Month: March 2018

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

There’s more truth to that saying than many believe. The conventional wisdom interprets that saying to mean that the way you dress sends an unspoken message to others about yourself that may actually raise or lower your status in their eyes. There is a lot of truth in that.

However, it also sends a message to yourself.

The best time to negotiate your salary is right when your future employers make an offer of employment. After you’ve been hired, it’s rare to get a raise beyond a yearly cost of living increase (typically around 3 percent). In over two decades of employment I have I only received a raise higher than cost of living once, and that was due to a change in job responsibilities. (Another engineer in the company had just left, and the engineering manager assigned me his product line, a high-profile product they were trying to grow.)

Here are some guidelines to follow when negotiating salary:

One of the first things a military officer learns is the five-paragraph operations order. The operations order, or OPORD, provides a common format for communicating an upcoming mission, what soldiers can expect, and how to carry it out.  The format is the same no matter the size, from a squad of a dozen men to a division exceeding forty thousand.

If you plan projects, or you manage a team, department, or organization of any size, the OPORD can be a useful tool to have in your proverbial toolbelt. As with any tools, there are times to use them and times to try something else. But having the right tool for the right situation is better than improvising with something less effective.

All OPORDs have five major sections: situation, mission, execution, service/support, and command/signal.