CV (Curriculum Vitae) idea's

Hello Everyone,

Recently I wanted to spice up my CV make it look good, update the information I had on there and have it profession looking.

At the same moment I have been interviewing candidates for a position within my team and have had 1-2 CV's in a similar format.

That format is called "euro pass", its a European Union template, which is quite simple to fill in and the same time when completed accurately looks really good.

check it out at http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/home

you can complete it online or offline as you want and once complete gives that professional feel and look.

Try and use bullet points for your information, keeping it short with main skills demonstrated.  Put there everything then try and shorten it to the most striking and maybe order in level of importance or attention catching.  to be honest I skim through CV's for applications checking only 5 main points and if they haven't caught my attention or met the minimum requirements by then, I reject them.

5 things normally are:

1. Meet the language requirements
2. Previous experience in relevant fields
3. Nationality (some regions might need a visa for local work)
4. Simplistic or Cluttered CV layout without  good striking information of skills
5. Duration of time spent in jobs, do they rotate jobs every 6 months? gives an idea of their personal stability to stay in the role with your company

Of course, sometimes you can be looking at 500 CV's for a role so need quick info checks to get through them all.  think of this when making your CV what is striking enough to get noticed? have you promoted yourself well enough?

Take a look, leave comments and be brave, making my CV already showed me my current skill level and gave me the idea to apply for some higher roles I was considering but scared based on experience to go for.  In the end, I found I had the right mix for the jobs!

Hope you all had a nice weekend

Scott

The Power of Twitter !

The Power of Twitter !

The Social Media platform is even used by 77 year old ! This 77 year old managed to deliver a 9.79% stock increase for Apple single handedly...

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/08/single-tweet-sends-apple-shares-soaring/

However, he is a billionaire investor who benefited from this with his $1 billion ...

nice to have cash, however I'm more impressed he is figuring out Twitter at his age, my dad is 20 years younger and struggles to understand on facebook friends from facebook recommends you might know this people! :o)

He added he has never heard of because facebook thought he might know them ! hahahaha.

The older generation are a fun bunch ! :o)

Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello readers !

So today is the final update to delegation!

In fact I went a step further than "communications" and even found you some helpful resources on the web to have a look at if you are interested further :o) As well as the strategic thinking approach to delegation

For those of you struggling with your hours per week at around 60 hours a week, I recommend to you this great little e-book offering advice on areas such as:

• Get more done in your job.
  
• Reduce your management headaches.
• Cut down on those 60 hour weeks!
• Have more time to spend with your family.
• Get a far better hit-rate when hiring new staff.
• Reduce the risk of losing your best people.
• Handle your people management with far greater ease.
• Lear how to create long-term motivation in your staff.

Take a little read here if you are interested further

http://51b85lqa4on2dcp9895j-ktm8v.hop.clickbank.net/

I recently purchased it but haven't finished it yet, so far its very interesting !

Remember Delegation is empowering ! It helps to save time and money, builds skills and helps to keep your employees motivated as they feel trusted and provide you vital support for busy periods and holidays. 

Consider it a partnership, but remember you remain responsible for the delegated work.  Take time in your delegation as it can have the opposite effect of causing frustration or confusion if not done properly.

Avoid micro management, of checking the details as they are being done or providing too much details on the individual steps if you can avoid it, you want the employee to be able to input and maybe even help you find a quicker, simple or better laid out way of completing the task on your behalf.

All this can help enhance your reputation not only within the team but also as a well thought of leader amongst your piers and colleges and above and can help you achieve a 'normal' 40 or close hour week.

I highly recommend now that you delegate yourself some rest on the week and come back at chopping the trees fresh on Monday morning !

For me I'm taking a small beer as a nice close to the quarter end fun of this week

Take care and have a great weekend!

Scott

Topic of the week: Delegation

So welcome back to this week's topic on Delegation!

So now you had a look around on the idea what to delegate, how to introduce it and use it for your employees I would like to take that all and wrap it in a package which looks enticing even for the employee to regularly help you in your leadership role and feel like they are benefiting and progressing as much as you are.

So I will start with examples of what to avoid and then progress to more and more positive outputs for both the leader and the employee:

• Follow these instructions precisely or do exactly what I say - there is no thought or freedom here only instruction 

• Ask them for options and then tell them you will decide which is the best - your missing their recommendation and maybe this is the most valuable input as they might combine or think about the options differently that a document list. 

• Take a look at this and we will sit together and decide together how to proceed - this is more coaching and development but encourages decision making from analysis 

• Take a look on this and decide on the outcome and I will approve it for implementation - this is normally a stage where a level of trust has been built and the employee has experience in being delegated similar tasks - we want to get here ! 

• This is your task, try and figure it out and let me know what you did - we can even go one step more and ask them not to inform you of the outcome, basically the level of trust here is good enough that they will basically add your authority to the situation and provide an outcome on your behalf one off. 

• The final level is to say that this is permanently your task from now on, take control of it and shape it the way that works best - basically if the employee owns it, even their mistakes are theirs to learn and grow and develop from. this is the highest level especially if we talk about multiple tasks, it give the employee confidence, skills and most importantly progress, if for instance you also have another role opening up it's as if they are already working themselves towards it in a constructive way 

There needs to be practice both from the employee and employer of regularly delegation to work towards the final steps, like a career plan, you don't start with the end result and work backwards the levels of trust normally.


So the advice here is practice, practice, practice ! :o) make yourself comfortable with this with different staff members, this will help develop your verbal approach to them and also at the same time give you feedback about each member's competencies and working styles to complement your own or contrast to yours in a positive way (like a technical person and an ideas generator together can provide great fruits).

Remember the best approach is to treat any mistakes as a learning curve not a way to get punish, otherwise no one will want to assist regularly and you will make it hard for your team to ever progress unless they are completely stubborn and try and prove you are wrong in a bad way to show you are not the leader of the team, they have something ahead of you.

I hope this has helped provoke some thoughts and you want to leave feedback !

Tune in tomorrow for more of the same !

See you soon

Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello and welcome back !

So today we will carry on the hot topic of the week: delegation

As promised yesterday, we should look at what to delegate now you have the basics of how to do it.

I wanted to start with the easy parts and get more complex to help you as you evolve.  I have found this nice flow chart which is a good start to figuring out what you want to do with you tasks, however its not everything you should consider and is a little bit brief for my liking but its a start to your decision tree:

To get more out of this and feel comfortable in proceeding we need to consider some pointers.

Things that are NOT recommended to delegate:

1. Hiring Employees
2. Firing Employees
3. Performance Reviews of your employees
4. Pay and company benefits (confidential information)
5. Policy Violations like dress code, absenteeism etc

Post delegation ideas:

• Encourage the inputs and energies provided by the team member and give feedback on the outcome if it was successful
• Plan follow on's for repeated tasks or additional training for more supportive tasks the main ones.
• Rotate the tasks if you are lucky enough to have a bigger team, so that holidays can be covered better and more people can support you.

Examples of delegation tasks (there are many more so take time to see you only you should really do this?):

• Regular reporting (including calculating monthly costs on a project, finding orders for regular audits, financial sales calculations etc.)
• Scheduling your calendar or meetings is popular with people important enough to have a secretary or an employee they consider close to that role
• IT developments (building the persons skills in this area I found to be most valuable to upgrading your systems and their functionality through testing and communication) - obviously a little more training would be key to making this a success
• Stock forecasting of items to make sure you always have enough supply for your customers
• Encouraging them to reply on your behalf is good to improve their communication skills and allows you to reply "yes i agree with points 1-5..." and show support within the team

Stay tuned for more soon on getting the employee more comfortable, freedom and control on the tasks at hand without them feeling like you are in reality micro managing their every move.

Take care until then ! 

Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello and welcome back

So this week I want to take you through Delegation as this a highly useful leadership skill that will help you with many things including time, team spirit, backups, skills development etc etc.

Before we get going, you have to have some trust in your team, focus on the brightest stars of the team, find the people who understand you to start with to speed up the process of trust.

I hear you say, "I don't have time to sit and delegate a task with the training to someone" - MAKE TIME! and you will be rewarded and helped a lot, and guess what? You will free up more time in the long term, but it will take some short term patience.

How to do it? -

• Whilst you are performing the task get one of your team members to come and sit with you and watch can be as easy as the training needs to be.  
• Make them take notes as they observe.  
• Give them the task next time and let them experiment and make mistakes as part of the learning experience.  You might be surprised... they might find a better or simpler way of the task you hadn't considered and help you both.  
• Don't kill the person if they take a little longer or make a mistake, be calm and encouraging.  say well done and that you highly appreciated their time and inputs, make them feel comfortable with helping you with tasks. Why? Because they might just come back and ask to help you with other things because you just became approachable at the same moment!

Successful steps to making this work:

• Explain the task and give it a start and end, don't leave your employee to guess the structure at least on the first attempt.  more on criteria of defining delectable tasks later
• choice the individual that should get something out of this, they show the most potential, have aptitude towards the skill set needed (attention to detail if its a spreadsheet, creativity if the normal solutions don't fit etc.), think about developing reliable potential for backup and time saving in the future.  dont split all your tasks to one person in your team only to avoid overload and favoritism
• is training needed, externally and internally and make some time for that if yes, it will reward you back in the future repeatedly.
• explain the importance or end result, so the employee knows what they are trying to achieve and also that gives them the aim of a desired outcome to know if they progressed correctly.
• make sure you give it a specific timeline for completion.  This is highly important otherwise it wont get don't when you want or need it.
• support the employee and communicate your thanks at the end and provide a feedback on the result if you will need to re-do the task repeatedly then its key they learn from their mistakes and get asked for their inputs on what could be improved. This might surprise you they come with different ideas and is always rewarding.

On the next update we will go through examples of what to delegate, a sort of short guide to what is appropriate, because you need to remain within your leading role and not allowing the employees onto something that is sensitive or confidential to other members of the team and departments...

Enjoy your day and see you soon !

Topic of the Week: Delegation

The work stops for the week and the weekend begins, but I'm busy at work on the next hot topic - Delegation !

• Working longer than 40 hours a week regularly?

• Want more support from your team?

• Feel like you are alone in your role and your employees aren't happy either?

All this and more coming next week... STAY TUNED! :o)

looking forwards to helping you learn and grow