Hey friends, in today's email we will be discussing:
Career value pyramid: Determine your dream job based on your values.
Holiday season is coming: Now is the time to start thinking about experiments to be successful at the end of the year.
Align Your Career with Your Values Using This Simple Tool!
When I was looking for a job early last year, I wanted to find something that fit me. Well, duh, who doesn’t? It ain’t that easy to find something that matches the values that you have. My business coach knows that I am someone who makes decisions based on data. Even when it comes to finding a new job. When talking to him during this process, he introduced me to something called the “career value pyramid”.
With this pyramid, you’re able to find what values matter to you and what jobs match these values best.
To make it easier, I recreated the career value pyramid in a Google Spreadsheet, so that you can use it too.
What is the career value pyramid?
The career value pyramid is a tool that creates a score for every single job description, based on your values. You’ll start by selecting the 7 most important values in the pyramid. The higher the value is in the pyramid, the more important it is.
After determining the 7 most important values, you can start evaluating job descriptions. Say, “security” (job stability, financial assurance, and a sense of job security) is the most important value for you. When looking at different jobs out there, you should be able to determine if the value of “security” is being met. When reading a job description of a CMO role, you might be able to get more security compared to say working as a bartender. Within the document, you can answer the question: “Does this job give me the security that I am looking for?”. If yes, you’ll get points, if maybe you get some, and if your answer is no, you won’t get any points.
You’ll do this same exercise for every single value that you’ve added to your pyramid. In the end, you’ll get an overview of every job description and a score. The higher the score, the more it aligns with your values.
This could technically land you a job you never thought was possible. When using this tool, don’t just look at the jobs that are in line with your current thinking process. Think outside the box. I am someone who loves marketing, but I also love football (soccer for our American friends). When I was in the process of finding a new job, I looked at potential jobs in the MLS. However, none of the roles could give me the security that I was looking for, so I passed. It did give me some other insights and made me realize that I could look for any job and see if it would match my values.
When to use the career value pyramid
This pyramid can be used to figure out if you’re currently in the right job, or if there is a role out there that matches your values even better. Remember, you’re values can change over time (especially after big life changes). You can fill in the pyramid with the most up-to-date values and determine if your current job is still the most suitable job for you.
You might ask yourself, does it matter if I score high or low on this pyramid? The moment your current job scores low on the career value pyramid, you might be working in a job that doesn’t make you happy. A simple example: say you care about innovation. You want to ride the wave of innovation as you find that important and get a lot of enjoyment out of it. If you are working at a company where they don’t want to innovate and your role has never changed, you might not be happy. However, when all your other values are met, you might compromise your innovation value, as all the other values do meet your criteria.
How to use the career value pyramid
To use the career value pyramid, you can make a copy of the spreadsheet. After that, you can fill in the “Pyramid” tab. On the left, you can find all the values. Add them to the input fields on the right. The higher the value, the more important it is. On the 2nd and 3rd levels, the value on the left is more important than the values on the right.
You can then add the values that you don’t care about at the bottom (or the ones that didn’t make the top 7).
Now the fun begins. In the “Jobs” tab you you can add a job title and job description. For every job description try to determine if the values that you have are being met by the description. After filling in all the values, you’ll see a score. Based on the score you know which job matches your values best.
Finding your new dream job
And that’s it! Based on the career value pyramid, you will be able to find a job that matches your values. It would give you the data to back up some of the feelings that you might have for a job description.
I hope this helps you to determine if your current job matches your values and if there are any jobs out there that might make a better match.
In the end, this document can help you translate some of the feelings you have for a job into data.
Holiday Sales Head Start: Planning for Peak Season Success
Yeah, you read that right. I did mention that this is the time to start thinking about the holiday sales. Look, June hasn’t even started for some of us, and we are already thinking about the November/December sales period.
For a lot of us, the holiday sales make up for most of our sales. For some companies, the holidays account for over 60% of their total sales. After putting it in that perspective, you might agree that now is a good time to think about the holidays.
Does this mean that you need to have your strategy and tactics ready by the end of this month? No, absolutely not. The reason why I’m already starting to think about the holidays is that I want to start testing new initiatives so that I can use the learnings during the holiday season.
I’ve seen it so many times that people tend to forget about the holidays altogether and need to run experiments right before the holiday. I’ve been talking with different reps from different companies to make sure we run the experiments that we need before going into the holidays. It’ll help me determine what initiatives would work for us during the holidays and which ones I can skip.
To get started and prepare ourselves for the holiday season, we can start thinking about experiments that we might need to run for a couple of weeks or even months. For example, I haven’t set up any “ad customizers” in Google Ads. These customizers let you dynamically change headline text. This means that your ad won’t constantly go back into learning and you can change the messaging when you want. If you’re going to run a sale, you’d be able to mention the discount code in your headline, without having to update the ad. PS. When running a sale event, you might also want to look at the countdown feature in your headlines.
I want to test this feature before launching this at the most important time of the year.
That is only one example. I have a lot of ideas for our current creatives and how we can further optimize these. I’m sitting down with different people in the organization to get this started. Start testing early. So when October comes around the corner, you know what you’ll be doing and what you won’t. Then it’ll become easy to ask for the right assets and run a successful holiday season.
For the upcoming weeks, set some time aside to think about the holiday season. Take a look at some of the things that worked or didn’t work during the last holiday season. This might give you some ideas of what else you’d like to test.
Podcast episode(s) you'd love
- Think Fast, Talk Smart: How to Excel at Nonverbal Communication. Nonverbal communication is very important in showing people's biases, likes, power, and social status. Culture and context play a crucial role in this. Learn how to become better at controlling your nonverbal communication.
Found any interesting articles yourself? Please share it with me, as I am always interested in learning something new.
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