(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10)
Loading ...Are you stagnating in your current job?
By Jason W. Eckert
Do you feel good about your job?
Are you being compensated adequately for the work that you perform?
Have you taken a vacation recently?
Do you have a (rough) goal of where you want to be in 5 years?
Are your skills being upgraded from the work that you perform?
Have you taken opportunities to expand your skill set recently?
Is your work-related stress level low?
Are you in good health?
Are you motivated?
If you answered “no” to some of the questions above, you may be stagnating in your current job.
There are times when we love our job, and there are times when we don’t. If it occurs occasionally, it’s normal – you can’t love your job every day. However, if it occurs frequently or affects your personal life, it may be an indicator that something is wrong with your current career position or your long-term career path.
Several years ago, an educational psychologist enlightened me to the close relationship between work and personal life. In North American society, we are socialized from an early age to accept the notion: “You are what you do.” In other words, a doctor is considered more “important” than a janitor in social circles.
Taking this notion a step further, many North Americans also equate work success with personal success and put great social value on their career and career choices as a result. The negative side of this is easy to see – a bad day at work often means a bad day at home afterwards, and bad work stress (as opposed to good, or motivating work stress) often leads to personal stress.
Bad work stress is often an indication that your career isn’t progressing the way you had planned.
According to the Government of Canada’s Canadian Health Network website, bad work stress can be caused by a number of things:
- Lack of career advancement (or possibility of career advancement)
- Inadequate compensation for the work that you perform
- Personality conflicts with others
- Not enough time to get work done
- Lack of vacation or time off
- Unrealistic work expectations
Ignoring or enduring bad work stress for a long time will undoubtedly affect your career and possibly your personal life. However, making the right changes to your current career to reduce bad work stress may not be so easy.
Here are some guidelines that I have found helpful in the past when dealing with bad work stress to prevent career stagnation:
1. Evaluate your job.
Take a few moments to reflect on your job itself in order to identify whether it is worth your time to continue doing. Does your job fit into your long-term career plan? Does your job (and organization) allow you to grow your career in a healthy fashion? Can you see your current job in a less stressful state 3 months from now? If you don’t feel comfortable with the answers to these questions, then perhaps the best use of your time right now is to start searching for another job opportunity.
2. Talk with your supervisor.
Often, people don’t let their supervisor know that they need to change their current job to better fit their career needs. Make an appointment with your supervisor to discuss opportunities for growth/education, as well as motivation, compensation, time, and procedural changes.
3. Take a vacation to rejuvenate yourself.
Be sure to take a vacation where you have ample time to relax. Some vacations such as boat cruises pack your time with tours and activities that will leave you feeling drained. Never take work with you on vacation!
4. Get organized.
A typical job position involves more tasks over time. Sometimes these new tasks can outgrow your current strategies for organizing time. In that case, it may be time to explore new ways of managing your time. Using a PDA, Outlook or Google Calendar to organize your events may allow you to better organize your tasks and reduce your job stress.
5. Sit a course.
Attending a class is one of the best career motivators. It allows you to broaden your horizons, learn new technologies, and interact with other classmates in your field. Each time I have attended a course in the past, I left energized about my career path!
6. Participate in a new outside activity.
In high-stress jobs, I find it best to embrace the phrase: work hard play hard. Make some time several times a week to engage in an activity that has nothing to do with your job. This could involve joining a fitness club, attending your local Linux Users Group meetings, playing a particular sport (such as Wii Tennis), learning a musical instrument (avoid bagpipes), or playing online video games such as Quake (stay away from online MMOs such as “World of Warcraft” as you may lose track of time and not show up for work the next day).
7. Eat right.
The food we eat can affect our health as well as increase or reduce the amount of physical stress that we have. Adhering to a healthy diet will not only make you feel better, it will likely help with your bad job stress. So, next time you go to McDonalds and order that double Big Mac meal with large fries, make sure you order it with a Diet Coke!
8. Buy a motivator.
For most IT people, there is nothing more satisfying than buying the latest PDA or laptop to help you with your work. It may sound silly, but it works – try it! Just visit a few gadget sites such as Engadget or Gizmodo to find a cool one (i.e. the Nokia N810).
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Will You Be Part of The Hot January Labour Market?
During the holiday season many people take time to reflect on their lives and makes changes or New Years Resolutions. While weight loss and quitting smoking have often been top of the list, the trend is now that more and more people are deciding to make choices that impact their work life balance. This has resulted in many new job seekers hitting the market in January.
Will you be one of the job seekers? What can your employer do now to stop your resume from hitting the streets in January?
As an employer what are you doing to ensure your talent does not walk out the door in January? Have you built a plan to capitalize on the Hot Market in January where you will see the largest number of actively employed professionals test the job market?
As an employer a little goes a long way in helping to retain employees. While a large year end bonus, I am sure, is on everyone’s holiday list some small things to consider are:
Ten Small Holiday Ideas that Will Improve Morale and Retention:
1) Mail Holiday cards to employees homes, addressed to the family, letting them know how much you appreciate the individual working for you
2) Give your employees an extra hour at lunch, at least once, to do last minute shopping
3) Do your reviews with them; let them know how they are doing
4) Ask them for a Holiday Wish list of things that you could do to help them succeed in their jobs
5) Take your staff to lunch to show your appreciation
6) Buy a small but personal gift (can be under $20) that you shows you know them on a personal level (music, itunes card, fancy coffee, Tim Horton gift certificate, flower, etc)
7) Give them all money or gift card value $20-$100 and tell them to buy themselves something and have each employee bring it back to office for people to see what they bought and why
Do a company Chris Cringle gift exchange and pot luck lunch
9) Take donations of food, money, toys or clothing and support a disadvantaged family
10) Let them leave early the last day of work before the holidays to beat the rush
It does not take a large financial or time commitment to gain valuable ground with employee loyalty. Employees want to know that you care about them both professionally as well as personally. Spend some time with them, let them know how valued they are and allow them some time for themselves. This will go a long way in keeping them loyal.
As far as what you as an Employer can do to capitalize on the Hot Labour Market; don’t put off your recruitment efforts, double them up for January. What ever works for you ensure that you are maximizing your market exposure and direct recruitment initiatives during this period. Most January job seekers will test the waters and many will stop entertaining new career opportunities as early as the end of the month. Job Postings usually increase in January by 50% so job boards are certainly an option. Our company implemented eCareerFairs to help jobseekers and employers connect directly from the convenience of their desktops. Most other major recruitment vehicles should also have special opportunities to take advantage of this short but HOT market, don’t miss out on this window of opportunity make sure you are taking advantage of the influx of top talent into the market.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...How to Prepare for a Certification Exam
By Jason W. Eckert
Exam preparation is widely considered to be a laborious task. When I asked my daughter for her opinion regarding exams, she was very succinct: exams suck.
However, the process of getting certified in IT can be fun at times and highly educational. Even pouring through sample exam questions and configuring software technologies that you haven’t spent much time with before can consolidate your understanding of those technologies that you are familiar with.
Preparing for a certification exam allows you to break from your daily routing of configuring technologies and organizes your thoughts. You will make connections that you wouldn’t otherwise make, and will become better at explaining technologies to others. Plus, you will always find a few technologies or features that you didn’t know about before preparing for the certification exam.
In that sense, preparing for an IT certification exam is less of a test of your current knowledge and more of a project that allows you to complete your knowledge of a certain topic. If you treat it as a project, preparing for a certification exam can be enjoyable.
What you need:
- Experience configuring the technology AND/OR some educational resource (textbook, course).
- A test lab at home or work you can use to play with the technology during your preparation. This test lab should have all the necessary software – often, vendors of proprietary software offer free evaluation copies, which are ideal for exam preparation.
- Some practice questions. This may come on the CD in the back of your textbook or from an online source such as Self Test Software.
- At least 7.18 kilograms of freshly ground Starbucks coffee.
If you have textbooks or courseware that relate to the material tested on the certification exam, I would spend some free time going through that material while you have access to a test lab that you can use to configure the appropriate technologies. The whole purpose of this stage is to become comfortable with the technology and its implementation.
Next, you need to apply your knowledge to some sample questions that came with your textbook/course. If you didn’t use a textbook resource or sit a course, you can purchase practice questions online (i.e. Self Test Software). Stay away from braindumps (exact copies of real exam questions spread on the Internet) since they provide absolutely no educational value and are often incorrect. This is an appropriate time to apply the Starbucks coffee listed above.
As you are going through these questions, you will often find that interpreting them may be difficult. Following are some tips that will help you as you are answering questions on any IT topic:
- Read the question and answer it if possible before reading the answers supplied. Most exam questions are designed to confuse the student who does not know the answer. The problem with this technique is that it also confuses students who are nervous or who have low confidence even though they know the answer.
- While answering the questions, be sure to identify why the answer is correct or incorrect. This makes each question’s value as a learning tool increase. It may be time consuming when you first start, but it will be worth the investment. You will turn each selection into a learning experience.
- Some questions are essay format or provide extra information that is irrelevant. This is meant to confuse the student who does not know the answer, but again this technique tends to confuse students who are nervous or who have low confidence. One way to approach this type of question (or any question in general) is to pick out key words. Sometimes one word can change the answer – some examples include:
NOT
BEST
ALL
SHOULD / SHOULD NOT - When answering scenario questions, read each “Required” statement and determine in a word or two what is needed to meet this requirement. Repeat this with the “Optional” statements. As you read the “Proposed Solution” statement, you can then identify the required and optional statements that are met or not met.
- With large questions, always read the statement with the ? first. Determine what is being asked and then read the rest of the question and pick out the relevant information. This avoids re-reading the question numerous times, which can be time-consuming and confusing in the long run.
- Certification exams are timed – if you come across a question that you are unsure of, mark it and come back at the end (if the exam allows you to). Quite often, there are questions farther on that may answer the one you were not sure of.
- Try to avoid changing your answer. Many students tend to select the correct answer, doubt themselves and change the answer to an incorrect answer. Remember that there is usually a subconscious reason for your first choice.
- If you are unsure of the answer, most times you can narrow it down to two choices through the process of elimination.
- Many certification exams use long answers to make the answer seem like the correct one. This technique is designed to confuse students who doubt themselves. Quite often, the longest answer is not always the most correct!
- In most certification exam centres, you will receive a small dry-erase board you can use for notes during the exam. Do not be afraid to write things down, even simple things can be forgotten under pressure. Draw the question as it is being described – visual representations always help.
- Never study for long periods of time. The maximum human attention span is about 45 minutes and the average is about 20-30 minutes. Be good to yourself and take long breaks between study times.
- Don’t try to do too much. If you neglect your personal life, you may be adding to unwanted study stress that will make it more difficult to study effectively.
- When studying, try to avoid details at the onset (i.e. tables of registry values, log files or obscure performance counters) and introduce them as necessary when you do practice questions. This will allow you to put everything in perspective quickly, use your time effectively and prevent you from being overwhelmed by non-essential details.
Remember that answering certification exam questions is different from configuring the technology. Don’t expect to get 100% the first time you start answering questions. Often, you will need to do some research or learn from your mistakes when you realize that you missed a “trick” in the question after seeing the correct answer.
For simulation questions, ensure that you complete ONLY what the question asks – no more and no less. Certification exams often give you a Reset button where you can reset your simulation to the beginning if you make a mistake. If you need to search for a particular setting during a simulation, use this button after you locate the setting and then go directly to the setting afterwards.
After applying your skills to practice questions, there will be a time when you feel comfortable enough to write the certification exam. This time will be different from person to person, but in general you should be getting over 90% on the practice questions to safely write the certification exam.
Now, you need to book your certification at a testing centre. There are two main test centres: VUE and Sylvan Prometric. Make sure that you check which testing centre offers your certification exam and then register using the 1-800 number or online website. You will need a credit card to complete the registration. If you do not have a credit card, some testing centres allow you to register in advance at the testing centre itself and pay using cash or debit card.
Finally, you can take the certification exam! Ensure that you pass it. That helps.
