Krazy Brain

By Kenneth Troon

 AUTHOR

Dr. Pauline Joseph DBA MBA

Research from the leisure industry tells us that only 7.5 per cent of members who join a gym actually attend on a regular basis. The remaining 92.5 per cent still pay their annual or monthly membership fees but do not attend regularly.

What is even more interesting is that members who make up this 92.5 per cent have no regular attendance patterns at all. They may attend regularly for a month or two and then lose interest. In six months time they try again for a month or two and then once again lose interest. By contrast the members who make to the 5 per cent who do regularly attend are likely to have consistent exercise plans which they implement methodically and improve gradually.

We receive similar feedback from the hospitality industry. Hotels groups report that those hotels with more extensive leisure and fitness facilities regularly tend to achieve higher bookings than those hotels where such facilities are lacking, but the interesting thing is that we still find that only 12 per cent of hotel residents then actually use these facilities during their stay.

As we mentioned earlier research conducted on Harvard students 20 years after they had graduated showed that 5 per cent were earning more money than the other 95 per cent combined. The only difference was that 5 per cent had clear practical career objectives before studying and were merely using the Harvard programmes as vehicles to identify the correct strategies in order to achieve their career objectives. The remaining students were enrolling upon these programmes because they wanted to achieve a Harvard qualification in the hope that this would somehow lead to greater career prospects.

This latter objective is perfectly reasonable of course and would invariably be achieved to some degree, but the fact that 5 per cent of these students will still achieve more money than the other 95 per cent combined is an enlightening statistic. The difference is nothing more complicated than having a good career management strategy in place and being capable of implementing it.

All of these statistics from various different industries are ultimately really telling us the same story. The majority of people tend to be reactive by nature, in other words, they do things only when they have to and tend to wait for circumstances to jolt them into action. This trend is also reflected within companies too. Some of the biggest global companies can still at times be managed and directed by a reactive management team.

This merely reflects human nature of course. We have seen it so many times where a company has achieved significant growth, secures significant market share, only to squander this achievement by then becoming complacent.

Developing an effective career management strategy is rather like developing an effective diet. Crash diets simply do not work. Indeed they tend to be bad for our health. We may lose some weight in the short-term but it will invariably all go back on when we lose interest and go back to living the way we were before we started the diet. All that we have achieved by doing this is putting our bodies through harmful and unnecessary stress.

Sustainable weight loss is achieved only by introducing a positive and permanent change of lifestyle. The emphasis here of course is on the word permanent.

Studying is very similar. Those students who have not studied since they left university and are considering enrolling upon a programme maybe 10 or 20 years later, will always find it much harder than those students who have always committed 10 per cent of their time towards ongoing self-development ever since leaving university.

So we have learnt that the majority of people are reactive by nature. This is in itself no great surprise, but perhaps the extent of this complacency, as illustrated within the statistics above, is the most disturbing factor. You can to some extent understand complacency creeping in at times with exercise, diet, leisure and studying. We are after all none of us perfect. But it is still somewhat surprising and disturbing that so many of us appear to be complacent with the development of our own careers.

Our career, after all, is about survival and prosperity. It directly affects our quality of life. Money and success do not in themselves buy happiness, but they certainly help. The biggest cause of negative stress is caused by the feeling that you are not in control.

Consequently not being in control of your own career development surely constitutes one of the major causes of stress and inevitably poor health too. Proactive career management is not just about being able to earn more money. It is about achieving a better work-life balance, achieving a better quality of life, spending more time with your family and improving your health. The fact that 95 per cent of the working population are prepared to leave this entirely to chance is amazing.

In reality most individuals only tend to think about their career development when they are forced into doing so by some form of emergent change, such as redundancy, a lack of promotion prospects, a disagreement with a work colleague perhaps, or a sudden recognition of a lack of personal achievement when compared to our peers.

We then tend to put in a disproportionate amount of effort in over a short period of time until the problem we have identified has been resolved quickly and then the sooner we are able to fall back into our comfort zone, commonly referred to as complacency, the happier we will be.

We all know of course whether we should consider ourselves to be part of the 5 per cent proactive category or the 95 per cent reactive category. Recognizing and actually admitting that we are probably in the latter category is for many a challenge in itself. We all like to consider ourselves to be successful and we all consider that we work very hard too, but career management success should be measured solely by our achievements, not by how hard we might work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Pauline Joseph DBA MBA is a human resource specialist who has 11 years experience in HR and 8 years experience within the executive recruitment industry. She has enjoyed a rewarding career in the board room of market leading global companies within the Fashion, Retail, Leisure and Healthcare industries. She now works within the professional education industry and is a registered Professor at the Academy of Business Strategy.

URL LINKS

Certificate in Career Management Strategy.

The Online Directory Of Engineering Career Job Listings

Work, Live and Migrate to New Zealand

By Ace

 Looking for a work and you do not know where to look? Interested in a change? Why not search for jobs in New Zealand?

New Zealand is a great place to work and live as it has some of the best wines and holiday destination in the world. NZ is blessed with wonderfully diverse range of natural beauty from deep fiords, beautiful bays, steaming geysers and unique boiling mud pools to snow capped mountains; New Zealand is an ideal place to start a new life and career.

Today, there is a high demand for more workers in New Zealand. In fact, New Zealand has more jobs than it had people. So this is the best time for you to bring your skills to New Zealand where the country is looking for migrants with the experience and skills to fill in available Wellington jobs, Auckland jobs, Christchurch and Dunedin jobs.

When getting a job or one of the career opportunities in New Zealand, you need a reliable recruitment partner to help you build your career in NZ.

Let Adecco New Zealand be that partner.

Adecco New Zealand is the worlds leading recruitment agency in the world with 6, 000 offices worldwide. Its recruitment managers will help you find work in New Zealand from the thousands of job ads placed at Adecco NZ every day. Whether you are looking for a permanent or temporary work, Adecco offers a wide range of opportunities with all types of companies small and large from local and national to multinational.

Adecco New Zealand has an online center that has the ability to update and maintain your personal records. In here you can create your own profile, store your resume and do a lot more. Once you are a registered Adecco candidate, its personnel will match your profile to employers and find the right job for you.

Adecco personnel will also give specialized training and development to help you prepare for your new work in New Zealand. They will also give you advices on how to make an effective CV and interview tips. Plus, you will have access to further developmental tools, skill set refreshers, advices and assistance whenever you wish through out your professional career.

Find out more about coming to work in New Zealand, visit http://www.adecco.com.au/ now.

Find more information about Wellington Jobs,

Careers New Zealand and

Jobs in NZ visit us online at www.adecco.co.nz.

Candidate Assessment Tools

By Ace

 Psychometric testing offers our clients a comprehensive and cost effective method of identifying the most suitable candidates for their businesses. Adecco Xpert is a proprietary assessment

product, which includes Adecco proprietary content, as well as content from leading test publishers around the world, such as Saville Holdsworth Ltd, is administered as standard as a

component of our recruitment process for many roles.

Adecco Xpert has been proven to successfully increase the longevity of placements, ultimately leading to increased retention. In short, Xpert is a key tool in ensuring that the Adecco Group finds the right candidate for your business. Adecco Xpert, will add value to your business by minimising the risk and considerable cost associated with staff turnover.

The expense incurred from testing is minimal when compared with the costs of under-performance or reemployment of staff. Adecco Xpert is a holistic assessment suite, which tests not only a candidates ability to do the job but also takes into account motivational and environmental factors that may impact upon their success in the role.

Can Do testing determines whether a candidate can step in and perform the essential tasks required on an assignment.

Adecco Xpert Can Do tests cover a range of testing options, including:

Light industrial skills (control panel checking, practical reasoning and spatial recognition)

Software package proficiency

Clerical aptitudes (analysing data, attention to detail and reading comprehension)

Customer service aptitudes (stress tolerance, agreeableness and situational savvy)

Will Do assessments provide an insight to an applicants attitude, motivation and work ethic.

Will Do evaluates attributes including:

Reliability, conscientiousness

Customer service skills

Work safety

Stress tolerance

Motivation and work conduct

The Will Fit questionnaire measures the fit between an applicant and your environment. Recognising that when retention and higher productivity. The Will Fit assessment assists to ensure employee compatibility with your work environment, increasing likelihood of job success. The Will Fit assessment is able to be customised for your work environment. To do this Adecco uses the Client “Will Fit” questionnaire, which is designed to help you describe your specific work environment.

This questionnaire provides a list of paired dimensions reflecting different work environments. This list will help us create a Will Fit profile for work environments within your business.

Once the Will Fit assessment has been customised to fit your requirements, the employees/candidates are then able to complete the online questionnaire describing the environment in which they prefer working. A matching report is then generated that reflects the overlap and degree of fit between your description and the candidates preferences, so that we get the best possible match for your job assignment needs.

Adecco New Zealands Proprietary System Ensuring Quality Candidates

Adecco Xpert allows candidates to our complete a customised suite of assessments over the Internet. Assessments are emailed to the candidate, completed over a specified time period and, upon completion, the candidate results are encrypted and returned via email to the Adecco consultant. Adecco Xpert also benefits candidates as they complete the assessment in their own environment, meaning they do not have to take time off from their current position to complete the assessment. For integrity, candidates are also required to complete a validation assessment, which includes a subset of questions drawn from the test pool, in the Adecco branch if they progress to the interview stage.

Key benefits of psychometric testing include:

Increase in staff retention, and associated costs

Provide objective and standardised information to assist candidate selection

Other elements of the recruitment process, such as interviewing and reference checks can be used to confirm or disconfirm the results of psychometric testing

Economical way of screening large numbers of candidates, particularly via online assessment

An efficient way of assessing personal needs and values that correlate with the cultural fit of a prospective organisation

Adecco New Zealands Xpert is an efficient tool to ensure businesses with only the top notched candidates having the right skills and fit to fill in available Dunedin jobs, Christchurch jobs, Wellington jobs, Auckland jobs and other available jobs in New Zealand.

To know more about Adecco New Zealand visit us at http://www.adecco.co.nz/.

Find more information about Wellington Jobs,

Job Search New Zealand and

Job Opportunities at www.adecco.co.nz.

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