Quo Vadis Opinions

Been a while since I posted, … time just flies.. sorry

Hopefully these links will be useful
The “activation measures” to help the unemployed
45 new courses for the unemployed seeking to enter college
Listing on Learning Ireland website
Geographic listing on Aontas website
Free courses on DIT website.

Profile of volunteers is changing as recession hits
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Top mistakes made in job interviews
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Less excuses for being late, but they are more creative
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Retrain in science, IT and sales, say experts
According to a panel of recruitment and academic experts the areas the long-term unemployed should be considering re-training in are science, accountancy, sales, information technology, biotechnology and pharmaceutical services. Ed Walsh, founding president of the University of Limerick, has advised people to re-skill as much as they can and to leave the country if they still can’t find employment. (Irish Examiner, 07/08/10)
Go to article

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The latest expert skills report is out.  Not a major amount of new change since the last one was issued. It reports a further reduction in the number of people employed with the biggest losses in construction, traditional and modern manufacturing, agricultural, retail and wholesale.

The report confirms the trends of employers having difficulties in recruiting only in a small number of certain high skills specialised areas.
These include
Engineering Specialists within an occupation
Pharmaceutical industry,
Medical devices,
Water purification,
Quality control,
Validation pharmaceutical and medical devices,
Wind energy
 High voltage electrical engineering.

Senior specialists
 Senior software developers, experienced marketing managers with specialised industry knowledge
Niche areas
 Nordic languages with telesales, scientists & science technicians with specific R&D experience

A specific skill mix
e.g. ICT with business

Financial
actuaries, risk managers etc with some difficulties  reported in recruiting multilingual accounting clerks.

Assuming the economy returns to growth and the various financial issues are resolved the authors believe 96,000 jobs made up of 44,000 replacements due to retirements and deaths with 52,000 through the expansion of industries will be created between 2011 and 2014.
The full report can be read here

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I coached a client recently, who had been sacked from a job for poor performance, after reporting a fraud. Unfortunately because she was less than a year in the job, she had no rights under employment law.
Hopefully you will never be in this very stressful situation, but here are some pointers  just in case. 
What can you learn from the experience?
Generally there are usually some indications that all is not well, prior to the sacking. Did you notice these indications? If not does this indicate you are not tuning in well to communications between you and your boss or co-workers?

Good communications?
If there were no indications, that you could reasonably have seen, was there good communication between you and your boss? If not maybe this is an area you need to improve on in your next job.

Looking for the next job
In looking for your next job, you need to establish whether there is any chance new employers will find out you were sacked from a previous job. If they are likely to find out, then be upfront about it and immediately state what you have learnt from the experience.
If relevant, explain why you may not have been a good fit for the organisation and position it as strength. For example if applying for a position in a very control orientated employer you could state “well it was a go-ahead young entrepreneurial company, and I’ve learnt I prefer to work in a company where T’s are crossed and I’s dotted, so I understand why I was not a good fit, as they wanted to act fast, where I insisted on the paperwork first then act.

Never criticise
Never ever criticise your previous employer, as this just makes you look bitter and no employer wants to employ bitter people.

Fixed Term contract?
 If you were only with the company a short time, is it reasonable to say it was a fixed term contract?

If you feel you are in danger of being sacked, don’t wait till it happens, but start looking around.

What  did my client  learn?
My client has learnt a lot from the experience and has now been shortlisted for a new position, so hopefully they’ll be back working soon. In the meantime they are keeping busy, with exercise, socialising and also completing additional training courses. One thing they have learnt though is  it is not enough just to be good in your specialist area and follow the legal advice you’re given.  There’s also a need to build working friendships with other managers that you deal with in other departments, as this may have made a difference in their case.

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What graduates do next, once they leave college?
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How to sort out long winded meetings
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Students can apply for grants earlier this year
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Some students still waiting on this year’s grants!
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Low cost seminars on redundancy and your rights
Further details

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Apparently workers are getting better at not being late for work
Click here for full story

Job trends from America. Some useful advice
Click here for full article

New social networking website specifically aimed at career building.
Click here to go to website

Scam jobs again
“Roughly one-fourth of recruiting advertisements on such giant job sites as Monster.com, Jobing.com and CareerBuilder.com are fraudulent.” Also some useful tips on what to watch out for
Click here for full article

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Top foreign firms put off by our ‘dumbed down’ college courses
“International companies are being put off locating here due to the ‘dumbing down’ of our education system according to Dr James Robinson, chief executive of the Kepler Institute. Dr Robinson would like entry points for pre-engineering courses set at 450. He believes this is the only way to reverse slipping standards” (Irish Independent, 15th February 2010)”

I think it’s not just a question of dumbing down, but the overall quality of our courses, lately I’ve had a number of  complaints about course quality, from lecturers constantly missing classes , lecture rooms too small to hold entire class, to assignment dates constantly changing.  Yet I’m not hearing any complaints from the students unions?

This website was launched in a blaze of publicity, a forum to help unemployed people find jobs, but there seems to be very little happening there.
Go to website

Not enough training places (Irish Independent, 16th February 2010)
Youthreach centres  and PLC courses are turning people away. Crazy stuff, why pay people to do nothing on the dole, when they could be training?  According to  an EU report I’ve seen,(sorry can’t find the link) demand for low skilled occupations is estimated to decrease by 2% with demand for high skill occupations increasing by 2% so we need to invest more not less in training.

Only 17% of new welfare recipients back to work in 6 months. (Irish Examiner, 23rd February 2010)
A good reason to use a career coach to help you get back to work quicker. If you can’t afford a private coach like me, try making an appointment in FAS or contact your  local VEC who often have adult education guidance services.

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Starting off in the  post room
A great story on advancing your career in publishing by starting at the lowest level. But the tips apply everywhere. Caroline also had a hearing difficulty, but she did not let this stop her.
Go to website article

A free personality test for people interested in working in the software games sector
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A good article on working independently of your physical location.
Before you feel forced to emigrate read this.
Go to website

CAO
CAO points set to increase for popular third-level courses
Economic downturn has led to something of a boom in the demand for third-level places.
Go to website article

Poor career guidance affecting school leavers
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Sign up to support a petition for increased investment in education
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Participate in research on on what it’s like to be unemployed.
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Only about 33% of employees say they trust their senior managers.
I’m not surprised at this given some of the stories, I’ve  heard from clients on how they’ve been treated. Many employers are using the recession as an excuse to bully employees.
Go to website article

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I’ve warned people about scam jobs here and here before, but here’s another variation from Maman Poulet where the job exists, but the training and pay are so poor that invariably people lose out.

They may stop advertising such jobs in their current ad format, because a bright spark complained to the advertising standards commision and a complaint was upheld againgst D7 marketing. See here for  details

I  wrote  here  about assessing  whether an employer is right for you , but based on comments on Maman Poulet and Beaut I think I need to add a few further items –

• where the recruitment procedure is vague or non existent, you’re probably looking at a job that is going to cost you money

• If your experience as a marketer is limited and you’re being offered a dream job in marketing, ask if it’s door to door sales.

I’m not saying that door to door sales is not a valid career choice, but make sure your employer provides decent sales training and a basic wage while training. You’ll also need to be very tough skinned, confident and resilient

The other area that seems to be taking off again is MLM or multi level marketing; I’ll come back to this as a lot of time & effort can be wasted in this area as well.

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A good article on getting your employer to fund your course
Go to website article

HPAT
Students can now appeal the HPAT test, which is essential for entry into medicine. Heard of students with excellent leaving points but not so good HPAT results are repeating the HPAT this year so this is good news. Maybe they do listen to us bloggers!
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Education
US firm calls for overhaul of Education. This is interesting and reflects what many educationalists feel. Will anything change though?
Go to website article

Also good on the education front was that RTE series on St Peter’s school Dunboyne. very inspiring. The students were great. Of course they only showed the good teachers and not the minority of poor teachers in every school who drag the staff room and students down.
They were very strict on the school uniform, thought school staff redoing pupil ties had gone out with the ark. Interestingly none of the girls wore trousers, just that icky green & white kilt. Many schools now allow female students to wear trousers, if the school is mixed as one of the Irish equality opportunity bodies found against Bewleys cafe when they made female staff wear that appalling pinafore & hat whilst the lads could wear trousers.
If you missed the show you can also catch it on the RTE website.

College applications
College applications up by 10% with 3 weeks to go
Go to website article

Also be aware of two new pathways to help school leavers with a  disadvantage or a disability to get to college. This is real progress and it is good to see very transparent requirements being put in place.

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A funny game where you can throw things at the boss
Click to go to game

From the BPS research blog

People think that money affects happiness more than it really does
“So zealous is our pursuit of money, it’s as if we think it will somehow make us happier. Strangely enough, whilst psychologists and economists have conducted numerous studies showing that the relationship between income and happiness is weak, only one prior study has asked what lay people really believe about money and happiness (and this was focused on middle-income, working women). A team have found that people do indeed overestimate the link between money and happiness, especially at lower levels of income.

More detailed analysis showed that people on higher incomes were more likely to overestimate the relationship between money and happiness, perhaps because they had more to fear from losing the ability to maintain their current standard of living”.

“We demonstrate that adult Americans erroneously believe that earning less than the median household income is associated with severely diminished happiness,” the researchers said. “[This is] a false belief that may lead many people to chase opportunities for increased wealth or forgo a reduction in income for increased free time.”
Full story here

“I wanted a new challenge” - Cross-cultural differences in workers’ thoughts about their career changes
“Katharina Chudzikowski and her colleagues interviewed a mix of over a hundred nurses and blue- and white-collar workers from five countries - Austria, Serbia, Spain, USA and China.
Their stand-out finding? Workers in the United States didn’t ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as conflict with a boss. Not once. Instead they tended to mention internal factors, such as their desire for a fresh challenge. By contrast, workers in China almost exclusively stressed the role played by external factors. Meanwhile, workers in the the European nations were more of a mix, attributing their career transitions to both internal and external factors.”

Hey we Europeans are more realistic and balanced!
Full story here

Getting involved in changing the world is good for you as activists are generally happier. (Not though if it involves extremism apparently,) I wonder does it apply to getting involved in Irish politics? Have found politician clients tend to be more cynical than happy!
Full story here

Learning a new language: reading the foreign subtitles on films helps
Full story here

As this is the last blog before Christmas. Hope you all have a lovely and restful break.

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career builder
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career guidance Ireland