It’s been a crazy few months between banks and stock markets and the big recession that is slowly gripping the world.  In an atmosphere like this it is up to everyone to improve their employability and career prospects by learning new skills and upskilling.  You don’t need to wait until your employer arranges this or even leave it so late that your social welfare officer arranges it.  Take the initiative and seek out the training that can make a difference for you.  If you want to keep up with the times, your old skills must be continually sharpened and new ones must be acquired.

Always keep in mind the following:

• There is no such thing as “Finished Learning.” One who stops learning, stops growing.  Work hard towards sharpening your Foundation and Transferable skills.  It pays to spend some time sharpening your axe before attempting to fell a tree.
• Keep an eye open for new skills and master them. At the same time, improve the ones you already have.
• Do some research to find out what skills are and will always be most valued in your industry.  Two sites that may help you here are ‘A Career Guide to Industries’ and ‘Tomorrow’s Jobs’.

Issues that people typically have include the following:

What can I do? – You can do whatever you want to. Right from cooking to eating, you will find information pertaining to any interest that you may have.

Where to look? – Keep your eyes and ears open. There’ll always be something happening in your locality to match your interest.

Universities/Colleges: – Usually, universities and colleges have clubs, societies and student groups which bring together students with similar interests. You can be sure to fit into at least one of them and learn from those who have more experience than you and build networks.

Leisure Centers & Gyms: – These are places where you will find people who like physical activity like hiking, swimming and traveling.

Evening Classes: – Collect details of all evening courses conducted in your area. Learn a language you don’t know, or get trained to do creative things like sewing or origami.

Volunteering: – Though not as glamorous as a lot of other things, the feel-good factor is immensely high! Giving something back to society is an amazing way to boost your morale. And of course, it looks impressive on your CV too and can be used to reinforce your skills and validate new ones.

Distance and Online Learning: – If you prefer to spend more time at home and if that’s the only hindrance you are facing to learning new skills, this is perfect for you. Learn Skills is one of the places where you can start hunting for relevant information about courses and as for online courses, it is the best place to start looking for what you want with a very comprehensive range of courses that cover both skills and compliance based training.  If you have any specific needs you can contact Learn Skills.

Source: CvTips.com article “Learn New Skills”.

By Elizabeth Gardner

USA – 1st March, 2008 – Walk into a City Furniture store in Florida on a slow morning and you’re likely to find a store associate at his computer. It may look like he’s web surfing, but he’s probably brushing up on his knowledge of couch construction or crib safety standards using the retailer’s e-learning system. For the past year, the 15-store chain has been moving its employee training away from classrooms and paper manuals and onto the Internet.

With stores all over south Florida, City Furniture’s 1,100 employees are far flung. “Imagine how challenging it is to get people to come an hour north, or two hours south, or an hour west, for a full-day training session,” says Janet Wincko, director of recruiting and learning. “Every moment they’re driving here and sitting in a class, they’re not selling.” And for employees in the 24/7 distribution center, scheduling classroom training to fit everyone’s odd hours is an additional challenge.

With e-learning, employees can complete little chunks of training; anything from five minutes for a quick briefing on a new product to a 20-minute module on store procedures, whenever they have a spare moment. Their reward is anything from lavish praise to bonuses or promotions. City Furniture’s reward is more training completed at less expense and potentially lower employee turnover and higher sales.

Internet-based e-learning is transforming how stores train their employees, whether it’s how to fold a sweater, how to deal with an angry customer or how to work the point-of-sale system. And sometimes that point-of-sale screen carries the lesson of the day.

“First-tier retailers: those with more than $2 billion in annual sales, all have embraced e-learning”, says Sunita Gupta, executive vice president at the LakeWest Group, a retail consulting firm. It recently completed a survey of 100 top retailers, and more than 70% said better training of store personnel was their top priority.

“Among second tier retailers: those with $500 million to $2 billion in sales, adoption of e-learning varies, and it’s most often used to introduce new technologies or programs”, Gupta adds.

Because e-learning systems are often available as a hosted solution and companies can pay per user, retailers of any size can potentially benefit, says Don Cook, senior vice president of marketing at Learn.com Inc., which includes about 30 retailers, including City Furniture, among its 500 e-learning clients. “We target the mid-market, between 10,000 and 30,000 employees is our sweet spot, but our biggest growth area is companies with less than 1,000,” he says. “Small companies should take training seriously. When you have three stores, it’s easier to develop a training system than if you wait until you have 50 or 100.”

Computer-based training has been around since all screens were black with green letters. The rise of the commercial Internet has made networked computers ubiquitous and inexpensive, giving retailers the ability to easily link trainees with centralized training. And the evolution of Internet technology has spawned a toolbox of presentation techniques as useful for developing training materials as they are for creating flashy web sites. Course developers can choose online video, Internet gaming techniques and other tools that appeal to the young people who form the backbone of many retailers’ sales forces. And those forces can take their training at any Internet-connected computer whenever it’s convenient, whether during a lull at the store or at home in their jammies.

“Retailers realize that e-learning offers a better toolset than traditional training,” Gupta says. “It’s interactive. They can add remedial sections if someone is taking longer than usual to understand something. They can be creative with learning protocols. And they can test as they go to gauge a person’s progress.”

Last year, Hudson’s Bay Co., one of Canada’s largest retailers with more than 580 locations and 50,000 to 70,000 employees depending on the season, realized a two-fold increase in the number of online training courses completed by employees, says Jason Hubbard, senior manager of e-learning and virtual classroom.

His in-house staff of five has produced dozens of e-learning courses over the past four years, not only on specific products and store procedures but also on personal growth topics like dealing with stress and improving language skills. Each course takes about three weeks to create and 15 to 20 minutes for a learner to complete. Hudson’s Bay employees completed more than 160,000 courses in 2007.

And often they revisit those courses for a refresher. “Any trainer will tell you that when someone gets training for a whole day, they’re overwhelmed and don’t remember everything they’ve learned,” Hubbard says. “With this system, you can go online to review specific things. If I do a spreadsheet once a month and I’ve forgotten how to do a PivotTable, I can use the Excel course as a reference tool.”

The courses run on a learning management system from GeoLearning Inc. GeoLearning hosts the system, which provides a platform not only for delivering the courses but for tracking participation and assessing the overall “skill health” of individual employees. The learning management system can serve as a general employee development tool for human resources departments, says Will Hipwell, GeoLearning’s senior vice president of product development.

E-learning can help geographically dispersed organizations develop a common corporate identity, says Angela Vazquez, director of instructional design at AMC Theatres, which operates 300 movie theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada. The company has been using e-learning for about four years. Its system provides courses for about 2,700 employees, including line managers at theaters. Vazquez plans to roll out courses this year for the 20,000 crew-level employees, the ones who pop the popcorn and clean between the seats.

“Having a centralized training function at the home office really helps us standardize and share our culture with remote locations,” Vazquez says. Each course uses the same branded template to give a consistent look and feel.

Face to face?

However, some subjects are still best taught in person, especially if they involve role-playing or lots of personal interaction, says Hudson’s Bay’s Hubbard. But even then, e-learning can streamline the process.

“A class that might have run a full day before can now run half a day because you can play around with the material a little bit online before the course and do follow-up online,” he says. City Furniture, Hudson’s Bay and AMC all use some classroom training in addition to e-learning for a blended approach.

Costs for e-learning vary widely, and the return on investment is sometimes difficult to identify, especially in the first few years when a company is incurring substantial expenses to set up a system and develop courses.

When City Furniture’s Janet Wincko was selling management on e-learning, she stayed away from squishy projections on increased sales or reduced turnover and stuck to the obvious. “Paying a dollar to an instructional designer is comparable to paying a dollar to an instructor,” she says. “But I have to pay the instructor every time he teaches a class, and I only have to pay the designer once.”

For Hudson’s Bay, direct return on its overall e-learning investment isn’t a primary concern, Hubbard says. Sales and management staff have to be trained one way or another, and his most important metric is successful course completions (defined as not only being exposed to the course, but passing the post-course test with an 80% score or better). Nonetheless, he can point to cases where introducing a course on a specific product: for example, digital cameras has resulted in increased sales. “Associates are much more likely to sell something when they’re knowledgeable about the product.”

In general, benefits from e-learning are significant, especially when viewed enterprisewide, some experts say.

“It’s hard to measure what you get back from having sales associates who can actually assist customers,” says LakeWest Group’s Gupta. “But many corporate initiatives fail because the execution doesn’t happen at the store level.”

Source: InternetRetailer.com

Elizabeth Gardner is a Riverside, Ill.-based freelance business writer.

Learn Skills aims to have a comprehensive range of essential skills and compliance training for the Retail Sector available soon, for both individuals and large groups of employees and learners.

Courseware BY nurses FOR nurses

Ireland – 6th October, 2008 – Learn Skills is pleased to announce its latest content partnership with MedSenses, an elite nursing content factory based in Canada, focused on building courseware BY nurses FOR nurses.

MedSenses, having researched maximum learner retention strategies, add custom design elements such as 3-D animations, medical illustrations, case scenarios, and clinical expertise – making all of their courses come alive with color and interactivity. Learn Skills through its partnership with MedSenses is pleased to offer one-stop shopping for any healthcare-related corporation in meeting the emerging need for high quality, relevant, and cost-effective training.

Learn Skills can now offer a variety of titles in the following sectors: Medical-Surgical, Cardiac, Critical Care, Compliance, Pediatrics, Newborn, Neonatal, Emergency, Ground Transport, and Flight Transport, offering a curriculum of over 400 contact hours through our Learn Skills LMS.  Healthcare organizations can now offer a high quality, cost-effective solution for their continuing-education programs – all while offering their nursing staff their annual CE credits!

Whether you are an individual nurse looking to upskill or a group of employees spread across numerous location, we have a solution for you and also you need to is Contact Us about your individual requirements.

For more than 20 years, David Allen has been a management consultant and executive coach. Allen’s first book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published in 2001, became a National Bestseller. Allen has been called a personal productivity guru whose work has been featured in Fast Company, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Getting Things Done is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides an outline for getting control of your life through the five stages of mastering workflow: collection, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing. Part 2, which is well over half the book, repeats a lot of what is said in Part 1, but provides much more detail on the application of Allen’s methodology. Part 3 explains why Allen’s methods work and the benefits to be gained from using his approach.

The entire process, including inputs, processing/thinking, and outputs (actions and action lists), is conveniently summarized in a flowchart provided in the book. Allen’s philosophy is that to be one’s most productive self, one must be able to think clearly. In order to think clearly, one must have completely downloaded from one’s short-term memory or RAM (like computer RAM) all the “open loops” — unfulfilled commitments one has made to oneself. This frees the mind to do naturally what it does best — think about things rather than of things. Allen gives pointers for using one’s critical thinking skills, including three methods for making decisions about what actions to take, in Chapter 9.

Once one has everything off his mind and written down, in paper or electronically, one has to decide, “What’s the next action?” This is THE critical question. Once this is decided, the action must be completed or tracked in a trusted system, such as a Personal Digital Assistant or PDA.

Allen also has a two-minute rule, which states that as one goes through their in-box and determines next actions, any next action that can be completed in two minutes or less should be completed immediately. In this way, a lot of items are touched only once and are forever cleared from “psychic RAM.”

Allen outlines a process for getting RAM cleared in the first place and then for keeping it clear on a daily basis, as new things come into one’s “in” box. The “What’s the next action?” question must be asked on the front-end, when the item from the “in” box is first reviewed.

Applying Allen’s system is put forth as a way for today’s knowledge worker to have a competitive edge in the new millennium. His system is as applicable to one’s home environment and projects as it is to one’s work. He also claims it can help procrastinators.

Getting Things Done is part tools and techniques, part psychology. Allen says that mastering your time enables you to live in the present moment. This may be the true gift of this book.

It’s not easy to see how these concepts help you until you actually do it. So try it.

Buy and read “Getting Things Done”.

Source: Wiki Summaries

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

The role of leader can be very stressful! Management studies have suggested that these roles include a very wide mix of activities, most of which cannot always be controlled or even predicted.

New managers and supervisors – especially supervisors – are almost overwhelmed with the demands of the job. They were probably promoted to be in charge of people, mostly because of their success in a previous role that was focused on developing a particular product or service. Suddenly, they’re faced with being in charge of people, which is much less predictable and has much less control than the supervisor had before. Consequently, the ability to manage time and stress is absolutely critical to the success of the roles of manager and leader.

The two topics of time management and stress management are often addressed together because they are so closely interrelated.

Myths About Stress and Time Management

1. All stress is bad. No, there’s good and bad stress. Good stress is excitement, thrills, etc. The goal is to recognize personal signs of bad stress and deal with them.
2. Planning my time just takes more time. Actually, research shows the opposite.
3. I get more done in more time when I wisely use caffeine, sugar, alcohol or nicotine. Wrong! Research shows that the body always has to “come down” and when it does, you can’t always be very effective then after the boost.
4. A time management problem means that there’s not enough time to get done what needs to get done. No, a time management problem is not using your time to your fullest advantage, to get done what you want done.
5. The busier I am, the better I’m using my time. Look out! You may only be doing what’s urgent, and not what’s important.
6. I feel very harried, busy, so I must have a time management problem. Not necessarily. You should verify that you have a time management problem. This requires knowing what you really want to get done and if it is getting done or not.
7. I feel OK, so I must not be stressed. In reality, many adults don’t even know when they’re really stressed out until their bodies tell them so. They miss the early warning signs from their body, for example, headaches, still backs, twitches, etc.

Major Causes of Workplace Stress

1. Not knowing what you want or if you’re getting it – poor planning.
2. The feeling that there’s too much to do. One can have this feeling even if there’s hardly anything to do at all.
3. Not enjoying your job. This can be caused by lots of things, for example, not knowing what you want, not eating well, etc. However, most people always blame their jobs.
4. Conflicting demands on the job.
5. Insufficient resources to do the job.
6. Not feeling appreciated.

Biggest Time Wasters

1. Interruptions. There will always be interruptions. It’s how they’re handled that wastes time.
2. Hopelessness. People “give in”, “numb out” and “march through the day”.
3. Poor delegation skills. This involves not sharing work with others.

Common Symptoms of Poor Stress and Time Management

1. Irritability. Fellow workers notice this first.
2. Fatigue. How many adults even notice this?
3. Difficulty concentrating. You often don’t need to just to get through the day!
4. Forgetfulness. You can’t remember what you did all day, what you ate yesterday.
5. Loss of sleep. This affects everything else!
6. Physical disorders, for example, headaches, rashes, tics, cramps, etc.
7. At worst, withdrawal and depression.

Wise Principles of Good Stress and Time Management

1. Learn your signs for being overstressed or having a time management problem. Ask your friends about you. Perhaps they can tell you what they see from you when you’re overstressed.
2. Most people feel that they are stressed and/or have a time management problem. Verify that you really have a problem. What do you see, hear or feel that leads you to conclude that you have a time or stress problem?
3. Don’t have the illusion that doing more will make you happier. Is it quantity of time that you want, or quality?
4. Stress and time management problems have many causes and usually require more than one technique to fix. You don’t need a lot of techniques, usually more than one, but not a lot.
5. One of the major benefits of doing time planning is feeling that you’re in control.
6. Focus on results, not on busyness.
7. It’s the trying that counts – at least as much as doing the perfect technique.

Simple Techniques to Manage Stress

There are lots of things people can do to cut down on stress. Most people probably even know what they could do. It’s not the lack of knowing what to do in order to cut down stress; it is doing what you know you have to do. The following techniques are geared to help you do what you know you have to do.
1. Talk to someone. You don’t have to fix the problem, just report it.
2. Notice if any of the muscles in your body are tense. Just noticing that will often relax the muscle.
3. Ask your boss if you’re doing OK. This simple question can make a lot of difference and verify wrong impressions.
4. Delegate.
5. If you take on a technique to manage stress, tell someone else. They can help you be accountable to them and yourself.
6. Cut down on caffeine and sweets. Take a walk instead. Tell someone that you’re going to do that.
7. Use basic techniques of planning, problem solving and decision making.
Concise guidelines are included in this guidebook. Tell someone that you’re going to use these techniques.
8. Monitor the number of hours that you work in a week. Tell your boss, family and/or friends how many hours that you are working.
9. Write weekly status reports. Include what you’ve accomplished last week and plan to do next week. Include any current issues or recommendations that you must report to your boss. Give the written status report to your boss on a weekly basis.
10. “Wash the dishes”. Do something you can feel good about.

Simple Techniques to Manage Time

There never seems to be enough time in the roles of management and supervision. Therefore, the goal of time management should not be to find more time. The goal is set a reasonable amount of time to spend on these roles and then use that time wisely.
1. Start with the simple techniques of stress management above.
2. Managing time takes practice. Practice asking yourself this question throughout the day: “Is this what I want or need to be doing right now?” If yes, then keep doing it.
3. Find some way to realistically and practically analyze your time. Logging your time for a week in 15-minute intervals is not that hard and does not take up that much time. Do it for a week and review your results.
4. Do a “todo” list for your day. Do it at the end of the previous day. Mark items as “A” and “B” in priority. Set aside two hours right away each day to do the important “A” items and then do the “B” items in the afternoon. Let your answering machine take your calls during your “A” time.
5. At the end of your day, spend five minutes cleaning up your space. Use this time, too, to organize your space, including your desktop. That’ll give you a clean start for the next day.
6. Learn the difference between “Where can I help?” and “Where am I really needed?” Experienced leaders learn that the last question is much more important than the former.
7. Learn the difference between “Do I need to do this now?” and “Do I need to do this at all?” Experienced leaders learn how to quickly answer this question when faced with a new task.
8. Delegate. Delegation shows up as a frequent suggestion in this guide because it is one of the most important skills for a leader to have. Effective delegation will free up a great deal of time for you.
9. If you are CEO in a corporation, then ask your Board for help. They are responsible to supervise you, as a CEO. Although the Board should not be micro-managing you, that is, involved in the day-to-day activities of the corporation, they still might have some ideas to help you with your time management. Remember, too, that good time management comes from good planning, and the Board is responsible to oversee development of major plans. Thus, the Board may be able to help you by doing a better themselves in their responsibilities as planners for the organization.
10. Use a “Do Not Disturb” sign! During the early part of the day, when you’re attending to your important items (your “A” list), hang this sign on the doorknob outside your door.
11. Sort your mail into categories including “read now”, “handle now” and “read later”. You’ll quickly get a knack for sorting through your mail. You’ll also notice that much of what you think you need to read later wasn’t really all that important anyway.
12. Read your mail at the same time each day.
That way, you’ll likely get to your mail on a regular basis and won’t become distracted into any certain piece of mail that ends up taking too much of your time.
13. Have a place for everything and put everything in its place.
That way, you’ll know where to find it when you need it. Another important outcome is that your people will see that you are somewhat organized, rather than out of control.
14. Best suggestion for saving time – schedule 10 minutes to do nothing.
That time can be used to just sit and clear your mind. You’ll end up thinking more clearly, resulting in more time in your day. The best outcome of this practice is that it reminds you that you’re not a slave to a clock – and that if you take 10 minutes out of your day, you and your organization won’t fall apart.
15. Learn good meeting management skills.

Written by Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC.

Without a doubt, today’s world is knowledge-based and depends on the rapid exchange of information. Countries that are equipped with the technology and knowledge to participate in the new electronic world are major players in its socio-cultural and economic developments. Education is changing, too. With the advent of multimedia technologies and the Internet, it is now possible to reach people who would otherwise have no access to certain courses or educational opportunities.

Electronic learning, or e-Learning as it has come to be known, makes use of the Internet and digital technologies to deliver instruction synchronously or asynchronously to anyone who has access to a computer and an Internet connection.

By some estimates, between 800,000,000 and 1,500,000,000 people world-wide understand English. Approximately 350,000,000 people use English as their mother tongue (mainly in the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa). Some 400 million use English as a second language (in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Pakistan, and the Philippines). At least another 150 million people use English with some degree of competence. Furthermore, it is an official language in more than 60 countries (Crystal 1992, p.121). With such a large number of people using English, it is not surprising that English has become the lingua franca of the modern world.

In the current state of affairs, the global dominance of English in commerce, science, and technology has created the need for an ever increasing number of people to learn to communicate in the English language. There is a market demand for English courses on a global scale, and the English language teaching industry is thriving.

As English is experienced across different linguistic contexts, it may be experienced primarily as a language of education, or higher education, as well as in official contexts, popular culture, and the local vernacular. It may be regarded as a language of social and economic advancement, or it may be seen as an imposition or a necessary evil. However it is seen, the English language is used across the globe in countless contexts to very different effects.

Thus, proficiency in English is seen as essential for participation in the global arena, particularly in the economic domain, in which transnational corporations conduct business and trade beyond the national borders. In addition, the global spread of the English language is further facilitated by American media products of mass communication such as videos, music, news, magazines, TV programs, and so on. The dominance of English on the Internet reinforces the flow of international information in English, and affirms the structure of global communication. English is the most widely used and taught language in the world, and it is accepted easily almost anywhere.

Second-language acquisition and intercultural learning can be greatly facilitated through e-Learning. At present, e-Learning is itself becoming an important global business not only in the commercial sector, but also in the support that national governments are giving to educational institutions to increase their export income. There is a drive for change brought on by technological innovation to which governments and institutions of higher learning are responding at a rapid pace.

Learn Skills aims to address these needs outlined above through the provision of web-based language learning in English initially, and then to expand this range.

Courtesy: In Global Peace Through The Global University System, 2003 Ed. by T. Varis, T. Utsumi, and W. R. Klem, University of Tampere, Hameenlinna, Finland

Studies by Stanford Research Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation among Fortune 500 CEOs found that 75% of long term job success depended on people skills and only 25% on technical skills.

This is true at other levels as well. For effective performance in the workplace, companies need their employees to have not only domain knowledge, technical and analytical skills, but also the skills to deal with the external world of clients, customers, vendors, the government and public; and to work in a collaborative manner with their colleagues.

The annual rankings of MBA colleges often place communication and interpersonal skills as the most critical skills needed for success in the corporate world.

Noted academic Prof. Henry Mintzberg while speaking on the importance of soft skills for MBAs, refers to the crucial “soft” skills – leadership, teamwork, communication, and the ability to think “outside the box” of a discipline – that separate the best from the rest in the management world.”

Companies are finding that they have to promote people faster than ever before to meet their growth needs.  At the same time, they are finding that the candidates do not have the necessary skills to make the transition from a technical or functional specialist to a team leader, supervisor or manager.  Companies in the IT, BPO, KPO, Biotech, and Pharmaceuticals industries have found that their people need soft skills to work effectively in cross-functional or project teams, local teams or global teams.

Learn Skills, the web-based skills and compliance training company,  can offer a tailored soft-skills program to benefit companies and address these issues and you can contact us for further information by clicking here.

“I bet I could have cut back on many of the seventy, eighty, and ninety-hour weeks that I’ve put in over the years,      if I’d been more systematic and rigorous in managing time!”

Get Aggressive About Managing Time!
Time and money are both very important in business. Yet, like me, many business people tend to give a lot more specific thought as to how to spend their money. Too often, how we spend our time is only thought of in terms of “What am I going to do today?” or “What should I do next?”

Just as a well-run business should carefully develop a strategy to determine how to spend its money, an effective businessperson should carefully develop a strategy to determine how to use his or her time.

Just as a well-run business follows a budget in spending money, an effective businessperson should also follow a budget (or schedule) in spending time.

Prioritize Your Time!
The first step in effective time management is not to develop a schedule, but instead to develop a time strategy. The time strategy should be based on a short list of time priorities.

You start by identifying the number one way you can most increase profits by use of your time; then the number two way; then the Number three way; etc. This short list of time priorities forms the foundation for your time planning for every week of the year.

These time priorities may be identical to key parts of your company strategy or they may be different. For example, if your company strategy is based upon excellent customer service, spending lots of your time in customer service may not be the best use of your time if you have a terrific customer-service manager.

Narrow Your Focus!
Focus is crucial for time management, and the fewer priorities you focus on at once, the more productive you will be.

After you have your major time priorities for the year established, you should allocate them by week or by month. Like it or not, a lot of our time each week is going to be eaten up by nonstrategic items that we have no control over; hence it is important to limit the number of strategic time goals we have for each week. So even if you have ten strategic time goals for the year, you may want to focus on no more than one or two of them in any given week.

For example, in a particular week you may plan on working on your number one time objective, let’s say planning improvements for the company’s major product line, and a secondary goal, let’s say re-evaluating the dealer marketing program, but no time on other secondary time goals that you plan on tackling during other weeks.

Set Aside Uninterrupted Time
Every week you should make up a detailed time plan, which you modify each day as needed. Except in times of crisis, try to make sure day-to-day issues don’t push your strategic time priorities off your schedule.

Generally your major strategic time priorities will involve such activities as planning, thinking, and developing ideas. More so than day-to-day issues, such activities require big blocks of uninterrupted time.

Constant interruption kills any hope of effective time management. One way to avoid interruption is to make it clear that when your door is closed you are not to be disturbed. Another is to have regular meetings, such as every week, with the people that you interact with the most and insist on saving nonpressing issues for these meetings.

Avoid My Time Traps!
These are some “time traps,” all of which have plagued me, that you should guard against:

• Spending a disproportionately high amount of time in the offices where the most congenial people are, as opposed to where the most important issues are.
• Wasting too much time getting daily updates on routine activities as opposed to waiting for a more meaningful weekly summary.
• Jumping too eagerly into the routine, more straightforward work and putting off the more complex and difficult work.
• Not starting the more important work first thing in the morning.
• Not bothering to make up a schedule for each day.
• Overscheduling–scheduling each day so tightly that it is impossible to stay on track and the schedule quickly becomes meaningless.

Source Streetwise Small Business Start-Up

Soft skills refer to a very diverse range of abilities such as:

• Self-awareness
• Analytical thinking
• Leadership skills
• Team-building skills
• Flexibility
• Ability to communicate effectively
• Creativity
• Problem-solving skills
• Listening skills
• Diplomacy
• Change-readiness

Many people often refer to ‘soft skills’ as ‘people skills’ or ‘emotional intelligence’. Hard skills are the technical abilities required to do a job or perform a task: essentially they are acquired through training and education programs, like those offered by Learn Skills.

Importance of Soft Skills

According to psychologist Daniel Coleman, a combination of competencies that contribute to a person’s ability to manage his or herself and relate to other people-matters twice as much as IQ or technical skills in job success.

Results of a recent studies on the importance of soft skills indicated that the single most important soft skill for a job candidate to possess was interpersonal skills, followed by written or verbal communication skills and the ability to work under pressure.

A constantly changing work environment – due to technology, customer-driven markets, an knowledge-based economy and globalisation that are currently impacting on the structure of the workplace and leading to an increased reliance on, and demand for, soft skills.

Soft skills are not a replacement for hard- or technical-skills. They are, in many instances, complementary, and serve to unlock the potential for highly effective performance in people qualified with the requisite hard skills.

Learn Skills provides a comprehensive range of soft-skill courses for employees who want to enhance their work performance and improve their employability.

Reference: sitagita.com