Want to be an asset to your boss? Start developing the following skills:
1. Serious attention to detail
If you’re the kind of person who notices a single dog hair on a dark carpet in the office, your attention to detail could be an asset to your boss. While your boss doesn’t care about dog hairs, that level of detailed attention means you’re likely to spot something they do care about. For example, you’d likely be the one to spot payroll mistakes or leads that come through the company website without getting segmented.
2. A marketing eye
It’s never too late to learn marketing skills. Investing your time and effort now will make you an asset to any future employer. Regardless of your position, a marketing eye is a valuable asset. For example, say you’re a website developer and you’re tasked with creating a new design for the company’s website. If you don’t know basic marketing strategies, you won’t know how to structure the site to maximize leads and sales. With design skills, you can make the site look great, but good-looking sites don’t automatically convert.
A marketing degree will teach you quickly
Instead of jumping around YouTube looking for marketing geniuses willing to share their secrets, go directly to the source and pursue a marketing degree. Having a degree is the authority that says, “I know what I’m talking about” and will support your position when making suggestions your boss initially rejects. If you don’t have time to head out to a physical campus to earn your degree, you don’t have to. You can find a degree program online, like the Associate’s Degree in Specialized Business offered by the IMBC.edu. Like most courses, this one provides theoretical and practical marketing knowledge.
You can also learn marketing online for free
As long as you’re discerning with sources, you can learn marketing skills online for free. Make sure the person or company you learn from has a proven track record of success, not just for themselves but for others. Trusting anyone with success is a bad idea. There’s no way to know how much of their marketing they outsourced. For instance, successful internet marketers often promote themselves as marketing masters despite outsourcing the majority of their marketing. If you want to learn marketing skills from people online, look for individuals and companies that get results for other people and not just for themselves.
3. Great problem-solving skills
Problem-solving skills will make you an asset, but not the kind of problem-solving skills you learned in school. The kind of problem-solving skills you need are skills you can use to solve problems nobody else can solve. For example, say your boss complains about a 2% open rate for a recent email blast after the company acquired 1,000 new hot leads at a national conference. Most people would pick apart the subject line and comb the content of the email for spam-triggering keywords. If hardly anyone opened the email, common sense says it either went to their spam folder, they didn’t see the email, or the subject line wasn’t interesting. However, that’s not good enough.
You need the skills to see to the root of an issue
To solve the 2% open rate dilemma at the root, you would need to ask the following questions:
- Was the email sent to everyone on the list?
- If not, why?
It should be an instinct to log into the company’s email marketing account and look at the list of individual contacts your email blast was sent to. If only 50 people out of 1,000 were sent the email, your next step would be to verify whether your new contacts were properly segmented with the correct tag. If your email blast was sent to a specific segment and not individual email addresses, anyone missing the tag would not get the email. If your leads aren’t tagged, then there’s a problem with your automated segmentation wherever your leads signed up. If you can follow trails this deeply, you’ll be an asset to your boss.
4. Flexibility/adaptability
Be flexible with more than just the hours you work. For example, be willing to fill in for other positions or delegate your regular tasks to someone else when your boss wants to put you on an urgent project. Being flexible and adaptable makes you easier to work with, and your boss will know he or she can count on you for the little things.
Nobody is indispensable, but you can still be an asset.
It’s true that no employee is truly indispensable, but you can certainly make yourself a valuable asset to your boss by developing the skills outlined here.
