Everyone knows what a quality learning experience feels like: exciting, energizing, satisfying, and entertaining. Conversely, everyone knows what a bad learning experience feels like:bored, useless, disappointing or unsatisfying.
So how do you create experiences that inspire the first set of words and avoid the second? Based on our experiences designing high impact learning experiences for adults, we’ve identified four universal truths that apply to almost all of our engagements.
If you were offered $2 million right now, no strings attached, would you take it? Of course, you would! But did you know that you may have already inadvertently said no thank you to this offer? Author Linda Babcock writes about salary negotiation in her book Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for Change. She states that when an employee fails to negotiate salary early in her career, it could add up to as much as $2 million in lost wages over the course of a lifetime.
Photo: WOC in Tech
We all could use a little extra in our paychecks, but asking for a raise is anxiety-inducing, even when you have a strong case to make. Asking for a raise without preparation can be awkward at best, and unsuccessful at worst.
A veteran hiring manager, Josh Doody, author of “Fearless Salary Negotiation: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Paid What You’re Worth,” walks us through how to ask for a raise — and what to do if you’re turned down.
You are a product manager. Or you want to be. As the fearless leader for your product, you need to be the best-informed and most up-to-date member of your team. From market trends to failed startups, your knowledge of the product ecosystem is critical if you’re going to succeed. Which you will. Ready?
Don’t waste your precious time reinventing the wheel. While each product has its own unique set of challenges, plenty of product folks have been in your shoes before. Learn from their mistakes and accomplishments, then iterate and innovate your own path. We rounded up five of the best podcasts for product managers so you can make big decisions, build your team, and make products people love. And do it better than before. Next time you reach for headphones tune into one of these shows.
We all know that bringing lunch to work is the smart, healthy, and financially responsible thing to do. We want to bring delicious lunches to work, but then motivation is always low. So we end up buying something or settling for whatever boring thing we could find in our fridge, wishing we could be better.
Enter Prepd, a lunchbox with modular containers and a corresponding app to help us be the lunch-bringer we always knew we could be.
We spoke with co-founder and GA Hong Kong alumnus Chris Place a few days before his goal-busting Kickstarter, which raised over $1 million, closed.
It can be extremely intimidating to any UX designer, particularly someone just starting out, to navigate the overcrowded world of design tools. There seems to be a tool for everything from user research to wireframing to prototyping.
So how do you know which tools to learn or least familiarize yourself with? Fear not! Below we’ve broken down some of the top industry tools for a variety of contexts and workflows. While this is not a comprehensive list, it will give newbies a sense of some industry musts, while providing some further suggestions for the more seasoned designers among us.
As the founder of a career mentorship platform for women, I spend my days speaking with people who want to change careers but aren’t interested in starting over. They’re terrified that taking risks might mean losing everything they’ve achieved. They agonize about explaining “gaps” on their resume during an interview or at networking events.
Lucky for them (and you), I have good news: changing careers doesn’t mean sacrificing your past. It means building from the experience you have and leveraging that in a strategic way.
What’s more? There’s a simple (seriously, it’s four steps) way to incorporate both your career change and past experience into your elevator pitch. It’s the perfect solution to that dreaded question: “So, what do you do?” for those of us who, frankly, have done a whole lot.
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Demonstrating return on investment is much easier in some parts of the business than in others. In business development, for example, it’s much easier to prove that allocating additional sales resources or tools can directly lead to an increase in quantifiable revenue, which is then factored into a clean-cut ROI formula.
Photo credit: Christine Bougie.
“The white-hot pitch of creativity is only useful to those who know what to do with it,” says Twyla Tharp in her best-selling book, The Creative Habit. In it, she shares skills learned as a lifelong accomplished choreographer that help make creativity work better for you. It’s filled with ideas and exercises made to enhance your craft, whatever that may be, with better tools—both mental and physical. While it does focus on those involved in “the arts,” there is plenty of wisdom for the modern multi-tasking creative. Here, some of her best pieces of advice put through the lens of a freelancer who must constantly juggle craft with commerce.
Not long after I changed careers to become a full-stack web developer, I received an odd Facebook message from a family friend. “I visited your website,” he wrote, “and I’m still trying to figure out what pancakes have to do with websites.”
Clever…or clueless? I’m still unsure. But one thing is certain: IHOP needs to move over; the term “full stack” isn’t about pancakes anymore.