cover all the areas there. For sure. So, with
our career plan, if you're fortunate enough to get into a bigger
company that actually has some training, what are some
recommendations for taking advantage of whatever training and
skills that accompany can get? And, again, I'm going to relate
something back to me that, when I was young, I worked for at and
They had training anything. I mean, they had training all over the
place and I was young and eager. So, anytime I could sign up for
something or anytime they asked me if I wanted to, I beat like,
yeah, because I wanted to gather all this knowledge in, but some of
the, older guys at the time were like, I'm not going to train
in.
00:39:26
Roy
I'm not going to sit in there and do all this. I, I guess we can
touch on a couple of things is, how can we take advantage of it,
but also the importance of taking advantage of that?
00:39:39
Mark
Yeah. Let me, let me address that. Although training by companies,
even big ones is came fewer and fewer these days. Let me offer a
simple example, why you want to take advantage of this, and then
we'll talk about how you can create this yourself, even outside a
big company. Okay. What's an example why this is important. Let's
take negotiated. This is the easiest skill to demonstrate with.
Imagine you go, we're going to be an employee. Now you go and get a
job offer for $70,000 and have some negotiation training. You say,
damn, I know how to negotiate in this job. I'm getting negotiate.
I'm going to get 71,000, right? That's a pretty small negotiation.
This wasn't, you were some master, right? It's going to be, it's
only 1000. If you sit in that job for 30 years, you never take
another job. You sit there for 30 years.
00:40:27
Mark
What happened? Well, you just made a thousand dollars more because
of that negotiation for 30 years, you made $30,000. One, five
minute negotiation just earn you $30,000. Now, of course, this is
not realistic. You're not going to sit in a job for 30 years.
You're going to take other jobs for motions, negotiate raises, and
you're going to negotiate more than just once. You're probably
going to learn how to negotiate for more than just a thousand
dollars. Learning to negotiate, not to be the world's greatest
negotiator, just learning to be a little better than where you are.
It's going to yield tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of
thousands of dollars to your lifetime earnings. Of course, as a
small business owner, you're going to be dealing with suppliers and
customers and partners and lots of other people. It might not be a
salary, but you're going to go to Kate over and over.
00:41:20
Mark
This is an additive skill. Now negotiation is the most obvious
example, because you can say, Ooh, I negotiate. And literally got
more money. When you work on your leadership. When you work on your
communications, it's not someone says, Ooh, you're a better leader.
Here's another thousand dollars. When you are a better leader,
people see that you're given more opportunities, more chances to
succeed, more chance to be promoted or to leave for better paying
jobs, right? So it is additive. All of this builds upon itself. You
want to invest today, whether you are 22, right out of school or
42, and you're still looking at years ahead. It is additive. Now I
mentioned that a lot of big companies don't have these training
programs, not as much as they used to, but you don't need them.
Here is the secret to how to learn these skills.
00:42:13
Mark
Most training is done through knowledge transfer. Most training is
we're going to teach you how to do Excel, macros, useful skill. If
they have a class, maybe you should take it and learn how to do
Excel. Macros. If you take that class, you're going to sit there.
They're going to say, here are the macros. Here are the keystrokes.
Here's what to do. You're going to memorize it and go forward. And
now you have that knowledge. You're going to be very clear about
when you need to use an Excel macro or not. That's very different
than skills like communication or leadership. It's not immediately
obvious when there's a communication challenge. It's not like
you're going to be taught communication in the next week. This is
where to apply it. It's more subtle. The other thing is there's no
do these three things and you communicate, there are lots of
different aspects to it.
00:43:01
Mark
There's lots of different approaches. No one is best. The way to
learn this, the way we teach at MIT, it's the way business schools
have taught this for decades is you want to create a peer learning
group. You want to get different people to come together. We talk
about communication issue and we talk about a situation and Roy,
how would you approach this? Oh, that's interesting. I never
would've thought of that. I would've done it differently. Even if I
don't like how your approach, it doesn't fit for me, even just
understanding that, knowing that it helps me have a better, deeper
understanding of the issue helps me recognize how other people
might be approaching an issue. If you're in a big company, you can
create this peer learning group through HR, just on your own with
other people. If you are on your own, you can just create a group
through peers through maybe a local business group.
00:43:52
Mark
You can create a local meetup group and you can download this free
kit on how to do it from my website, who explain how to set up a
group, how to think about you can use my book for it, but I don't
want you to think this is just a ploy to sell books. You can use
any other book you want. You can use great podcasts like this one.
You can say each week, we're going to listen to Roy's podcast and
discuss it as a group because it's like group discussion. That's
where the learning comes from. Interesting.
00:44:18
Roy
That's a great concept. I've heard that before. I've been a part of
like, entrepreneurs, CEO groups, where people sat around and, it's
basically the same thing. That's a great idea. I never really
thought about applying it, just in general, but these guys, it was
awesome because between all of us, we had all had some the same.
We'd all had a problem come up. Somebody could give us some advice
on the best way to handle it or the converse. They could tell you
what, this is, what I did. It did not turn out very well to you so,
well, one more topic, try to cover right quick. I know we're long
on time, but, such, a lot of great material here. I mean, we could
probably talk for days and cover this and never scratched the
surface, but, let's talk about negotiations for a minute and I
mean, it's important.
00:45:13
Roy
It's important again, to know where is the line? I just got offered
a job for 50,000 and now I'm going to counter offer with 85.
There's a, I guess we have to know when is that, kind of where's
that line that somebody, the person on the other side of the table
is like, I'll just, again, I can use myself as an example, like
when you're house hunting, if you go out and you find, a house
that's $300,000 and you look at it and you're like, I would offer
them about 175 for it. My thing is there's always so, such a big
difference is I wouldn't even make that offer because they would
say no. And, on the other hand, I guess, if you never, if you don't
ever ask, you never know, but the reality is that when you're so
far apart, the other party just doesn't even bother to counter.
00:46:09
Roy
How do we, how do you handle that when we're talking about our
careers?
00:46:14
Mark
Sure. When you're in this situation, there was a great book. I read
where the author said your opening offer should be the biggest
number or smallest, depending on your side, the biggest number you
can make with a straight face. Right? So you say, well, look, if
you really think you're worth 85,000, I think it's fine to say
5,000. Now what comes out of this? Well first, why do they think
it's 50? Why do you think you're 85? Maybe you have very different
expectations about the role or about your skillset. That might
uncover the other key thing is you never just say, I want 85. I'm
going to offer 50. You want to give your reasoning, right? You
don't just say, I want, frankly, I don't care what you want. I only
care what I want. Right. If you can justify, if you can say, this
is why I deserve 85, I have these skills, these abilities, these
things that make me stand out.
00:47:11
Mark
So, I hadn't thought of that. Okay. Maybe I can't do 85, but I
definitely see you're worth more than 50. There, it's not simply
the number it's about how we approach the number and in the book, I
break down each stage of negotiation and how to approach it.
00:47:27
Roy
Okay. Yeah, because that be delicate. Some you look at, if you just
look out over the salaries, the same position in different
industries can pay wide ranging, wide range. Anyway, just, and
that's always, to me, it's very tricky being on both sides of that.
If I'm trying to, ask for more as the, trying to get a job, or if
I'm trying to, if you're working for me and you're trying to
negotiate more as trying to, stay where we can stay on good terms,
if you do a good job or, I really feel like you'd be an asset, but
not, I don't know if that's kind of a tricky part for me. I never
know really, w w when did jump on that one.
00:48:20
Mark
Yeah. It is. It comes from some experience in threading the needle.
This is exactly why if you have that peer learning group, to your
point, getting that advice, saying, look, I have this tricky
negotiation, and you can say, well, I had a similar one. To your
point, we learned so much more from failures than successes. It's
great that you're going to bring in those stories. Right?
00:48:41
Roy
Yeah. The other thing I, I saw that you mentioned too, I think we
always have to keep in mind and I, this goes to the explaining of
our skills and why we think we're worth more, but we truly have to
set this up. It's a win situation, not a, never a win loss, because
that's always going to, you may win at the moment, but eventually
things go south and that whole relationship sour. I think that's
important to keep your eye on that ball to very true. Yes. Well,
mark, well, I certainly do appreciate, like I said, we are running,
you're gracious enough to give me a lot more time than what we had
allotted. I appreciate that. There's just so much good information.
I'm going to challenge everybody to run out and get the book. What
is the app that goes along with the book?
00:49:36
Mark
The app called the career toolkit now of course contains all this
information that I mentioned earlier. If you go to my website,
thecareertoolkitbook.com, you can learn more about the book. You
can follow links to go to Amazon Barnes and Nobles, even local
bookstores to buy it again with me, or go to one of the stores to
get the app, which is free. You can also download all these free
resources, like talked about or links to other books and resources
that will help you in your development. Okay, great.
00:50:06
Roy
Will, y'all be sharing reach out before I let you go. What is a
tool are, a habit that you have every, that you use every day that
really adds value could be professional, could be personal, but
just, what is that thing that really, does it for you every
day?
00:50:26
Mark
I, there are these great people successful. So this is my daily
habit. I don't think I have a daily one other than to recognize
when I am in stressful situations. This has gotten easier as I've
gotten older, to have the wisdom and perspective to get out of the
moment, get out of that stress and say, I've been stressful
situation before I'm going to overcome this and just not let that
drag me down and pull down the rest of my day or the rest of my
thinking. Being able to do that. Mental reframing is so important
for your mental health and efficiency. Yeah,
00:51:05
Roy
No, you're exactly right about that because it's a, if you get hit
in the morning and you can't get over it just tends to run your
whole day and your, my productivity goes away. So, that is a
definite challenge for me as well, just to be able to shake it off
and reset and move forward. So that's great advice. All right,
mark. Well, again, thanks a lot. We certainly appreciate you being
here. That's going to do it for another episode of The Business of
Business Podcast. Of course, you can find us at www.the
businessofbusinesspodcast.com We are on all the major social media,
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a, the video will go of this
interview. We'll go live when the episode goes live as well. Of
course, you can find us on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, all
the major platforms. Anyway, until next time, take care of yourself
and take care of your business.
www.thecareertoolkitbook.com
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