Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Business Application Development Hear from the Experts

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Business Application Development Hear from the Experts At the recent EMPOWER 2016 conference, I heard from a panel of executives regarding lessons learned from their rapid application development implementations. The panel was moderated by Ankit Shah, senior manager of platform and product marketing and strategy at QuickBase, Inc. and participants included Rich Buckley, vice president of global ops engineering and order management at Metso; Joe Lichtefeld, vice president of application services at ResCare; Nathan Mascenic, vice president of business systems at Freedom Financial; and Bruce Squibb, senior director of program development at Sodexo. Here’s a recap of the QA. What have been the core challenges within your organization? Bruce: Sodexo provides contract food services. In the U.S. prior to 2008, we were operating a lot of standalone businesses. Then, we grew our global business and were suddenly opening 20 locations for a single client. We were a very large organization but needed to become more nimble. Rapid application development was the answer, but we had to create a value stream from it so senior leadership could understand the path forward. Nathan: Freedom Financial offers loans and debt negotiation for individuals; we settled $1 billion in debt for our customers last year. It wasn’t long ago that my team had to fight about who got to keep the spreadsheet open. Eventually, a few Excel-savvy people decided to transition everything to QuickBase. Today, we have about 100 applications serving 1000 users. Joe: ResCare has four main operating units that provide home healthcare. I’m in the IT department but my background is in accounting, so I understood the value of QuickBase when my company acquired a firm that was using it. I’ll never forget when our CEO asked our compliance officer for information. After a fast response, the CEO said: “Normally, when I ask for something like this, it’s six months. How did you do it in six weeks?” We’ve since grown to 2000 users. Rich: Metso is a Finnish industrial equipment manufacturer with 16,000 employees in 50 countries. There is so much data, it’s unbelievable. People don’t have tools to stay on top of data from 300,000 order lines. We used Microsoft Access and Excel spreadsheets, and people were actually taking reports, making copies of them, highlighting their portions, and passing them down. We needed a much better way to tie our operations together. What are some of your RAD use cases? Rich: We have a global inventory app as well as a global engineering app that tracks fluctuations in business so we can allocate resources in real time, and an order management app. Because global similarity is so important to us, our process is heavily controlled. Only two people in the company are authorized to build apps. Joe: We have the CRM app we started with, and also now have a residential app that helps with site reviews in 42 states. It ensures everything is working properly and looks nice onsite, and that information can be centrally reviewed and managed from the corporate office. We have departmental, one-off apps. Each line of business has different needs but they use the same platform. Nathan: We have a sales CRM for client onboarding and a ticketing system for IT operations. Bruce: We built a cluster of operational apps that all sites use across the country. These apps perform various reporting and administrative functions. What’s funny is that many of our clients use our platform to measure our performance! We find that client-facing solutions are great at solidifying partnerships. How do you collaborate with business? Bruce: Our requests to build apps come from the field and we have established processes for executing them. We require a subject matter expert (SME) to join each development team. That person helps us storyboard the current process and map how we’ll use the new app to improve upon it. Nathan: The most successful projects are those in which we are joined at the hip with the business. There’s lots of real-time coding and many whiteboard sessions. When a business leader just tells us: “Build an Intranet” and walks away, that doesn’t cut it. Both parties have to be willing to invest in the process. Joe: Requests tend to come in through hallway conversations and emails. We can show our business team members what the platform can do in a few hours. We make a point of operating on agile business terms instead of our traditional IT terms and go out of our way to meet partner and contract needs as well. Rich: We work with a business leader to define the problem, then we pull that person into a management meeting, and finally we get feedback from end-users on the skeleton and core functionality. This way, once we launch and do training on the app, we already have pockets of people who will promote it. We’ll leave the app for a month, get some additional feedback, and make changes. It’s an extremely controlled, standardized process. For the rest of the QA, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

When to leave grad school off your resume

When to leave grad school off your resume I have been railing against grad school for a long time, and  I’m starting to believe that you should leave grad school off your resume if you are not working in the field you studied. Here are five reasons why putting grad school on your resume makes you look bad. (And at the end of this post, theres a game plan for what to do with any gap youll have when you remove grad school from your resume.) 1. Grad school on your resume is a formal announcement of a mistake. If you are working in the exact field that you went to grad school for, then this advice does not apply to you. But most people do not get jobs that are directly related to their graduate degree. Most people did not need to go to grad school to get a job. Which begs the question, “Why did you go?” For most people the answer will be that it was a mistake. It was a lot of time and money spent for a degree they didn’t need. Other people will say they love to learn. This is not a good thing to say because it is not remarkable. At least, not among the people you need to be better than to get hired. Those star employees are learning all the time and do not take time away from work to go to grad school. Are you so stupid that you cannot learn without getting grades? Because this is what it looks like if you say you went to grad school because you love to learn. You might say that you went to grad school because your parents were paying, or because it was a free ride. But this does not bode well for your work ethic. Because your time is valuable. Or at least you need to talk like it is, so that you can get someone to pay you for it. If you just went to grad school to kill time, you will probably kill a lot of time at work, too. 2. Grad school on your resume makes you look like youre worth less money. Going to grad school in a field unrelated to your job is like having an irrlevant job on your resume. And you already know that people leave stupid jobs off their resume. Grad school is like that a stupid job that detracts from your story. The story is really important: A resume is  a story of how you managed your career  in a way that is focused on what you want to do right now. You dont need to tell your life story. You need to tell  a story that makes you look like the perfect candidate  for your perfect job.  If your resume shows that you’ve done tons of thingslike study law and work at an online marketing firmthen you look more like a generalist, and you won’t be as desirable.  Specialists get more money than generalists. 3. Grad school on your resume makes you look like you’re scared of adult life. Generally speaking, people who have huge excitement about creating their own path in the workforce do not go to grad school. People who have excitement about deciding for themselves what to read and what to learn are people who stop going to school and join the workforce. The workplace, done right, is a place for self-directed learning. Most people who went to grad school did it to prolong adolescent needs for grade-based approval. (Note: This analysis comes from  writers at the Chronicle for Higher Education.) This is because the  model of grad school is generally outdated for today’s workforce, and high performers see this flaw before they enroll. But people who are scared to try holding their own in the workforce see grad school  as a way around the inevitable difficulties of finding a job one enjoys. 4. A Ph.D on your resume often makes you look like a poor self-learner. Graduate degrees in the humanities are totally useless. I should know. I went to graduate school for English, which served only to give me a little break  from real life. But it’s not just English programs that are dead ends. The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported that one would have had a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a job as any type of humanities professor. Humanities PhD programs suck up time and energy with little return. Most people who go to grad school for humanities defend their decision by saying they love their topic. But look, if you love your topic, open a book and teach yourself, after work. You don’t need permission, or a graduate degree, to become an expert in something you love. There is little correlation between education and success in the workplace. There is huge correlation between success at work and ability to be a self-learner. 5. Business school on your resume makes you look timid. If you went to a top-ten schooltop ten in the nation, not in your statethen the selection process is so stringent that it’s meaningful that you were accepted. Put the degree on your resume.  For those who went to business school anywhere else, the selection process was weak because they make a truckload of money from each student admitted. So having made it into an MBA program there is no big achievement. But really, if you think you’re good at business, why did you dump $100,000 into business school instead of investing it into your own company? And even if you wanted to learn about business, there are  reams of data proving how you learn faster by having your own company rather than talking about other peoples’ companies. So putting business school on your resume makes you look like you dont have faith in yourself. Solution: Leave a gap in your resume. Really. The strongest candidates have gaps in their resume. Taking time off is an honest way to learn about yourself.   The interviewer will assume you did odd jobs to support yourself. (Which is what most people do when they are starting off in adult life.) Instead of putting your graduate school degree on your resume, it will look better if you focus on the other stuff you were doing during that time. Travel, maybe. Or training for a marathon. Or learning to dance.  You can tell people you took time off  from the typical workday life of sitting in front of a computer.  Theres intrinsic value to physically doing something, and you can talk about that when you talk about a gap on your resume. When an interviewer says, What did you do during this gap? They dont mean what did you do every second. They mean, what did you learn? And they want to hear self-learning, and self-knowledge. They dont want to hear spoon-fed grad-school learning. Some of the hardest parts of adult life are gaining self-knowlege and applying it to get a job that is right for you. The best way to show that youre a strong performer is to tell the story of you facing this challenge head on, day after day, year after year.

How to Use Data to Influence Hiring Managers

How to Use Data to Influence Hiring Managers We have all been through the painful process of conducting a difficult search. The challenge can stem from a host of reasons â€" managers looking for a unicorn candidate, reputation (or lack thereof) of a company, unclear requirements, and so forth. Attempts to convince an HR manager to change a job requirement gets shot down immediately.   As a recruiter, your job is to of course find the best people, educate managers on the realities of the market, and consult them where necessary. The consulting part often gets lost somewhere in the mix. Ultimately, if you want to influence a decision maker to change a hiring process, there are three ways that will influence how you convince them. Your persuasive ability Your relationship   Data   The first two are skills that you develop and invest in â€" but they’re also not scalable. The third, data, can be re-used and remains accessible forever. Data is hard to ignore. It’s just so matter-of-fact that companies are forced to acknowledge and take action. Here are three ways that you can use data as a powerful tool to persuade and consult companies on their hiring strategy. 1. Are the hiring manager’s expectations realistic? Ask the data. Before you even agree to start a search it’s important to establish how realistic the hiring manager’s goals are. The worst feeling is agreeing to a mission impossible. You have an incredible amount of information already at your fingertips to show them (assuming you are keeping track of the basics). For example, company X is looking for a marketing manager with 10 years experience in the biotech industry. You provide comparative data and explain that the salary they are willing to offer is 20% less than the industry average. Also, candidates with 10 years under their belt tend to have a senior/director title. At this point, most recruiters will explain that Company X change their expectations…and they stop there. You need to show them. Send the client a list or table that includes real information, minus the candidates names of course. Industry standard compensation Position titles across industry Company names Time to fill for similar positions How to influence: First, simply telling them versus having this data will allow the HR or hiring manager to have evidence that they need to convince their boss. Second, it establishes your credibility. And third, the client is forced to explain their logic to you. Having this conversation before agreeing to a search will avoid headaches down the line. It will make choosing the right searches easier and allow you to say yes or no more confidently. 2. Use weekly updates to gather data From the start of the search set the expectation of a weekly update or report that you send by email. This approach provides a retained-search level quality and has the added benefit of holding you accountable. You are not just providing a “pipeline report” of numbers, rather you are sharing real feedback and information. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy and should include all of the following: The specific companies you are targeting (“This week I am focusing on contacting candidates from company X, Y and Z”) The # of candidates you have reached out to and their position title (“Approached 24 candidates with sales and business development backgrounds from the above companies”) The # of candidates you have engaged with (“Already spoke with 4 of them and scheduling calls with 8 of them). The feedback you have received, both positive and negative thus far from candidates (“Most people not familiar with your company since it’s a relatively new startup, so candidates needed more time to research and try your mobile app). Questions you have received from candidates (“People are most curious about the CEO’s longer-term vision and would love to get your insight into this..”). Expectations for next week (“Will focus on talking to people from company A and B. Also expect to see 1-2 prescreened resumes”). Profiles of candidates who did not fit the description but that you found interesting anyway (This is a good way to slip in a candidate or two that may not be the perfect fit). How to influence: Companies will see that you have put in the work. You are showing them the market and giving them real feedback as you progress. Having all of this data now allows you to go back in three weeks and make a convincing pitch. “We have spoken to everyone from small sports brands but the candidate doesn’t exist because of X and Y. Here’s the data. Shall we explore sourcing candidates from larger companies?” 3. Position yourself as a customer experience expert The profession “customer experience manager” became popular among B2B SaaS enterprise companies and refers to an employee who works cross-functionally to provide a better service for clients. As a recruiter, you can take on this same role with data you’ve collected over time. The approach boils down to analyzing candidate application and interview information across dozens, hundreds or thousands of interviews. Once you gather a larger volume of data you can create a rating system (from 1-10) for each subject and present it to your clients in the format of a “customer experience report.” Taking it a step further, you can plot a chart of this information against other clients to rank all of your clients. It could include all of the following: Quality of job description Brand recognition Company reputation Product/service attractiveness Interview process effectiveness Realism of requirements Interviewer responsiveness/speed of feedback Candidate submittal to offer ratio How to influence:  Sharing a comprehensive, objective report is extremely powerful. It takes the emotions out of the conversation. I’ll share two examples of how I’ve experienced this. We showed one client comprehensive feedback from all candidates that had interviewed. We rated the client 4 out of 10 on quality of the job description. The HR had been the point of contact thus far and disregarded the need to update the job descriptions. The hiring manager immediately turned to her and said, “The data is right there. We need to make a better job description â€" please schedule to make this happen by the end of today.” One client scored low on “speed of feedback” and “interview process effectiveness.” Realizing these barriers, he subsequently cut two steps from the interview process and agreed to a schedule a weekly call with us to review all outstanding candidate feedback. Data will continue to play an increasingly important role in recruitment. Data visualization will be a minimum expectation from all hiring managers and required for anyone looking to influence key decision makers. Fortunately, the incentives to take a data-driven approach are high. When you have the right data you will be able to persuade and find that there is less need to “push” hiring managers or HR. The data speaks for itself. Happy hunting. About the author: Misha Yurchenko is an ex-recruiter who blogs frequently about the job market, Japan and the future of work.

Hiring Your Own Boss - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Hiring Your Own Boss - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career If you’ve never been in the position to have a seat at the table when it comes to hiring your next boss, let me just tell you that it can be a strange experience. On one hand, it’s extremely valuable to have a say in who will lead your department and represent you in your organization. But on the other hand, it can be awkward, intimidating and quite frankly, just confusing. This is especially true if you don’t typically participate in interviewing employees, but even if you do, it’s a whole new ballgame when you’re hiring up. When hiring your future boss, there are special considerations beyond how the person would fit in the organization, their track record and their resume. You’ll also be considering whether or not they fit with your working style, if they can handle the pressure and frustrations that you’re familiar with and how their personality would come through as your boss. But even with all these lingering questions, you have a responsibility to maintain your professionalism and make a good impression on every candidate since each one could be your future boss. Score points with your future boss and your company with these tips: Separate business from personal feelings While it can be hard to separate your personal feelings when you’ll be working so closely with the candidate, it’s important to focus on what the candidate can do for the organization. Think about the overall fit of each candidate and your company rather than just yourself. And remember, the key to better hires is a better candidate experience. Represent your organization well The overarching theme to keep in mind here is that your company has asked you to do a job, in this case finding your next boss. You may be tempted to over share about your department to see if they are comfortable with the way things currently are, but you are still representing your company and should act as if you are not personally connected to this hire. Take advantage of the opportunity The fact that you’ve been given the opportunity to be part of this process is a big deal, so make the most of it! You can do this by wowing your boss before they ever step foot in your department. Do this by offering thoughtful answers to their questions, asking valuable questions, being welcoming and open and not coming across as combative or unhappy. Let go of bias It’s often difficult for interviewers to be unbiased in their critique of candidates, and you may be even more likely to judge upfront. Avoid doing so before the candidate has an opportunity to present who they are and what they bring to the table. Keep in mind that just because they look, act or manage differently than you doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be a great fit. Have you ever had the chance to assist with hiring up? Let us know about your experience in the comments section below. Author: Jessica Miller-Merrell  is an  Author and workplace technology strategist. @blogging4jobs

4 % Reasons Continuous Delivery Considered As Key For Success of Developers Career CareerMetis.com

4 % Reasons Continuous Delivery Considered As Key For Success of Developer’s Career â€" CareerMetis.com Have you ever heard the word Continuous Delivery?It is an advanced software engineering approach that allows teams to create software in small cycles, making sure that the developed software can be released at any time. This is one such approach that mainly aims at developing, testing, and releasing software quickly and often.evalThis approach is highly well-known among professional developers as it decreases the cost, time, and risk of serving changes by enabling more incremental updates to apps in development. For continuous delivery, a repeatable and straightforward process is highly essential.Today, people whenever talk about this term, their main context is how it will improve the software delivery process and contributes to making business revenue. However, both these points are valid and true; however, it is important that they address the opportunities for career growth that Continuous Delivery offers to developers.The world’s most successful and popular companies like Amaz on, Google, Facebook, Etsy, and more are using the Continuous Delivery approach. This approach increases competences downstream into QA and operations, boosting the flow of work for everyone across the pipeline from designing through production.Moreover, it stances a practical imperative for professional developers, allowing them to learn this method and practice.However, if you are hiring professional mentor developers, the benefits of Continuous Delivery go far.It gives a comprehensive range of benefits for developers, who wanted to enhance their job satisfaction, develop technical skills, and want to become the upcoming creative. The best thing about this approach is that it gives power to developers, who want to become successful.1) Locate Yourself for the Best ProjectsevalFor newbie developers, it is one of the biggest issues. Do you know that how will you become part of your company’s best project if you are busy with maintaining scripts or dealing with operations handoffs?e valBut Continuous Delivers provides a complete range of opportunities for professional developers to shed the boring stuff and make themselves available to work on advanced creativities. It would be a wonderful option for you to shine within your current company and develop skills and knowledge that required to expand your career.2) Increase in Job SatisfactionAs there are various developers, who work late nights and weekends to fix various problems and bugs, lack of interest and more as they have buried themselves under uninteresting tasks. Continuous Delivery proved to help in boosting job satisfaction by decreasing development work.Moreover, this approach delivers various benefits, including:Using this approach, you don’t have to wait for operations to develop deployment environments.Least release delays due to bottlenecks.The amount of time spends on getting approvals has been reduced.Get maximum time to focus on developing great apps that create business value.Get instant fee dback from users, so you can develop better software.Fewer surprises while deployment.It also allows you to spend more energy on the technical work and the very least amount of time doing things that developers don’t like.3) Better ProductsContinuous Delivery has made it easy and economical to work in small batches. It allows getting feedback from users throughout the delivery lifecycle based on working software.Different techniques like A/B testing allows users to take a hypothesis-driven approach to product development, where testing of the product is easily possible before developing whole features. In simple words, it helps you to avoid the 2/3 of features that develop and deliver zero or negative value to businesses.4) Being Creative in your workevalIf you have decided to distinguish yourself from other developers, you need to be creative. Along with knowledge, talent, and experience, innovation also plays an important role and it needs two basic things like a chance to build vanguard projects and the time to perform it.As you know, there are lots of companies that have adopted the Continuous Delivery approach for their company and deliver better products and services to their customers.If you are one such developer, who is following this approach, you have a great career and you can work with these companies if you show that you are aware of the principles, practices, and different tools of Continuous Delivery.

Getting Started in an Acting Career - Margaret Buj - Interview Coach

Getting Started in an Acting Career Today, I’m going to be writing about getting into a slightly different career than usual. It’s a job that seems to be venerated and desired by many but successfully attained by few. That job is acting. Many people believe that getting into acting is next-to-impossible. And it’s true that it can be a difficult thing to pursue if you want to earn a living from it. But if you’ve got the passion and the talent, then it’s not the impossibility you may think it is. Read on for some tips for getting started with an acting career. Get classes Many budding actors out there are scared to attend acting classes. Surely if you can act, you don’t need classes? Isn’t it kind of insulting to suggest otherwise? Even many famous greats still get acting coaching in some form. There is a difference between having a coach and having acting classes, but the point here is that not going it alone is important. Having a guiding hand as well as other people to warm up with is vital. Acting classes can also get you roles in front of an audience, which will help you overcome anxieties. Study the greats Who are your favourite actors Why do you love their work? Do you like the variety of roles they play? The intensity they bring to a particular type of character? Their voice? People sometimes forget that actors aren’t just some deranged version of themselves on screen or stage. They use a set of techniques that allow them to channel the character’s personalities through themselves. Read up on the techniques of your favourite actors. It will also help to know their early years; how they got to where they are today. And remember that there are classic books such as An Actor Prepares that can help. Join a casting agency A casting agency will help you prepare a résumé and land auditions. While you may be tempted to go straight to a talent agent, it may be a little too early for that! The best thing to do at first is get yourself on the radar of casting agencies. Your details will be placed in their database and, when a particular casting choice is needed, you may be called up. Let’s say a TV casting agency is looking for a brunette female with a Scottish accent. If you’re an aspiring actor who fits those criteria, then you could be called if you’re registered with that agency! Don’t be afraid to take roles as an extra Don’t make the mistake of equating a job as an extra with failure. This is where pretty much everyone starts! Being an extra in a film or theatre production will still give you something extremely valuable. And that’s experience. You’ll get an inside look into the production process. It will get you time on stage or on screen, which is always valuable even when it’s brief. It can help you make connections in the industry, as it’s a good opportunity to network. It’s also better than having absolutely nothing on your résumé! Audition, audition, audition! You didn’t think I’d forget about auditions, did you?

Career Writing in Bangalore - Top Reason Why it is One of the Best Places to Do it

Career Writing in Bangalore - Top Reason Why it is One of the Best Places to Do itWhen it comes to making a professional resume, Bangalore is known to be the best place to do so. The reason for this is that it has many job centers available for anyone who needs it.When you want to be able to express your career goals and achievements, it is important that you go to the places that are known to make resumes. So in Bangalore, one will find that there are many career centers available.These career centers provide various programs and also trainings. People can learn everything about the professional side of resume writing. If you are looking to be able to write a good resume, you should attend these trainings.Trainings are very important because it helps you learn about different aspects of resume writing. It is important to know how to craft a strong career statement because this is what is going to attract people to read your resume. A resume is important because it gives the applican t his or her future career path. This is very important because every career that an applicant gets is going to determine if he or she stays in the position or not.There are many people who have stayed in the same position for years and they never learned the art of writing a good resume. They tend to think that there is no way that people care about their resumes. And when this happens, they never bother to show up to job fairs and resume writing contests. This is the reason why we can say that career writing is the one career that is good for everyone.One should know that there are a lot of people who think that these career writing programs are very expensive. But if you want to learn the skills and techniques, then it is possible to do it on your own. You just need to search the internet and find the tools that you need to start your own career writing skills.There are some people who think that starting a career training program is hard work because most of the time, the traine es do not get anything. However, what is important is that if you take into consideration the training, it is important to note that it is the most valuable thing you can invest in.When you are looking to be able to write a good resume, career writing in Bangalore is something that you should consider. This is the best place to begin because this is where you will be able to become an expert in career writing.