If your current job ended tomorrow, how hard would it be for you to find a new position?
Of course, that answer is going to depend in part on the state of the economy and the current supply of qualified pricing professionals. But to a large extent, your answer is going to depend on you—the state of your skills and your recent accomplishments.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you are a happy, well-paid, loyal employee. In that situation, you might not give a lot of thought to your next career move.
That’s a mistake.
You never know what might happen tomorrow. Maybe your company will be bought out by another firm, and your position will be eliminated. Maybe you’ll need to move to another city for your spouse’s job or to take care of an aging parent. Maybe your current employer will hire a real idiot to be the next CEO, and you will need to jump ship. Or maybe you’ll just decide that you would like to move up the corporate ladder to a position that offers more responsibility and higher compensation.
If any of these things happen, you need to be prepared. And the best time to prepare is long in advance of when you want—or need—to move to a new job or a new company.
In order to prepare, we encourage people to build a transferable base of knowledge.
What does that mean?
If isn’t enough to know the ins and outs of the way your company practices sales ops. You need to have a base of understanding that will help you in your next position, whether that is at your current employer or somewhere else. More specifically, we tell people to build their knowledge in four key areas:
- Broader pricing best practices—How do other companies manage their pricing efforts? What are the best-in-the-business doing that you might be emulate?
- Data-driven decision-making, diagnostics, and analytics—Build your understanding of the latest tools and techniques for identifying the root cause of problems and implementing a solution that will solve those problems.
- Sales and marketing models and financial concepts—Of course, you need to understand the terminology of pricing. But if you want to be valuable to a future employer, you also need to understand the key terms and concepts from these other areas of the business.
- Influence, storytelling, and change management—Having the soft skills that enable you to influence other people even if you don’t have authority over them can be invaluable.
So are you ready to find a new job?
Even if you don’t want one now, it’s good to know that you could find a new position if you wanted to. For more tips on acquiring the skills and making the right moves to improve your employability, check out the webinar Advancing Your Career in Pricing. There will never be a better time than today to start preparing for your next career move.
Advancing Your Career in Pricing
There's never been a better time to be a B2B pricing professional. But when it comes to your career, you can’t just hope that good things will happen in the future. In this on-demand webinar, learn how to take charge and make good things happen.
