If you want to keep from becoming obsolete in your work, you have to keep learning, especially in today’s fast-paced environment. How do you stretch your learning muscle?
Here are some suggestions:
1. Have a positive attitude. If you don’t have a good attitude about learning, you’ll never get enough energy to get outside of your comfort zone, which is where most learning and opportunity exist. Successful people have a positive outlook about change and continuous improvement.
2. Look for it. Learning doesn’t just happen. You have to consciously and actively seek opportunities to learn. There’s always room for improvement on almost anything we do at home or at work. Looking for ways to improve and learn from tasks keeps our minds open to learning.
3. Experiment. Make a conscious effort to try different things, be it driving a new route to the gym or trying a different process at work. It doesn’t have to be a huge, wholesale change; take a small step to get started.
4.Make a list. Write down a list of 50 abilities that would help you grow and learn. Some examples: Make a speech, volunteer, or ask for regular feedback from bosses. Pick two that you can do within 90 days and go for it. Then work your way through the rest of the list.—adapted from BizSuccess.com Web site
CAMBRIDGE – The students practice networking and hone “elevator pitches,’’ entrepreneurial ideas summarized in under a minute. They don blindfolds for team-building activities. Failure is met with candid critiques about their leadership styles. This isn’t business school. It’s a new engineering class at one of the premier engineering universities in the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT created the unusual undergraduate program in response to industry pressures to produce engineers who are as skilled at communicating face-to-face as they are at writing complicated computer codes on their own. Business leaders complain that many of today’s engineering graduates, trained as abstract thinkers, have too little grounding in the actual practice of working with others to deliver innovative products amid time and budget constraints. To read the complete article, please click here.
Whether you’re an entry-level employee or a manager, how you present yourself can determine your level of success.Stylist Kristen Harper http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/cne_flash/production/media_player/proteus/one/proteus2.swf
Accomplishments: these are the achievements you have had in your career. These key points really help sell you to an employer — much more so than everyday job duties or responsibilities. In your cover letters, resumes, and job interviews, focus on key career accomplishments — especially ones that you can quantify.
If you’re worried about making a good impression on an employer, you should probably be thinking about your digital reputation. A recent survey, developed by staffing services firm The Creative Group, says that nearly 50 percent of advertising and marketing executives polled said they go online to find information on prospective candidates. Fourteen percent said they had decided not to hire a candidate because of the online information they found.
So what can you do to manage your online image? The Creative Group recommends you use business Web sites, such as ZoomInfo, to strategically post positive information about yourself. Professional social-networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are also good places to go to make contacts and learn of job postings. If you know negative information about you exists on the Web that you cannot remove, be ready to explain if you’re asked about it.
Workplace Wellness Programs: Encourages employees to take steps to prevent the onset or worsening of a health condition, eliminate unhealthy behaviors and habits, and promote the adoption of healthy lifestyles. There are two types of wellness programs. First, there are insurance-based programs (that lower premiums if employees agree to certain lifestyle changes). Second, there are employer-based programs (in which the employer is truly trying to change the lives of its employees for the better).
Follow-up: Put the name and e-mail address of a new acquaintance in your database and program your calendar to remind you in a month’s time to drop the person another e-mail, just to keep in touch.
You walk into the company kitchen to pour a cup of coffee, but when you pick up the pot there’s only a teaspoon of coffee left in it. You go to the copy machine to make a quick copy, but when you press Start the “Out of Paper” message flashes. Who hasn’t had these irritating experiences at work? We’ve all been there and groused about it. But there’s an easy solution. It’s the Workplace Supplies Golden Rule. When you take the last of something (or nearly the last), replace it, add to it, or let the person responsible for reordering know about it. Lead by example. Imagine the amount of grumpiness that could be eliminated from the workplace if everyone practiced this bit of courtesy.