Employability Mantras For This Decade And Next : Evaluating Your Worth
I have observed that most of the employees overrate themselves within their organizations just because they happen to do their job well. The job being done well has no relevance to their future employability. Rather most of the people I investigated, I realized that they happen to do the job given well because of the familiarity with the work they kept doing for months and years and not because of their wider knowledge.
IT industry largely survives on billing the hours of skills they have with their employees. The business margin depends on how much the customer pays and in how less they can execute the work. Therefore almost all the time either the employee remains low in cost to the employer or the customer ends up paying high enough for the services being taken from that employee. Both these conditions do not remain the same. This situation remained constant for a long time in the industry. However with rising cost and fight for talent, these two conditions now fluctuate heavily.
It is therefore in theory very safe to remain low cost and continue to give high value to the employer and the client. The situation on ground is just the opposite. Every employee wants to earn more and more, even to the extent that the value they generate for their employers and customers do not keep pace with that increase. The prime objective of every business is to earn profit and if that comes by taking care of the employees, companies ensure that they do so. However if that comes by eliminating the employees whose value is no more what the company wants, even that is happening regularly.
It is therefore necessary for every employee to evaluate his or her market worth. This can be done in few ways.
- Evaluate if someone at significantly lower cost can take up your knowledge? Such situations arise in most of the standard commodity skills where supply is always more than the demand. Even someone taking up the job overseas is a significant possibility and that should also be evaluated. If you find the answer to be ‘Yes’, start working quickly to build the distinction that would justify your existence for some more time.
- Evaluate what market has to offer for your skills. Looking out in market at regular intervals can give you a feel if market is open for your kind of skills. It is not necessary that this exercise should result in job change. Changing job must be having several other criterions, the most relevant amongst them is the opportunity to learn and increase your value.
- Evaluate what you do with your available time apart from doing your assigned job. If you like to chill out and shut yourself off from your work after work, it is high time to re-evaluate your utilization of spare time. A technologist must spent a significant amount of spare time in honing and learning new skills. If that is not done, it is certain possibility that someone else is working harder to replace you.
- Do you like your work? If the work is very mundane and is not giving enough opportunity for you to learn, you are at high risk. In case the work gets eliminated, you would not have any other skills that would keep you with your job unless the employer feels pity on you. Do look out for change within or outside the organization if that happens.
I hope, you got some useful tips on knowing your worth. We will discuss more in the next blog.
