When the Competition Is Fierce, Turn to Your Core Strengths

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report and Mercer’s Global Talent Trends report both indicate that reskilling will be a fundamental need for the future workforce. Tied to future of work, 73 million jobs that will likely be displaced but the good news is that 133 million new jobs are projected to emerge by 2022.

In a world like this, I often ask myself, “how do I prepare myself for the new jobs being created?” Below are key strategies I’ve gleaned through my own experience as a marketing professional.

1. Acknowledge that the skill set needed will be different: Demand is rising for technology skills, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, active listening and the ability to work with others. In fact, in marketing, soft skills are perceived to be far more important than hard skills, especially in working in dynamic, diverse environments where creative thinking and initiative remain essential.
2. Hone your analytical skills: Analytics are gaining ground. It’s nearly impossible to think of an area where analytics haven’t yet taken the main stage. Serena Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratouglu, was one of the first tennis coaches to analyze where an opponent would be most likely to place a serve or hit a shot from cross court. Armed with this data, Serena improved her tennis game tremendously over the years. This video, by Mercer’s Workforce Sciences Institute founder Haig Nalbantian, is a great source for learning why analytics are important today, and will continue to be in the future.
3. Build on your fundamentals: The UX/UI profession is fairly new to the scene. It won’t be long before new jobs like these that combine art and design will emerge. As individuals, often we know our strengths and where our interest lies. So how can we take a step back to discover what more we can do with our skills? It’s important to apply feedback as well. What are others telling you you’re good at? How can you take those skills to the next level? Can you apply your strengths to your daily job? I think we all can — it’s just a matter of tuning into our core strengths to step into the best version of ourselves.
4. Take on opportunities to learn new skills: Right now, 55% of companies are doing some kind of reskilling to prepare for the future of work. In fact, two of the top demands employees have in curating their careers are to be given the opportunity to grow, and to be provided with ongoing learning opportunities. As employees, we want to learn more. We want to develop ourselves. My biggest learning experience came from being a mobile employee. This experience taught me a lot about change management and adapting to new environments and challenges. If given the opportunity to try something new or make a change, don’t think twice. There is no better way to challenge yourself than getting out of your comfort zone.
5. Own your own career, with mentors on your side: Often times we wait for our managers, or for a magic wand to appear, to direct us toward our next career journey. But in a world with a growing gig economy and a rising number of contingent workers, this more passive approach is quickly diminishing. Instead, we see employees taking on more and more responsibility for creating their own career paths. But even though independence can be a very appealing choice in guiding one’s career, having the support of mentors, and having colleagues to look up to, shouldn’t be minimized.

      6.  Copy, improve and share: Rafael Nadal, another tennis great, once said in an  interview,     “The best advice I can give is to copy the best practice.” Ask yourself how you can leverage and build upon your colleagues’ successes. Learning from colleagues — from all generations and all levels in the organization — offers a quick win for everybody. When we’re all working toward the same goals with a “sharing” mindset, we can unlock the key to greater success.

Work like a CHAMPION

According to World Health Organization (WHO) one third of adult life is spent at work. That translates to approximate 13 years of our lives. With life expectancy rising with medical improvements and pension systems pushing  retirement age no one will be surprised to see these years of work go higher. Reaching a certain point in life and career, I started becoming more sensitive to happenings around me, to the time spend at work and I thrive to make it a good one.

Organizations definitely play a certain role in cultures  built within  that has an impact on our career experience and  I often wonder if as individuals we can build our own culture to take it with us where ever we go and if we can impact the place we are in and create a domino effect. I certainly believe we can! 

7 values from the USTA flag

Above flag was hung at the USTA Billie Jean King  courts today in New York.  It had 7 values and it was suggesting the players to COMPETE LIKE A CHAMPION. Champions ‘mind think and operate different, they tend to have a plan or a learning from every game played, every competition that takes place .

Although it’s not possible to win at every circumstance, can we also WORK LIKE A CHAMPION and  make this our own culture to take with us regardless of the workplace we are in? Can we be Confident,  Determined, Engaged, Professional, Resilient, Respectful and Tough all at once? Again I think we can!

Nowadays corporations are doing great things to ensure the employees are happy and healthy. Happy and healthy employees translate to better performance which then leads to better business results. Flexible working environments, modern working places, extended benefits for families, education for closing gender pay gap are all stellar programs. While not all corporations will be at the highest level of these programs or we as individuals won’t be at a spot to feel all these great things we can always WORK LIKE A CHAMPION regardless of where or how we work. Corporate, start up or freelance, it really doesn’t matter.

We have a responsibility

I think as individuals we have a responsibility, starting from today we can try to have all these values and start spreading. There will always be a black sheep in a group, always a manager to look down on you, a moment we don’t feel strong enough and that confidence is nowhere to be found or a colleague to be disrespectful but while keeping the minimum we can overcome these circumstances. This is all human and we will be worn down at times but we are strong enough to keep it together or bring it together.

This is my interpretation to the 7 values with a WORK and COMPETE* perspective.

	WORK like a champion	COMPETE* like  a champion
Confident	Knowledge	Trust in ability to perform/make a certain shot
Determined	Hard work	Practice
Engaged	Being connected to colleagues and topics	Loving the sports you do and being motivated
Professional	Reacting/taking decisions  with mind and not letting feelings take over	Keeping it calm under pressing moments in a competition
Respectful	Empathy and appreciating others’ effort	Accepting superior opponents  and their efforts
Resilient	Knowing how to stand up when you fall	Concentrating on the next point
Tough	Critical to question if any better outcomes are possible	Mental strong

*COMPETE part is filled by taking Tennis as the reference sports  

Hoping this all resonates with you and you also have your version of interpretation to 7 values. Whether its 13 or 30 years that we work I think we all deserve a fulfilling experience and we can make it better by starting influencing ourselves as well as others by WORKING LIKE A CHAMPION.

Best
Isil Cayirli Ketenci

You can read more of my blogs on gripshape.blogspot.com

What is your grip?

Being a tennis player, spending a good amount of my life on tennis courts, clubs, tournaments built me to who I am today. So this is my blog Grip Shape , totally personally driven from my passions, learning and experience and inspired by tennis.

It took me a while to name my blog and have decided on Grip Shape for some  reasons. For tennis there are certain ways you would hold a tennis racket. These can be numerous names  called eastern, western and continental,grips. They all would get you somewhere. You can still hit the ball and it will go over the net. Every tennis player will grow into a grip depending on how they are taught and how comfortable they are with the hold. I don't think anyone can judge if a certain grip will bring you success or one is superior to other.

Grip shape is my voice, the way I hold a tennis racket. I am hoping you will enjoy the articles that will bring you some life long learnings or  perspectives of me.

Just scroll down and enjoy! If you feel it will be useful to anyone, don't hesitate to share.

Best
Isil Cayirli Ketenci

Analytics today and in the future with Haig Nalbantian

I started to think lately that it’s a shame not to share what you best know to new generations and  to societies.  How are we going to progress if we keep the good information to ourselves  (good information in the sense that; outstanding expert advices, books read and quotes that helped our lives).

Did you ever think that maybe with few words you put in writing or few moments you spend  with a person  can have a huge positive impact?  This is my motto now #shareyourbest 

So here I am thinking what could best fit to this topic and I am  thrilled with the idea that I need to share some videos of my dear colleague Haig Nalbantian.

Haig is a Senior Partner at Mercer and he is also the cofounder of Workforce institute for the company. He is the guru in my eyes for the topic of analytics and one of the best consultants my paths have crossed.

It was only a few months ago I squeezed an interview with him on the topic of “analytics today and in the future” as  its often I am running into questions of  "what the future holds for students on this area, how important it is and do we have the luxury to neglect this topic? "

 

I myself couldn't agree more on the essence of this topic. Every project we work on starts with the KPIs and  what we want to achieve. No surprise that KPIs always aim for improved results for recurring projects and analytics is our greatest support with context  added on top of it. As little as sending a mass email at a certain time or measuring the open rate of a long text content versus a short text content can be the game changers that you might be looking for. Analytics is the key for all this.

While you enjoy the responses first hand from Haig; WEF’s Future of Jobs report confirms that the rising star jobs  are  going to be taken over by data analysts.

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What motivates you?

For some time now I’ve wanted to share with others my personal experiences in career, sports, life, thinking and thanks to my husband’s motto: “never delay what you want to do in life”, I finally sat down to write my inaugural blog.  Just in time to kick off one of the resolutions I have on my 2019 list. Have you made your resolution list yet?
This piece will center on motivation-the biggest and strongest drive in my life.
It was this year that my friend, Dr. Sertan Kabadayi, invited me to speak at Fordham University at their “Industry career speakers series”. In preparation for my speech, I reflected on the many aspects of my career. While I will share in future blogs more about some of those reflections, for this one I wanted to focus on motivation. It was the end of my speech at Fordham, during the Q&A session, that one of the students asked me “what motivates you?”. The question struck me as I wasn’t expecting it based on the topic of international careers. Without much thought, I replied, “success motivates me.”
I realized success is just a term I give to different outcomes I achieve in different circumstances. In sports it’s easy, you become the champion and that is a clear success. How about the runner ups? Don’t they feel successful? Often in sports I felt unsuccessful when I lost a tennis match to an opponent that I thought I could beat. But when faced with opponents much better than me then even winning a few games would make me happy and again that was a motivation for me. In this case, failures are secret successes; in these situations I excelled compared to what I perceived I could have achieve.
 When this thinking is applied to day-to-day business life it’s often a more complicated story. On a daily basis at work it’s hard to find a success story; a business place can be an environment hard to define what success truly looks like. It could be even more failures than successes given the circumstances. For this I set long term goals, long term successes that I can achieve over time and work towards. That motivates me.
 Million-dollar Manhattan Condo as motivation?
Whether its success, giving, sharing, health, happiness, a nice Bentley car, million dollar Manhattan condo on the 5th  avenue or an expensive Bordeaux wine , it’s important to find what motivates you. I have secretly found what it is for me with a question that came out of the blue and mine is ‘feeling successful’. I find motivation and hope directly correlated leading to positive thinking and driving stellar outcomes for one’s self.
Maybe this is a moment to think what motivates you? And if you are one of the lucky ones that identified it you already have the power in you.