Exploring Career Options With Your Teen

This question is a very relevant question to my own family and a subject I have pondered over quite recently. We know that children are meant to be children for as long as possible but I do think it healthy for early teens to start considering their career options or at least researching career possibilities as soon as possible.

There are of course the lucky ones among us who are born with a talent, spot that talent early on in years, enjoy the talent given to them and end up in a career involving that talent.  For most of us, this is not the case and having someone by our side and helping us to explore and identify possible career options is extremely important.  I would suggest having the initial conversation with them, they might not have the vocabulary to be able to quantify what they would like to do and they probably don’t know what they want to do as yet, but it’s certainly advantages to get them thinking about it and get the cogs turning.  However, before you do and to make the conversation engaging, familiarise yourself with career options, take an interest and become somewhat of an informal career guidance resource when your child asks the question.  If they are really unsure, why not suggest careers to them based on the skill set that you know they possess, this could be I.T., game development, teaching, medicine, trades, sport or people orientated careers.  At this stage its not to pick the career but more to get the mind ready to choose. 

I would much rather my son or daughter take a compulsory 10min out of their day and instead of constantly looking at You Tube, playing XBOX or PlayStation to take this small amount of time and start researching what they would like to do when they leave school.  Reward them for taking an interest, listen attentively to their ideas and let them explain why they are interested in this specific career and remember this will change many many many times, so be patient.

How to make your meetings more efficient

Meetings are a necessary evil in today’s busy working environments. They give the team an opportunity to meet and greet as a group and discuss important topics outside of their day to day roles and responsibilities. However, in order for meetings to be effective they need to be minuted, controlled, systematic and organised.

How many meetings have you attended that are just talking shop and go on for hours? This drives me crazy and they are such a waste of time and money. How many times have you attended meetings that are not minuted? How many meetings have you been too were people don’t bring a copy of the minutes or worse you know that the time hasn’t been taken to even read the minutes or made an effort to action any of their allocated items?  How many times have you been at meetings when the start time is just seen as a proposal and not respected as an official start time?

Getting tough

Simply, you need to get tough and take action, explain to the team what is expected of them in relation YOUR meetings going forward. Clearly identify/communicate the roles and responsibilities of each attendee. Communicate in advance the allocated duration of the meeting along with a start and finish time and explain that tardiness is compulsory.  Take minutes.  Ask people to ensure they close out each item allocated to them on time.  Ask them to bring a copy of the minutes with them to the meeting and when discussing items stick to the point and don’t allow digression. This will be a shock to the system at first but after a couple of meetings, and no doubt a couple of conversations with certain individuals your meetings will become more productive and actually more enjoyable for most!

In the initial stages thank people for attending and for being on time, congratulate those who have closed out his or her action items and don’t forget to discuss any other business.  Productivity is so important but do try to have some fun and be engaging.

Price of Progress

It seems the economy is thankfully turning a corner with increased activity visible across a number of different sectors such as construction, architectural, food industry & professional services.  This has resulted in a lot more job opportunities, so much so that some job seekers are now receiving multiple job offers during their change in employment. It is very quickly moving from an employer’s market to a candidate’s market and as such choosing the right employer and waiting for the right package is now an option for some.

But getting back to an important question I was asked recently should I accept or decline a job  offer? Well it really depends on the offer and a myriad of considerations from personal to professional.  Although the position you have been offered may not have the initial financial rewards you had hoped for, don’t forget it may still offer you a step in the right direction and sometimes this step in the right direction can propel you forward considerably and is much more important than any short term financial gain.

Look at the offer in detail and factor in questions such as, is the company closer to home? is there paid overtime? are expenses accepted for work related activities? is there career growth potential? does this new position get me closer to where I want to go in my career? does it include educational support, pension or health care?  are there more holidays? flexi time or early finish on a Friday? You see on the surface the base salary offered may be disappointing but take the time to sit down with a calculator and work out the complete offering in detail and you may find it’s not that bad after all.

Bottom line examine all aspects of the offer and before you decline the offer go back to the company with your comments, if it’s still not for you then don’t accept. Remember, sometimes you need to take a side step in order to get to your dreams and this is the price of progress.

Cultural Knowledge

For Multinationals, expatriates and lone workers through the advancement of transport, communication, information technology and reduction in flight costs in travelling abroad in recent times, taking a post in a foreign country or conducting business across foreign borders is a feasible growth opportunity for some and unfortunately a financial necessity for others. For the individual, whether you’re a practitioner of management, engineering, medicine, manufacturing, education or construction, your country of origin’s current economic situation need not be the be all and end all in determining the financial stability of your family or indeed be an over ruling factor in preventing your career advancement prospects.

However as easy as it may seem to get on a plane and start in a new company abroad, it has been identified through various studies driven by the growth in international business, that there is a need for cross culturaltraining.  Working in a foreign environment can be a difficult experience and a study by Buckley and Brooke in 1992 suggests that failure rates of the expatriate to be high for a variety of different reasons from both a professional and personal standpoint.  Expatriate failure can also have a negative monetary impact on the company, for instance it is reported that failure rates of expatriates has a reported $2billion per year negative impact on US multinationals.

Globalisation is here and now and having an impact on everyday business.  Modern managers at some point in their career may work abroad, but the skills required to manage abroad in a multicultural setting are extremely important.  You can study in advance theories on cross cultural management from theorists such as Hofstede, Schwartz, Trompenaars or R House but quite simply my advice would be before you go, take some time to learn as much about the culture and people as possible, contact colleagues on the ground and they will advise how best to adapt and what to expect when you get there, rest assured things will be very different.

Dropping out of College

Dropping out of college has pros and cons. There are many different paths one can follow to succeed in this world and they all don’t follow the conventional routes of school, college then work.  For instance, I left school, repeated my leaving cert and did not get the points I needed, so I did a PLC course and then started working.  During the first 10 years of my working career I performed well, but found that lack of qualifications and academic knowledge was holding me back from taking the next step which I so deeply wanted to do.  I then went back to college and 17 years later completed a Master’s Degree.  My brother on the other hand did his leaving cert, got the points, went straight to college only to drop out 6 months later deciding to do an apprenticeship, again he also returned to college and 11 years after leaving school, he has an extremely successful career and has just finished his Higher Degree.

Do you have what it takes to progress?

You see the most important ingredient in all of this is having the desire and motivation to progress, the willingness to be the best you can be, to see your weaknesses and improve. This moment of enlightenment happens at different times for all of us, some are born ready and some later in life as we mature or in my case directly as a result of a life experience.  So although the traditional route of school then college makes sense and is compulsory for some professions, remember it’s not the end of the world if things don’t pan out that way for you.  Follow your gut instinct as it will very rarely put you wrong.  Its also important to point out that even though college may not be right for you now, academic qualifications are vitally important to possess if even just for security.  You may wish to drop out of college today but at some point in the future when you are ready you will realise that you must return out of necessity or passion, as knowledge is power! 

Solving Work Related Problems Methodically!

There will always be times in work when despite best efforts things are just going completely wrong and not according to plan.  If you take the time out to study exactly what has happened, you will usually see a pattern to it and in that pattern is always a recipe for improvement or a signal to change direction and quick.

Root Cause Fault Analysis

9 times out of 10 what went wrong could have been avoided no matter how you dress it up.  In the manufacturing industry they use what’s caused Root Cause Analysis or Root Cause Fault Analysis (RCA or RCFA) which arose in the 1950’s out of a study by NASA to seek reasons as to why things went wrong at a fundamental level, at the root.  It’s a super tool and one that will benefit the whole organisation if used effectively.  You don’t just presume why things went wrong at face value, well you can but this is a sure way of ensuring they will keep happening. There is a technique to be followed that involves 12 steps from defining the problem, interviewing or data gathering, data mining, identification of a solution, implementation, effectiveness to standardising the solution. This is a powerful tool to master to close out issues permanently or at least to reduce the possibility of reoccurrence to a very minimum.

Helping you grow

Problems are put before us to enable us to grow.  No matter how difficult the lesson, there is always something to be learned from it.  Even if we don’t identify the root cause of a problem, just deciding to investigate the problem is a mammoth step in the right direction to mind-set improvement. Taking this step means that you are no longer saying it just happened, you are no longer saying what can I do about it, you are now saying that yes it happened but it bloody won’t happen again on my watch.  Conducting yourself with this mind-set is a key ingredient to success at work and certainly an important trait you must possess to lead.