Career Motivators: What Drives Me?

Part II: Career Motivators - What Drives Me

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowing what you want in a career is better than following where a path leads. I have uncovered a few personal motivators by going through the book "Get the Job You Want Even When No One's Hiring."

In addition to motivation, one must find meaning in what they do. A meaningful job to me is one that helps people, has personal meaning and connection to your life, a job that comes naturally with not extreme efforts, is fun, brings lots of opportunity and challenge.

Here are a few of my motivators, many of which are tied to my career values.

• problem solving, finding an answer, research, solving hard problems, motivated to learn and solve difficult problems, finding the best solution
• teaching, helping, knowledge
• nice personality, smart
• communication skills
• saving money

Do my motivators align with my career direction? I am considering a career that involves business, analysis and builds upon my background in science.

Career Similarities and Differences
The differences between a scientific job and marketing research: you do not have to work with dangerous chemicals. Data sets for marketing can be larger and more complex than scientific data. Correlations tend to be weaker for measuring consumer behavior vs. scientific behavior.

Scientists are less concerned with the cost of doing research, where as market researchers are more concerned with the bottom line.

In general, I see marketing research as being a more people oriented job than a scientific researcher. Another career I am considering is product manager. Product manager involves more sales and is the most people oriented job of the ones I am considering. Finally the internet marketing job involves less people interaction, is more aligned with internet marketing, but involves the ability to respond to change quickly.

Product manager, marketing research and internet marking involve knowing the needs of the market. Knowing the market is not as readily translatable to the scientist's career. Both marketing research and internet marketing involve a lot of technology and writing skills. Product management and internet marketing are driven by sales and budgets.

Characteristics of a Scientist:
1. Inquisitive
2. Explorative
3. Persistent
4. Creative
5. Analytical

Characteristics of a Marketing Research:

1. scientific method — observation, hypothesis, prediction, and testing.
2. innovative ways to solve a problem
3. multiple methods to acquire data and shy away from over-reliance on any one method
4. base your research efforts on solid models
5. relationship between the value of information and its cost
6. clearly sees the market
7. win-win-win for company, the product and the customers

Characteristics of a Product Manager

1. passion to sell great products
2. empathy
3. humility
4. self-awareness
5. tenacity
6. decisiveness
7. innovativeness
8. confidence
9. focus
10. persuasiveness
    

Characteristics of an Internet Marketer

1. Adaptive/Pro active
2. Should have TAS (think Ahead Systematically) approach
3. Should know exactly the requirements of the business
4. Recognize the long term goals
5. has a personalized brand
6. knows the needs of the market
7. Should be able to write great content
8. Traffic increase
9. Maximize the budget
   

Career Potential: What Are My Values?

What Are My Core Career Values?

I am reading a book that I should have read years ago. But then years ago we were not in the recession that we are coming out of. The book is "Get the Job You Want, Even When No One's Hiring."

Instead of following the trail of hot job areas, the book walks you through a career soul search.

I am currently working on the values clarification section and this is what I've learned about myself. This is what I value in order of most to least important. Some of this I knew already but it is time to use this information to look to my career future.

Career Values: I feel strongly about

1. Logic/Analysis/ Challenge/Overcoming Obstacles: research, look at data, solve challenging problems, experiment, figure out how things work
2. Collaboration/Teamwork: social, collaborate, integrate in to a team, nice personality, like to help people
3. Adventure/Discovery/Creativity/Innovation: create, explore, go on an adventure
4. Management/ Leadership: leadership, take responsibility, dedicated
5. Education and Knowledge: learning, teaching
6. Communication: good at presenting
   
7. Technical Competency: worked in technical jobs
   
8. Money/Wealth/Power/Influence: sales
9. Control People/ Projects: develop a project

This tells me that my main motivator is analysis, discovery and learning in a collaborative environment. I should seek a job that allows me to use both my analytical and social skills. These are typically two skills might be viewed as opposites. If I remember correctly, my Myers Briggs is ENTJ (extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment).

One of the inconsistencies with working as a scientist is that it can be a solitary job. Being that I am a social teamwork oriented person I would like to find a career that involves more interaction with people.

The Journey Towards a Better Career FIt

How Do You Define a Career Fit?
A good fit is when your goals, past industry experience and job function align with the company's short and long term strategic goals, organizational behavior and mission.

I am a Number-Cruncher
Whether it be chemistry or business, I am the type of person who loves to analyze and look at numbers and data to make meaning out of it.

My Career Path
When I was young my mother died of lung cancer. For me this was a moment that would shape my life and my career. I wanted to do something to help find cures for disease. I set a goal to get a Ph.D. and become a scientist. I achieved that goal and even ended up working at the National Cancer Institute. Reach for something you really want and chances are you may get there.

After the Ph.D.: The Jump to Biotechnology
When I graduated from Michigan State University I went in to biotechnology, as it sounded like an interesting new field with great opportunities.

I lived in Maryland and worked in R&D for 7 years before returning to Illinois to pursue a career in teaching. I taught undergraduate chemistry for 2-3 years at local colleges until I met my husband and got married. What I gained from teaching was feeling comfortable in front of a group of people and fine tuning the way I communicate information.

The Importance of Marketing
In 2007 I decided to go back to the life of a chemist in the lab. What I learned from my job in back then was the importance of marketing and how a company is run. Marketing was everything to that company, and I wanted to learn more about it so that I could make a contribution.

An MBA to Broaden Skills
In 2008 I decided to start an MBA program. I had started doing some consulting work. I wanted to learn more about business, entrepreneurship and how to write a business plan.

When I started at DePaul I was interested in Venture Capital. I chose DePaul because of the price, reputation of the school and the variety of campuses and coursework. For me the subjects that came easier were business statistics, internet marketing, writing business plans and organizational behavior skills.

What are the Transitional Careers?
There are several books available that discuss careers for transitioners. I tried science and medical writing prior to starting an MBA. I tried to get in to technical sales - right around when the recession hit. At that time I got interested in green and sustainability careers.

Part of transitioning involves considering your core skills - who you are - that transcend boundaries. When thinking about career, I think about my industry background, mostly biotech and biopharma, and also my functional role, number cruncher and analyst. After you consider your core transferable skills then you look for the language you need to convey the skills.

The Job Search Now
Now my main interest is internet marketing, market research, analyst position and still a technical sales role. I have learned a lot about human behavior and the 'probability of a click' from Google AdWords. These analytical skills will help me in my job search. As I heard in a recent presentation at DePaul, "You only have so much time and energy. You have to put it to good use."

Targeting and segmenting the job search and assigning numbers to the chance you'll get a job is a good skill to have. I am starting to develop a system to help me organize and prioritize how I spend my time. It helps when speaking to recruiters to get an idea of the per cent goodness of fit you have for a job. Tracking those job titles and goodness of fit will help you manage your time.

About to Graduate
I am on the edge of graduating. I have started looking for a job after having taken a job search vacation in 2010. After noticing that my writing skills have gone downhill from lack of use, I've decided to start this blog up and dedicate it to my career search and researching companies, job functions, job search strategies and skills and industries. I will be graduating in June. Let's wish all the job seekers out there good luck in 2011. May we all find the appropriate job!

AdSense and AdWords Synergy

I just received a postcard from Google AdSense. Actually made money! $31.37

Our internet marketing class participate in the GOMC and received $200. It seems that in May AdSense on that site (and maybe some blogs) made about $25 back.

So it seems that if you put AdSense on the websites you run AdWords accounts on actually will give you back about 10% or some fraction of the money you spend on AdWords.

Experimenting with Google AdWords

After receiving $150 in coupons from Google Adwords I decided to run a campaign today. It was easier than I thought to set up the initial campaign. My website is www.welldash.com, a website for wellness awareness and applications.

I chose the pages that I wanted to focus on as the landing pages.

1. wellness
2. depression
3. qigong
4. support groups
5. sleep

I wrote up my ads and selected the keywords. My campaign is called "Building Awareness." One mistake I made was to lump the Ads in one campaign and not divide them up in to groups. To fix this I went back to the home tab of Adwords and clicked on campaign. I divided the ads into 5 groups with appropriate AdWords for each.

I have started at $5 a day with <$0.60 CPC.

I set the landing page of each ad in the ad itself. Initially I had set everything to go to the index page but I went back and set the ads and keywords to go to the invidual 5 pages listed above.

Up to now the qigong page is the best performing page at 1% CTR.

The Learning Curve

The summer I have decided to to some internet marketing and web development independent study. I am reading up on javascript and studying Twitter for the most part.

Direct Tweets
To direct tweet there must be a mutual follow and not a one way follow. The Twitter help section clarified that for me.



Deleting Tweets?
Recently I made a tweet where the URL shorted version seemed to be malfunctioning. I was using Hootsuite. It is possible that the fault lies with Hootsuite. If you use Twitter or LinkedIn you may see a Tweet with bit.ly or ow.ly. For example http://ow.ly/21SQq is the short URL I made in Hootsuite that seems to go nowhere.

My solution was to Tweet out again the entire URL. This experience has caused me to think about what Twitter application I am using to send out messages and that it is important to test the URL shortener before tweeting out.

MKT595 Week 9

Disclaimers, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Given all of the news about privacy on Facebook, it seems that any website should be concerned about privacy policies, if the users are storing data on the website.

In the course of designing my website, WellDash, I have added a disclaimer in the footer area on each page.

"WellDash content is for educational purposes only. WellDash and its contributors cannot be held liable for any damages incurred by following any of the advice found on this website. Copyright © 2010 WellDash"

WellDash gives information and advice on wellness. I was wondering what type of disclaimer I should use. I consulted with a professor at DePaul. He said that a simple disclaimer is sufficient for now, but as the site grows the disclaimer should be revised and additional documents added.

In the case of an initial privacy policy, disclaimer and terms of use to start with, simple is better. More complicated online documents should be written under the advice of a lawyer.

Copyright
The image on this blog is taken from a stock.xchng, a website that provides free images. For the legal reasons we discussed in class it is better to have your own images or ones that are free.

Using PowerPoint Images and SmartArt on a Website?
One of the questions I have about copyright is, are the images and SmartArt that a user creates in PowerPoint copyrighted by Microsoft? Is it ok to use those on a website? It would seem to me that if the product was purchased by the user then the images are ok to use.