Graduating seniors—congrats! This is an exciting time. The transition from college to “the real world” often ushers in many firsts—including your first full-time job. It also brings some lasts: your last final exams, research reports, and essays. While your days of academic writing may be behind you, I can assure you that the act of communicating your ideas is not. 

Professionals spend approximately half their time at work writing, according to new research from Grammarly and The Harris Poll. And communicating in the workplace is hard—the same study found that 86% of workers believe communication is one of the most underrated professional skills.

The circumstances of the last several years have caused a massive shift in the way we work, and yours is one of the first graduating classes to enter the professional world amid this global renegotiation. Like you, the most seasoned professionals are making adjustments to more asynchronous work, less face-to-face time, and new ways of collaborating with colleagues. In a way, this is good news—your future colleagues are recalibrating their relationship with professional communication at the same time you are creating yours. 

The challenges of workplace communications

The impact of professional communications may be less tangible than grades, but that doesn’t mean they’re low-risk. Your day-to-day communication in the workplace directly impacts outcomes—whether it’s getting buy-in for an initiative, winning over a new client, or protecting your company’s reputation. 

Skillful communication can also safeguard your time and energy from the negative consequences of poor communication. Data shows us that these side effects include increased stress and wasted time. Let’s put a finer point on that: business leaders estimate their employees lose nearly eight hours each week to ineffective communication. This is approximately one full day of a five-day workweek! As you begin your career, consider the significant impact such a time drain can have on your productivity and morale—and how prioritizing communication skills can help you overcome these undesirable outcomes. 

These concerns aren’t limited to those new to the workforce. The majority of professionals are worried that hybrid and remote working models will hinder their ability to communicate well in the future, and nearly two-thirds wish their company had better tools to support people in communicating effectively. 

And that’s not because there aren’t already enough tools in the workplace! The needs of a hybrid world have led to a surge in contexts where we communicate—Slack, email, video meetings, in-person meetings, workflow platforms, and more. Today’s workers face a readjustment of where and when they share updates and collaborate with colleagues. Here are some tips on juggling all these options: 

• Be considerate of others’ preferences and communication styles. Do they like to have document drafts in their email inbox? Are they okay with receiving everything in Slack? Or do they want to walk through materials for review on your weekly chats? When in doubt—ask!
• Be clear about your own needs. New hires may feel obligated to work around the styles of others. While it’s always wise to note how your boss and teammates operate, setting your own guidelines and boundaries will prepare you to deliver your best work. 
• Be mindful of context. Remember you may need to alter your writing style throughout the day to best suit the platform. For example, emojis and more lax punctuation might be acceptable on Slack but not via email.  

The shift from academic to professional writing

Beyond constant context shifting, academic writing is, by nature, dramatically different from business writing—from conventions around length, sentence complexity, tone, and more. 

New professionals must also contend with the change from writing wordy essays to concise communication when entering the workforce. Even those who once excelled in writing at school may miss the mark when writing for the workplace if they don’t adapt to a “less is more” mindset. Instead of writing more to hit word counts or page lengths, you now need to get your point across as quickly as possible. Keep this in mind when drafting long emails and documents. If lengthy memos are unavoidable, consider summarizing the key takeaways with a TL;DR section.  

Another change from academic writing: your audience is no longer limited to your peers and professors. With your new job come countless new connections. You may have to communicate with your boss and your team, clients and vendors, outside partners and prospects—just to name a few. In the same way you must adapt your writing style based on where you write, you’ll want to tailor each communication to the recipient. It’s essential to take a bespoke approach to ensure your message is received as intended. 

…and how to ease the transition 

By understanding the impact of workplace communication before starting your career, you will be better prepared to navigate this progression to professional life. So now that you’re aware of the challenges, here’s what you can do to set yourself up for success:

• Develop your soft skills. In a hybrid or remote work environment especially, soft skills like empathy, teamwork, and confidence are not just critical to your success but also to your team’s success. And strong communicators tap into all of these skills (and more!) to work efficiently and effectively. 
• Invest in the right tech and professional development tools. Thankfully, you no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars each semester on books—but that doesn’t mean the learning is over. Digital communication assistants, courses on public speaking, or books on leadership, collaboration, flexibility, and other soft skills are all options.

When in doubt, lean on the basics

Despite the adjustments from academic to professional communication, many tenets of good writing stand: 

• Know what you aim to accomplish with your message, and keep that goal at the forefront.
• Consider your audience and tailor the message accordingly. Assignments for your creative writing professor probably differed from the research papers you turned in. Similarly, adapt your workplace comms based on your mission, recipient, and relationship. 
• Self-edit! Proofread for spelling and grammar errors, cut unnecessary words and clauses, use active voice whenever possible, and don’t hedge—be confident in what you know and recommend.

By giving your workplace communication as much thought and attention as your final papers, you’ll be well on your way to building the confidence, connections, and capabilities you need for another transition—your next dream job.

Have you recently thought about your content marketing skills?

People create content every single day – a sponsored social media post, a hilarious parody that gets stuck in your head, an emotional video tribute, an insightful blog, a moving photo that perfectly captures a moment in time. How we consume that content, however, changes – sometimes that change can seemingly happen overnight.

Think back to how you consumed content five years ago. That probably looked like scrolling through photos on Facebook, subscribing to an email newsletter, or watching a video on YouTube. The way you consume content today is probably much different. New social media platforms emerging and evolving or the growing popularity of podcasts are just a few examples. These shifts are usually seamless to consumers. Downloading a new or trending app is commonplace – and exciting. For content marketers, however, it’s a welcomed challenge as we’re typically tasked with brainstorming and creating engaging content, and then deciding the best method to share it. And, since the industry is swift, a critical part of our job also involves helping our clients navigate these changes and shift strategies accordingly.

So, whether you’re brushing up on new skills ahead of an interview or you’re a seasoned professional in need of a refresher, below are three essential content marketing strategies to strengthen for an industry that refuses to slow down.

Upcycling content

Calling the team together to brainstorm or researching new ways to engage an audience are all important steps for content marketers to create fresh content. However, there’s no shame in recycling content. Afterall, there are only so many ways to repackage the same core messaging. That said, it is essential that you master the art of upcycling content, because there is a right way to do it. Just because a piece of content is updated doesn’t automatically mean it will perform well.

To get started, weed through the fluff to identify the main message of the content. Now, it’s time to freshen up all the ancillary elements to include a new, timely title, different headers, rephrasing your call to action (CTA) and updating links. The goal is to make sure it’s updated enough to be viewed as new while capitalizing on the elements that made it successful in the first place. One way to make this entire process easier is to standardize content by building out a document that shares grammar usage rules, style rules or preferred terminology. Even though you’re upcycling content, it’s critical that voice and tone are always clear when writing consistent content for a long-term engagement.

Understanding the impact of the user experience (UX)

Your content could be spot on with its message, voice and overall feel, but it could easily fall flat if you fail to consider the User Experience (UX), which is why it’s critical to understand how your users consume your content. The tricky part is that people are constantly changing their preferences. For example, you’re working for a product brand that knows they get high engagement when sharing content on the weekends when people aren’t working. Your team may opt to share a short, digestible video clip on the weekend as opposed to a information-packed newsletter sent during the work week. Now, you can see – the tone, the amount of text, the visuals all play a vital role here.

Helping to improve UX will likely translate into better content performance, so how can we take steps to actively improve UX over time as content marketers? The key is to not get too comfortable and commit to diversifying your content medium, timing and other factors. Step inside the shoes of your target audience and think critically about when they would most likely watch a quick video, share an infographic or react to a social post. Consider how and when your message will best be received. The answers to these questions will help you start experimenting to find what works best – and beware, it will continue to evolve.

Pushing content holistically

Avoid pigeon-holing yourself to one channel, like only sharing blogs. Instead, do your research and take a holistic approach to push content out regularly via a variety of channels. Many think that producing more content will help you rank better organically – and it will – but it’s also important to consider where this content is being shared. For example, when a brand has a strong web presence, with an established social media following, a full YouTube library and guest blogs appearing on third-party sites, it tends to build authority faster through creating this feeling of the brand appearing everywhere.

Refuse to be limited by traditional content marketing channels. Challenge yourself to think of creative ways to appear in other media, like other brands’ newsletters, podcasts, social posts – leveraging partnerships with like-minded brands is a great holistic strategy to build credibility and brand awareness – and gain more views. Explore a mix of paid and unpaid. Many content marketers find this combination helps boost all efforts across the board, like featuring paid opportunities (reviews, video interviews, etc.) and sharing those out organically to your newsletter subscribers.

One thing that will remain constant in the industry of content marketing is the element of change – You can always rely on the media and marketing landscapes to throw a curveball. It’s critical for successful content marketers to stay up to speed on the latest industry updates, but to also have the creativity to pull over messaging and adapt by looking for ways to upcycle content, improve UX and share their content.

By Steve Krull, CEO and Co-Founder of Be Found Online, an award-winning digital marketing agency.