How to Market Yourself for Larger Paychecks and Promotions

Engineering students often learn all the technical details behind the engineering jobs we begin after graduation. Unfortunately, they rarely learn business aspects behind their roles in companies including marketing and sales. One aspect that students rarely learn is the importance of marketing oneself. The underlying key means understanding that companies exist to make money. Some companies make money for their investors. Others make money to support local communities. In order to earn larger raises and promotions, you need to prove your value to your manager. In this post, I will give on advice on how you can do that.

To many engineers and technologists, the concept of marketing oneself feels foreign and uncomfortable. Many of us exist as introverts: We enjoy spending time alone or among other nerds who share our common likes. (Think about the last time you hung out with fellow engineers to watch The Big Bang Theory or the latest Marvel movie. Did you hang out with any managers?) The idea of bragging to managers scares introverts because they might fear judgement or rejection. At this, I once felt this way. A good manager is a leader who wants their team to succeed. An excellent employee wants to see their manager succeed by showing them positive results. They help the manager move up in the company. Senior Managers look for managers whose teams win contracts, sell products, and make their customers happy. When you show your achievements regularly, you make your manager look good in their managers' eyes. This will reflect positively on you.

Here are several ways you can market your achievements to your manager:

• Regular status reports
• Monthly One-on-One Meetings with your manager
• Communication with Program and Other Managers
• Achievement Emails
• Yearly Reviews

Regular Status Reports

These are often known as Items of Interest or IOIs. Most managers request monthly status reports, and others request them bi-weekly. If you intend on marketing your achievements, you must take your IOIs seriously. Yes, status reports can be a major pain in the butt. However, you must complete them sufficiently if you want your manager to consider your for higher raises and promotions. You might want to give weekly status reports to stay on your manager's radar. According to Veli-Johan Veromann at WeekDone, "weekly reports are an efficient way to communicate all projects, tasks and progresses during a week." They note that reports must be accurate and brief to keep your manager's attention. You could communicate the following topics:

• Major customer presentations given
• Quantitative results including dollar cost savings or product sales
• Contract wins with dollar amounts
• Efforts to fill in any gaps you have
• Achievements that show leadership such as achieving a major team milestone

Quantify your results as much as you can especially if you can show that you brought money into your company, or you saved your company a significant amount of funds. For example, suppose you implemented a process improvement. It might take four hours for a test engineer to test Major Electronic Manufacturer High-Tech Wireless Widget, and your process improvement brings that down to an hour. Per device, this might appear as an insignificant event. However, suppose the test engineer costs the company $25 / hour in labor fees, and your company will sell one million electronic devices. By trimming three hours off the testing time, you just saved your company $75 million! You achieved an awesome achievement, and you must communicate that to your manager during your regular status report. Market yourself!

An important reminder: Keep your regular status reports brief. New employees reason that every achievement matters no matter how small. I should know, as I used to report minor achievements myself. It will take time for you to understand what you should report. If you are unsure, find a senior employee and ask them for advice. You can ask them to review your status report draft. If they agree, get their feedback and trim accordingly.

Monthly One-on-One Meetings

To market yourself, your manager must know you and your accomplishments. Although you will email your manager (a.k.a., boss) your status reports, emails can seem impersonal. You must follow them up with in person meetings. Sometimes, your manager will schedule monthly one-on-one meetings. If they do not, it is your responsibility to get regular time on their calendars. According to Bruce Tulgan, of RainmakerThinking Inc., "The fundamental goal of one-on-one meetings is communicating with your boss about the work you are doing for him. With each boss, decide what to focus on at each meeting." Tulgan suggests that you ask yourself the following questions during each meeting:

1. What problems have not been anticipated?
2. What problems need to be solved?
3. What resources do you need to complete your tasks or your manager's goals?
4. Is there anything that you do not understand? Any instructions or goals that need clarification? 
5. What things have happened since the last meeting that your manager needs to know about?
6. Do you have questions for your manager?

Clear communication is a major component of employee to manager meetings. You want to communicate your achievements, that is true. However, you must communicate any mistakes or errors you made and steps you have taken to correct them. Employees are human, and humans make mistakes. You will make mistakes. The important thing is that you learn from them and make sure you put steps in place that prevent them in the future. Managers expect their employees to screw up from time to time. What they don't expect is for employees to be proactive about their slips and falls. Catch your mistakes early and often, so they do not get repeated one million times and cost the company millions of dollars.

You can express concerns during one-on-one's with your manager. If you feel your performance slipping, meet bi-weekly. Your manager can coach you into better performance. According to Christine Zust at Kent State University, "a good coach recognizes the gem that lies beneath the surface. The coach can often see things that the protégé can’t. If you are helping your protégé to become a greater leader, then make an honest assessment up front. See where the gaps exist. Work with the protégé to create an action plan for improvement. Support the protégé’s goals and action plan." A novice employee might think that reporting bad news to a manager will poorly reflect in their yearly review. I argue that the opposite is true. You must give yourself an honest assessment, so you can communicate skill gaps to your manager, and your manager in turn can offer advice for you to close those gaps. (Click to Tweet). You want to communicate this during in-person meetings well before your yearly review. You give yourself time to improve and show how brightly you can shine in challenging situations. Otherwise, your manager will give your a poor review.

See: "The Top Complaints from Employees About Their Leaders" Published on HBR.org by Lou Solomon on June 24, 2015

In short, you must meet with your manager regularly. Not convinced yet? According to Lou Solomon at the Harvard Business Review, "data shows that the vast majority of leaders are not engaging in crucial moments that could help employees see them as trustworthy." From the graphic above, the top complaint about managers is that they are "not recognizing employee achievements." Regular face to face meetings with your manager give you opportunities to close these communication gaps. If your manager is not proactive in meeting with you, you must insist on arranging those meetings. Your career depends on it!

Communication with Program and Other Managers

What is the fifth employee complaint according to Solomon? Managers who take credit for their employees' ideas. How can you overcome this? Meet with other managers. If you work for a small company, it might be difficult for your manager to steal your ideas because ideas spread quickly in small groups. However, it becomes difficult to prove origins of ideas in larger companies if employees do not speak up. Your direct manager assigns you to work on specific projects or programs. You report to team leads, project managers, and program managers. Talk to them as much as you can! They speak among themselves, and your ideas cannot get claimed by someone else if you tell multiple people about them.

If your employer uses a stakeholder based feedback system, you might list your program manager as a stakeholder who gives feedback to your manager. You want to make your program manager happy. Establish face to face / one-on-one meetings with your program manager especially if you are a team lead. You want to ask yourself the same questions that you asked before meeting with your manager. Who knows, you might take on a position under that program manager. Although you will make mistakes, and the relationship might sour at times, you want to communicate any issues you face during the project cycle. Do not be scared of getting negative or critical feedback from your program manager. Instead, think of it as opportunities to improve yourself. Set goals to report improvements back to your program manager, so they know you heeded their warnings and advice.


Achievement Emails

Often, we receive kudos from program managers for milestone achievements. Perhaps, you led a team to a successful software delivery. You gave an important presentation to a customer or client, and you pleased them with your results. You helped the company win a multi-million dollar contract with a major customer. Whatever the achievement, forward the email notice to your manager. If possible, mention this achievement in passing when walking through the office, and make sure to include them in your regular status reports.

Your manager can list your achievements in status reports to their managers. Remember, you want to make your manager look good. Your manager wants to show positive results because they reflect positively in their yearly reviews. Help your manager succeed by showcasing your success. Do not be afraid to toot your own horn. You achieved something great, and you have the right to tell people about it. This is a key to marketing yourself.


Yearly Reviews

Few employees enjoy yearly reviews, and surprisingly few managers like giving yearly reviews. However, fewer managers show willingness to do away with them. (An alternative to yearly reviews are 360 reviews as discussed in Performance Reviews Are Dead. Here's What You Should Do Instead by Thomas Koulopoulos, Founder of Delphi Group.) Until that happens, you must summarize your yearly accomplishments during this review. Focus on major accomplishments. Go through your monthly or bi-weekly status reports. You saved them, right? Look for the biggest accomplishments in each of the areas your company's yearly review process ranks its employees. Keep it short and sweet. Do not repeat yourself because you want your major accomplishments to stand out. Remember, do not make your diamonds hard to find by hiding them in the mine. Put your diamonds on pedestals and shine bright lights on them!

If you continually meet with your managers, you will shine bright during your yearly reviews. They should be an informality, yet you must not neglect them. Many companies still use yearly reviews to rank their employees and to decide how much salary increases go to each. You will compete with your fellow employees. Many of them will be friends. This does not mean that you throw them under the bus. In fact, if you are in an engineering leadership position, it behooves you to help them succeed and showcase their success to their managers. A good leader looks for employees with potential, and you summarize yourself during the yearly review to maximize your potential for growth and value.


Summary

It will take time for you to achieve a promotion. If you are a new hire, it might take several years to achieve a promotion. However, if you communicate your achievements with your manager regularly, you do not allow them to forget you as a person and employee. You put a face to the name, so your manager sees you as someone valuable to the organization. Do not fear discussing setbacks or receiving negative feedback. If you meet with your managers regularly, you will have opportunities to correct your errors well before they become issues. You will succeed because your manager will coach you to success. You must get out of your shell and be willing to market yourself by consistently communicating your efforts and successes. You will get used to marketing yourself, and you might find yourself writing about it!

Will you disregard important relationship advice?

I want to give. In life, it's the relationships that we form with each other that matter. We need to develop close relationships with other people. They could be our spouses, children, friends, or co-workers. We are not meant to sit alone in boxes isolated from the rest of the world. We often bury our heads in our phones or get sucked into video games or what not. It becomes easy to get frustrated with others and choose isolation. How is this affecting us as a society? How does it affect us as individuals?

I'm not sure how to answer the first question. Okay, I recant my previous statement: I can answer the question. I'm convinced my answer will stand the heat of logical debate. The lack of relationships makes us poor. We become poor in compassion, generosity, and caring for our fellow human beings. I know there exist plenty of examples of people helping others. That's great, and I make the world a better place one person at a time. Yet, I see so many examples of people hating other people for one reason or another. They're Mexican. They're Jewish. They're Muslim. They're LGBTQ. They're whatever they may be, perceived to be different and thus a threat. For each type of person, the haters give reasons for expressing their hate. They're going to take our jobs. They want to replace us. They want to kill us. They live in sin. So many reasons to hate, yet how well do you know these marginalized groups? Will they take our jobs? Do they want to replace us? Do they definitely want to kill us? Do they actually live their lives in sin?

Develop close relationships with people and get to know them better. Think of all the ways we can make this world a better place by listening to other people's stories. Visit a local mosque and learn how their congregants are attempting to live their own lives in peace. I know co-workers who are Muslim, and I respect them because respecting others is the right thing to do. For those haters of Jews, I can tell you I have no intention of replacing you. (Yes, I'm Jewish. I'm proud of it, and I'm not going anywhere because the United States of America is my home.) In fact, I'm trying get through this struggle called life like everyone else. I have a wife whom I love and have arguments with over and over again. It is outright difficult. Forming close relationships means you have to be vulnerable. You must admit your flaws and mistakes. (Click to Tweet) You must put yourself in the shoes of the other person even should they lack feet.

How does this lack of contact with other affect us as individuals? It makes us feel small and insignificant. What can I do, so future generations remember me despite being one out of billions on this planet? I see many ways to do this: become famous, write books people won't forget, do heroic actions in the face of danger. After thinking about this, I tend to think this is a wrong approach. Instead of being important to billions of people, I should become important to a few close people. One must develop close and intimate bonds with my family and friends. You should do wonderful things showing compassion, love, and generosity. This will make you remembered by future generations. What I mean is that you should not forget the people who love you. You should not forget that there are people in this world who are different. You can improve their lives through simple acts of love and kindness. Form close relationships with people who are not like you. Learn their cultures. What does it mean to be Hispanic? To be Jewish? Muslim? LGBTQ? Put whatever preconceived notions you might have aside. Get to know them as individuals.

Forming close relationships and bonds with other people is a never ending task. There will always be haters, yet there will be people yearning for close friendships. We will continue getting into arguments with our loved ones, yet we can work through those issues. Be vulnerable. Know that you will make mistakes, yet take responsibility for them. You should learn with the intent to improve yourself and your relationships. Get to know others, so you can know yourself. It will hurt at times. That is a risk you must take to develop your friendships and loving bonds.

Our world can be a good and nasty place. Many people what to do harm to others. This was true in the past, it is true now, and it will be true in the future. You can improve our world by showing love and kindness to one person at a time. Imagine a child who bullies others because their mother recently died. The father retreats into grief by displaying anger. If you can coach and mentor that child, show them love. Let the child know their father loves them, and it is okay to grieve a loved one.

Quite often, people choose hate because they feel isolated and unloved. You cannot reach each person who closed their hearts, yet form a bond with that person. This individual might have become the instigator of the next mass shooting had you moved on. Instead of responding with anger, invest time to understand their hate. You might need to reach within yourself and understand why you respond the way that you do. This is an opportunity for you to show them you are there for them and care. Open their hearts with patience, kindness, understanding, and compassion. You can improve the world one person at a time. (Click to Tweet)

Remember, our time on this planet is finite. Although future generations might forgot you and me, we must make positive impacts. Be positive forces in the lives of those close to us. By showing examples of kindness and compassion, they in turn will do the same. Not every single person we influence will do this of course, yet one or two will, and the pattern will repeat. Thus, you can have a great positive impact on the world by forging a few meaningful relationships. After all, quality not quantity matters.

How to Evolve Your Stagnant Career towards Exciting Fields in STEM

Recently, a contact on LinkedIn asked me how to transition into a cyber security role. Although i know little about cyber security, I gave advice that you can apply if you decide to change careers. Let's suppose that you decide to change fields within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. How do you effectively drive your career in a different direction? You could follow one of several paths:

1. Earn an advanced degree in your targeted field
2. Learn on your own pace
3. Take on stretch assignments within your current company

A quick qualifier before I discuss these methods: I assume that you already have an undergraduate degree in a STEM field. You have a basic understanding of science and mathematics. I'll discuss these three methods in detail.

Earn an Advanced Degree

Of your three options, earning an advanced degree requires the greatest effort. It will focus you provided you know in general what field you want to move into. You will specialize within a specific field. For example, you could earn a Master Degree in Computer Science with a emphasis on machine learning. If you to earn a PhD, you will perform ground breaking research in a field, and you will become an expert. In my case, I performed research in applying genetic algorithms to adapt antenna array hardware that spatially focused wireless energy in a signal of interest while simultaneously minimizing energy towards interfering sources. Don't let my research description frighten you: you can develop a fulfilling career in Industry with a PhD. You will develop skills important to advancing your career while earning your PhD.

If earning an advanced degree takes so much effort, why pursue one? I can give you several reasons:

• Your employer offers tuition assistance or reimbursement
• You realize that you need an advanced degree to move up quicker
• You have the time to pursue the degree
• Your career has flatlined
• You enjoy learning in a classroom setting
• For a PhD, you enjoy researching and teaching others

The first three reasons apply if you work at a company that encourages continuous learning. Clearly, you need time to read textbooks, study for exams, and develop class projects. You won't do classwork during normal office hours, so you need to set aside hours during evenings and weekends. Not an easy option if you work for a startup or have a young family to raise. It can be done if you can set clear boundaries.

What do I mean by one's career flatlining? This could be a euphemism for unemployment. It could mean you've been stuck in the same role for years. You see no clear path to promotion. In this case, an advanced degree could be a good option for you. It won't be easy especially if you are unemployed. However, you can get fellowships for PhD's in STEM majors provided you put together a strong application package. In spite of it's difficulties, a PhD represents a better option if you are unemployed and on limited income. If you feel stuck at your current employer, you should take advantage of your work's tuition reimbursement program. If you enjoy research, get a PhD. Otherwise, earn a Master Degree. Remember, a PhD can take four to five years in a full-time program. Should you have a family, you must communicate your educational intents with them because it will eat into family time.

Learn on Your Own Pace

Learning on your own pace involves taking online courses without credit towards a degree, reading books, and do it yourself (DIY) projects. You can find online courses offered through your company's continuous learning program, or you can find free classes offered by universities. MIT and Stanford both offer their classes online free. MIT offers free lectures on MIT Open Courseware. Stanford offers free courses on iTunes via Stanford on iTunes. You take these classes online as if you're a student, yet you do not receive credit for the classes.

I enjoy reading books, and I choose books in subjects unfamiliar to me. If you are interested in learning about machine learning, you can read a plethora of books on the subject. For a high-level overview of AI, I suggest that you read AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together. Read as many books as you can and focus on the field that you want to enter. As you read books, take detailed notes. It doesn't matter if you write in physical notebooks or apps like Evernote. You must write down and organize your thoughts, impressions, and references when immersing yourself in learning materials. Otherwise you will soon forget what you read.

DIY projects can be physical or virtual. They can be a combination of both. It depends on what you want to learn. Interested in building robots or automating your home? Buy a Raspberry Pi and learn to program in Python. Do you want to program Alexa Skills to make Alexa do cool things? Go through the tutorials in the Alexa Skill Kit. Yes, these examples are specific to computer programming, software engineering, and computer engineering. However, you should pick projects relevant to the field you want to transition.


Stretch Assignments

This option depends on availability. Your employer might not allow employees to take on temporary assignments outside of their defined roles. If this is your situation, you will need to focus on the other options I described above. However, I encourage you to take rotational assignments outside of your specialty. This will challenge you and allow you to grow. Speak to your manager and see if you can take a temporary assignment. It will be difficult at first. However, your peers will want you to succeed, and they will help you get on track. They will make sure you know information you need to succeed.

Employees face challenges during stretch assignments. Challenges include rapidly learning new skills while subjected to a project deadline. Of course, therein lies the difficulty of first convincing one's manager to allow for a stretch assignment. This couples with finding a team lead or program manager willing to risk bringing in a novice into their organization. It helps if you establish a track record for excellence prior to seeking rotational assignments. If your assignment lasts nine to twelve months, you can expect the first three months to consist of learning on the job. This helps convince your rotational manager to bring you on. Whatever challenges you face, you will find the stretch assignment to be worth its troubles. You will challenge yourself and learn skills in a new field. The power in stretch assignments is that you can try out a new field. If you do not like this field, you can return to your previous assignment, or take on a different role for a year.


Summary

You can move  into a new field. It will take work, and you will need to prove your capability along the way. In this post, I discussed three ways you can move out of your current are of knowledge into a different line of STEM work You have options depending on your situation. You can earn and advanced degree, learn on your own pace, or take on stretch assignments at work. Whichever path you choose, you will succeed.

Update on My First Alexa Skill Top 50 Podcasts Quiz

In a previous article, I wrote about my experiences developing my first Alexa skill. I will update you on the status of my skill submission. Following submission, the Amazon Alexa skills team failed my skill because it was missing a background image for the Amazon Alexa display. This was my own fault because I thought of adding the background images as an upgrade. In my mind, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was the skill itself. The simple answer would be to disable display support. I decided this would be poor programming habit, as I would be excluding users with Amazon Alexa displays. Thus, this article will discuss how I addressed the Amazon Alexa Skills team reason for rejecting my skill and resubmitting it for certification.

In an Amazon Alexa skill that supports displays, programmers will see a function of the form supportsDisplay(handlerInput). This function checks to see if the Amazon Alexa device (i.e., Echo) supports a display. If the result is true, the skill will display either a background image or an image related to the quiz question. I originally commented out code wherever a call to supportsDisplay existed. My first step was to removed my comment blocks and re-enable the display code.

If I left my code as is, the code would not compile. I did not define my background image and quiz item images. To get images to work with Amazon Alexa skills supporting displays, I needed to understand how to use the Amazon Web Services' Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) for storing files on the cloud. The Alexa skill would access images from my AWS Free Tier S3 bucket. For readers interested in learning more about storing files on the cloud via AWS, I suggest you read AWS' article titled Store and Retrieve a File. For my podcast, a bucket already existed for my podcast, so I found a background image from a free stock photo site (via a Google search) and uploaded it there. When you upload an image for your Amazon Alexa Skill via S3, the default setting for Manage public permissions is "Do not grant public access to this object(s) (Recommended)." You want to change this to "Grant public read access to this object(s)" because Alexa users will need to access it when they use your skill. See the image below.

The next step in uploading an image to AWS S3 is to set the storage class properties. The default storage class is Standard. Unless you subscribe to an AWS service other than the Free Tier, leave the default storage class as is and click next (see below). Click Next to review your upload, and click Upload.

Once you have a background image uploaded, you need to reference it in your Amazon Alexa skill javascript code. In my podcast code, I referenced my background image as

const backgroundImagePath = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/toppodcastquizshow-userfiles-mobilehub-187033348/public/podcastQuizBackground.jpeg";

In the quiz podcast, the backgroundImagePath  constant variable is referenced in a function called getBackgroundImage(label, height = 1024, width = 600). Notice this function uses a default width and height for the image. You must supply the function with a label. In the US States Quiz, this call looked like

const backgroundImage = new Alexa.ImageHelper().addImageInstance(getBackgroundImage(attributes.quizItem.Abbreviation)).getImage();

Clearly, my Podcast quiz does not have a quizItem field called Abbreviation. During the quiz section of my code, I changed this call to

const backgroundImage = new Alexa.ImageHelper().addImageInstance(getBackgroundImage(attributes.quizItem.podcast)).getImage();

This works great for showing the background image during a quiz. There exists another section of code that displays an image when the Amazon Alexa user asks Alexa to them them about a specific podcast (example: "Tell me about How I Built This.") I changed my code in that section by commenting out the definition of the variable image and replaced it with the following block of code:

I ran the tests, and my Podcasts Quiz skill displayed background images as expected. Note that I could have added individual images for each podcast for the "tell me about..." option. However, I decided against this because it was more work that I was willing to do at that time, and the podcast images are likely copyrighted. I resubmitted my Podcasts Quiz for Certification and am waiting on the results of the Amazon Alexa team review. Images of my Alexa skill in action in the Alex Developer Console are below. In the first case, the Amazon Alexa user asked for more information on "How I built This" Alexa said the network is NPR, the artist is Guy Raz, and the ranking order at the time of code development is 15.

Below is the example of the quiz. For this question, Alexa asked "What is the Network of Over My Dead Body?" The choices were Wondery, Barstool Sports, and Oprah. The correct answer was Wondery.

I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. Please come back for updates on my Alexa Skills development and other topics.