“Refuse to let your time get burned up
with things that are less important.”
A critical lesson Azzarello learned in
her career at HP is that the “most suc-
cessful executives don’t do everything.
They do a few things right and hit them
out of the park.”

Look Better. The second step of Azzarello’s career plan involves making your work and accomplishments known to your immediate bosses. After all, if you deliver excellent results, but no one above you in the company is aware of them or doesn’t connect the results with your job performance, it’ll be difficult for you to advance in your company.

Azzarello recommends creating an audience list of the people in your company who should know about your achievements at work and a communication plan for how to inform these key players about your work and what you’ve accomplished. The audience list should include the influencers who have a say in your career—your bosses and your bosses’ bosses—and any stakeholders who are dependent on your work. And your communication plan should describe how you will inform these influencers—usually via conversations, reports, and email—about your job and what you’ve accomplished.

For your achievements to be appreciated, Azzarello says it’s vital that they are relevant to your company’s goals. “Your priorities must be relevant to their priorities,” says Azzarello. “Your work must be recognized as matching the business’s goals.”

Connect Better. The third step of Az-
zarello’s career plan involves connect-
ing with key players at your company,
which involves building relationships
with mentors and creating a broad net-
work of support. “Successful people
get a lot of help from others,” Azzarello
says. “You can’t be successful alone.”
Azzarello stresses the importance of
mentors (note the plural) at your com-
pany and outside of it, and says em-
ployees “shouldn’t attempt career ad-
vancement without mentors.” Not only
can mentors help you understand a
company’s culture and goals, but they,
and other key players, can help you get
a spot on the company’s list of employ-
ees who are viewed as up and coming.

All of this is about visibility. The company president or other top executives must know or know about you, or

you must have a relationship with mentors or others who are connected to the company president and key executives.

This step involves networking, and many people (and Azzarello admits she’s one of these people) are uncomfortable with meeting new people for the purpose of networking. If you’re one of these people, Azzarello’s advice is to network with the people you already know.

If Azzarello’s career advice sounds like a lot of work, you’re right—it is. Which is why she urges employees to create a yearlong plan for implementing these three stages.

For many employees, Azzarello’s advice is a real challenge. The alternative, however, is rather unsatisfying. After all, who wants a zero raise?

 

Judy Robertson “Laptops in the classroom” http://cacm.acm.org/ blogs/blog-cacm/93398

Do you ever find yourself checking your email during a boring meeting? Do you drift off on a wave of RSS feeds when you should be listening to your colleagues? Do you pretend to be taking studious notes during seminars while actually reading Slash-dot? In fact, shouldn’t your full attention be somewhere else right now?

I find it increasingly tempting to do
lots of things at once, or at least take
microbreaks from activities to check
mail or news. I do think it’s rude to
do so during meetings so I try to stop
myself. My students don’t tend to have
such scruples. They use their laptops
openly in class, and they’re not all
conscientiously following along with
my slides, I suspect. In fact, in a recent
study, “Assessing Laptop Use in High-
er Education Classrooms: The Laptop
Effectiveness Scale,” published in the
Australasian Journal of Educational
Technology, 70% of students spent half
their time sending email during class
(instant messaging, playing games,
and other nonacademic activities
were also popular). They did also take
notes and other learning tasks, but
they weren’t exactly dedicated to stay-
ing on task. If you’re interested in sur-
veying your own class to find out what
they really do behind their screens,
the study’s authors provide a reliable,
validated questionnaire tool about
laptop usage in education.

Jack Rosenberger is senior editor, news, of Communications. Judy Robertson is a lecturer at Heriot-Watt University.