Career Success by Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
In order to blossom into a productive body of the society, one needs to treat his career like a baby- with careful handling, nurturing, ownership, grooming, acquiring& application of skills and a freedom to make experiments and meaningful socialization. Career Management consists of: Taking initiatives, staying valuable to the company, cultivating relationships and continuously learning.
- Taking Initiatives: Every great achievement is the result of taking initiatives. A Chinese proverb says that a journey of thousand miles starts with taking the first step. People who marshal courage and take steps and dare to fall and bear the consequences and jeopardize their finances and risk becoming laughing stocks go into history as winners, victors, saviors and celebrities. World will always remember Neil Armstrong as the first person to have landed on moon because he took the initiative to come out of Apollo, although Colonel Edwin was also traveling in the same shuttle. Since Colonel did not take the initiative, he will always be remembered as No 2.To move on to the next level in organizations, one needs to take initiatives, start new tasks, take risks, plan new activities and go beyond the usual call of duty.
- Staying valuable to the company: When you are working for an organization, treat yourself like an entrepreneur. Your time, talent and skill-set are your products and your organization is the client. If the product does not add value to the life of the buyer, repeat purchases will not occur. In order to be considered as an asset for upcoming organizational moves, you have to ensure that you invest all the time and effort you can to create value for your employer. Read more
CV is a Marketing Communication Tool: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
The words Curriculum Vitae (CV) take its origin from Latin and literally mean “the course of one’s life.”A CV or résumé is a marketing communication tool. Imagine the CV as being a brochure that will list the benefits of a particular service. The service being your time, talent and skills! When writing a CV, look at it from your employers’ point of view. Would you stand out against the competition (the other candidates)? In what way, can you meet your employers’ needs? What value addition can you bring to the organization? You’ve to ask these questions when writing your CV or curriculum vitae.
I read somewhere that CV is just like “toothpaste commercial” that means that an average employment manager devotes about the same amount of time to scanning a CV that most television viewers spend watching a commercial designed to sell toothpaste about 30 seconds. But rather than advertising the features and benefits of toothpaste, a CV is designed to advertise the accomplishments and track record of its author- that’s, you.
Think for a moment about the concept of marketing. Marketing means taking a careful look at the needs of a certain segment of consumers and finding a way to satisfy those needs. A CV is, fundamentally, a marketing tool. The consumer is the employment manager or the person in the company who makes the hiring decisions. The needs of that consumer are the requirements of the position he or she’s trying to fill. You’re the product, and your qualifications for that job are the way in which you’ll meet that employer’s needs. CV is your first form of advertising. Another way to understand what a CV should be is to look at what it shouldn’t be. Obviously, if it’s a marketing tool, it’s not a chronicling of everything you’ve ever done or experienced with no regard for how that list meets an employer’s needs. Read more
Networking: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
Life works like a boomerang. What goes around comes around. When you practice the boomerang effect, you may actually notice a sense of relief because you don’t have to control things and keep score anymore. When you concentrate on supporting other people in your network, you’ll receive an abundance of ideas, support and referrals.
The heartbeat of networking is people caring about people. Even if you learn all the skills, say all the right things, networking is only truly powerful when genuine human caring exists.
Networking is an aptitude; it’s a way of life. It’s not just a ritualistic list of things to be done in a specific timeframe. Even though there are some specific rules and tools that you can learn about networking by reading books, but unless you have a networking aptitude, unless you develop a mind-set about networking, the impact will be short-lived and results will be below potential. Read more
Career Tip: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
Networking is Key to Job-hunting
If you want to be prosperous for a year, grow grain.
If you want to be prosperous for ten years, grow trees.
If you want to be prosperous for a lifetime, grow people.
–CHINESE PROVERB
Networking is about growing and cultivating people…..relationships, friendships, synergies, and trusts. Like IQ and EQ, high Networking Quotient (NQ) is a pre-requisite to personal and professional success.
Dr. Stephen Covey says in his epoch making book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that highly effective and successful people are neither dependent nor independent, in fact, they’re interdependent people. They derive strength from others and give strength to others. Successful people are like colonies, they interact with each other, help each other, support each other, integrate with each other, coordinate with each other, synergize with each other for the ultimate and collective good of the entire community. They survive on their mutual strengths; they thrive on their collective resources. Someone has rightly said that T.E.A.M stands for Together Everyone Achieves Miracles.
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Career Tip: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
While you’re on prowl for job-hunting, treat yourself like an enterprise. Your skills are your products and services. And you’re CEO of “You, Inc.” A CEO’s job is mainly to sell: selling change, selling his ideas, selling his vision and image. CEO in other words refers to the Chief Selling Officer. You need to bring out your entrepreneurial skills to push yourself forward on the course of life
Starting a job hunting process is similar to launching a product or service. The only difference is: here you’re a product; you’re a brand; you’re a product manager; you’re a brand manager; you’re a sales manager. You’ve to position yourself. You’ve to bring out your Unique Selling Propositions. You’ve to craft your own marketing strategy. You’ve to open your own channels of distribution to make yourself ‘on-the-shelf’. You’ll press the launch buttons of your marketing campaign. For more elaboration, let me draw the comparison between job hunting and product launch.
Job Hunting Tips from Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
Job Hunting?
“Treat a job hunt like a personal development project and be the project manager.” –PENELOPE TRUNK
The Majority of fresh graduates, treading the beaten trail, trust writing their CV and sending it out to potential employers is all that’s required to land a job. I’ve screened thousands of CVs and Cover Letters in my one and a half decade career and I have to say that minimal efforts are usually invested by job seekers to customize their CVs and Cover Letters. An employer could easily get frustrated with vague imprecise words such as ‘Metric, Martial, and Carrier etc’ in CVs and sentences in Cover Letters like ‘ I’ve come to know through reliable sources that you have a vacant position and I assure you that if given the chance, I’ll leave no stone un-turned to satisfy you’. All such CVs and Cover Letters end up in piles of unsuccessful candidate files. Successful people don’t sit on haunches, waiting for miracles to happen. They make miracles happen!
Careers Uncovered: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
1. Best career advice I ever got: I was in 7th grade, when I read the translation of Dale Carnegie’s classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I learnt that throughout our whole life, we are in the ‘selling’ profession. The function of ‘selling’ starts with first cry for milk by the baby and it just goes on. When you opt to roll out your professional career, you are in the ‘selling’ business all the way. You sell your ideas to your colleagues; you sell proposals to your boss; you sell budgets to finance; you sell stumbling blocks to yourself as stepping stones. I am incredibly lucky that I got this career advice in my childhood from no less than Dale Carnegie. When you take yourself as a salesperson rather than as an employee, your approach towards career in particular and towards life in general is very different. You take everybody as your prospect. You remain on auto-networking mode all the time. You look for avenues within the organization as well as outside where you are able to sell your ideas. By selling ideas, you create value-addition possibilities. The more valuable you are to the organization, the bigger price tag you will put on your services. That is how you scale the heights of career.
