Hey, hey, va fam, It's time for the ba Qa, the va qa just with Manday. No Tiffany today. Tiffany is still feeling under the weather, so we center all of the virtual cups of ginger lemon tea with a little bit of honey so that she feels so much better. But I got y'all, I got y'all. I am in the hot seat today and I am here to answer some really juicy career questions. If y'all want to have your answers answered or sorry, if y'all want to have your questions answered on BA you know what to do.
Head to our Instagram Brown Ambition Podcast on IG and slide into our DMS with your question. Use a fun pseudonym if you want to be anonymous, that's fine. We love all of your questions, from career to money to
investing to business questions. We love them all. Just a reminder, though, I am your financial bestie, right, I am not your financial guru or your financial planners, So bring those salt shakers out and get ready to take everything I say with a little bit of salt, because obviously I'm never going to know everything about your situation, right, but I will do my best to give you guys all the juicy insights that I can offer to help you through
these career conundrums. All right, let's kick things off with our first question from Paradise. Paradise sent us an email, and by the way, you guys can email us your questions. Brandnabisson Podcast at gmail dot com. Paradise has an interesting question for her sister. All right, She says, my sister is in her fifties and has been working in fuel assistance, helping individuals and families get fuel for their homes during
the winter. She's been doing this for nineteen years. She would like to move on to a new position, but she doesn't have a college degree. What strategies can you provide for landing a job without a college degree? Also, she's fearful of leaving her job because she'll be leaving her job and financial security. How can she overcome these fears? Thanks in advance, Oh, Paradise, you're a good sister, alrighty, So, first of all, I think there's a couple of things
working here. She's been there for nearly two decades. So at that point you start to lose confidence that you're able to do anything else. Anywhere else, and I think in order to build her confidence, my solution is get her interviewing. So whatever she can do to get her resume out there, build a LinkedIn profile if she doesn't already have one. I mean the fuel assistance industry or just a fuel industry in general. I believe, you know,
this is a pretty cool niche. And for for example, I live in the Northeast and there's all kinds of fuel companies because so many of the homes here are still powered by oil. And I think with nineteen years of experience, I mean, she must have a lot of knowledge and expertise that would be really valuable to some of these companies that I've been around for a long time and would love to hire a veteran. The thing is, because she's been there for nearly twenty years, she needs
to build up her confidence. So that's why I'm immediately saying, let's get her notice buy these jobs. Let's get her applying. Let's get a LinkedIn profile created for her so that she can actually attract some attention from recruiters who are on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is their Google, y'all, when they're searching for job candidates. That's their number one stop, right, And how are they going to find you if you're not there to be found. So she can overcome these
fears by building her confidence. So let's get her on LinkedIn, get her sending her resume out for opportunities. Maybe you can even help. You're such a nice sister, Maybe you can even help find some jobs that she would qualify for and help her submit some applications. She's only going to start feeling more confident when she gets into those job interviews and starts killing it. And then she realizes, Oh,
I actually do know my shit. I'm able to answer these questions with authority and with knowledge, and I feel like college degree or not, I am well qualified for these roles. And at this point in her career, with nearly twenty years of experience, I think that she'd be able to get a job not having a college degree. It's going to be based on her expertise. Now, listen, I have a four year college degree. I don't have
an MBA, and yet I'm a business owner. You know, I don't have a PhD. And yet I call myself a career expert, a negotiating expert. It's not because of the paper that I've collected along the way. It's because of my experience, right, the fact that I can speak
from a place of authority and share credibility. And your sister is going to be able to do that as well if she can discuss herself in a way that makes them forget all about the fact that she doesn't have a piece of paper and five figure student loan debt to go with it. She needs to be able
to talk about her experience and share. You know, you don't really give me much information about what her exact skill set is or what role she's in, But with nineteen years of experience, I would just be shocked if she wouldn't be able to hold a really strong conversation highlighting those skills in the interview. But I wish you all the best. I think that you are the best. I don't know. This is giving like little sister energy, I don't know, but the best little sister ever for
looking out for a big sis and listen. At the end of the day, confidence comes like one little tiny morsel at a time, and it's by taking those baby steps. So help her with the resume, getting that maybe dusted
off or even created. You know if she's been in this job for twenty years, she may not even have an updated resume, but there's plenty of templates you can use online to create one and then start applying so that she can actually hear directly from recruiters or hiring managers that she is actually someone they would be interested in hiring. And then she will start to overcome that fear of leaving and start to realize that even though her job feels stable, she has options, and she has
options to be getting paid a lot more. All right, Paradise, thank you so so much. Hey, keep us posted. Let us know if your sister ends up applying for any new roles and getting some interviews and what happens next. We love, love, love y'all's update. All right, let me take a quick break and I will be back with more. Baqa Soriah says, I hope you're doing well. Here's my question. I'm about to graduate with a social work master's degree
and I'm applying for jobs. Do you have any recommendations for doing salary negotiations when you're someone who works in social services? I got Mandy's nail the Negotiations scripts Guide. Thank you, Mandy, but she talks about negotiating equity, and I'm not sure if that's even on the table because I'm mostly applying for university and nonprofit jobs. Also, do you know what it means when a salary range is not posted in a job offer? Soria? Okay, Sarriah girl.
So much to unpack here. So one of the reasons why I felt, like, you know, really connected to those question is a lot of my clients, and honestly a lot of women in color in general, we are drawn to these service industries. We have big hearts, we want to help. Y'all know, Tiffany got her start as a preschool teacher, and I've been a dirty capitalist from the beginning, so I'm very different. I've been about securing that back
my whole career. No, but in all seriousness, in my business now, I serve when of color who are trying to over get into a position where they can increase their earnings and find new career opportunities. So I'm very much in the service space as well. And of course through the show, we're all about helping people and that is extremely noble, right, It is important work. Unfortunately, the work that we do, especially in the service space is
not always valued the way that it should be. That being said, I don't want people who are in the service industries or service professions to immediately tell themselves a story that starts with I'm never going to earn that much. I chose this path, and this path that's probably not going to lead to a decent earnings. Now, this may be the perception that you have, and hey, certainly if you know people in the social work space, they will
tell you that it does not pay extraordinarily. Well, that being said, I do still think there's some things you can do to give yourself a stronger position when you're negotiating. Now that you've got your masters, which I know is like the bare minimum or one of the minimum requirements
for advancing a career in social work. Like, I know that probably wasn't cheap, so riah, Okay, so let's go ahead and say that it's worth trying to negotiate because you know the stakes are high, that you have maybe some student loan debt that you want to pay down, and you really want to get the most you can
out of this degree. So my number one recommendation for you is to really hit the interview market hard and try to drum up as many job offers as possible, like a couple, Okay, maybe three more if you can, because leveraging job offers against one another is one of the best ways to negotiate, especially when you're not someone who's currently employed, and you're someone who doesn't really have a sense of what your market value is because you
haven't been working and you haven't acquired that job yet. Does that make sense? So as you're applying, you want to be taking those interviews, even the ones that maybe are not your top top choice, and killing it, you know, making them really excited to hire you so that they are giving you a generous offer. And then if you have multiple offers on the table, then you can start to leverage those against one another. So, for example, I have a client named Jasmine who I met last year
and she's wonderful. She also worked for a university as a researcher and at the time she was making like fifty thousand dollars and she suspected that she was underpaid, right, but she wasn't sure. So I encouraged Jasmine to start job searching, applying, putting herself out there, and a few months later, she had three different job opportunities on the
table at the same time. And now this is a little bit where luck plays in and timing right, So she happened to get the three final offers for these roles within the same week of each other. Okay, So that meant when Offer one came through, she could tell them, hey, I need some time to think about it because I've
got two more offers on the table. And when she got the other offers, she was very quickly able to say to offer one no, way, even at seventy three K, which is twenty K more than I'm making, it's not good enough for me. And so she went to offer number two and Offer number two negotiated a little bit, they got her up to ninety K. So she's already confirmed like, oh wow, I am really underpaid for my
value in this market. So that was good confirmation. But still she had a third offer on the table, so maybe whereas she would have been excited over the moon for that ninety K offer, originally, she waited for offer number three to come. Offer number three came in very close to Offer number two, and what she said is, well, I've got offer number two on the table. I'm really excited about your offer, though, is there anything y'all can do to increase the compensation? And they blew her away.
They added like twenty K to her base, and that doesn't happen all the time. She happened to at that point, you know, be in a space that was really in demand. But what I'm trying to illustrate here is the power of leveraging multiple job offers at the same time. So when I coach and negotiating, that's one of the first things I do is how can we get some excitement around you? How can we show that you were in demand?
And one of the best ways to do that is by getting those additional opportunities and getting those other offers. And not to knock the nonprofit sector, but actually to knock yeah, I'll go ahead and knock them, because I think the nonprofit sector gets away with giving the perception that they pay terrible and they like that because they attract people who are not going to negotiate so hard because they think, oh, nonprofits don't pay that much anyway,
so I should just be grateful. No no, no, no no. Some of these nonprofits are Hella funded, Okay, they have hella cash on hand, they can afford to negotiate. So I think that should give you some extra boost of confidence that even though it's a good it's a profession that's doing good and you're helping people and it's a nonprofit and it gives back, it's still a business, okay,
and you are still worth what you're worth. So don't feel bad about getting competing offers and going to even a nonprofit and saying, I've got other offers on the table. What are y'all gonna do? You know? So I hope that that is helpful. And your last question here, what does it mean when a salary range is not post it in a job offer? It means you live in America where it's trash. I don't know what to tell
you now. Right now, it's not a requirement in most of the country for jobs to list the salary range in the job offer. So a lot of times you're kind of going in blind and you're expected to guess what an appropriate salary range would be. But because they put you in this position where they can ask you, okay, what's your expected salary range? And by day, I mean like the recruiter or the hiring manager. I always coach women,
don't give a number. You can deflect, deflect, deflect, So I offer I think in that scripts guide that you have, there's a bunch of scripts that I offer, several that are particular to this exact question. What do you say when a recruiter asks you what is your salary range? So the key is to deflect and tell them that you just don't feel comfortable discussing, and then you can ask them, hey, if you have a particular range in mind for this role or a budget set aside, I'd
be interested to know. Okay. That being said, in some states it is now required for companies to offer the salary range in their job posting, so especially with jobs that are for national companies, so companies that are hiring across the nation, they may have job postings in some states like Colorado and what other ones in New York.
I want to say, you can google it. You may find a job listing in the state where it is required and be able to see the salary range there, just as a you know, as some info to give you a bit of a heads up as to what the range could be. But that's what that means. They don't have to actually give it to you in most of the country, and unfortunately all the power is in their hands unless we make it different. All right, Thank you so much Sriah for your question, and all of
our BA fan thank you for your questions. I can't wait to take more of them again. Head us up. We are Brand Ambition Podcast at gmail dot com. You can also go to our ig and slide into our DMS with your questions. There. We are a Brand Ambition podcast on them and I will see y'all next week, hopefully with my partner and crime back in the hot seat. Feel better, Tiffany, sending you love, Hey, BA fam, We could not do this show without your support or the
support of our team behind the scenes. The Brown Ambission Podcast is produced by Cumulus Podcast Network. It's edited by the wonderful Emani Crosby and produced by Tanya Bustos. Dennis Stimplinsky is our in house tech guru, and I am Bandy Woodard Santos your co host, and I will see y'all next week.