The Quest For Career Fulfillment

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Career fulfillment | The Quest For Career FulfillmentWhen embarking on a career, there are a number of goals that most of us want to achieve. The most obvious goal is the desire to earn enough to live on comfortably; enough for a stable home environment and, if possible, a few treats along the way. Secondary goals tend to include a pleasant working experience – getting on with colleagues, feeling valued, and so on and so forth – as well as a work-life balance that allows us to work to live, rather than live to work.

However, there is one goal that tends to be, at best, overlooked – which is somewhat surprising, given its importance to our overall well-being. The goal in question? Career fulfilment.

What is career fulfilment?

The concept of career fulfilment is, as one would expect, a desire to feel fulfilled – in some way – by the work we do. On a basic level, fulfillment is simply a way to achieve a sense of satisfaction from your career; a satisfaction that comes not from the wage you earn and the lifestyle you are subsequently able to afford, but from the work itself.

Career fulfillment is most commonly associated with careers that serve a greater good or improve the lives of others; careers like that of Cynthia Telles, which take a passion and turn it into a vocation. However, any career can offer a sense of fulfilment; some careers are more likely to offer fulfilment but any type of career can under the right circumstances be fulfilling in its own way.

How common is career fulfilment?

Unfortunately, not particularly. A huge number of people work for their entire lives without achieving true fulfilment – and for some individuals, that works just fine. Particularly in financial and city-related jobs, many individuals choose to work extremely hard in a role they don’t really care about, with the goal of retiring early. For these people, fulfilment is not a necessary aim; the end – early retirement – justifies the means, and they are willing to tolerate even an unpleasant decade or so, as long as they meet their eventual FIRE goal.

However, for those not focused on FIRE but instead just trying to make a living, fulfilment becomes more important – but it remains incredibly rare. A surprisingly large number of people dislike their job, and only 33% of workers are fully engaged with their role; which, given that engagement is more likely to lead to fulfilment, is concerning.

Why is fulfilment so uncommon?

The reason many people work without career fulfilment varies wildly. Some people just need to earn a living; what they do, or how fulfilled they feel, is fairly unimportant. For others, the work itself does not – and cannot – offer significant fulfilment. What’s more, some people don’t even see fulfillment as particularly important; even those who are not aiming for FIRE may be more than content to simply work comfortably, earning what they need to live on, and look for nothing more.

As a result, career fulfillment is best thought of as a concept that is important for some people. For others, it would be nice to have, but far from crucial – we all have different priorities in life, after all. However, this does beg the question…

What happens if fulfillment is important to you, but your career is not fulfilling?

The above circumstance is the worst case scenario: you may be someone for whom fulfillment is incredibly important, but you do not find that your existing role – or even your entire career – offers this fulfillment. The consequences of working in such a scenario can be extremely challenging, leading to dissatisfaction, unhappiness, stress, and even an exacerbation of underlying health conditions.

How can you tell if you are lacking in career fulfillment?

Common signs of poor career fulfilment include:

  • Disinterest in the work itself; you do not feel excited or enthused by the work you have to do
  • Frequent absenteeism; you will more readily take sick days and will usually try to use all of your available vacation days
  • Malaise or even depression during the working week, which tends to lift in the evenings or on weekends – i.e. times when you are not working

What can you do if you are not achieving career fulfilment, but want to?

First and foremost, it’s worth considering other methods of achieving a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction outside of the workplace, as some people find that this can help them to better manage their overall career concerns. After all, if your hobbies or out-of-work activities offer a sense of fulfilment, then achieving this from your career may become less important. You could, for example, consider volunteering or fundraising for a cause close to your heart in your spare time, and switch to trying to see the work you do as a means to an end.

However, if you find the above is not sufficient – or you simply want to achieve fulfilment in your career rather than your personal time – then switching careers is likely to be the best choice.

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Career fulfillment | The Quest For Career FulfillmentWhich careers should you consider switching to?

As we touched on above, while careers that can be considered meaningful are arguably more likely to offer career fulfilment, any career may be suitable. It’s just important to try and focus on a career where you feel that you would be happy with the work itself; where you feel that your contribution would be valuable (not necessarily in terms of money) in some way. To that end, it might be worth considering volunteering initially, so you can try out a few different ideas and see which affords you the most fulfilling experience.

In conclusion

Career fulfilment is not an essential – many people can spend their entire working lives without career fulfilment, but remain happy and content with this fact. However, if career fulfilment is important to you personally, then making a change that allows you to achieve the fulfilment you require could well be the right choice for your future happiness and well-being.

Four Things You Could Be Doing For A More Sustainable Construction Biz

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Sustainable Business | Four Things You Could Be Doing For A More Sustainable Construction BizThe construction industry has always been well respected while also being at the center of a global focus for pollution. Poor air quality is a big deal, and the construction industry is always in the spotlight due to the way the pollutants hit the air. It’s construction that is a number one polluter, and yet there are so many things that companies in the business could be doing to clean up their act.

The air we breathe and the grounds that you work on all need to be cared for properly to avoid adding anything more to the environment than is necessary. Your strategy should take into account the space your teams work in around the country, too. Taking all of that into consideration, you can check out the four things that you could be doing to build a sustainable construction site from today.

  1. Look At Your Premises. As a lot of pollution comes directly from the building sites and the transportation used in the business of construction, and it’s important that you get as much information about zero valent iron and other safe remediation products to remove pollutants from the soil outside. Your site should be energy efficient, and you should be able to use as many renewable sources as possible while you and your team work.
  2. Remove Waste Safely. Construction sites often emanate waste, and the contribution to waste streams means that construction is never really considered as sustainable. An effective waste management policy is essential for your business, and if you want to combat the sustainability issues with your company, you need to look deeper.
  3. Make Your Transport As Economical As Possible. At the moment, transport on the road is a significant contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. If your drivers aren’t efficient on the road or with the vehicles on site, you will not be as eco-friendly as you would like. You can switch to cars that are more efficient with fuel, and if you source as many materials locally as possible, you can reduce the impact on the environment, which will be a positive thing in the long run.
  4. Efficient Equipment. As well as making sure that you are using the right materials to remediate the grounds you are working within, you also need to ensure that you are using renewable options for equipment where possible. This also means using fuels of a high-quality, and this means choosing the right equipment for your site from day one. The equipment here can include the generator, as you want to use generators that fit your needs.

The construction industry is working hard to remain responsible in the industry, and your business should be taking a stand, too. Operating a carbon reduction strategy is just one of many ways that you could do well for the environment, and you can get started today to do better for the world.

Mastering The Product Development Process

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StrategyDriven Online Entrepreneurship Article |Product Development|Mastering The Product Development ProcessWhatever it is that your business does, there will be some kind of product that you need to make along the way – unless you offer a service free of products of any kind, of course, which is not commonly the case. Because that product is what the customer ends up with in their hands, it is one of the major determinants of what they think of your business, and as such you should make sure that it is going to be as close to perfect as possible. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure that you are going to create a close to perfect product, and in this article we are going to look at a range of them. Mastering your product development process is going to bring huge benefits to your business, so if you take the following on board you should find that you are in am much better position on the whole.

Strong Ideation

An early and important phase in the development of any product is ideation, or in other words where you actually come up with the idea for the products you are going to create. Having a good process for coming up with those products is obviously always going to be important, as it will result in much more successful products being created in the end. But how can you make sure that you are going to improve the ideation process involved in your development? For a start, you should consider trying to solve a problem that you have identified as being common amongst people in the society. Doing that will mean that you can get a better sense of what kind of thing you need to produce, and you are much more likely to end up making something people really need.

Whatever ideas are generated, it’s important to make sure that you have plenty of people around the table who can talk it through together and decide on what needs to be improved or what needs work in any way. The more you have a range of experts and so on, the more likely it is that you will be able to create something that is as close to perfect as possible. This process should be worked on as much as you can if you want to create great products, so be sure to put a lot of effort in at this point for benefits later on.

StrategyDriven Online Entrepreneurship Article |Product Development|Mastering The Product Development ProcessCreation

When it comes to the actual start of the manufacturing process, you need to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to really make it work out as well as possible. You want as few things to go wrong here as you can manage, so that you can have less to work on later on, and the best way to make sure of that is to look at developing a manufacturing process at this early stage which is set up to succeed as well as possible. You will be surprised at how much you have to think about here. For a start, you’ll need the space, which in most cases will be a factory. Within that factory, you’ll need to set up the proper equipment for ensuring that it goes as smoothly and swiftly as you would hope: that means having the right roller conveyor systems in place and ensuring that you have all the materials necessary to be able to actually create the item in question.

Having the factory set up means you can then work on ensuring that the manufacturing goes well, and that ensures the future quality of the product. Clearly, it’s something you should spend some real time on if you are to ensure that your product ends up as successful as possible.

Marketing

It’s often easy to forget that marketing is a part of the process of product development, as much as any other part of it. You need to have one eye on your marketing from the very start if you are to make the most of it, as you can gather more ideas and make sure there is a synthesis between product and marketing later on, making it much more likely to sell well. A big part of this too is ensuring that you have looked into the right kind of packaging and labelling for your products, which ultimately form the last part of the marketing process. As long as you have done that, you will find that you are going to have much more success with the product on the whole.

6 Reasons why PPC isn’t Working for You

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |PPC|6 Reasons why PPC isn’t Working for YouWhen everything is done right, PPC can be one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. But when it goes wrong, it can be easy to throw in the towel and blame everything on it. However, while sometimes PPC may not be the best suited for your application, in many cases, failure is caused by errors that could’ve been easily avoided. Let’s take a look at why your campaigns might be failing and some solutions to correct them.

Using the Wrong Settings

Setting up your ads properly is very simple and takes but a few minutes but make mistakes here and the performance of your ads might be seriously affected. The first thing you have to make sure you get right is the campaign type. The type you choose has to be aligned with your goals and will have an influence on where and which types of ads you can display.

The other thing you have to decide is your whether your ads will be displayed on the search network or on both search and display. When your site is on the display network, your ads will show up in AdSense ads featured on websites. Some people like display ads while others want to only have their ads show up when people search for their terms. It’s up to you which one works the best for you. But if you’re new to PPC, we strongly suggest you start with search only as it will be easier to monitor.

Location settings is another thing a lot of people get wrong when they get started. Some people try to cast a wide net to attract the highest number of people, but it’s usually a better idea to target areas that are close to you. Consider using zip codes or GPS coordinates to zero in on specific areas, especially if your service is local by nature.

You should also consider which type of ad rotation you want. Going with default settings isn’t always the best idea. The “optimize for clicks” option will display the ads that have the chance of performing the best based on their previous performance. What it doesn’t compute, however, is that other factors that have absolutely nothing to do with the ad could’ve affected performance. In our experience, the “rotate indefinitely” option is much better for getting clicks and really testing which ads are working the best.

Your Ads are Wrong

In other cases, your ad might be wrong. Maybe the headline isn’t eye-catching. Or there’s no call to action. Or maybe your particular business could benefit from a call only ad where you’ll be able to track phone calls generated and get leads that way.

Creating great ads is an art, and you can’t leave it to chance. Your ads should be relevant, specific, attractive and sometimes even thought-provoking. And you should also make sure that your keyword appears somewhere in the copy. Just making one adjustment could send your click through and conversion rates skyrocketing. If you want to learn how to make great PPC ads, check out this information.

Poor Keyword Research

Your keyword research will be just as important as your ads when creating a campaign. You have to know which keywords are selling and how much you should be willing to pay for them. There are some paid and free tools out there that will allow you to perform some keyword research. Some will allow you to see some of the analytics before having to switch to their paid version. You have to pick words that are cheap enough to get a ROI, have little competition, but still enough traffic to make a difference.

If you’re strapped for cash right now, Google’s Keyword Planner is ok if you’re just getting started. You’ll be able to search for ad group and keyword ideas, see how you can expect them to perform, and start budgeting.

Poor Understanding of Negative Keywords

Some people completely overlook negative keywords either because they don’t think they make an impact or simply don’t understand how they work. Negative keywords are any keywords that could trigger your ads without being related to your service. If you’re running a construction company, for instance, you’d want to filter out words like “jobs”, since many people might be looking for construction jobs. Your ads will not be shown as often, which will reduce the chances of people clicking on them. But you have to be careful with negative keywords as too many could reduce impressions greatly.

You’re Not Targeting the Right Audience

PPC allows you to pinpoint the kind of audience you want to target, and you have to take advantage of this feature if you want to be successful long term. So make sure that you research and truly get to know your audience. Then work on developing campaigns tailor-made for them and push them through whichever step they are in the sales funnel.

Once you know exactly who your audience is, you can go with even more advanced targeting and start looking at demographic targeting options. You could start targeting customer groups that are likely to be in a specific household income range, gender, age group, or parental status.

You Aren’t Tracking your Conversions

Another reason why you may be failing at PPC is that you either don’t monitor or poorly monitor your results. If you don’t test your conversions and constantly test your ads to monitor not only those who get tons of clicks but those who actually turn visitors into sellers, then you’re wasting your time and your money. By using conversion tracking tools, you’ll be able to see which ads, ad groups, keywords, and campaign are converting the best. You’ll also be able to see if changing landing pages could increase your conversion rates and A/B test different landing pages for different ads.

Conclusion

PPC is one of the most efficient and easy to monitor marketing methods you can find online. However, you have to make sure that everything is done properly and that you take the time to test and tweak your strategy until you get the desired results.

How to Add Character to Your Local Store

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Branding|How to Add Character to Your Local StoreIf you’re a local store owner, you might feel like business terms like ‘rebranding’ and ‘brand curation’ are reserved for larger and more successful businesses. But this is not the case; in fact, small businesses can see some of the sharpest up-spikes in business after putting in the effort to spruce up their brand. This article provides some useful tips for small store owners whore interested in modernizing their brand’s appearance, drawing in more curious customers as a result.

Brand Redesign

Your brand consists mainly of your business’ name, your logo, your color scheme and all the other material you’ve produced over the years to give your business a character of its own. While this might have been a successful and alluring brand at some time in the past, it’s rarely a bad idea to go over your branding again, perhaps with a professional consultancy, designer or a trusted individual in your network. All of whom can pitch ideas as to how you can get your brand looking smart, professional and exciting in the eyes of the consumer.

Bold Lettering

As a store owner, you’ll know as well as anyone that books are judged by their covers and stores are judged by the shop windows. As such, this is a hugely important area in which you need to impress potential customers from the outset. One of the primary methods of sprucing up the exterior of your store is to commission and buy new lettering to advertise your store’s name. Find a provider of Channel Letter Signs to partner with to get your glowing and exciting new lettering front and center outside the front of your store to tempt new customers in to browse.

Staff Behavior

While character is somewhat maintained by a brand and the shop window that you advertise your brand’s ethos with, it’s also something that often boils down to the staff that you work with inside the store. Sullen and moody staff will give your whole brand a sullen and moody aura, whereas engaged, energetic and positive people will naturally help customers feel more welcome while feeling that your brand has something characterful and interesting about it. Make sure that your staff are on board with this responsibility so that your store is at all times exhibiting the right kind of atmosphere to prospecting customers.

Promotions and Rewards

Finally, many businesses use promotions, rewards, competitions and loyalty systems to generate repeat custom or inspire first-time customers to part with their cash. One of the most characterful and exciting ways to encourage this is through a one-day promotional bid, which you can advertise digitally beforehand. Many stores do this on their ‘birthday’ by offering free giveaways to the first 100 customers, or other such rewards that generate exuberant energy around your brand. Think hard about what your store can offer in this domain to garner publicity and excitement around your brand.

By using the tips in the article, you’ll be able to spruce up your brand by making changes to your store, helping you drive up custom to see a spike in profits this summer.