However, not all training gigs are created equal. Establishing yourself as an expert, perhaps by becoming an author or developing a niche, allows you to command higher rates and deal directly with clients. But when you’re starting out, you may need to work with third-party training providers to gain exposure. While these organizations can offer broader networks and infrastructure, they can also lead to situations where you feel undervalued and exploited. Here are some tips to avoid getting hustled:

Recognize Your Worth

Many training providers might not care that you hold a prestigious community award, have authored a book, or maintain an active online presence. Instead, they focus on training certifications, which, while important, are not the only indicators of a good trainer. It’s essential to communicate your expertise and insist on being compensated appropriately.

Your other credentials should set you apart and command higher rates. Unfortunately, many training providers don’t recognize this value. They see you as just another trainer, interchangeable with anyone else who has basic knowledge of the subject. It’s essential to clearly communicate your expertise and insist on being compensated appropriately.

Having old webinar recordings and an active LinkedIn presence are strong indicators of your ability to teach effectively. These demonstrate your engagement with the community and your ability to communicate complex ideas clearly. Make sure to highlight these assets when negotiating with training providers.

Differentiate Between In-Person and Online Training

Your travel time matters. Negotiate separate rates for in-person and online training sessions to account for the additional time and effort required for travel.

In-person training requires a significant time investment beyond the actual training hours. There’s travel time, potential overnight stays, and the physical toll of being on the road. Online training, on the other hand, allows you to conduct sessions from the comfort of your home or office. These differences should be reflected in your rates.

When negotiating with training providers, make it clear that in-person sessions come with additional costs. Break down the extra time and expenses involved. Propose a higher rate for in-person training to cover these costs. If a provider insists on paying the same rate for both formats, consider whether the additional time and expense are worth it.

Insist on Compensation for All Work

Pre-meeting meetings, feedback sessions, and curriculum preparation are all part of the job. Make sure you’re compensated for these activities. Your time is valuable, and you shouldn’t be expected to work for free.

One common way trainers get hustled is by being asked to attend “pre-meetings” or feedback sessions without compensation. These meetings can take up significant time, especially if they’re frequent or require extensive preparation. Insist that any time spent on activities related to the training be included in your contract and compensated.

Another area where trainers often get shortchanged is curriculum preparation. Developing high-quality training materials is a time-consuming process. Whether you’re using your own curriculum or adapting the provider’s materials, this work should be compensated. Clarify this expectation upfront and include it in your contract.

Set Clear Boundaries on Feedback and Adjustments

Responding to learner feedback and making adjustments to the next day’s plans after an eight-hour training session is unreasonable. Insist that any required adjustments be scheduled within normal working hours and that you’re given adequate time to prepare.

Feedback is crucial for improving training sessions, but it should be managed in a way that is fair to you. Some training providers expect you to act on feedback immediately, even after a long day of teaching. This expectation is unreasonable and can lead to burnout.

Establish clear boundaries around feedback and adjustments. Specify that feedback sessions should be scheduled within regular working hours and that any adjustments to the training should be made with adequate preparation time. This ensures that you can provide high-quality training without compromising your well-being.

Be Wary of Training Agencies

Many training agencies operate like temp staffing agencies and will exploit your willingness to work. Advocate for yourself and stand firm on your terms.

Training agencies can be a double-edged sword. They offer access to a broader network of clients and can handle marketing and administrative tasks. However, they often treat trainers as temporary workers, offering low pay and little respect.

Approach training agencies with caution. Before signing a contract, research the agency’s reputation and speak with other trainers who have worked with them. Look for red flags, such as a high turnover rate or negative reviews. If an agency seems exploitative, it’s better to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Get Compensated for Prospective Project Work

Some training providers will ask you to speak with clients about prospective projects, complete take-home exams, or check your availability for projects that may never materialize. Ensure that this time is reflected and charged for. Consider proposing a retainer or guaranteed minimum to cover the time spent on these preliminary activities.

Prospective project work can be time-consuming and often leads to nothing. Training providers might want you to invest significant time in these activities without any guarantee of compensation. This can be incredibly frustrating and a waste of your valuable time.

To protect yourself, propose a retainer or guaranteed minimum. This ensures that you are compensated for your time, even if the project doesn’t go ahead. Be clear about your availability and the terms under which you are willing to discuss prospective projects. This approach not only values your time but also sets a professional tone with the provider.

Advocate for Fair Treatment

Lastly, always remember that while earning a good paycheck or traveling to exciting locations can be appealing, you should never feel exploited. Advocate for fair treatment and compensation, and seek out clients who truly value your expertise.

Training providers and agencies are businesses, and their primary goal is to maximize profit. This often means cutting costs, including trainer pay. Don’t be afraid to advocate for yourself. Clearly communicate your expectations, and don’t settle for less than you deserve.

One way to ensure fair treatment is by building strong relationships with your clients. When clients see the value you bring, they’re more likely to treat you with respect and pay you fairly. Take the time to understand their needs and deliver exceptional training. Over time, these positive relationships can lead to repeat business and referrals, reducing your reliance on third-party providers.

Conclusion

Being a successful independent training provider requires not only expertise in your field but also strong business acumen. By recognizing your worth, insisting on fair compensation, setting clear boundaries, and advocating for yourself, you can avoid getting hustled and build a rewarding and lucrative career.

Have you encountered any other hustles? Share your experiences in the comments. And if you’re looking to embark on your own journey as a trainer in data analytics, please check out my career coaching services:

The post How to avoid getting hustled as a corporate trainer first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.

I can’t say how to get started.

My quest to self-employment was more “organic,” to put it nicely. “Mutant” may be more accurate.

I was unexpectedly let go from my PhD program at the end of the 2018 school year, after which came a summer of scrambling. I looked for regular employment, but couldn’t find a role that would offer me challenges commensurate to the abilities I picked up in grad school. Many of the roles offered the same responsibilities that had caused me to seek a greater challenge in the first place, and at the same pay rate. 

If an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down, then I am someone who got pushed off a cliff, grabbed a tree root on the way down, and decided to build a plane because he didn’t see anywhere worth landing. This was a difficult transition because, even though I had major reservations about academia, I did appreciate the autonomy and intellectual challenge it offered. 

If an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down, then I am someone who got pushed off a cliff, grabbed a tree root on the way down, and decided to build a plane because he didn’t see anywhere worth landing. 

I just wasn’t getting that kind of challenge at work, which is why I started the blog so many years ago as a clueless, cubicle-dwelling rookie analyst. Plot twist: the blog became more than a hobby. 

I can say to start a blog. 

To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, the best time to start a blog is before you need to make a career change. Blog posts are like making investments in your career: they seem small, trivial, something you’ll never see again. But look years later and they’ve grown, given you super powers. 

Don’t pay attention to the Blogging Rockstars of the world. They have millions of views of their YouTube videos, with awesome cuts and fades. But you never know what’s going on behind the scenes. I mention Siraj Raval not to pile onto his shaming committee but to offer a case study in the perils of moving too quickly as a content creator. Raval inspired tens of thousands to learn about data science and AI, but was found to have plagiarized a research paper and lifted lots of content for his blog with little to no attribution. 

So, don’t worry about your subscriber count or social media stats. Don’t even worry too much about your “editorial calendar” or making sure you get X posts out a week. If it’s quality content, it will get noticed.

For example, the client I am most proud of working with approached me based on my YouTube channel. I only have a couple of hundred subscribers, but that didn’t matter to this highly sophisticated client who knew quality when they saw it. And that’s the type of client you want anyway — the one that can look through the “vanity metrics” to the core value you are offering. Which brings me to my next point…

I can’t say whether I am a consultant or a trainer.

By and large my client work comes from training. I love training: it’s intrinsically fulfilling, and clients tend to be more educated about what you do and more grateful for the value you provide. That said, everyone knows the cliche: “Those who can’t do, teach.” 

This sentiment falls apart quickly under scrutiny — it assumes that there are no market signals for evaluating the effectiveness of educators, and that there are no benefits to specializing in education. Of course there are — proper training keeps companies operating, and we all know someone who is technically brilliant but lacks the empathy or creativity to share that knowledge. 

To put the final kibosh on this cliche, I’ll throw out another cliche: “Catch a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.“

A-ha! Walking into an organization with that day’s fresh catch of data is of short-term value. On the other hand, showing that organization how to think about data, how to design for it — this becomes the long-term win. If it’s better to teach a man to fish than to catch him a fish, shouldn’t educators get paid more than consultants?  

If it’s better to teach a man to fish than to catch him a fish, shouldn’t educators get paid more than consultants?

A focus of my work over the past year has been building blended learning assets to teach professionals about data analytics. While the work has been done with coding bootcamps and technical education platforms, every organization should be preparing for what McKinsey has called the analytics academy.

This is a bigger job than coming in and building that one report or analyzing that one dataset. It’s about designing the education that each organization’s employees need to stay skilled in a rapidly-moving economy. Those who can teach, have economic incentive to do so.

So, am I a consultant or a trainer? Given what I’ve just written, I’m leaning hard toward the latter. It’s a sentiment that changed after I even started writing this post… 

I can say that it’s a bumpy ride. 

Everything you hear about being self-employed is true, but it doesn’t really sink in until you experience it yourself. 

I go through regular panics of not having enough work. Even at a paid salary job, it was hard for me just to relax when there was no work. I am someone who needs to be productive at any given moment. All the more so when my income has become so intrinsically tied to my own personal efforts. For a fun way to stay engaged and unwind, dive into joker123 gaming.

How I feel every day as a freelancer. pic.twitter.com/kqcYX3t01o

— George Mount (@gjmount) May 24, 2019

It is a bumpy ride. Even being a lean, minimalist “company of one,” there is enough uncertainty for business to change on a dime. I call that sinking feeling of several turns of bad breaks as a freelancer, “entrepreneurial Jenga.” Each time, however, the ship has righted itself. Not only that, but the work becomes stronger from the disorder, a la Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility. 

As noted before, one of the “bumpiest roads” I’ve traveled yet is what exactly I’m providing with my business. As mentioned, I never set out with a clear plan or objective — it was all “organic/mutant.” Fortunately, I’ve had the help of some great guides and mentors to craft the path forward. That said, “Consultant or trainer?” isn’t the only eternal debate….

I can’t say how Taylor Swift did it.

By that I wonder, how did she rebrand from doing only country music? 

One of the more interesting conundrums of digital life is the paper trail we leave behind us. This usually has extremely negative connotations, such as finding indecent former tweets or Instagram photos. But I have found that even in the totally up-and-up world of data blogging, a paper trail can weigh you down.

If you’ve read the blog for a while you’ll know one of its eternal questions has been: “Is this an Excel blog?” Now the question takes on new life: “Is this an Excel professional?”

I will never pitch Excel from my toolkit, despite the mongerings of some of my data comrades. That said, Excel is only one tool in my toolkit: my skills range from R and Python, to inferential statistics, to research design and methods, to professional development. Regardless, my “claim to fame” remains Excel. 

I have to wonder: how did Taylor do it? Of course, I don’t have hoards of agents and the press on my side. But still, I hold Taylor’s relationship with country music as the relationship I hope to have with Excel: as just one thing I do, and something I’ve evolved from. 

I can say that I still have a long way to go…

Don’t we all? … So I’ll move to the next one:

I can say that I am proud of what I’ve done. 

I am really not one to toot my horn, but if I’m going to list my goals, it’s only fair to list my accomplishments. In my first year of working solo I’ve:

• Wrote the lion’s share of a data analytics curriculum
• Gave my first WordCamp talk
• Developed a course on a highly technical subject for a data science training platform
• Developed assets for synchronous data science and data analytics courses
• Delivered a workshop on R programming at my alma mater
• Launched business analytics courses on SQL and R for a leading publisher
• Gave my first full meetup talk
• Launched a new trade name and branding kit for my business: Stringfest Analytics

So, what’s on for Year 2? I’m looking forward to creating even more new and exciting programs with my clients, and continuing to hone my branding and content strategy. I also plan to develop more talks, and you should see quite an facelift on the blog very soon. 

How long will my freelance tenure go? I’ll never say never to regular employment, but I will say that the sense of personal achievement, domain expertise, and community-building that this year has brought will be difficult to match. 

Thanks for taking this winding road with me, by the way. 

The post One Year In: What I Can and Can’t Say About Full-Time Freelancing first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.

Subscribe and get more tips for the awesome analyst. Plus, your free ebook.

The return to higher education can be brutal. So much reading and writing, so much unstructured time to manage. It’s quite unlike the structured, spreadsheeted world of work.

A common solution to the student life is to “treat it like a job:” that is, come to campus at 8, put butt in seat, and study until 5.

Bad idea.

This is an arbitrary schedule

The 9-to-5 schedule is an arbitrary eight-hour allotment of time meant to split the 24-hour factory day into three shifts. It presupposes that you must be on-site for eight hours to work a machine. 

There’s nothing magical about eight hours a work a day. If you don’t have to use it as your workday benchmark — don’t! 

“That 2:30 feeling” is your body trying to tell you something

The eight-hour workday might be a decent length for physical or machine labor. But creative work is much more messy, coming in spurts and stalls. 

Pushing your brain to eight straight hours of mental labor just doesn’t work. Ever feel incapable of looking at the monitor at 3p? It’s not your imagination. Stop! 

What to do instead?

Perhaps the nicest thing about graduate school is having my schedule back. I pine for the day when the work world transitions to a “creative timecard” model rather than one based on factory runtime. 

With the freelance economy on the rise, this will happen. So “treating it like a job” will also become obsolete. A few things to keep in mind as you find your best work schedule:

• Block your mornings.  Research indicates that we are at peak mental capacity around two to five hours after waking up. So make your mornings count. Save your grocery shopping until the afternoon (Maybe you’ll get a half-price doughnut, you destitute student!) So, here’s your chance to keep a routine.
• Find a “mindless side hustle.”  For me, it’s selling stuff on eBay: I spend a few minutes photographing items, listing them, going to the post office, etc. It clears my mind and it’s income generating. Do you have a skill to post on Upwork?
• Take public transit.  No, seriously. I’ve started taking the train to school and treasure my commute. It’s especially good as a graduate student to go on off-hours — again, breaking up that “treating it as a job.” Take a seat, open a book, look at the window, whatever. It’s time away to zone out of work. 
• Move. Pretty obvious, but some motion can jolt your brain. I walk through campus or take a bike ride if I’m home. (You can do this one at an office, too.)

Other tips for crafting a more manageable workday? Fire away? Workday cohort: I’d love your inter-office work break tactics, too. 

The post Why “Treating It Like a Job” Is a Bad Idea first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.

I’ve been working as an analyst in various capacities for nearly four years now, covering everything from womens’ flasks to neurosurgery billing.

It’s surprising how similar all these roles are — namely, how all require a strong understanding of data analysis, specifically in Microsoft Excel.

This is something I wish I’d known a few years ago when I was looking for my first job and spinning down this vicious cycle:

Now that I’ve been in the workforce a few years, I’m cataloguing my thoughts so college students, interns, and other aspiring analysts can get in the mind of someone a few years ahead. This way, they can at least sound like an experienced candidate.

I’ve found very little on this topic online — surprising, given the increasing complexity of data analysis and the difficulty of getting that first job.

I’ll try to take some breaks today, but how better to spend “Labor Day” than by blogging about my work skills? Hope you can benefit, too. 

The post Labor Day Reflections first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.

1. Do Your Homework.  Internships offer work experience that can’t be replicated in the classroom. But a lot of what you’ll learn is readily available outside the organization – especially for public companies. Don’t ask easily Googleable questions such as “How many employees are here?” or “When did this new company get acquired?” This makes you look dependent on your supervisor for any information you get. Show that you can take initiative and get answers on your own.

2. Always Be Learning.  This is similar to the above point in that you cannot expect your supervisor to teach you everything about the industry. Be curious. If you’re interning at a hospital, subscribe to Kaiser Health News or the Health Affairs blog. Tech startup? Try Techcrunch. Industry trends will influence your work more often than you think, and you will really impress people if you can tie your “tree” of an internship to the “forest” of industry trends.

3. Don’t Interrupt.  This sounds obvious, but it’s true. You are low in the pecking order. This doesn’t mean you should be afraid to speak up — quite the opposite — but you do need to know when to speak. If your supervisor is speaking to a colleague, allow them to finish speaking. Do not walk into your boss’s office and assume his world stops turning. If you absolutely must interrupt, say “Excuse me” and offer a reason. As an old business professor used to say, “It’s just good manners.”

4. Don’t Know? Say So.  As an intern, you are likely a student — and students learn. Most people at the office will be happy to explain things to you. I enjoy how it forces me to frame things simply. It’s easier to explain things at the outset than after several frustrated attempts. This will show that you are humble and eager to improve.

5. Get Out There.  Regardless of your daytime tasks — social media, dashboarding, database administration — good interns have after-work activities, too. Ask a recent graduate at the company about young professional groups and find some receptions to attend. Contact the local chapter of your alumni association for meetups. Blog about what you are learning. Business is increasingly about providing value to your network — so after you’ve learned valuable skills during the day, spread them after work.

Good luck to the SOTC interns!

What tips do you have for summer interns? Share below in the comments.

Photo courtesy user StartupStockPhotos on Pixabay.

The post Crush Your Internship first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.

This WSJ piece offers a compelling compromise to the raging college vs. workforce debate.  While I am convinced there is a bubble in higher education, I think some critics of a college education go too far.  

There is always a need for the trades such as plumbing, carpentry, etc. But every industry is undergoing a data revolution.   To be a car mechanic today can require significant computer programming abilities, for example.

Advancing to a management position in the trades still requires some post-high school education.  Whether that has to be from college is debatable.  With so many fine online learning resources, the brick-and-mortar college needs to make a better case for itself.

The College of the Ozarks seems to be doing this.  

Each student works his way through school, graduating debt-free.  What a great program.  I worked as an RA through college, and I found this one of the more rewarding parts of my education.  

I met people and engaged in activities that would have never happened through my studies.  Employers often asked just as many questions about my college jobs as my actual studies.  

I wonder how much of this real-world experience can be replicated for online learning.  While so much less expensive, you do get what you pay for.  For specialized training to those who already have a network, online education is a deal.  But for young people still making their connections and drafting their career plans, there is no substitute for a good college campus.

The debt-free feature of this program is almost unbelievable.  So many young adults are deferring retirement investments, buying a home, etc., because of the crushing student debt.  Leaving college with no debt will open up so many doors to these graduates.

The College of the Ozarks “business model” should get college administrators thinking.  While college is not for everyone, it can still be a good investment for a motivated young person – especially when the cost is nearly free.

The post Hard Work U first appeared on Stringfest Analytics.