Top Tips To Switch Careers From The Founders Of The Muse

A successful career switch doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process of self-reflection, trying things out, adding skills and more — and it can take a few years to get things rolling. That’s why The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career by Alexandra Cavoulacos and Kathryn Minshew, cofounders of the popular career site The Muse, appealed to me. And I believe it will appeal to many of you pondering a career shift as well.

“The advice in this book is going to be focused on that two-to-five-year horizon; on getting you ready to make the most of what you are doing today and for the next few years,” Cavoulacos and Minshew write. “The best part is you can return to it again and again — the practices and thought exercises we’re doing here will serve you not only now, but the next time you’re ready for another step, shift, or reinvention in your career.”

Preparing for Your Next Act

While The Muse tends to skew Millennial (its founders are in their early 30s), this straightforward guidebook isn’t confined to the newly-minted graduate. It covers the workplace waterfront from resumés to networking to job interviews that can help people of all ages and in all stages of their careers.

If you’re in your 50s or 60s and job searching for the first time in decades or pondering shifting fields to pursue a passion, The New Rules of Work captures the essence of what you need to prepare for your next act. (Curiously, though, there’s no chapter on starting a business, which is odd given the success of Cavoulacos and Minshew with The Muse, which they launched five years ago.)

One of the underlying takeaways from the book, which I preach with regularity, is that to follow a career path you love, you need a good grasp of your career values — from flexibility to compensation to creativity. What do you really want to get out of work? That must be your guide to navigating your career.

Top 7 Trends That Will Transform Digital Marketing In 2017

Social and digital marketing have hit their stride — and now that everyone is back from winter break and settling in to the new year, it’s time to review the lessons learned from last year, and look forward to what’s needed for your company to shine in 2017. From the evolving world of artificial intelligence to expectations of instant communications, Stacy DeBroff, CEO and founder of Influence-Central, shares her take on the social and digital marketing horizon, based on her research and work with over 350 national brands last year.

1)New Products Roll in From the Brand Revolution

“As consumers – via social media – we all have a seat at the marketing table —by sharing our needs and priorities through direct feedback and our purchasing choices. We’ve seen the impact of the ‘brand revolution’ on key consumer-facing industries,” DeBroff says. “In the coming year, brands will become even more attuned to the needs and priorities of the consumer, and increasingly shape their product offerings around the latest lifestyle trends.”

2) A.I. Solutions Point to a Brave New World

2017 will be the year when we will look more to artificial intelligence to lend a helping hand. “This current trend with start-up brands, as well as data analytics, identifies applicable A.I. solutions as a way for consumers to navigate in an increasingly complex world,” DeBroff notes. “From advanced electronics applications, to pinpoint analytics that predict consumer needs as they arise, A.I. is on the way, in a big way."

3)“Instant” Speeds up as the New Normal for Gen Z

What happens when you grow up surrounded by social media and technology? Expectations of instant communications and entertainment become inevitable. Generation Z consumers gravitate to instantaneous social channels such as Snapchat, Instagram, and the new social app Musical.ly. “The downside?” DeBroff explains, “This generation has grown up with instant response as its baseline expectation. We can count on at least three platforms we’ve never heard of rising to social prominence next year that embrace faster, more pictorial, and more spontaneous ways for rising Gen Z to bond.”

4)Niche Curation Sorts Information Overload

“We find ourselves awash with more information than has ever been available to us as humans, and we simply can’t process it,” DeBroff concludes. “As a result, we’ve increasingly come to rely not just on curated information, but on the people we most trust to curate this information for us in a way that resonates with our lifestyle, interests, and values. In 2017, consumers will be on a mission to find peer specialists with niche expertise to filter recommendations that meet their needs in a customized way.”

5)Mobile Devices Forge On-the-Go Consumerism

In 2017, DeBroff predicts we will see the emergence of a new “electronics evolution” with innovative technology and apps for the mobile phones we keep tethered to our sides. “As these devices offer up smarter, faster, and more intuitive information, they will become even more ingrained into our daily patterns and connected culture — and dramatically influence consumers at the point of purchase. Mobile devices will emerge as shoppers’ most valued shopping partner, as consumers check them for recommendations from their network of trusted advisors while fact-checking product attributes and using online coupons,” DeBroff says

6)Social Influencers Diversify, Specialize, and Grow Exponentially

“We’ve never had more on-call peers to advise us — from peer advisors to specialists and trend-spotters,” DeBroff notes. As we move into 2017, she predicts we will “entrench ourselves more deeply within the social web, immersing ourselves in increasingly diverse and broadening circles of discerning opinions. These influencers will powerfully inform and guide us in our consumer decisions.”

7)Influencer Marketing as a Fundamental Brand Strategy

Many brands now recognized Influencer Marketing as the industry’s hot “go-to” strategy, but they struggle on how best to leverage it and measure it from the perspective of business results and attribution modeling. “As we head into 2017, influencers will entrench as defining voices in consumer marketing, as brands concede advertising control and look to passionate brand advocates to sway consumers on social media,” says DeBroff.

Marketers in India Still Reluctant to Spend Big Despite Sizable Digital Opportunities

Rajiv Dingra, CEO and founder of WATConsult—a Mumbai-based hybrid consultancy that splits its business between media planning and digital branding—spoke with eMarketer’s David Green about why spending by marketers in India lags, and why digital video is growing.

eMarketer: What role does digital play in relation to total media ad spending in India?

Rajiv Dingra: The entire advertising market in India is not more than $10 billion to $11 billion, which is quite small when compared with China, where digital alone will account for that. Internet penetration in India is about 25% to 30% [of the population], or 300 million-plus users, and digital spend is pegged at about 12% to 15% of overall spend—anywhere between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion. So it’s a small market, but it’s probably the fastest-growing market in Asia-Pacific at 30% to 35% [per year], and by 2020 it is pegged to be close to a $3.5 billion to $4 billion digital advertising market.

eMarketer: Print is still India’s second-largest medium by spend, at an expected INR215 billion ($3.20 billion) out of a total INR597.3 billion ($8.89 billion) this year, according to a KPMG and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) report. What keeps print so healthy?

Dingra: India has 26 states and some union territories, and each of these has a different language. With only 300 million people on the internet, what are the other 800 million people doing? They’re consuming content in their local language on paper. Print grows in higher single digits every year, and in television’s case it’s double digits—about 12% to 13%. So neither is dying. In fact, all media are growing in India because consumption is growing.

“With only 300 million people on the internet, what are the other 800 million people doing? They’re consuming content in their local language on paper.”

eMarketer: What effect does the fragmented nature of the market have on cost per reach (CPR)?

Dingra: In relative terms the CPR in India will be peanuts—a rupee or two, maybe 5 rupees, though higher on digital because you are hitting premium audiences. In India, the 300 million people on the internet are largely English-speaking. Vernacular sites do not command huge traffic, except for two or three sites down South that are in the Malayalam language.

Digging deeper into demographics, about 20% to 25% [of internet users] are rural users. There are people in rural India who are well-to-do: They can afford a Mercedes because they have land. A large [portion], 45% to 50%, will be under 30—maybe even more than half. It’s a young audience, as 70% of the country is under 30. And about 70% [of internet users] are male.

eMarketer: Do the myriad geographies and languages make it cost-prohibitive to run national campaigns?

Dingra: Most brands don’t compete nationally—brands have their strong markets around the country, though not everybody has a strong presence in the East, because a lot of brick-and-mortar companies have distribution issues there. So, yes, for advertisers it is expensive from an Indian perspective to have a national campaign—only telecom players really undertake large national campaigns. But if you look at the financials of Indian companies compared with their global counterparts, the percentage they spend on advertising is much lower.

eMarketer: Why is the spend so much lower? How do clients typically allocate that spend, and could you give an example of a typical client’s media buy?

Dingra: There are two reasons. One is the CPR is so low. The other is clients are used to being judicious with their ad spend. They look at a combination of all media. The most expensive medium is television, because you have to buy some 50 to 100 spots, and that bulk amount runs into [the] millions of dollars.

Clients do a bit of television, a bit of radio, they do some amount of print and they spread their budget to drive 360-degree effectiveness. So an FMCG player, a private company that is about $400 million in company turnover, doesn’t spend more than $20 million a year on advertising and marketing. So that’s 5%.

“If you look at the financials of Indian companies compared with their global counterparts, the percentage they spend on advertising is much lower.”

eMarketer: How is that spend typically allocated across digital, and what trends are you seeing in terms of growth in spending on digital ad formats?

Dingra: Video is growing exponentially—so is social, and all mobile formats. Search would still be about 25% to 30% of the market. It would be a lion’s share, followed by social. When I’m saying social, I’m including YouTube as well, which will be close to 15% to 20% [of digital ad spending].

So between search, social and video you would probably get about 60% to 70% of the overall market. Specialized mobile ads are not that big, about 10% to 11%. Then email marketing would be smaller—about 4% to 5%. And programmatic display will be about 4% to 5%, while pure display will take 10% to 15% [of the digital spending share].

eMarketer: What form does video advertising take?

Dingra: Brand awareness would be probably 80% to 85% of all the video content that’s created. India is a TV market, so digital video commercials have taken off. People are serving 3-minute films, long-form content on digital, and also getting into advertising on [over-the-top] OTT platforms—which are basically Netflix and its close competitors from India.

YouTube is huge in India for display buys, whether it’s a masthead or TrueView or other YouTube formats. Beyond this, there are mobile innovation video banners that are available. All these ad formats are scaling exponentially, and brands are creating both webisodic series [and] one-off commercial campaigns for attracting brand awareness.

eMarketer: How tolerant are Indian consumers of video and other forms of advertising?

Dingra: Oh, Indians are very tolerant. If you look at newspapers, especially in the metro cities, you will probably find 30% of the newspaper is filled with ads on a holiday. There’ll be two cover jackets, three internal cover jackets, and then a whole complementary supplement, which is also sponsored.

[Mumbai] is covered with billboards. So the tolerance is very high. There is also ad blindness to some extent on TV and other spaces, as a lot of the youth are now consuming content largely through digital. So TV production houses have started to create their own digital app-based platforms as well.

eMarketer: How are brands leveraging their social presences to drive ecommerce spending?

Dingra: Some brands are purely driving their ecommerce strategy through Facebook. Myntra used to be a big spender on Facebook, and even now there are a lot of mid-sized brands, purely ecommerce and new brands that drive a lot of spend through Facebook. Traditional brands won’t have their own ecommerce store and app stores—they prefer to spend via their third-party ecommerce channels. So they will advertise on Amazon or Flipkart, or do a joint campaign across traditional platforms like Yahoo or Google Display. Smaller-sized brands believe in the power of social much more.

“Brand awareness is probably 80% to 85% of all the video content that’s created. India is a TV market, so digital video commercials have really taken off.”

eMarketer: You mentioned India has a lot of the same major publishers as the West, where some have run into ad verification problems. How concerned are your clients about similar issues?

Dingra: Ad fraud is not a big issue in India. It’s not yet reached the point where marketers are really even talking about it. They are excited about trying to do something strategically more intelligent in digital. The negative concerns of digital have not yet reached the extent where they start questioning the medium itself. So this whole click fraud, ad fraud, ad transparency [issue]—all of that is something that is not a serious part of boardroom discussions or a part of pitch ratings, in part because the budgets are relatively so much smaller.

eMarketer: Where does the biggest opportunity lie for brands in India?

Dingra: There is a huge opportunity in branded apps and mobile web platforms—where you become a publisher and really grow content—because we’ve not even scratched the surface of content consumption in India as yet. Between paid, earned and owned, we look at owned in a big way because the audience and consumption is growing day by day, and there is a huge opportunity for brands to create niche communities and monetize them over a five- to six-year time period. Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) has done it by creating a big community called Be Beautiful, which is a content community and network for its face and skincare brands.

No mass layoffs in the IT sector, NASSCOM says either re-skill or perish

Refuting reports of mass layoffs in the IT sector, NASSCOM said the industry will hire about 1.5 lakh people this year on "net" basis although techies will have to re-skill themselves to stay relevant. 

Over the past few weeks, there have been reports suggesting that over 50,000 people could be laid off this year from companies like Wipro, Infosys and Cognizant. 

"We categorically reject the reports of mass layoffs in the sector. FY 2017 saw 1.7 lakh people being added, while in Q4 alone, the gross hiring was of over 50,000 by top five companies," Nasscom President R Chandrashekhar said. 

Nasscom said that employees will have to "re-skill or perish" as the world moves to new technologies like automation, robotics, analytics and cyber security. 

Chandrashekhar said the association has consulted its members who have assured that the industry continues to be a "net" hirer, adding about 1.5 lakh people this year. Also, new opportunities are emerging in areas like tech startups, e-commerce, Digital India and digital payments. As many as 3 million new jobs are expected to be created by 2025. 

Representatives from leading companies like Cognizant, Wipro and Mindtree were also present at the media briefing. IT companies have started their annual performance appraisal cycles, which often leads to a number of terminations based on poor performance. IT companies have maintained that there is nothing different this year. "Performance-linked workforce realignment impacts about 0.5-3 per cent of the talent pool and there is no change this year. It is something every company does to stay competitive and have the right skill sets," he said. 

However, Nasscom could not clarify the reason why there was noise around the layoffs this year. The reports of mass scale layoffs have compounded the worry in the industry, as the sector is already battling challenges in the business environment and stricter work permit regime in countries like the US, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Nasscom Chairman Raman Roy said companies are making huge investments in training and re-skilling their employees on new technologies to ensure they stay upto date. 

"The need for re-skilling talent is a reality that we have to address. To keep up in a fast-evolving technology environment, the IT industry must reinvent itself by re- skilling its employees in new and upcoming technologies," he added. Chandrashekhar said there has been a "gentle deceleration" in the growth rate of net hiring as companies move focus from scale to skills.