The recent years of economic boom have offered ample opportunities for the creation and development of businesses. As a result, the expertise of commercial solicitors have been in high demand for both the set up and subsequent smooth-running of businesses. However, as many businesses find themselves cutting back – or worse, failing – the workload of commercial solicitors has evolved to meet a new set of demands.

During the recent years of financial prosperity, the role of a commercial solicitor has predominantly focused on nurturing healthy business. This begins immediately after the conception of the business, when the legalities of setting-up need to be formally undertaken. A commercial solicitor will, for example, advise on whether their client should trade as a limited company, partnership or limited liability partnership: technicalities which will have a profound impact on the running of the business thereafter.

As the business evolves the expertise of a commercial solicitor continue to be of the utmost importance. Any incorporation, sale or purchases of the business need to be handled by a legal professional, as do the undertaking of intellectual property protection, corporate restructuring and financing.

However, the economic situation has significantly altered the landscape in which commercial soicitors operate. Not only is it a very hostile environment for the setting up of new companies but because of the reluctance of banks to lend, businesses have been forced to postpone any plans of expansion for the time being. The uncertainty of the economic climate has also made businesses more cautious about investing, which has significantly reduced commercial work for solicitors.

However, the altered economic climate brings its own new challanges, so that whilst one area of work may be reduced, elsewhere commercial solicitors are finding themselves in demand. An area of particular growth is litigation. As clients and suppliers attempt to avoid obligations which have suddenly become difficult to fulfil, commercial solicitors wil find their services heavily called upon.

However, the field of work most rapidly expanding under current conditions is employment, and in particular redundancy. The employment laws for businesses are extremely strict and employers will find themselves in hot water if they do not abide by them very carefully. With unemployment anticipated to rise, companies who exercise any form of caution will undoubteldy be consulting their lawyers.

So, whilst the set-up and expansion of businesses may temporarily be on hold, commercial solicitors should find themselves faring a little better for work than many other professions. The current financial crisis will undoubtley throw up an abundance of tricky employment issues which should, for the time being, keep commercial solicitors busy.

These days, most companies are looking for ways to save money, and downsizing is one obvious option. The magic number for layoffs seems to be about 10 percent; companies feel they can cut this number of staff as a quick way to boost profitability. But downsizing has a lot of risks: people get demotivated, they become anxious, and some will even jump ship thinking another organization is more secure. On top of this, companies may find themselves with too little talent to bring in new revenue and provide the level of service needed to retain existing clients.

When Drake’s HR consulting group talks about ‘rightsizing’ we are not using a pleasant euphemism for job cuts; we are talking about a disciplined process that will improve an organization’s profitability. Effective rightsizing focuses on creating success and avoids the dangerous downward momentum that can come from poorly planned downsizing.

How Much Can You Safely Cut?

If your company has decided to reduce staff levels, the question becomes how many people you can safely cut? Far too often companies take an accounting driven approach: ‘We need to save .5 million, which means we ought to cut 12 percent of payroll.’ The trouble is that cutting that many staff may lead to reductions in revenue that completely undermine the cost savings. The solution is to analyse operations before making any decision on the number of staff to cut.

Drake’s HR consulting group believes the safest route to rightsizing is through workforce optimization (see Vol. 14. Optimize Workforce Planning – A little planning eliminates a lot of panic). When organizations conduct a workforce optimization analysis they look at the annual fluctuations in workload. Once the minimum and maximum workloads are known, they can better determine how many permanent staff is required to handle the ongoing workload and then plan to handle the peaks in workload by using temporary staff.

With this approach you know the minimum number of permanent staff required and can be confident there will be no impairment of your organization’s ability to generate revenue since temporary staff can provide sufficient numbers to meet customer needs. The trick here is to work with a staffing agency that understands the type of work to be done and can provide trained people with the right skills and the right cultural fit.

Some people think HR’s role in rightsizing is just to handle terminations. A good HR consulting group will add value to the decision making process by providing an operational analysis. It’s that analysis that lets you know where you can safely make cuts and where a staffing agency can be used to fill in any gaps caused by fluctuations in demand.

Who Can Be Let Go?

Once a company has done the operational analysis that tells them how much to cut, the next question is who to keep and who to let go. How do companies make this decision? Circuit City infamously made the decision to cut its experienced staff since they were more expensive-a move that led to no end of bad publicity and a decline in the ability to serve customers on the sales floor. More traditionally, companies let go of those most recently hired and keep long tenure staff. Another popular method is to share the pain by insisting that every department cut a couple of people. Unfortunately, none of these decision rules do anything to guarantee that the company will be positioned to achieve profitability after the job cuts.

Clearly, the smart thing to do is to keep your best performers. To do this you need a reliable method to identify them. Drake’s HR consulting group has long been encouraging companies to conduct Top Performer Profiling (TPP) so that they understand what distinguishes high performers from average ones. Top Performer Profiling involves looking at the three areas that lead to high performance:

1) Knowledge & experience,
2) Skills & abilities, and;
3) Behaviours & characteristics.

Once a company has determined what mix of attributes leads to success it can rate people against that profile.

If the organization has been conducting Top Performer Profiling then they will already know which people they can afford to let go. However, even in the absence of having done this sort of analysis in a rigorous way, companies should bring in an HR consulting group to help them through the thinking process of identifying who to let go. It’s important to remember that in rightsizing the goal is not to just cut headcount – it’s to improve profitability. Unless you have a good process for deciding who to keep and who to let go, this end result won’t be achieved.

Follow-Through: From Downsizing to Success

Any sort of downsizing, even a well run rightsizing process, requires that the HR consulting group uses good change management practices. First and foremost there has to be a great deal of communication. Experience has shown senior management consistently underestimate how much communication is required. People need to understand what is happening, how it will make the company stronger, and what it means to them.

One of the important aspects of communication is that the leadership has to show it is competent and is leading the company to a better future. This is one of the benefits of rightsizing as opposed to a downsizing. If employees see that management is taking a thoughtful approach to workforce optimization they will feel much more confident about the leadership than if all they see is a sharp round of layoffs. The company needs to be explicit in what organizational changes are being made to accommodate the fact that it will have less headcount, but the same amount of work.

Alternatives to Downsizing

At this point we hope you see how rightsizing can cut costs in a way that leads to greater success. We also hope that you recognize the risks of downsizing and understand that if it’s badly done it will hurt the company.

Remember that the goal is to improve profitability. You can improve profitability by reducing costs or increasing revenue. Often cutting headcount seems like the easiest thing to do. Regrettably the income statement makes no distinction between unnecessary costs and the costs that lead to revenue generation. If you cut the wrong costs you damage revenue and that leads to lower profitability. So before resorting to drastic downsizing companies should consider programs such as:

Salary cuts and bonus program elimination/modification
Reduced benefits programs
Reduced facilities cost (rents, utilities, etc.)
Reduced travel (through leveraging Web conferencing and other technologies)

More importantly, new revenue initiatives should also be considered, such as:

New product offerings
New markets/applications for existing products
Price increases
Expanding into new geographical markets

A downturn is a time to be smart about cutting costs and creative about increasing revenues. Drake’s HR consulting team knows how to ensure that if you do cut staff, you do so in a way that makes your company stronger.

Business coaching has evolved over the years, owing to the changing demands around the world. Business coaching has opened a myriad of opportunities to people aspiring to pursue a self-motivated career. It is a vast field and includes a variety of teaching techniques and modules to fit into different business requirements. To become a good business coach or to learn business coaching effectively, you should be aware of some of the basic tools involved in the coaching process.

. Active listening: It is an important aspect of business coaching. The biggest hurdle in active listening is the inability to concentrate. You need to focus your attention on the important skills being taught during the coaching session. Active listening refers to being receptive and absorbing the finest details taught by the coach, during the session.

. Practice: Active listening and concentration need to be supported by practice and repetition, to facilitate better comprehension. Ideally, practice is recommended between two coaching sessions.

. Establish a good rapport: A good rapport between the coach and the student facilitates better understanding and interaction. Establishing a good rapport essentially means building a relationship based on trust.

. Asking questions: Asking questions is the key to a successful training session. Without getting your questions clarified, you cannot proceed towards the next session. As a coach, you need to hurl frequent questions at your students, in order to ensure that they have understood the concepts taught so far. Asking questions also makes the session more interesting. Interaction with the students during training sessions gives you a chance to gauge the progress of your students and allows you to make timely changes to a pre-designed training program.

. Sincere Feedback: A regular and honest feedback from the coach helps students to understand their strong points and simultaneously work out ways to eliminate their weaknesses. As a business coach, you should offer feedback based on assessing the progress made by the student, his potential and his individual business and management skills.

. Add humor to your coaching session: Monotony is the biggest drawback of a training session. It has been observed that majority students drop out from training sessions merely because they lost interest midway. To retain their interest in the session, it is important to add a dash of humor and make your lectures more interesting and lively. Humor minimizes the burden while learning about serious business coaching. Many authors, in their books related to business coaching, have emphasized on the importance of the humor element, when conducting business coaching classes.

Encourage students to apply the newly acquired skills: You would fail in your mission to bring about a positive change in the mindset of students, if they do not inculcate the newly acquired skills in their organizations immediately. All students should be encouraged to work unanimously towards achieving a common goal, that of making a positive difference to their organization.

Business coaching is meant for all those who wish to sharpen their management skills and learn new skills to manage their people and business efficiently. Several websites on the Internet provide detailed information about the changing trends in business coaching. Business coaching can be included at management level too.

Almost any small business can use advice on how to improve its collection cycle. The first line of defense against late payments is a complete invoice. Your bills should be accurate, detailed and easy to understand. If difficult to understand, then your client will need to call for additional information. That translates into “you have been added to their to-do list,” which increases the time of your collection cycle. Include on each invoice:

Your company’s contact information: name, address, tax id number, phone and contact person

The date the invoice was prepared

The customer’s name and address

A description of the goods or services sold to the customer – itemize, if possible (An itemized bill is harder to contest.)

The amount due, with sales tax amount broken out

When the invoice is due

Once prepared, send invoices promptly. Another piece of small business advice is the longer you take to bill a customer the less likely you are to receive payment for the goods and services provided.

Many of my business mentoring clients are surprised to learn that the step requiring the most amount of time in the cash conversion process is the time it takes to collect on a customer account. The cash conversion process begins the moment they make contact with the customer, and ends when they have received and deposited payment from that customer; hopefully this cycle repeats itself each month.

The time it takes my business mentoring clients to collect their accounts receivable is measured by the average accounts receivable collection period. The average accounts receivable collection period is an important indicator for determining when their business will be paid for the goods and services it provides.

This simple calculation gives you a powerful tracking tool that helps you adjust your cash in-flow on an as-needed basis:

Step 1: Calculate your average collection period by dividing your total sales for the previous year by 365. This gives you your average daily sales volume.

(Total Sales / 365 Days = Average Daily Sales Volume)

Step 2: Then divide your average daily sales volume into your current accounts receivable balance to get the number of days it takes to collect a bill.

(Average Accounts Receivable Collection Period = Average Daily Sales Volume / Current Accounts Receivable Balance)

Now that you know your average accounts receivable collection period, you then need to interpret that number as it relates to your business by asking four important bookkeeping service questions.

Bookkeeping Service Question #1: Is your average accounts receivable collection period in line with the company’s credit policy? If your credit terms provide your customers with 30 days to pay their bills, then you should expect that your average collection period will be somewhere around 30 days – maybe a little longer. If your average collection period is 60 days then you need to examine other factors that affect billing.

Bookkeeping Service Question #2: Are you billing your customers consistently? Look at your Accounts Receivable Aging Report, the report that summarizes all of your outstanding invoices by client and number of days outstanding. Are the outstanding invoices on that report related to products and services sold within the last 45 days, or are they related to products and services you provided three months ago and just got around to billing? Create a procedure to bill customers once a week or each time you have a completed sale.

Bookkeeping Service Question #3: Are you billing your customers effectively? Are your customers calling you with questions about your invoice? Perhaps you didn’t have that important upfront conversation with your client about how you charge for your products and services. By having this conversation, confusion and anxiety over wondering if the customer is going to pay you can be eliminated.

Bookkeeping Service Question #4: Are you tracking overdue accounts and taking consistent action to collect past due accounts? Do you have an effective tool in place to track when an account comes due, and knowing who has paid their bills and who has not? When a customer’s invoice goes past its due date, is there a procedure in place to follow-up with that customer? Sometimes sending customer statements and making friendly reminder calls is all it takes.

By answering these four basic questions, implementing a few bookkeeping service procedures and heeding this small business advice, you’ll soon be running a fine-tuned collection machine.

Having spent nearly a decade and a half building large businesses around the world, Andrew Laurie found his calling in business and executive coaching.

“I started my career in the small business world, and then spent 15 years building large businesses worldwide –initially in sales, marketing and business development and later as Managing Director of several companies. In this capacity, I built new businesses, turned around businesses and grew existing businesses in Australia. Hong Kong and the United Kingdom,”   he said.

Laurie grew companies of all sizes –the largest reaching close to billion in sales.

Most recently, he expanded his business coaching practice at ActionCOACH by adding executive coaching certification to it.

“The ActionCOACH Executive Coaching program is excellent and it provided me with a number of practical techniques and frameworks to utilize in helping business leaders develop themselves and their businesses,” he said. “In addition, it drew greater value out of my existing knowledge and experience by overlaying a range of techniques, which facilitate the application of this knowledge and experience to other business leaders.”

Confident and raring to go, Laurie’s personal brand and positioning statement is distinct.

“I am the “go to” coach for those wanting to rapidly grow and develop the performance of their business, while still maintaining a great and balanced lifestyle,” he said. “I bring a broad and deep knowledge base, an outstanding record of achievement and proven ability to achieve great results with a range of businesses and executives.”

Laurie listed four things that set him apart from the competition in the executive coaching marketplace.

“I believe there are four things, which give me an instant edge over any competition –firstly, the ActionCOACH intellectual property and the network of coaches within the system; secondly, my own hands-on experience of having actually built and led large companies; thirdly, my knowledge-base and academic background; and fourthly, the fact that I have been able to do it all whilst maintaining a healthy, balanced lifestyle,” he said.

Laurie’s long-term vision is to further develop and grow the practice by providing exemplary results to both executives and businesses.

He enjoys climbing, skiing, running, playing a wide range of sports, traveling and spending quality time with his family.

“Being a Business and Executive Coach with the world’s leader grants me the luxury to do it all,” he said.

Stand By Soft announces the release of version 3.18.1 of RationalPlan Project Management Suite. The new version adds a budgeting mechanism for the Multi Project product and more filters for assignments in the web interface for the Project Server product.

RationalPlan is a Microsoft Project alternative with additional features like multiple projects management, shared resources, email integration developed to assist project managers in creating plans, tracking progress, allocating resources, managing budgets and analyzing workload. RationalPlan Project Server is a concurrent user project management software developed to improve the existing suite of products by adding a server module that gives project managers concurrent access to a central project data repository when creating plans, tracking progress, allocating resources, managing budgets or analyzing workload.

Important changes of this version:

Added budgeting mechanism in RationalPlan Multi Project
Added filters for assignments in RationalPlan Project Server
Bug fixes

Current version adds budgeting possibilities to RationalPlan Multi Project. Users can now define an initial budget for their products and use it at any time against the new total cost of the project. Based on the percent completion of a project the application computes a budget variance that will indicate to the project manager if the project is over or under the initial estimated budget. This is a good solution for the project manager to make a comparison of the actual project with the initial planned one. The analysis can be used to detect potential problems that can be used as experience for future related projects.

For those companies that use RationalPlan Project Server the resources now have the possibility to to filter the assignmentsusing multiple filters. They will be able to see pending assignments, upcoming (current week) assignments or assignments with deadlines. An additional help is the assignments color coding. This way every resource will quickly be able to detect uncompleted tasks or tasks with deadlines.

RationalPlan suite includes:
RationalPlan Single Project - project management software for single projects
RationalPlan Multi Project - project management software for multiple projects, projects that are interconnected through dependencies and share common resource
RationalPlan Project Viewer - free project management software viewer, the solution for anyone (from project stakeholders to team workers) to view projects details
RationalPlan Project Server - a centralized management of company’s projects while offering concurrent/controlled access for different users

RationalPlan is designed as an affordable alternative to Microsoft Project with some extra-features like multiproject management and it is covering project management area from WBS construction, project planning and scheduling to critical path management, over allocated resources detection, progress tracking, cost estimation, etc. Gantt chart support as well as various time line reports are also provided. It offers you the most important capabilities of a good project management software while being able to operate on various platforms starting with Windows, Mac, Linux and all other Java enabled platforms.

Mistake #1: Lack of the right resources and skills
Result: Proper project staffing is important. While you may be tempted to hire an entry or junior-level contractor to ease up on costs, the time spent in training and managing mistakes can eat your budget.
Solution: Hire well. You want a strong staff.

Mistake #2: Inexperienced project managers
Result: Projects can quickly grow out of control without a keen PM.
Solution: Hire certified PMs with both soft skills and technical expertise to handle IT and business staff.

Mistake #3: Constrained IT from too much process.
Result: FRUSTRATION.
Solution: Maintain flexibility

Mistake #4: No tracking of changes to the scope of work
Result: Unpleasant surprise in budget and timeline.
Solution: Use of a formal change request process keeps everyone and everything in line. Explain all specific changes and determine how it will impact the budget and timeline.

Mistake #5: Lack of live data about the status of projects
Result: We’re human and it’s very easy to lose track of things.
Solution: Reliable PM Software.

Mistake #6: Ignoring problems
Result: Problems are like weeds—they show up from nowhere, take root, and invade your harvest. The longer you ignore them, the longer it’ll take to uproot everything.
Solution: Fess up early, fix quickly.

Mistake #7: People forget that the world is NOT perfect
Result: Freezes with sudden challenges and issues.
Solution: Perform a risk assessment as part of the project planning. This not only prepares you for a “battle,” but also helps you identify the vulnerable areas of the project.

Mistake #8: Project schedules are incomplete
Result: Project team members forget the due dates of items, which may very well lead to a failure to meet the project deadline.
Solution: Document a detailed Scope of Work with a number of hours and due dates for each activity. PM software greatly assists in creating schedules and tracking work progress.

Mistake #9: IT goes along with unreasonable deadlines
Result: From the client’s perspective, IT under-delivers over-time.
Solution: IT management must explain clearly the need for the stated time to meet all objectives—and stick with it. If the client still demands an earlier date of completion, he will have to pay more for the additional resources needed to cover for time.

Mistake #10: Generic documentation of needs, assumptions, and deliverables
Result: Unsatisfied client upon delivery of finished project.
Solution: Start off on the right foot. You want to start strong with a shared roadmap to a solution. In PM, the first step is the paper agreement between you and the client. This contract states the client’s needs, and outlines what changes you’ll make to achieve a desirable solution. Be sure to document mutual understanding, mutual agreement, mutual assumptions, and mutual expectations.

Managers and owners of small businesses are always on the lookout for methods to help to improve their business. One way to do this that is very popular with small business owners is to implement a small business management software solution. These are web based applications which enable anyone within the business to sign in and work remotely from anywhere in the world. However this is just one of the reasons why a small business management software solution is perfect for a small business. So why does your business need a small business management software application?

• This will save you and your employees a great deal of time each working day. With only one application in use there is no need to be constantly switching between applications to complete on task.

• Integrated calendars will help business owners and managers to see what staffs are doing with ease.

• Project planning is made simple with small business management software – just create a project and assign it to a member of staff. Then track its progress by simply clicking into that project, no more chasing employees up to see where they are with a project.

• Quoting and invoicing is made much more straightforward by creating both through one application. This means that sales leads can be followed up with ease by simply checking which quotes have been created and not followed up. When a quote is then accepted it can simply be changed into an invoice which means even more time is saved.

• Document storage, which can sometimes be an issue for small businesses, can be streamlined with small business management software. Now as soon as a document has been created it can be saved directly onto the application, it can then be accessed by any employee with the correct level of access. So no more waiting for documents to be emailed from employee to employee, by saving them all on one application they can be retrieved quickly and easily. In addition to this small business management software can help a business wave goodbye to missing documents, something that everyone will welcome.

• Small businesses with up to 50 employees can use small business management software, which means that you don’t have to be a tiny company to benefit from it.

• Any business that has off site employees that need to fill in timesheets can use small business management software to track employees working hours. Off site employees can log into the application, fill in their timesheet and managers or owners can use this information to work out wages. When this is compared with the time it can take to chase up time sheets from various employees it is clear to see why this type of software is so useful.

As you can see there are numerous reasons why small businesses need small business management software. It can cut down the time spent on tasks drastically; this is easy to access and has business wide functionality. It is the practical and simplistic way.

Office relocation can happen for a number of reasons and normally they are good, whether you are expanding and moving the company a new location in the UK, or moving it to another country like the United States it can be stressful. Planning for office relocation can be very easy if you take the time to do what you need ahead of time to make the move successful.

The first thing that you need to do when you finally decide to move is you need to at least 6 months before the move evaluate your current situation as far as the space you have and the space you will need when you move. When you do this you will then need to look into location that you want to move to and make sure that it is the right size for you, make sure to make all the proper size conversions if you are moving to another country. Also, make a budget for the move estimate how much money you are willing to spend and how much you need to spend on every aspect of the move.

Within the last 5 months before the move you need to begin cleaning out your current office and making sure that you have all the files necessary for the move, this includes all work documents, also you may want to have a talk with your current workers to explain to them that their help is absolutely necessary in order to make the move as easy as possible. Also, make sure that all of the employees that you are planning on bringing with you have passports and proper work documents so they don’t get stuck in the UK and are unable to travel. If they don’t already have a passport make sure they apply for one at least 6 months before the office relocation. Also, it is very important for you to send out a change of address announcement to all current clients and employees so they know that the company is moving and know where the new office is and how they can reach you. The change of address announcements should not be the first time a client is being notified of the move, you should notify them on the phone or in person a few months before the move so they can make the appropriate decisions regarding the services you currently offer them.

Within a few weeks of the big move you need to make sure everything is packed up and ready to go, if you are using self storage it is important to have all of the moving details mapped out and ready for them. Also, make sure you have boxes that are holding important things that you will need immediately easily accessible at the top of all of your moving things.

What do employers look for in potential employees? That was the question that was posted recently on a career discussion forum online. Naturally, for each different position, the particular answers to that question would be different. However, there are some common skills that employers look for in all employees, whether the employee happens to be a network engineer or a fry cook.

In-Demand Skills for Success

1. BASIC SKILLS‚ Reading, writing and arithmetic! Believe it or not, a good portion of high school graduates (and some college grads) do not read at an 8th grade level and cannot do multiplication in their head. Employers are seeking employees who can read well, can write coherently, and who can calculate mathematics in a business environment (fractions, percentages, etc.) Add to that the modern basic skills of keyboarding skill, basic computer knowledge, and ability to use most computerized tools (e.g. fax machine, basic word processing program, etc.) to round out the basic skill sets needed for employment success.

2. PERSONAL SKILLS‚ Can a potential employee speak well? Can he/she answer questions of customers in a positive, informative manner? Can the prospect provide good customer service? While not everyone has an outgoing sales’ personality, successful employees can communicate in a non-confrontational, positive manner with their coworkers, team members, subordinates, management, and customers. Being able to work well with others is a vital skill for success in all jobs.

3. JOB ATTAINMENT‚ Job search is a process that requires a great deal of dedication and attention to be conducted successfully. It follows the old principal that many veteran programmers refer to as GIGO ‚ Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you put lousy effort in, you will receive lousy results. Employers are seeking employees who know how to present themselves in a positive manner and who display enthusiasm and knowledge about the companies they approach. Not only do candidates get evaluated on their skills and experience, but also on how they are approaching the job search. Enthusiastic candidates with fewer skills have an even chance of getting the job as dull candidates with better skills.

4. JOB SURVIVAL‚ Now there’s a hot topic in this period of layoffs. Who gets the ax and who doesn’t is often a matter of numbers, but it is also often a matter of performance. Employees who have consistently demonstrated their worth, taken initiative, and made themselves a valuable asset to the company have lower incidences of being downsized than employees who put forth mediocre or average effort in their jobs. Surviving within a company through layoffs or moving up the career ladder is a success skill that is learned and is consciously cultivated among successful professionals.

5. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT‚ As all high tech and engineering pros know‚ it’s learn or burn in today’s work environment. Attaining new skills, applying new concepts, updating established skills is an absolute necessity to succeed in today’s work force. The successful individual is constantly attending seminars, taking classes, attaining training on new products or releases, and otherwise learning new skills that will keep them marketable in their careers. Successful people are lifelong learners. Employers are looking for people who have the training necessary to fulfill their needs.

6. CAREER DEVELOPMENT‚ Career Development differs from Professional Development. Professional Development is learning while Career Development is a planning and goal setting process. Successful individuals design a career plan with written goals for short term and long term. They lay out the steps needed to move their careers from Point A to Point B within Time Frame C and plan how they are going to achieve those steps. Successful people have someone to whom they are accountable for their progress and who will monitor their success in achieving their goals. Employers are seeking individuals who (believe it or not) wish to commit to the company for a long period of time. Good career progression is a high selling point of candidates to prospective employers.

How do you measure up? Do you have the 6 In-Demand Skills for Success? Feel like you need some help? Give us a call!