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Careers & workplace advice from Hays

Have you been within the same job role or company for a while, and are starting to feel less motivated at work? You may feel like you are going through the motions and find every task very repetitive. You may feel like you haven’t learnt anything new in a while and cannot see any signs of progression. You could even find yourself questioning your purpose within the organisation. If so, then you are facing a mid-career slump.

In these situations, it is important to step back and think about how you got to this point and how to overcome it. Ask yourself questions such as; what were my passions and ambitions when I began my career? Have they been fulfilled? Have they changed, if so how? Now use your answers to create a list of goals.

Getting out of the slump

The way in which you pick yourself out of the slump depends on the nature of your goals. For instance if your ambitions surround career advancement-look at opportunities within your organisation that appeal to you. Set up a meeting with your manager and explain why you think you could be suited to that role, and how you can get there.

Your goals may be best achieved through various educational options, for example, you may want to make the switch from sales to marketing whilst remaining within your current company. Are there any relevant in-house apprenticeships within your organisation? Is there budget for external courses?

Perhaps your goals need to be realised through someone who has already achieved them. Is there anybody within your organisation who inspires you? What is it about them that you want to replicate? By speaking to the people who you look up to, you can gain some perspective and experienced advice. An estimated 75% of organisations use mentoring programmes for this very reason, so it may be worth finding out if your company is one of them.

Overall, in order to get out of the slump, you may need to communicate your goals to your organisation, and find out how they can facilitate them.

Getting out of the company

For whatever reason, your objectives may not be met within your current environment, be it through budget, lack of opportunity, or you simply want to move on. If this is the case, then consider the alternatives.

Talk to a recruiter or career advisor who can help you to navigate the range of roles available elsewhere, finding the best one for you and your career progression.

If your goals require education, look into cost effective and even free ways to up-skill yourself, be it via webinars, books or online training courses. Attend talks, motivational speeches and networking events- perhaps you will find a mentor here. You don’t have to rely on your existing organisation to lift your mid-career slump, the power is in your hands.

In summary, once you identify whether or not you have reached the mid-career slump, it is easier overcome it. You must firstly ask yourself some key questions in order to draw up a list of aims. The next step is finding out which strategies will achieve these, which may include a change of role or undertaking educational and mentoring programmes. Lastly, it is important to decide whether or not your current employer can help you implement these strategies and whether you want them to. If not, perhaps it’s time to look to yourself as well other companies who can.

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Tackling cyber crime has become one of the most important challenges businesses face. According to Symantec’s 2016 Internet Security Threat Report, the company discovered 430 million new pieces of malware last year alone. In the UK, two thirds of big businesses experienced cyber attacks in the same time frame.

New types of attack are being dreamt up with increasing degrees of sophistication, and organisations are particularly worried about ransomware – malicious software that locks or encrypts documents on a computer and demands a ransom to unlock or decrypt it. But what have these changes meant for organisations?
Continue reading New cyber security challenges: What you need to know →

At some point during our careers, we all start to feel a sense that it could be time to move on from our current role and take on a new challenge. Perhaps you have been in the same position for a number of years, and feel frustrated by your lack of development. A desirable vacancy with your name written all over it might have caught your eye.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the last time you had to think about the job search and application process, will more than likely have been when you were hired for your current role, which could have been years ago – so the very idea of embarking on a job search may feel extremely daunting to you.

Your mentality will have changed as you have become more and more embedded into your company culture. There are more emotional obstacles to overcome in these instances; we develop a sense of loyalty, we lose sight of what we want, we start to fear change and even doubt our capabilities. These insecurities are often a bi-product of being at a company for a long time, and are often what has kept us from looking for a new role.

If this sounds like you, then the below advice will help you overcome these fears and start your search successfully.

You are loyal and feel obliged to stay

Are you dreading the idea of handing in your notice? It is easy to become attached to a company, especially once you become so intertwined with the people and the culture. You may feel a sense of belonging and loyalty to your manager and colleagues, and don’t like the idea of deserting them.

You can overcome this, by thinking about how they got to where they are. They put themselves first and did what was right for them, and you need to follow their example. Remember, they were fine before you joined the company, and they will be fine again. You have to make your career decisions in isolation of your co-workers’ needs.

Remember that you can keep in contact too. Just because you don’t work alongside them anymore, doesn’t mean you cannot see them in your spare time! Don’t let this stop you from beginning your job search.

You don’t know what you want

Another thing holding you back, could be confusion over what you actually want from a job. Having been in your current role for so long, you may find that your job is becoming repetitive and you are just going through the motions without really questioning whether you enjoy it and what it is you’re actually passionate about.

Throughout our careers we should be prompt ourselves to go through a process of elimination, in the sense that we must assess what we do and do not want from a role through our professional experiences.  Reflect on your journey so far, and ask yourself – what do you enjoy about your current role? What don’t you enjoy? What motivates you? Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? What kind of company size and industry do you prefer?

Knowing what you want will motivate you to start seeking it, and will definitely help shape your job search.

You are comfortable and fear change

The longer you have been at at company, the more every aspect will start to feel familiar and comfortable. As much as this is making you stagnate and question whether it is time to move on, it is also making you fear the implied changes.

However you shouldn’t just stay somewhere because you are afraid of the unknown. You will spend the majority of your time at work until you retire, so it’s important base your choice on stronger reasons than this.

As much as you may know this logically, how can you actually overcome the fear? Well, start by looking at jobs. Upon reading job descriptions at exciting new companies, you may start to feel more positive about the new opportunities.  You will realise that there is a whole world of possibilities outside of your current company, and they are yours for the taking.

Another good way to alter your approach to change is by making small adjustments to your current work environment. If possible, work from a different office, or even a different desk. Talk to a colleague that you haven’t spoken to before. Learn a new skill. You will soon start to feel more adaptable and able to embrace change.

You lack self confidence

Once you have been in a role for a while, it is easy for yourself and others to take your talents and skills for granted. Therefore you may not have received any praise or confidence boosts in a long time. In addition, if you haven’t applied for anything for ages, you won’t have had to sell yourself recently and therefore think positively about yourself in preparation.

Start by updating your CV. Talk about the projects, training courses and accolades that you have achieved. This will remind you of everything you have accomplished.

Connect with recruitment agencies such as Hays. A good recruiter will boost your self-esteem. They are reading your CV for the first time, and will point out skills that you forgot you had. Moreover, they will show that they have confidence in you when they put you forward for roles.

In summary, as well as practical planning, it is just as important to mentally prepare for a job search, particularly if you have been in your role for a long time. The above obstacles are completely normal in this situation, and will be what’s held you back from your job search for so long.

About to start your job search? Reading our job searching tips will help ensure it’s a success

 

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Data, as a topic, has hit the big time. From residing in the basement in early 2000, data (and more specifically big data) has risen to the boardroom. A 2014 Gartner survey even predicted that 73 per cent of organisations would be ‘investing heavily’ in big data projects by 2016.

With 2016 nearing its end, I think now is a good time to review the data landscape and assess the top ten jobs in data.

10. Chief Data Officer (CDO)

It all starts at the top and for those companies serious about unleashing the potential of their data footprint, appointing a CDO is an essential first step. From 400 CDO’s in 2014 to over 1000 in 2015, Gartner suggests that 90 per cent of the UK’s large companies will have a chief data officer by 2019.

The CDO role is a varied and complex position that can incorporate data infrastructure, data governance, data security, business intelligence, insight and advanced analytics. Just as it is important for a CDO to be technically competent, it is also essential that the CDO is able to understand and guide the company objectives and incorporated change management processes, in order to deliver on this vision.

9. Campaign Analyst / CRM Analyst

Loyalty programmes, web analytics and Internet of Things (IOT) technologies have led to a vast influx of customer data, which progressive companies are using to support their strategic growth plans. Marketing departments in particular are being challenged to deliver more relevant, targeted campaigns that take advantage of this data. Campaign analysts utilise their expertise in Excel and data analytics tools like SQL to provide greater customer segmentation, thereby ensuring that digital marketing campaigns meet the targeted customer base. When paired with campaign management software like Adobe Campaigns a company can ensure that their marketing strategies hit the mark.

8. Data Engineer

As trendy as Hadoop and unstructured data warehousing is in today’s big data world, the first priority for any analytics function is in getting the basics right. Business Intelligence and Data Science starts with having clean, organised and usable data structures; often run through SQL Server, Oracle or SAP databases. A quality engineer with expertise in data management and ETL processes will remain a primary need for many organisations. In reality, many CDO’s could even argue that this plays a more important role than its big data sibling – refer to point four, big data engineer.

7. BI Developer

BI developers, in its simplest form, manage the process of delivering structured data from data warehouse structures to its end users in the form of dashboards and reports. Once the land of commercial finance, Business Intelligence has now evolved into its own department, with many BI teams now prioritising the building of self-service dashboards. In doing this, they allow operational managers the chance to quickly and neatly pull key performance data to review performance.
The most common technologies within the BI landscape lie with major technology giants including the Microsoft BI package (SSIS/SSAS/SSRS/PowerBI), Oracle (OBIEE, OBIA), SAP (Business Objects) and IBM (Cognos).

6. Visualisation

OK, this probably should have gone in the column above, but with the proliferation of dashboard and visualisation tools, ‘front end’ BI developers with expertise in Tableau, Qlikview/QlikSense, SiSense and Looker are in increasingly high demand. Developers that have utilised d3.js in building visualisations on web browsers are also growing in popularity. Salaries in major business districts can surpass £75k a year with daily rates exceeding £500 per day.

5. Software Developer

Wait, what? This isn’t a data job! The rise of big data has led to a direct increase in companies building web based applications on top of big data platforms. Balancing traditional software development tools, including Javascript, C# and PHP with Python frameworks like Django, Pyramid or Flask has become commonplace.

4. Big Data Engineer

As noted above, a data engineer owns the collecting, storing and processing of a company data in order to facilitate its analysis. Historically this has involved the use of relational databases to manage data that can be stored in a tabular way-yet this often does not go far enough. Defining when data becomes big data is a much discussed topic. However for this purpose we will emphasise the mix of structure and unstructured data (image, video, audio files etc.), sometimes gathered in real-time, that is too complex to be handled by traditional structures.

Big data engineers will build and maintain structures that can handle large, heterogeneous data sets often in NoSQL databases such as MongoDB. Many companies utilise a Hadoop framework with a variety of Hadoop based sub-packages such as Hive (data warehousing), Pig (data flow language) and Spark (a diverse programming model) though the list of big data infrastructure solutions is considerable.

3. Insight Analyst

Whilst the name can vary from company to company, there is no denying the ever-booming demand for technically proficient analysts who can create actionable insight. Typically working within or close to product and marketing departments, insight analysts use statistical programming tools to interrogate large data sets with the goal of delivering analysis to support with customer acquisition or customer retention strategies.

From a technical perspective, insight analysts will have expertise across one or more statistical programming tools. Traditionally this has meant SQL, SAS or SPSS. However more companies are looking at how R and Python can deliver greater depth of analysis and, when paired with support packages (]such as RStudio). can also include dynamic visualisations.

2. Data Architect

Operating within the big data landscape is one thing. Building a big data Infrastructure is quite another. From understanding data storage in the cloud with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, to designing an infrastructure to manage unstructured data with Hadoop or NoSQL databases an exceptional data architect can provide the foundations for a cutting edge big data solution.

1. Data Scientist

Glassdoor recently called the data scientist the ‘#1 job in America’ and as the resident rock stars of the data world the role even comes with a healthy amount of discussion around what and who really classify as a data scientist. Whilst that debate rages on, the fundamentals include a strong academic background (PHD or Masters) within Statistics, Mathematics, Physics or Economics, and deep expertise in Statistics, Data Mining or Machine Learning.

A quality data scientist will identify and solve highly complex business problems, utilising advanced analytics principles and tools including statistical programming in Python, R or Spark. This analysis will play a central role in decision making, providing the required intelligence to ensure that companies can successfully navigate through an increasingly complex business environment.

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If you’re looking for jobs in data, or looking to expand your data team, get in touch with your local Hays office here.

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For those not familiar with the term, a purple squirrel is a term used in recruitment to describe a candidate that is near impossible to find. It is someone who has a set of niche skills, experience and background to do a specific role. To put it in human terms, we were recently asked by a client to find a nuclear physicist who spoke French for a short-term assignment in a specific Eastern European country. As you can imagine, our short list was pretty short!

So if you are being asked to find a purple squirrel, what should you do? Follow these 5 simple steps:

1. Reassess which attributes are essential

By drilling down into the requirements of the role, you can ascertain exactly what skills and expertise are absolutely necessary in your new recruit and what can be learned/trained on the job.

For example, you can teach someone how to use an unfamiliar email marketing platform – if they’re already digitally savvy with exposure to other similar platforms. Similarly, just because somebody hasn’t worked abroad before, doesn’t mean they won’t adapt to a new environment. Somebody might not have that specified degree, but their professional success could speak volumes about their ability.

Steve Jobs was famously rejected by HP, simply because he didn’t have a college education. I think we can all agree that HP are regretting passing up that particular candidate!

2. Research the market

Once you have the essential criteria for your purple squirrel, it will be easier to start your search.

Some simple market research to gather intelligence will help. Firstly, establish how many purple squirrels actually exist. Where do they exist? If you cannot find someone locally, could you pay for someone to relocate from another country? Then consider how much they are looking for to work in your location or how in demand this group are. Working with a resourcing expert will help provide these insights.

3. Develop a personalised sourcing strategy

Now you have pinpointed your audience and gained some valuable intelligence on them, you need to figure out your approach.

Some applicants will respond to job advertisements, some will look for recommendations in community forums on social media, others will only respond to a direct approach. For example, there is no point placing an advertisement for a data scientist in a local newspaper and expecting any response. There are so few data scientists and they are in such demand that the sourcing strategy has to be much more finely tuned.

Essentially, you need to use your knowledge of the purple squirrel market to develop a personalised sourcing strategy. Once again, a resourcing expert can recommend the best tactic.

4. Make yourself attractive

Once you have reached your purple squirrel, you need to position yourselves as the employer of choice. The chances are, there will be other companies wanting to hire this unique candidate, so make sure you emphasise your Employer Brand and Value Proposition in the job criteria and throughout any on-going correspondence.

Take this opportunity to highlight some attributes that other employers might miss, such as company culture, training programmes, charity efforts, social activities, flexible working and progression opportunities. The selection process is a two way street, and the candidate ultimately wants to know that they will be happy within your environment.

5. Manage stakeholder expectations

After following these steps, you should be able to gauge your options, potential time to hire and overall likelihood of being able to find a purple squirrel. Make you sure you feed this back to stakeholders as they may have a different perspective! By keeping stakeholders aligned to your search, you will avoid any disagreements when it comes to actually making a final hiring decision.

In summary, if you need to find a candidate with a niche set of skills, you should distil the essential criteria, work out how and where to find your target audience, make a personal approach and be truly authentic about selling your business. Following these stages will hopefully help you to secure and retain that ever elusive purple squirrel or at least someone who can do the job just as well.

Want to attract the best talent? Our talent attraction tips and advice will help you attract the right people for your business
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Having recently conducted a range of management training at Hays, I can’t help but reflect on the many conversations I’ve had with both new and experienced managers on the different challenges they face with managing people. Being a manager is without a doubt the toughest job I’ve had to date, one that is constantly filled with surprises (the good, the bad, and the ugly), but still incredibly rewarding at the end of the day.

Continue reading Lessons I’ve learnt as a manager →

Do you have an interview coming up for a job that you really want? It’s important to articulate to the interviewer what made you apply for this job.  

Learn how to explain that you want this job, not just any job. Our experts have defined 6 key steps for how to answer why you want this job, without coming across as desperate.

Continue reading Why do you want this role? 6 ways to show you really want the job →