Grad Expectations: The essential guide for all graduates entering the workforce by Rob Cross

In these tough economic times, development expert Rob Cross provides invaluable advice to Britain’s desperate graduate workforce to help them achieve their true potential.

Never has the job climate felt so hostile as in this cruel recession, and never have graduates, both newly qualified and established in the workplace, had to fight so hard to win their jobs and then to keep them. In Grad Expectations (published by Ecademy Press), an entirely unique professional guide by business and talent development guru Rob Cross, constructive, inspirational pearls of wisdom are unveiled, enabling readers to recognise the tools and qualities they need to nurture within themselves in order to enjoy successful and rewarding careers.

Grad Expectations wittily combines fact with fiction, as Cross offers his sage instruction through the life experiences of five young university graduates who meet at the induction day of their two year development programme at World-Corp PLC, a company like any other real organisation. Cross allows us to follow their individual journeys, charting their highs and lows, their individual and collective challenges, how they manage the complex hierarchy of office relationships, while establishing a system for success which enables them to fulfil their true potential. Cross was horrified by the inadequacies of UK careers advice programmes which were failing to give students a tangible understanding of life at work. He was shocked to discover how many good graduates were ill-suited to the careers they had worked towards, and were now effectively suffering from a quarter-life crisis. Cross was motivated to write Grad Expectations by the thought that millions of ambitious, talented graduates were trapped in jobs they hated, and that employers were themselves saddled with lacklustre staff.

Grad Expectations enables all young graduates to feel empowered and better equipped to deal with the daunting professional world. It removes any notion of shame that might be attached to those who must chose to resign from it and follow another path of employment. Rob Cross’s priceless advice should be both a comfort and an inspiration for students on the cusp of employment, as well as acting as a brilliant guide for those talent managers who may need to fine tune their own working practices.

About the author: Rob Cross was born in Melton Mowbray but emigrated with his family to Melbourne, Australia as a toddler. He has degrees in both business and engineering. After an influential tenure with the Australian Air Force he returned to Britain in 2004, and was employed to deliver leadership courses to public, private and not-for-profit organisations. He currently works as a business and leadership development consultant focusing on developing tomorrow’s leaders through providing specialist coaching and consultancy, as well as running training seminars and motivational speaking assignments. Rob Cross lives in London.

To find out more about Rob Cross go to:
www.rob-cross.com
www.grad-expectations.com

You can buy the book for £12.99 (excluding delivery) from Ecademy Press or Amazon (UK site linked) on-line or by ordering using the information below at your local bookseller.

Bibliographic Information:
Grad Expectations
Rob Cross
ISBN 978-1-905823-61-1
Published by Ecademy Press Sept 09
Retail Price £12.99

Ecademy Press is a leading publisher of new authors writing on business and life-solutions based titles. Since its launch in December 2005, Ecademy Press has published a number of highly acclaimed titles including Amazon bestseller ‘BusinessWise’ and ‘Property Magic’ by property millionaire Simon Zutshi

For more information about the author or to arrange an interview please email :-info@authoright.com

In his blog today, Geert Conard explains why he published A Girlfriend in Every City with us and why we are working together again to produce Friends with Benefits, his new book on 21st Century Networking.

In general there are two options for publishing a book : Making a bookdeal with a mainstream publisher or self-publishing. For me both these options don’t really work. Getting a bookdeal with a mainstream publishing brand is close to winning the lottery. The odds are against you unless your name is Dan Brown and you have already published a million-selling book before.
If you go for self-publishing, you are choosing for publishing without any backup at all. In fact you have to become a publisher yourself to get your book on the market.
I have chosen for Ecademy Press which is a cooperative publisher, offering packages of services which makes you land somewhere in between both choices I mentioned before. When I wrote my first book in the summer of 2005, I didn’t even have a clue about the processes that were needed to transform my manuscript into a nice paperback book.

Friends with Benefits will be launched in Belgium on November 21st and will be available from Ecademy Press and Amazon before that.

Watch this space …

It’s all very well writing a book or an article for a magazine, but how can you find out whether your message is hitting the right people and having the desired impact? Executive communications strategist Mindy Gibbins-Klein suggests that the first step to successful communication is accepting that writing is very likely to be a one-way approach, at least at first…

A business colleague said something astounding the other day. He said he would rather speak to an audience of ten people than write for an audience of a thousand. I thought that sounded a bit strange, so I challenged him on it. It turned out that he had written an article for a magazine with a good circulation, but he hadn’t had any feedback at all from it. He felt he had spent his time crafting a wonderful, informative piece that no one appreciated. He also felt that if that message had been delivered in person, he could have seen the response from people immediately, in their eyes and their body language.

It’s true, what my colleague said, so how can we justify putting time into writing when we don’t get feedback? That, my friend, is the nature of writing. Sometimes you get to find out what your readers think of your material, and many times you don’t. It’s my view that we have to be OK with the fact that writing is one-way until we get a response, and we must continue to put good material into the market. There are some excellent guidelines for one-way communication that I have seen business experts use to their advantage. Here are my favourites:

1. Keep your outcome in mind at all times.

Hone your message according to what you have to say as well as what your reader needs to hear and decide what kind of information you are imparting. For example, if you need to teach people with your writing, you would probably choose a style which puts your ideas across in a reasonably straightforward way and allows you to get into plenty of detail. You will probably also want to offer the reader a chance to test his or her learning in the form of questions or even exercises. This differs tremendously from writing which aims to influence or persuade. That would need to sound more exciting and compelling; it would possibly use psychological elements to make the key points. Being conscious about your desired outcome will make whatever you write more clear and effective.

2. Deliver your message as passionately and authentically as if you were speaking.

I prefer to see writing as an extension of speaking, and in fact, for people who will not get the opportunity to hear you in person or even on the phone, your writing must do the same job. It has become very trendy to write conversationally, spurred on by the advent of blogging and newsletters. That style can be used effectively in books and articles as well. It’s no secret that one of my favourite authors is marketing guru Seth Godin. I love the in-your-face, direct style he uses. It feels like he’s in my living room talking to me one on one. It seems from his book sales that others also respond to that style. And it happens to be the way I prefer to write, in case you hadn’t noticed!

There is one caveat here which I must stress to you. Delivering your message as if you were speaking does not mean that it is the same as speaking. There are excellent ways of recording material for books and articles by using digital recorders and voice-to-text software. If you choose to use those methods, you really do need to take extra time to get it sounding right. I know some people who record their books take hours to tidy the text up and edit it. That can work and I have even had some of my clients make excellent progress by recording parts of their books. I just think you can be more careful and precise with your wording when you write or type.

3. Get feedback.

That may sound like it contradicts what I said earlier. Actually, there are some clever mechanisms to get people interacting with you, even though you are not there. Starting with the most basic idea, get people in your network to review your book – favourably and honestly. Even though we are all busy, we find time to help friends, don’t we? Once your friends’ reviews are published, it will encourage more readers to post reviews. You can also get readers to go to a web page and complete a survey – with or without an incentive. You can put an email address at the bottom of the piece, asking for comments – again, with or without an incentive. This can work equally well for books. I get a lot of clients excitedly planning to include CDs with their books, until I show them how they can still give away free CDs and capture people contact details and feedback at the same time. Never include bonuses with your book when you could engage with readers and get some indication of how many people read it and liked it at the same time.

That’s plenty for you to be getting on with. If you know your subject and deliver your message well, if you write powerfully and authentically, they will listen. And they may even respond. Let me know all about your success by writing to me at mindy@ bookmidwife. com – I offer lots of fabulous bonuses for my readers.

Mindy Gibbins-Klein is better known as The Book Midwife™. She has helped hundreds of experts get their message out into the market by writing and publishing the best possible books and articles. She is also a founder and director of Ecademy Press, an independent publisher established in 2005 and specialising in business and personal development books. For more information visit www.bookmidwife.com or email info@bookmidwife.com