Business School Alumna Shares Sage Career Advice

05/13/2016
By Ed Brennen

As head of Product Branding Strategy at KCG Holdings, Inc., a leading global financial services firm in New York City, UMass Lowell alumna Lorna Boucher knows a thing or two about personal branding — and where it can take you.

Boucher, a Lowell native who graduated from the Manning School of Business in 1986 with a degree in marketing and international management, returned to campus recently as the featured guest at the Women in Business Speaker Series at Moloney Hall.

While most of the 200 students in attendance were undergrads, the real-world advice Boucher offered in her talk “Be Nimble, Be Quick!” was perfectly suited for new graduates just entering the workforce.

Instead of trying to climb the “career ladder,” Boucher told students to build a “portfolio career” made up of a wider array of capabilities and experiences.

“It used to be a very hierarchical world, where people would stay in company for 25 years and slowly go up the ladder,” she said. “The world’s a lot flatter now. People are more valuable when they are multi-disciplined.”

Image by Ed Brennen

Here’s a summary of Boucher’s 10 principles to stay ahead of the pack in your career:

1. Education is an active process. Never stop educating yourself. The more information you have, the less risk you’re exposed to. There will be many situations where you’ll be thrown into a room of people and they’ll say, ‘What do you think about this?’ You’ve got to have some basis for your opinion.
2. Learn what you’re good at. Know yourself, your personality, your skills and your strengths and weaknesses. You can’t establish why you’re valuable to other people if you don’t know what you’re good at.
3. There are no shortcuts. Before you can take ownership of your career, you have to actually do the work; you have to accomplish things first. You can’t short-circuit the hard work.
4. Be clear. Communicate well. The fundamental starting point of good communications is to be clear in your own head about what you’re trying to say. It’s actually a lot harder than it sounds, but organizing your thoughts is one of the most important habits you can develop. People try to be clever and use jargon to make themselves sound smart. What’s really smart is to communicate something simply and effectively. All things being equal, the better communicator wins.
5. Be open. Luck favors the prepared. There are things in your life that just don’t fall into a plan. If you have only one narrow goal for your professional development, and you only focus on that one thing, you’re going to miss good stuff along the way. If you’re open and your objectives are more broad, you’ll have a better chance of achieving your goals.

6. Image by Ed Brennen

   Adversity is a teacher. Bad stuff happens. Everybody at some point in their lives is going to suffer a setback or a series of small disappointments. When bad things happen, you have a huge opportunity to learn. It makes you stop and think, ‘What do I do now? What did this teach me?’
7. Stand up for what is right. Being brave is hard. There will be situations where you’re confronted with a set of choices at work. Someone will try to tell you to do something that you completely disagree with. You have to have principles and integrity and be willing to stand up for them. You might not win every time, and you’ll probably get pushback. The key is to put it across in a way that doesn’t paint you into a corner.
8. You can always do something. Find a way through obstructions. Look for that point of negotiation, that thing you can do to get around the obstacle. Just keep swimming.
9. Zig when others zag. There’s a lot of mediocrity in the corporate world. People sometimes do things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done. A healthy bit of skepticism can be a good thing. Don’t go with the crowd. You can show your value as an employee by rethinking ‘conventional wisdom,’ which is actually a contradiction in terms.
10. Pay it forward. Karma is real. When someone needs your help and you’re in the position to give it, then give it. Help out the junior guy when you’re the senior guy. Things have a way of coming around.