The Book

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About The Book

The working world has never been tougher for college graduates. Global outsourcing, older workers postponing retirement, and all of those school loans to pay off.  Today’s students must get their careers off on the right foot fast — failure is not an option.

These kids need a break!

Dave Horne began developing Career Secret Sauce; 9 Winning Strategies for Building a Great Career to level the playing field for today’s college graduates.

Dave began his research in the early nineties as his own career progressed. He was struck by the fact that some people seemed to breeze through their careers effortlessly, while others faced a constant struggle (like himself). He began to study this phenomenon more closely. He learned what the successful people were doing right and equally important, he took note of the dumb things people were doing to sabotage their careers. This was the genesis of Career Secret Sauce.

Dave followed these lessons himself and his career really took off. Eventually he developed a management style focused on counseling his subordinates with practical strategies and techniques for career success, more than tasks and objectives.

In 2005, Dave left his executive career in Silicon Valley and moved to the desert of Southern California to further develop the concept of Career Secret Sauce. He is completing his first book on this subject, focusing on the needs of college graduates. He has augmented his own experience with numerous interviews and academic research.

This weblog will be Dave’s forum for emerging trends, concepts, and, most importantly, public feedback and comments.

Buying The Book

The Book, Career Secret Sauce; 9 Winning Strategies for Building a Great Career is now available on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and fine bookstores.

If you’d like to order in bulk for gifts or donations, there is a special 10 copy bundle available at the publisher’s web site:

http://holtkampandleger.com/Buy_The_Book.htm

You may also order a limited edition autographed copy at that site.

Finally, If you’d like to take a closer look at the book, here is the first chapter and introduction in its entirety.

Dave

Introduction

Don’t Take Your First Career Step On The Wrong Foot

ur job and career are vital to the quality of our lives. In many ways they define who we are, put food on our table, enable our families to live in nice homes, and hopefully pay for our kids to get a good education. They consume the majority of our waking hours. We go to school for 16 years or more to prepare for work and if anything goes sour, we lay awake at night worrying about it. It’s tough stuff, but as Sinatra said, “that’s life.”

According to research from the Employment Policy Foundation, 46 percent of new hires don’t last 18 months on the job. Getting fired is devastating at any time on your career, but being fired from your first job can damage your career beyond repair. The truth is that new workers are almost never fired for “not knowing their stuff.” Recent college graduates usually know more about their profession than their superiors who have been out of school for 10 years.

Surviving the first few months of your career won’t necessarily assure success; it will just keep you alive long enough to have a chance at excellence. Once you get your footing, you still need to create the right reputation, impress people around you, get promoted, and ultimately become a great leader. You can waste 10 years figuring everything out through trial and error like I did, or you can make it your business to learn these 9 winning strategies as soon as you can. I trust you’ll choose the latter.

I wrote Career Secret Sauce to share what I have learned about creating a great career and still having a fulfilling personal life. I wrote it for people who have already decided on a career path and are looking for ways to increase their odds of success. The strategies in Career Secret Sauce are what I wish my professors had taught me in school. Whether you’re just finishing college or well along in your career, these strategies can have a profound, beneficial, and immediate impact on your life and your livelihood.

The Three Phases Of Career Secret Sauce

Like any great human endeavor, you must crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.

In the case of your career this means:

Phase One—Get a clean start

Phase Two—Create a reputation as a future winner

Phase Three—Effectively navigate raises, promotions, and job changes

For some people in certain industries, it may take a decade to encounter all three of these phases. On the other hand, if you work in a volatile environment, you may find yourself facing these challenges during your first few years on the job.

Get A Clean Start

While the first few months on the job are critical, your chances of success actually began well before that. Hopefully, when you chose your career, you selected a profession you like and something you can be good at. But just because you picked the right field doesn’t guarantee success or happiness with every employer in your elected vocation. You must pick an employer who suits you personally, get your first job, and make sure you play the game correctly during the ever-so-critical first 30 days on your new job.

Strategy 1: An Internship—Your First Big Career Break

Unless you have top grades from a top university, most companies won’t hire you without experience. It’s a classic Catch-22—you need experience to get a job, but the only way to get experience is from having a job! Fortunately, there is a solution: college internships. They’re a lot easier to get than a real job and once you’ve landed your first internship, the second, third and fourth are a breeze. Strategy One discusses the benefits of an internship and how to go about getting one.

Strategy 2: Select An Employer That Suits Your Nature

Career success doesn’t end with choosing the right vocation. The industry you select, the company you work for, and the geographic region you live in will set your career along a certain trajectory. The question is, is it the right trajectory for you? Or if you’ve already started working, is the trajectory your career is currently on helping or hurting your career? Strategy Two provides a framework for evaluating whether or not where you currently work suits your nature. It discusses the pros and cons of different venues and company characteristics.

Strategy 3: Thrive On Your New Job

Perhaps the most dramatic day in your life is the first day at the first serious job in your chosen career. Every bone in your body wants to start building a great career, but you’re completely clueless about what to do. The questions you ask, the people you trust, the work you take on, and results you deliver will determine your future. This chapter provides practical advice for performing above expectations on your first job and setting the stage for long-term career growth.

Create A Reputation As A Future Winner

Simply avoiding crashing and burning during the first three to six months on the job doesn’t guarantee career success; it just gets you into the game. From there, you have to build a solid reputation with the key people in the company. You can try to do everything right, but that’s a lot of work and not much fun. I offer three proven strategies to help you establish a reputation as a future leader and set your career on a winning trajectory.

Strategy 4: Craft A Winning Reputation

It may not be obvious at first, but managers constantly keep score on everyone’s behavior and coworkers love to gossip about each other’s work habits. Unfortunately, this is often how the pecking order in the organization is scored. It would be great if your score was based on the merits of your work, but the sad truth is that your perceived work habits carry more weight than your actual work product. Once you know this, you can apply a little secret sauce to take control of the perceptions about your work habits and systematically create the reputation you need for a prosperous career.

Strategy 5: Do What You Say You’ll Do

One of the biggest secrets to career success is so blatantly simple that people often miss it:—“just do what you say you’re going to.” The fifth strategy in Career Secret Sauce is a technique I call “The List” It transcends time management systems and provides a framework for actively determining the best use of your time on a daily basis. It is also a vehicle for turning the tables on office politics by proactively managing suggestions from every constituency at work to neutralize adversaries and convert them into allies. It provides a method for a systematic dialog with your boss, subordinates, coworkers, and other key executives for setting priorities and continuously demonstrating your invaluable contributions. This dialog not only assures you of solid job security, it also gives you a head start on your next promotion.

Strategy 6: Master The Art Of Presentation

The fear of public speaking has been widely publicized. Perhaps the most extreme finding was the 1973 Times of London survey of 3000 Americans that reported that 41 percent of those surveyed reported Fear of Public Speaking as their number one fear. Yes, public speaking can be scary at first, but therein lies the opportunity for the most powerful ingredient of Career Secret Sauce. Public speaking is not only scary for you, it’s more than likely scary for your coworkers and even your boss. Unlike every other opportunity for glory on the job, most people don’t volunteer for a speaking assignment. Once you learn how to speak well, you will harness the power to persuade and impress large groups of people with ease. The skill of public speaking is not that tough to conquer, but the fear of confronting an audience is so paralyzing that most people never even attempt it. The sixth strategy of Career Secret Sauce makes a compelling case for mastering public speaking, and then provides a series of simple techniques for learning how to do so.

Effectively Navigate Raises, Promotions, And Job Changes

Once you get on the radar screen with the right people, your success will come much quicker. If you’ve made the right moves, new opportunities will open up both inside the company and beyond. You can nurture these opportunities and strategically move ahead, or just go along for the ride. From time to time your career may run into trouble and you have to know how to quickly turn things around before any permanent damage occurs.

Strategy 7: Promotionology And The Art Of The Raise

Strong managers seldom volunteer raises and promotions. They want to see you work for them and retain these precious rewards as long as possible. Setting salaries and determining raises or bonuses is one of the last black arts in the industrial world. The seventh strategy details strategies for winning both incremental raises and major promotions. It also provides a background on the basics of compensation planning and administration.

Strategy 8: Career Saving Moves

Suddenly one day you wake up and realize that your job is at risk. Maybe you did everything right and the company or the economy just hit a speed bump. More likely, though, you inadvertently stepped into one of the dangerous career land mines described in this book and now you need to hustle to get back on the right track—or worse yet, to simply save your job. Strategy Eight covers a number of strategic moves that you can make to minimize the risk of this constant threat and techniques to save your career if the grim reaper strikes home.

Strategy 9: In Search Of Greener Pastures

There are very few companies that offer enough opportunity to fulfill a career. Those that do are usually huge, complex organizations that hinder personal individuality. This means a good career must include a number of strategic job changes. There is no magic number, but it’s safe to say it’s probably more than three and less than nine. Changing jobs can be one of the most stressful things you do to yourself, so you have to get it right. This chapter examines the mental side of changing jobs and outlines techniques to help you do it well. It also discusses the critical role of the search firm and how to create a win-win relationship that will serve your entire career.

The nine strategies in Career Secret Sauce will provide you with a solid platform for a great career. All you need to do is to learn them, apply them, and enjoy the life they bring.