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October 2016

Oct 10
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7 Ways to Build Your Professional Skills for Free

By Your Employee Matters

1610-em-4Today’s job market is competitive. You can get ahead when you build your professional skills. While you could pay thousands of dollars for classes, consider seven ways you can improve your professional skills for free.

Earn a Diploma or Certificate

A diploma or certificate on the wall proves that you took the time and thought necessary to learn a new skill. With ALISON, you can take classes in sales management, sociology, web development or a variety of other courses. After completing all the modules in the class and scoring a minimum of 80 percent on the course assessments, you’ll receive your diploma or certificate.

Access Top College Courses

If you’ve ever wanted to attend the top colleges in the United States, now’s your chance. Coursera gives you free access to numerous classes. The lectures and non-graded materials are available at no cost to you, or you can pay a fee and earn a certificate for the graded work you complete.

Take College Courses

Maybe you want to change careers or brush up on new industry trends. Sign up for one of over 10,000 college classes available at Open Education Database. The math, engineering, health and other in-demand subjects are taught by college professors.

Learn a New Language

English may be spoken across the world, however, you want to stay relevant in today’s global economy. Use Duolingo to learn a new language. It’s a free app with lessons that include opportunities to listen, speak and translate. They challenge you to learn the language quickly, and you earn rewards every time you provide a correct answer and advance to a different level.

Boost Your Personal Development

Thousands of free classes are available for you to access on Udemys. Learn Adobe Illustrator or advanced writing skills from trained professional instructors as you advance through lessons that use videos and reading material. You can even leave messages for the instructors if you have a question about something you’re learning.

Hone Your Soft Skills

Whether you want to improve your Instagram abilities or learn advanced accounting skills, check out Skillshare. It offers 353 free video-heavy classes taught by professionals who are experts in their fields. Your free membership includes access to the classes, mobile app and Skillshare community.

Barter

You may not know programming, social media tricks or time management, but you might have a friend who knows these skills. Agree to trade lessons.  You can learn from your friend as you teach him or her something you know well, and you both benefit.

Improving your professional skills makes you more marketable in your current job and in future positions. Use these seven tips for building your skill set for free.

Oct 10
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How to Take Time Off From Your Hectic Job

By Your Employee Matters

1610-em-3The average American leaves more than two full days of vacation time on the table every year. That may not sound like much, but time off from work is crucial for your productivity and well-being. So how can you make time for vacation when you have a hectic job? Try these tips.

Be Assertive With Your Manager

Your manager has the right to limit when you can take vacation. He or she may insist that everyone work during busy seasons, and two people in your department may be discouraged from taking off at the same time. However, you need to ensure that you get the time and the break you need and deserve.

Make an appointment to talk with your manager and express your reasons, including long-term sustainability and increased productivity, for taking off. He or she should be able to see the long-term benefits of allowing you to take the break you need.

Plan Coverage

Part of your hesitancy to take vacation is because you have so many responsibilities. Increase your willingness to take a break when you plan coverage for your duties.

Document how to do each element of your job, and include details about how to handle your clients’ needs. Then discuss the plan with your manager. Delegating responsibilities and assigning staff to handle your voicemails ensures your job gets done and helps you enjoy your vacation without worrying about whether or not your job is being done.

Prepare a Way to Check In

Unplugging completely is the best way to take a vacation. You need time to unwind. Realistically, though, you may need to check in occasionally and answer questions or handle issues.

As long as you can still maximize your relaxation, prepare a plan for checking in. You may agree to read your email or check your voicemail once a day or every two days. Or maybe you only respond to messages that are marked as urgent as you stay in touch but still get away from the daily grind.

Don’t Wait for a Good Time

Due to the nature of your job, it may never be a good time to take off. If you wait for a good time, though, you may never get the vacation that you need.

Instead, grab your calendar and decide when you want to take your vacation days.  You can then plan coverage for your duties instead of wondering if you should take off.

Your work performance and well-being improve when you take vacation. Despite your hectic job, you can take the time off you need when you use these tips.

Oct 10
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8 Ways Social Media Can Help You Get a Job

By Your Employee Matters

1610-em-2You already use social media to connect with family and friends. Now, you can use it to get a job, too. As many as 2,000 hiring and Human Resources managers use social media to research potential employees, so make a good impression and land a job when you use social media in eight ways.

  • Be Authentic

    Most hiring managers are adept at spotting frauds. Be sure your resume, LinkedIn profile and other social media match as you create an authentic, honest and consistent image.

  • Exhibit a Professional Image

    In real life, you may be the life of the party, but hiring managers need to see that you’re a professional. Your profile picture should be a high-quality head shot in which you wear work appropriate clothing. Remember to proofread your posts and avoid posting racy, negative or controversial content, too.

  • Demonstrate Your Communication Skills

    Communication plays a major role in most jobs. Demonstrate your skills when you check your grammar, spelling and punctuation, and avoid profanity, arguments or negative rants. Always remember that someone may be using your social media accounts as an informal look into whether or not you can communicate properly.
  • Show Your Personality

    Hiring managers like to know that potential job candidates will fit in with the company’s culture. Include real life posts, pictures and other information in your profile as you show your personality and prove that you can fit in.

  • Showcase Your Interests

    As many as four out of 10 hiring managers select candidates who are well-rounded. That’s why you want to showcase your interests outside of work, including your volunteer activities and the ways you spend your free time. Consider leaving out any controversial or extreme interests, though, that may interfere with your ability to land the job you really want.

  • Include References or Recommendations

    Your resume includes professional references, and your social media accounts can, too. Ask your supervisor, co-workers and clients to post reviews of your skills, capabilities and services. The recommendations give hiring managers insight into your capabilities.
  • Post Awards and Accomplishments

    Awards and accomplishments prove that you have the skills listed on your resume. Include photos, screenshots or badges on your social media accounts as you reveal your skills.
  • Show Off Your Creativity

    If you can think outside the box, you are more likely to be hired. Use your social media accounts to demonstrate that you try new things, master new technology and are willing to learn new skills.

Your social media accounts can help you get your next job. In these eight ways, you can make a good impression and showcase your professional skills.

Oct 10
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Tips to Get In-Depth Job Performance Feedback

By Your Employee Matters

1610-em-1You may think that you’re doing your job to the best of your ability, but every employee has strengths and weaknesses. Professional feedback affirms your strengths, reveals your weaknesses, helps you maximum your potential and improves your chances for career growth. If your supervisor is too busy or uninterested in giving you a review, try these tips as you get the feedback you deserve.

Perform a Self Review

You definitely want feedback from your supervisor, but evaluate yourself first. Be honest about your skills, capabilities, areas in which you excel and areas that require improvement. If possible, ask your co-workers for input into your job performance, too.

Prepare a Performance Review Document

Prepare for your feedback review when you create a performance review document. It lists three to five job objectives upon which you would like your feedback review to be based. As an example, if you work in sales, ask your supervisor to evaluate your appearance, ability to build rapport with clients and success at follow-up.

Ask for a Review

Now that you have your performance review document, you’re ready to approach your supervisor and ask for a review. Mention that you want to improve your job performance and ensure you remain a valuable team player. Remember that you can ask for a review whether you’ve worked in your current position for several weeks or several years.

Be Ready to Accept Criticism

Even though you asked for the review, you may not be prepared to hear what your supervisor has to say. Prepare yourself before the review meeting to accept criticism no matter what it may be. An open attitude shows that you are truly committed to making the changes that will improve your job performance.

Commit to Change

It’s easy to ask for feedback and then dismiss it without acting on it. Show your supervisor that you are truly motivated to change when you ask for a follow-up meeting and take his or her feedback to heart. Continue to practice your strengths, and for each weakness listed, create steps that help you achieve the requested changes. Discuss your progress during your follow-up meeting.

Ask for a Review at Least Annually

Now that you’ve had your first in-depth performance review, write a reminder to schedule another review at least once a year or more often if necessary. Your job performance and career future will improve as you request, accept and implement the feedback you receive.

Your job performance and future career path depend on you honing your professional skills now. Use these tips to get an in-depth performance review that identifies your strengths and weaknesses as you improve your professional capabilities.

Oct 10
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McDonald’s Defective Wearable Device

By Cyber Security Awareness

1610-cyber-4McDonald’s recently suffered an embarrassing recall of a Happy Meal prize, a wearable fitness tracker that children could use to keep tabs on how many steps they’ve taken in a day. The “Step-It Tracker” is a pedometer using a simple LCD wristwatch design, and if you’re wondering how they could produce those cheaply enough to pack into a Happy Meal, the answer is: It looks like maybe they can’t.

Incidentally, the hazardous part of the watch was actually not the device, but the band. The Chinese-made watchband on the Step-It was found to irritate the skin of many users, leading McDonald’s to immediately enact a voluntary product recall.

There’s an important lesson here as it pertains to product recalls and tech in general: Sometimes, quality control and product testing won’t do the trick. We release beta versions of software, for instance, because we know that there’s no way to find every single bug without releasing the software to the public. When it comes to physical products, the launch and the fixes are both more expensive than with an app launch, but the principle is the same. There are some things that you just can’t know until you put your work out in the public’s hands.

In theory, McDonald’s could have tested the toy on hundreds of users before launch, and found none of the test subjects to suffer an allergic reaction. But when you release it on a wide enough scale, you may wind up discovering that the chemicals in the plastic watchband are an irritant for people with certain skin types or allergies. Every time we release a product, we’re rolling the dice and hoping that nothing like that happens, but you just can’t test every possibility in the quality control process.

What McDonald’s did right in this scenario was call for an immediate, voluntary recall. No matter how expensive it may be to toss thousands of toys in the trash and roll out a replacement, you have to be willing to jump on that grenade in any industry, because losing customer trust will cost you a lot more in the long run. McDonald’s has enough issues with public relations, and by taking immediate control of this story, they managed to come across as a company that is genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of their customers. Waiting for the FDA to order a recall, or simply slapping an allergy warning on the package could have done considerable damage to their public relations. Managing the potential PR disaster that is a product recall is a bit like catching a tiger by the tail, but it beats letting the tiger run rampant.

Oct 10
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What “Silicon Valley” Gets Right (and Wrong)

By Cyber Security Awareness

1610-cyber-3Mike Judge’s HBO series Silicon Valley has earned a lot of commendation for being an accurate spoof of tech culture, so accurate that even those of us who are being lampooned can’t help but laugh when we see ourselves and our colleagues reflected in the characters onscreen. A big part of the show’s appeal is in how extensively well-researched it is, but that’s not to say that they don’t tweak the truth here and there in service of the story (or just a good joke). Here’s what the show gets right and wrong about the real Silicon Valley.

What Silicon Valley Gets Right

The show’s lampoon of tech culture is a little exaggerated, but the way it presents the technology itself is surprisingly precise. Mike Judge actually has a background in tech, and the writing staff frequently checks with renowned developers, mathematicians and researchers in order to ensure that the show is accurate, or at least close enough to be plausible. One of the best jokes in season one has to be the “Beautiful Mind” moment wherein the guys at Pied Piper accidentally work out a new algorithm through an extensive conversation on, well, we don’t want to spoil anything, but the show’s writers actually contacted researchers and put together a research paper on their findings (Warning: Not exactly safe for work).

The show’s devotion to believability is so intensive that they’ve actually made real-life progress in the industry. The Weissman Score is frequently referred to on the show, and it rates how much data can be stored in proportion to how much can be compressed. It was actually developed by Vinith Misra, a grad student, and Tsachy Weissman, a Stanford professor, for the show itself, and is now used within the industry at companies like Dropbox.

What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong

If Silicon Valley can be said to get anything dead wrong, it would have to be the business proceedings at startups like Pied Piper and corporations like Hooli (the show’s stand-in for companies like Google and Apple). A season 2 plot thread involves a split decision at a meeting of board members leading to an empty CEO chair. This is a great plot twist for a story, but no experienced venture capitalist would fire their CEO without already having their replacement named, few meetings with the board of directors end in a split decision, and no serious meeting like this is going to take place without a corporate lawyer present. The truth is, of course, that accurate representation of firing and hiring CEO’s wouldn’t make for a very funny show.

Silicon Valley has lampooned 2010’s tech culture as efficiently as Office Space lampooned 90’s office culture. Just remember that it’s a sitcom, not a documentary, and take some of it with a grain of salt.

Oct 10
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Steps to Avoid a Tech-Product Recall

By Cyber Security Awareness

1610-cyber-2A product recall is not only expensive, it’s embarrassing. You have the build up to the big release, the excitement of launch day… and then you have to sheepishly issue an announcement not to use the product, and here’s everybody’s money back.

No matter how well you test your product, there’s always the chance of that bug or factory defect rendering it useless or even dangerous. We can’t guarantee that a product is safe for release, but we can make product recalls less likely by going the extra step in quality control.

DfM

DfM is a term being thrown around lately, meaning Design for Manufacturability. This means that you need to create a product that is easy to churn out on an assembly line or with a 3D printer. You’re trying to eliminate things like delicate moving parts, finding a more efficient way to build the product.

Verify Your Manufacturers And Suppliers

If you’re looking at a manufacturer that has produced six recalled products in the last two months, look elsewhere. No matter how good your design, no matter how good your product, bad manufacturing is bad manufacturing.

Test The Mass Production Models Personally

Don’t assume that you know what to expect because you took a look at the prototype. Test your mass production models thoroughly before sending them out to store shelves.

Break Your Toys

Don’t just fiddle around in testing and quality control, try to break the product, and see how much effort that takes. If it’s easy, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Have A Plan B

Your plan B will depend on the nature of your product. A device that does not work as advertised might be fixed with something as simple as a firmware update, for instance. You should have a crisis management team of coders and PR professionals to handle the job if something goes wrong.

Keep Your Legal Team In The Loop

Some product recalls take place because of rules and regulations that have changed between design and launch. Keeping your legal team in the loop throughout the entire process of development and production will help to ensure that you’re not wasting a year working on something that’s going to get you sued.

There’s no way to guarantee that you will never have to recall a product, but by taking these steps, you can at least stack the deck in your own favor.

Oct 10
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Managing a Website Hack

By Cyber Security Awareness

1610-cyber-1No matter how many resources you’re devoting to cyber security, a website hack is still a very real possibility. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but all the same, you need to have a plan in place for what you’re going to do if your site gets hacked.

Cut The Hackers Off

Before you try to fix the hack, you have to cut the hackers off. Change passwords, take your server offline. Do whatever you have to do to ensure that no more damage is being done.

Put Your Users First

You can fix a website hack. Lost data can be restored. User trust is much more difficult to earn back once it’s been lost. Right away, you need to start doing damage control with your users.

The most important thing here is transparency. Your users have trusted you so far, and you need to reward that trust by being completely honest about what’s going on. If they need to change their passwords, let them know. If some of their data has been compromised, make sure that they are aware of this. It’s not just your website that’s been hacked, it’s the data of everyone who uses the site. Make sure that your users know what’s up so that they can respond accordingly.

Break The News

If it’s a major story, then it’s a story that you need to take control of. In tech reporting, the story that breaks first is usually the version people stick to. If you break the story yourself with a press release to relevant blogs and websites, then you can cut off damaging speculation before it starts.

Take Preventative Measures

The silver lining to a website hack is that it teaches us where our vulnerabilities lie. This is why websites like Google offer bounties to anyone who can crack their security.

This is a basic guideline, but you need to talk to your people, hold a meeting with your tech staff, with your public relations people, and make sure that you have a comprehensive plan in place should somebody crack into your website and steal data from you and your users. No matter how good your security may be, there are no 100% guarantees in tech. Security is always playing catch-up, always figuring out how to combat what hackers have already done in the past. This means that learning as we go is just part of the job.

Oct 10
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What Your Gofers Need To Know

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

1610-con-4On a job site, you’re going to have people of varying levels of experience and expertise. A stone mason, for instance, is an artist, a scientist and a builder all in one. That’s not a job that you can hand over to just anybody. Then again, how experienced does someone need to be to help carry lumber across the site and hold a wall up while you piece a frame together?

Not every job demands an expert, but, that’s not to say that “any idiot can do it.” There are a few basic requirements you’re looking for when hiring your crew, even if they’re only going to be handling the most basic tasks.

A basic sense of how to stay safe on a job site is a must. If there’s one thing that “any idiot” can do on a jobsite, it’s injure themselves. Make sure your new guys know all about basic on-site safety, from hard hats and safety goggles to on-the-job common sense. A great thing about construction work is that almost anybody can take on an entry level position and learn a trade, but you don’t want people who simply have no sense for the job, people who got kicked out of shop class so the school wouldn’t wind up getting sued.

Show your new hires around the place, let them know where the first-aid kits are and what to do in an emergency. Keep an eye on them on their first day, make sure that they know what they’re doing, and don’t assign them to any tasks that you’re not sure they can safely handle.

Take time to teach your gofers. If it’s a small crew, you can get hands-on with them and show them the ropes. There are trade schools for HVAC pros and electricians, but there’s not much you can do to learn how to be a general handyman besides learn on the job. If you have a larger crew, you can turn a fresh hire into an expert in no time by assigning them to unofficial apprentice positions, helping your carpentry crew to build the frame one day, installing a tub with the bathroom team the next.

Oct 10
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First Aid Myths

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

1610-con-3Too often, first aid tips are passed off as fact when they’re based on outdated information or old wives tales. Here are a few that still persist even in 2016:

Ingesting Vomiting Always Works

In the old days, if someone swallowed some cleaning fluid or something, the immediate response was to induce vomiting to get the poison out of their system. There are times when inducing vomiting can help, but you should never do this before speaking with Poison Control. Many poisons can do just as much damage coming back up as they did going in. Many poisons, like the chemicals found in laundry detergent, can be counteracted with milk. Milk will curdle the chemicals and make them difficult for the stomach to digest.

Tourniquets Are A First Line Of Defense

Tourniquets are a major compromise: In the most extreme of emergencies, a tourniquet might save a person’s life, at the expense of the injured limb. When encountering a serious wound, you want to stop the bleeding with direct pressure to the cut itself with a clean cloth (or paper towel, bandage, t-shirt, whatever you can get your hands on) while somebody calls 911.

Butter Can Help A Burn

Rubbing an oil all over a burn is actually not a very good idea. Ice, cold water and topical ointments are really your only option until help arrives.

Soak A Sprain In Hot Water

This can actually increase swelling. The correct response is rest, ice, compression wrap, and elevate, or RICE.

Staying Awake Can “Fix” A Concussion

The main reason you don’t want someone to fall asleep after a head injury is so that you can monitor their condition. You can’t check the pupil dilation when someone’s eyes are closed. For serious head injuries, immediate medical attention is absolutely necessary. Keeping a person awake will not guarantee that they’re fine.

Tilt Your Head Back To Stop A Nosebleed

This will only result in blood getting into your stomach or lungs. Better to sit up straight and apply pressure to the flesh part of the nose just below the bone. Hold it for ten minutes straight without letting up to check if it’s stopped until the ten minutes have passed.

Let Your Wound Breathe

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