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MenuHow to land an executive position in tech?
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Tip: You'll likely generate far more income, spread across far more clients, working freelance.
I've been working as a Fractional CTO for decades.
If 1x client drops out, there's another 10x on my waiting list.
Or, if I require a cashflow boost, I just take on a few additional clients.
Working for 1x client you're looking at a 6 figure income.
Working for 100x clients, you can easily hit 7+ figures.
Tip: Book calls with Clarity folks you have affinity with (their answers make sense). Provide them details of your experience. Ask them how they'd tool their offerings to produce whatever target income (monthly net) for a given amount of time (hours/week) worked.
Good to see that you got wonderful exposure and hands on experience in tech space.
Hope you got a reasonably done resume. If you have sufficient supporting documents, good presence in professional networks, and reasonably updated about opportunities around, you could land up on your next big opportunity in a matter of three weeks.
I would not recommend to park 6 months for preparation as the economy is not that good.
So if you are ready, begin today with a plan in place.
1. Your objective is clear and established a target job
2. Load your resume in a couple of tech job portals, angel, LinkedIn etc.
3. Collaborate regularly in LinkedIn and stackoverflow kind of forums
4. Set targets every day - like find and apply for 20 opportunities, follow up with recruiters, talk to consultants, startup investors etc.
5. Monitor what is happening, evaluate progress and see what is the end result
6. Find some quality time and attend short online courses to refresh yourself. Do not forget to promote your certificates via professional forums.
Good Luck
Any executive position be it big or small starts with you be it in whatever industry you are in. A person’s “executive skills” are those brain-based skills required to execute tasks – that is, getting organized, planning, initiating work, staying on task, controlling impulses, regulating emotions, and being adaptable and resilient. These skills primarily reside in the prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain that helps you manage complex problems, goals, and self-control. We are all born with executive skills; but they take about twenty years to fully develop. After all, if it takes twenty years for the executive skills to mature, perhaps we should be spending some of that money on exercise, diet, education, and ways to counteract the negative effects of technology on our brains. Strong executive skills are critical in today’s digital age of speed because life is getting more and more complicated with increasing numbers of choices and decisions to make and less time in which to make them.
Although there are similarities between the management functions that we teach and executive brain skills, the executive skills, relate to brain skills acquired through normal development. They are in the prefrontal cortex and are the last areas of the brain to develop in late adolescence or early adulthood. The frontal lobes themselves, thought to be the main areas where the executive skills reside, require 18 to 20 years to develop.
Twelve executive skills are required for success in any industry be it tech or non-tech. These are:
1. Response inhibition: the ability to think before you act.
2. Working memory: the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks.
3. Emotional control: the ability to manage emotions to achieve goals.
4. Sustained attention: the capacity to focus on a task despite fatigue or boredom.
5. Task initiation: the ability to begin tasks without undo procrastination.
6. Planning/prioritization: the capacity to develop a road map to arrive at a predetermined goal.
7. Organization: the ability to arrange according to a system.
8. Time management: the ability to estimate and allocate time effectively.
9. Goal-directed persistence: the ability to have a goal and follow through until its completion.
10. Flexibility: the ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles and setbacks.
11. Metacognition: the ability to observe yourself in a situation and make changes so you’re better able to solve problems.
12. Stress tolerance: the ability to thrive in stressful situations.
To strengthen this and any other executive skill, you must buy into the fact that you are not your brain. You can control these impulses and rewire your brain with sufficient effort. For example, do not go shopping on an empty stomach, do not have email open when you are working on a project, and don’t have your cell phone turned on when you’re in a meeting. In the same way, you should not face an uncovered window when you are working on an important project or have personal photos and memorabilia on your desk that could encourage distractions. If your workstation is not conducive to concentration, try changing the location by having work sessions at a local coffee shop or spare boardroom. Other things you can do are: work for shorter periods of time, structure your day by scheduling appointments with yourself to get specific things done, have specific times to check e-mail and text messages, and work with your natural body rhythms of high and low energy.
Therefore, my advice to you is research the tech industry you are interested in thoroughly, leave no stone unturned, Once you have done that enlist essential executive skills you will need in that industry. Sharpen them and you are ready to go!
Besides if you do have any questions contact me: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
Related Questions
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My startup is a NY LLC and we're hiring an employee in Bangalore, India as a developer. Am I required to pay or withhold taxes in the U.S. for him?
I have established off-shore development relationships with individuals and firms in India, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Korea going back to 1996. You might find it a lot smoother to have them work through an established firm in India that is already set up with all appropriate licenses, tax-reporting, payment systems, and so on. It can be tricky enough to communicate the software requirements and other specifics of your project without you and them also learning and implementing processes to respect domestic and foreign regulations. If you'd like more information, feel free to set up a call.SC
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What advice would you give me when I take over a new department with a weak team?
For the first 90 days, listen and plan - but don't do anything. You need to understand why they are under performing and 9/10 it's because the previous Manager was just not a good Manager, could not recognize people's strength's, had them in the wrong roles, tried to do their jobs etc etc Read "First break all the Rules" - get to know your team, get to understand their strengths, get people in the right roles (plan a change if reqd) and then your focus after that is break down the barriers that stop your team being successful and get out of their way. “Now, discover your strengths!” that Swier suggests is also a marvellous book\resource to help you in this task. You are in a very fortunate position - there is nothing more rewarding than turning this situation around and there is only one way to go.... up... and that will get you noticed. It is much harder to take over a high performing team and either keep that going or further improve on it, as it's very unlikely you'll get the chance to really meet the previous Manager and understand why they had success and that team's loyalty will be with the previous Manager - this team will be looking for someone to lead, guide them and help them be successful as no-one goes to work wanting to under perform. Show and help them to achieve that and they will do and achieve remarkable things and you will be so proud of them as you watch them develop, achieve, grow in confidence and keep going. So, give thanks for having landed such a great career opportunity and go enjoy it.MH
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What do you do when your vision for the company diverge too much from your partners'?
Congrats on the success you have achieved in just 3 years! That's statistically uncommon and reveals that the initial focus of the company was effective and worth reviving. Yes, it must be frustrating to feel like you are the only one carrying the company uphill. I've been in a similar position. First, I suggest you take responsibility for the position you currently find yourself in. It's easy to cast blame on people and circumstances outside of yourself. It's the most common first reaction. If you really think about it though, you will realize that where you are did not appear overnight. Every day for the past 3 years you have either consciously or unconsciously agreed to move towards where you are now. By doing that you are no longer a victim of circumstances and can move forward from a place of power. As the primary producer in the company you do have the leverage however, you also need a pro-active plan to promote using that leverage and it needs to be something that benefits everyone involved. First of all I would check your perspective on the whole situation by calling a meeting of stakeholders to recalibrate the company vision. The idea here is to get everyone to tell you what they see as the primary problems with the company right now and where they each would like to see things improve. You need to see what everyone else is seeing not only what you are seeing. This meeting in and of itself might change your perspective entirely. If it reveals nothing that profoundly changes your view then move on to the next step. If you are the star salesperson then you have a method by which you get results. Try creating a sales training program out of that method and then go to the team and present this training plan. There are books and resources online on how to create a sales training plan like this. The goal is to duplicate and systematize how you achieve your above average results. Frame the plan as a way to get all the other team member goals accomplished. Whatever those goals are, inevitably they will require more money. By using your leverage as the star salesperson and taking the initiative to create a program that will effectively create more star salespeople then you are bound to create more revenue for the company. This way your goal is a means to an end for everyone else's goals. This way you get unanimous buy-in. Set a goal of 8 weeks or so to implement this training across the enterprise. Provide bonuses and other incentives to participants to achieve this goal as well as longer term sales increase goals. Create company-wide perks for achieving these long-term sales goals. Maybe a retreat somewhere awesome? You get the picture. The idea is to create a win-win situation for everyone to get going in a positive direction that will, in the end, alleviate your present problem as well as achieve a greater success for everyone involved. Hope that helps. Best of luck!CV
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Are there any good and free resume collection software?
I'd recommend RecruiterBox as long as you can focus on filing one position at a time. It let's you accept up to 200 applicants for 1 position for free. http://recruiterbox.com/recruitment-software-pricing-with-free-signup/ Also, There are quite a few others out there most of which offer free 30 day trials or free access to their platforms with feature limits on them vs the company's paid offerings. Based on the way you phrased the question, this app should do the trick! Side note - if you're making use off Google apps - just create a form for submissions. It's always free.TB
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How do build a empowered and motivated engineering team?
I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).SG
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