Careers You Can Get Started in Fast

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article | Careers You Can Get Started in FastEverybody wants to have a successful career, but that’s easier said than done. Not only do you have to spend years mastering your craft and working hard to succeed in any career, but most careers also require years of school and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Fortunately, there are some careers that let you skip all the schooling and money spent. If you’re looking for a career you can get started in fast, here are some options.

IT

IT is one of the most interesting, popular career fields today. Those who work in Information Technology (IT) deal with computers and computer networks, including the individual software and hardware that creates a system for an organization. If you’re a big fan of working with computers, you’ll love IT. You have so many options within the field. You can work in any industry as an IT professional, as the modern day business culture depends on technology to succeed.

The coolest part about choosing IT as a career is how easily you can earn IT certifications through online programs. Certifications do require you to pass a test and you will have to pay a fee for each attempt.. Keep in mind there are several types of certifications, which is great since it allows you to follow the area of study necessary for the career you want. Choosing a certification path immediately puts you in a strong position as you begin pursuing opportunities in the IT field.

Trade Work

While many people are looking for careers in the fast-growing fields of technology and medicine, a big hole has opened up in the world of trade work. While trade work does require a bit of schooling and some time in an apprenticeship program, you don’t need to have a degree or a ton of experience. Some of the most popular trades include plumbing, electrical work, and HVAC.

To get started in a trade, find an appropriate shop to work in as an apprentice. After securing an apprenticeship, enroll in classes as a supplement to your work hours. At the end of it all, you’ll earn the title of a journeyman, which allows you to start your own shop or work on your own.

Computer Programming

It may be surprising to learn that you can get into almost any computer-related field without having a college degree. For example, if you’re interested in creating software, you can actively pursue a career in computer programming while avoiding the high costs of a college education. However, preparing to take that step requires a lot of work.

Becoming a computer programmer from the comfort of your home means spending hundreds or even thousands of hours learning how to program. If you’re a beginner, expect a steep learning curve that takes a while to overcome. Fortunately, there are tons of great resources online, including short courses you can work through to understand various programming concepts. If you’re interested in programming, you should also know a fair bit of math, as that can be a big part of the job.

You have to spend an eternity going to school in order to have a successful career. With these great career choices, you can get started quickly and not waste your time working somewhere you don’t want to. If you’re interested in one of these fields, you can find more information online about where to start.

How to Create a Safe Working Environment

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Safe working environment |How to Create a Safe Working EnvironmentAll employers have to provide their employees with a safe working environment. Failing to care for the health and wellbeing of your staff can lead to workplace accidents and injuries, which will harm productivity and affect your bottom line over time. It is also likely to impact employee engagement and result in low levels of satisfaction in the workplace. Health and safety should, therefore, be a top priority for all businesses. With that in mind, here are some suggestions on how to create a safe working environment:

Identify potential workplace hazards

All workplaces have some potential health risks. This includes physical hazards such as trips and falls, along with ergonomic hazards, including musculoskeletal injuries caused by poor posture. Some working environments may also have additional risks, such as biological and chemical hazards. Employers have a legal responsibility to identify potential workplace hazards and take reasonable steps to control the risk. Managers should carry out a regular risk assessment and look at work activities to determine what hazards are present in the workplace. They should then decide what control measures should be implemented to help minimize the risk of damage or injury. There is an excellent variety of resources providing guidance on how to carry out an assessment in the workplace.

Offer quality employee training

Employees must receive training on health and safety and be educated on the best practices to follow in the workplace. Making your staff aware of potential hazards will help them avoid accidents and injuries in the workplace. For instance, your team should be trained on how to safely lift and move heavy items and how to operate work machinery correctly. Ideally, you should provide regular training sessions on health and safety and enforce strict safety regulations in the workplace to help protect your staff. You can encourage employees to follow safety compliance by implementing clear policies and placing visual signs around your workplace that remind employees of the rules in place.

Provide the right equipment

Employees should always be provided with any equipment needed to complete their work activities safely and effectively. Failing to provide the right equipment will harm workplace productivity and may contribute to accidents and injuries in the workplace. For that reason, it is worth investing in reliable, high-quality tools and equipment. Employees must also be provided with uniforms and protective equipment, particularly if they are working in a high-risk environment such as construction. For example, staff will require shielding solutions like lead-free radiation shielding if their job role requires them to come into contact with radiation. Employers should complete a risk assessment to identify what tools and equipment their staff need to carry out their work tasks safely.

Conclusion

Every employee deserves to work in a safe environment, and employers should take steps to protect the health and wellbeing of their teams. Fortunately, there are plenty of simple ways to maintain a safe and positive working environment for your employees. Use the above tips to boost safety levels in your workplace today!

Five ways you can get products to customers

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article |Distribute your product|Five ways you can get products to customersSo you have a product to sell. It’s ready to go, and you may have already started to market it – but how do you get it to customers and how can you make it available to others? If you’re setting up a business for the first time, then it can be a daunting and complicated stage as you work out what’s best for you and your brand.

There are many different ways you can distribute and deliver your new product range to potential buyers. You may be familiar with these already, so take a look at the options below to see which will be the most suitable for your company, product and business model:

Through wholesalers

A wholesaler will distribute your product to retailers. It means that you can get your product into more stores than you may do on your own and, although you may be charged a higher commission, your shipping and sales costs will be reduced. There are other benefits you may find using this method, too, such as having a contract so the wholesaler handles retailer returns and complaints rather than yourself.

With retailers

You may need to look at several different costs here, such as hiring sales representatives to speak to and service retailers. Your representatives will also need to deal with commission, potential sales volumes from different retailers, markdowns you may offer, plus support provision. Other costs may include expenses, salaries and shipping.

Direct to customers

Although this method will add some expenses, it also eliminates others, such as commissions or discounts. Yet you may add the expenses associated with running a physical store, or increased staff time for selling items online, plus shipping costs. You may also have increased technology costs which could include items to help you package your items such as a Heat Sealing Machine, for instance, so you can send your products to customers.

Using brokers and agents

Here, you’ll have someone who will handle the logistics of sales. Not only will they deal with marketing, they will also do contracts and look at specialised shipments. Customer relationship management is also part of their role, and they will take ownership of the product through distribution on your behalf.

Through a distributor

This type of wholesaler will have extra responsibility, as they will actively sell an item for you as well as fulfilling any orders. You’ll also find that they can offer market analysis, and will look to get peak sales performance by looking for new opportunities. They will focus on certain areas so they can build strong relationships with manufacturers and, unlike other wholesalers, a distributor is more likely to have stronger links with certain organisations. They will be responsible for product sales.

These are a few of the options that you may wish to consider for you and your product when looking to sell it to consumers. You should now think about which of these possibilities will work best for your situation so you can achieve the best result for your range, and please your customers.

3 Steps to Creating an eCommerce Strategy for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Strategic Planning Article |Ecommerce strategy|3 Steps to Creating an eCommerce Strategy for Your BusinessFor an eCommerce store to be as successful as it can be, the business or individual behind it needs to have a clear strategy. This is because a strategy helps keep the business-focused, and also allows you to measure how your business is doing, which can give you critical insight on how to develop and change your approach in the future.

A strategy is an outline of how your store is planning to achieve its goals and improve its market position. Strategies can alter depending on the specific goals for the business, and these can range from reaching more customers to boosting customer engagement. There are a few things to consider when making a strategy for your ecommerce strategy, here are some essential steps you can’t miss.

Create a Buyers Persona

When making a strategy that targets your audience in some way, you must get a good understanding of who that audience is. It’s useful to know their interests, demographic, age, income, location, as well as other factors, as this can inform how you go about your strategy.

One of the best ways to get to grips with your audience is to create a buyer persona. These are semi-fictitious representations of your customers, which are informed by some of the data you have on previous buyers. A good persona will go deeper than the surface level details and investigate their desires and wants in terms of buying, what challenges they may face and what they’re interested in, as these can help you implement the right procedures and processes into your eCommerce website. If you’re unsure where to start, you can use a template to make sure you cover the essentials.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals help you define what you want to accomplish and puts tangible metrics in place that can be used to track your progress. For example, your overall goal may be to boost customer engagement. As SMART goals, this will be translated into things that are numerical and measurable, such as increasing the number of shares, comments or likes, or boosting the number of reviews customers leave. SMART goals have to be the following:

  • Specific, meaning that it’s defined and not too broad.
  • Measurable means that that you can track your progress.
  • Achievable, so that it’s realistic.
  • Relevant, meaning that it’s useful.
  • Timely, meaning that it has a deadline to be achieved by.

It can be challenging to know what goals you should be aiming for, and which of them would help improve your business. That’s why a lot of ecommerce businesses turn to third-party companies such as this Magento agency in Manchester, as they can help you find the perfect strategy and build a fantastic website.

Define Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

KPIs are pieces of data or information that can be used to track how well your strategy is performing. There are many different performance indicators and metrics, with some being only useful in certain situations and criteria, meaning that it’s essential to identify which indicators are useful for your specific goals.

It’s important not to get performance indicators confused with outcomes. An indicator is something that’s active and tracks efficiency, and is usually represented through percentages or ratios, such as a click-through rate or bounce rate.

COVID-19, Manufacturing Skills Gap and the Connected Worker

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StrategyDriven StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Connected Worker|COVID-19, Manufacturing Skills Gap and the Connected WorkerBy 2050, the world population is estimated to grow from 7.6 billion to 9.6 billion. This growing population will boost consumer demand across all industries. From construction, to food & beverage, to life sciences, oil & gas, and many more industries. This growing demand means that we expect to see investments into production and manufacturing facilities, creation of many new jobs and a positive impact to the economy. Ultimately this positive impact will lead to hiring of many new front-line workers to support these operations.

These new opportunities create new sets of challenges in the COVID-19 Era. In this blog, I will highlight four challenges that business operations will face to keep their operations running.

  • Digital Natives – The New “Front-Line” Worker – While the above growth in population is the good news, the bad news is that many of these new front-line workers are born digital natives. They expect everything digital in their life and we expect to see a talent war with these new front-line workers having a choice in where they choose to work. The new front-line workers will be expected to perform highly complex jobs and processes with minimal human interactions in the COVID-19 Era. Big, fat binders, walkie-talkies and pages of work instructions will no longer even be an option. Availability of experts to hand-hold these front-line workers is also rapidly diminishing and with COVID-19, it even makes things harder to keep machines running and spare parts available at the right time and at the right place.
  • Disappearance of Tribal Knowledge – The tribal knowledge that exists with your expert front-line workers is expected to disappear in relatively short time. The average age of front-line workers is at 44.1 years and it’s estimated that these workers will soon start to leave the workplace, creating a huge skills gap and tribal knowledge disappearance. This aging workforce, coupled with a tight labor market, has resulted in critical skills and talent gaps impacting the ability of asset-intensive industries to recruit, train and retain a workforce with suitable competencies. The Manufacturing Institute estimates that because of the skills gap 2.4 million job openings in manufacturing will likely go unfilled through 2028, representing half of all open positions.
  • Shrinking Profit Margins – The growing pressure on profit margins and talent challenges is felt across all asset-intensive industries, such as CPG, Life Sciences, Oil & Gas, Utilities, Mining & Metals, Chemicals, and Industrial Manufacturing. This pressure doesn’t just stem from the rising cost of people; these industries are facing increasing demand from customers to deliver higher value for a lower cost.
  • Worker Safety – During the COVID-19 crisis, we have seen many business operations grind to a complete standstill, impacting production and revenue streams. New safety procedures, risk assessments and contact tracking will become an integral part of running an operation without interruption. Practicing “Social Distancing” requires context of worker health and their location within a plant or a site. The old ways of working and implementing standard operating procedures on paper will not work in the COVID-19 Era.

Recently Forbes wrote an article asking, “Is now the moment for the connected worker platform?” It’s very critical for companies to start thinking about a “Connected Worker” strategy in the COVID-19 era. Companies need to start thinking of how digital transformation can help them combat these macro trends and challenges. Simply delivering a mobile app for your front-line worker is not the right solution.

You need to be thinking of a connected worker strategy that puts your front-line worker at the center of all your disparate systems and they are converted into a “Connected Worker.” The definition of a “Connected Worker” is to converge different technology trends such as Cloud, mobile, web, chat, social, wearables, AI/ML, and more to change the entire working life of your front-line worker. As a simple example, it’s important that you not only think of enabling your front-line workers with important ERP operational data, but also empower them with step-by-step guided work instructions that help them get the job done faster, better, cheaper and safer.

You also need to be thinking about the growing population from 7.6B to 9.6B and the consumer demand. If you are not already thinking about bridging the skills gap between a new front-line worker and an experienced front-line worker, you may soon end up in an operational crisis that may impact your production and revenue streams.

Best-in-class Connected Worker Platforms will offer you the technology for experts to guide new front-line workers remotely. We expect to see a trend where more and more expert workers will be used to help four to five new front-line workers from the comfort of their homes. Remote guided assistance and over the shoulder coaching with smart glasses and a two-way video conferencing experience will not just be a “cool technology,” but will be a necessity in the next two to five years.

Connected Worker Platforms appeal to younger front-line workers, who are “digital natives” and comfortable with mobile technology. Such platforms also help industrial plants successfully solve shrinking profit margin challenges, skills gaps, tribal knowledge loss and worker safety issues. For these reasons, a Connected Worker Platform will soon be a necessity for manufacturing and industrial facilities.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Sundeep RavandeSundeep Ravande is the CEO of Innovapptive Inc. and believes in a better way of running plant based operations. In most enterprises, operations are a set of tedious linear steps – slow, inaccurate and highly inefficient. Sundeep believes in a world where field work can be done faster, cheaper and safer. He envisions Innovapptive to be at the center of all plant-based conversations between humans, machines and workflows. By digitally and autonomously connecting humans, machines, and workflows in the 21st Century Economy, Sundeep aims to create a “Connected Workforce” experience for 11 million field workers across the globe. Prior to co-founding Innovapptive Inc, Sundeep worked with several Big 5 consulting firms, such as IBM & Accenture, serving several Fortune 500 clients such as Verizon, Shell, Mead Johnson Nutrition, Coca-Cola and FMC Corporation to help them re-invent and re-imagine their business operations with digital technologies.