The Fast Starter Case and Worksheet

Your company “Fast Starter” has had great success helping undergraduates get a jump on their careers. Your sales proposition of identifying “Skills that Succeed” and “Actions that Accelerate” are gaining a reputation for your young company.

“Skills that Succeed” are those skills critical to an early career that help a young new employee differentiate themselves from the pack. 

“Actions that Accelerate” are specific steps and timelines the people that take to build “Skills that Succeed”

Your recommendations are known to follow the SMART goals methodology that has been highly effective to move people forward.

You were recently hired by “Joe Blow” a young undergraduate who is soon going to be making a first position decision. They want to make the right decision and are willing to build additional skills if they will create long term positive outcomes.

Prepare an analysis and a presentation for your client with SMART goal recommendations.

Your presentation should at a minimum include:

1) a brief description of the starting position recommendation

2) a supported difference in starting salary that can be expected

3) a financial analysis conclusion about the amount of lifetime wealth on the line 

4) specific SMART goal recommendations that can help develop the skills and capabilities that will achieve the higher starting salary.   Use the SMART structure to help move your client forward to develop “Skills that Succeed” through “Actions that Accelerate”.

Use the attached worksheet to help you develop this analysis.

‘Fast Starter’ Worksheet  Pt I: Doing the research

You are the client, it is your middle name. You will be generating a financial analysis and consulting recommendation for yourself.

You need to answer a few questions:

Your answers to the following two questions can be used to help you make recommendations about “Actions that Accelerate” and “Skills that Succeed”

What is the title of your expected entry level professional position?

What are important skills necessary to excel in this position?

Your answers to the following two questions will help you create your financial analysis

What is the expected starting salary for this position?

What is the range of starting salaries for this position?

What is the title of your expected entry level professional position?

There are many good internet sources for you to do this research. For example, there is good information from the bureau of labor Statistics through their Occupational Outlook handbook as well as good information from the First Destination Survey put out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.  There are also private information resources such as Salary.com, Payscale.com, glassdoor.com, and many others.  You can also use KSU job postings to get a reasonable idea of a first position post-graduation.

For this exercise, I am going to direct you first to O*Net at: https://www.onetonline.org/.  Since we are all management majors, use the Occupation Quick Search and type in ‘Management’. It will show 20 occupations. Click “show all occupations”.   Now scroll through and identify one interesting to you.  As an example, lets choose 11-2121.00 Human Resources Managers. Now, I know that HR Manager is not an entry level position, so I use ‘Human Resource’ as a search term and find “43-4161.00 Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping”, which is more entry level.

What are important skills necessary to excel in this position?

As you click on Human Resources Assistants, it will take you to the next page with a lot of information about what skills, etc… are needed to be a good Human Resources Assistant. Read through the list and identify hard and soft skills important to success in that position.  You should be thinking about an Influence Diagram as you do this.  Your objective function is starting with the highest salary possible…. What skills/ capabilities, etc… influence that objective function. 

From the information in O*Net for the Human Resources Assistant, I might pick out:

• Database software

• ERP software

• Oral Expression capability

• Knowledge of Personnel and Human Resources

• Reading Comprehension

What is the expected starting salary for this position?

At the bottom of the webpage is the section titled “Wages & Employment Trends”  Put in Georgia for State Wages and you can get the information for the Median salary for this job, $41,430 (2019).  That is pretty good info to have.

What is the range of starting salaries for this position?

O*Net does not give us a range of wages, so let’s move to a different data source. Salary.com has good salary range information (https://www.salary.com/).

Lets open the website and see if we can find a similar position to “Human Resources Assistants”. When I search on Human Resources Assistants, I don’t find much but when I search on Human Resources Assistant I get some good results.  Lets look at the “Human Resources Assistant I”.  This give us good information on Median Salary at $42,815 with a 75% level at $48,346 and a 90% level at $53,381.

So, now we have good range information… the difference between the median and the 90% level is $10,566. That difference will occur every year that person is employed and will be increased by raises.

Continue to explore salary.com to see what skills and capabilities are needed for this position. 

Salary.com

Salary.com

https://www1.salary.com/Entry-Level-salaries.html

https://www1.salary.com/Business-Services-industry-Entry-Level-salaries.html

https://www.onetonline.org/

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report

https://www.payscale.com/research/US/School=Kennesaw_State_University/Salary

‘Fast Starter’ Worksheet  Pt II: Preparing a financial analysis

When you make this presentation, you need a ‘hook’ to tell the client how important it is going to be to follow your recommendations. Your ‘hook’ is how much more money they will make in their lifetime if they start at a higher initial salary in their first position out of college.

To calculate this number, you are going to need to develop a spreadsheet based upon the information you found and some understanding of how raises, inflation and savings work.

Your goal is to develop a spreadsheet that estimates the lifetime increase in wealth from starting at a higher initial salary. 

I have prepared an influence diagram for you.  See the Fast Starter Influence Diagram.

The objective you are trying to calculate is the: increase in wealth over the working lifetime in current dollars due to the difference in starting salary.

The way you arrive at this is to calculate the wealth that will be received in the future and discount it at the rate of inflation.  Assume inflation is 4%

The Future Dollar calculation is dependent upon:

• the number of years the salary difference will be received see “Number of Years”

• the investment return on the salary difference received.  Assume that the salary difference is invested in the stock market every year at an average annual return of 7%.

• We can’t forget that you will receive raises and promotions in the future. Since they are usually a percentage of your current salary, we need to take the impact of them into account. Assume that you receive periodic raises every 5 years and that those raises are on average 10%.