Tag: workplace tips

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How to make job-searching less scary?

The job market is becoming increasingly competitive especially due to the COVID pandemic, as many businesses exit the market, the unemployment rate keeps increasing, etc. For one position, you might have to compete with others with many more years of experience and higher qualifications. What can we do to stand out?

1. Set attainable goals Although it is advisable to set ultimate goals for your career and view your career development in the long term, it might be hard for a fresh graduate to reach them shortly. Try to set short-term attainable goals, stay positive, motivate yourself to reach them, and learn from failure.

2. Stay open-minded Feeling emotionally and mentally drained is understandable in the job-hunting process but remember never to let the negativity and close-mindedness get into your way. Thus, it is a good sign if you show that you listen and are open to new ideas and strategies. To cultivate this trait, try not to reject the new concepts without thinking. Listen to others’ explanations clearly and humbly and make the conclusion later.

3. Persistence and Good Positioning The process of job searching requires persistence because it can be time-consuming and may cause sunk costs; it also requires good strategy because applying to every position without a target or positioning is a waste of your resources.

Source: CareerOne

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

Website: https://opc.edu.au

Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Running business effectively

It is no coincidence that some businesses face challenges and risks of getting bankrupt every day, while others develop rapidly. Running a business requires a lot of effort from the founder, and we could help you with these three tips

1. Write a business plan
A comprehensive business plan can help you avoid many mistakes commonly made by new businesses. A few essential questions you must ask yourself to ensure your business is operating on the right track are:
– What is the purpose of your business?
– What are the goals?
– Who are your potential customers?
– What is the efficient process?

2. Reward teamwork
Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Think about your strengths and weaknesses first, and hire professional and experienced employees who can complement your weaknesses. Also, remember to establish incentives for employees’ creative thinking, participation, and achievement.

3. Quantify customer satisfaction
To save costs and boost profits, we must know how customers feel about our products or services because high-quality goods and services will enhance trust between them and businesses and the business image. You could have informal conversations and use feedback forms and questionnaires to understand your customers better.

Source: CHRON

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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How to improve your work productivity?

In order to work more efficiently, it is crucial for you to properly prioritizing your tasks. Usually, when tasks are piling up, we may feel overstressed about the things that have not been completed, which is overwhelming. So what is a proper way to prioritize tasks?

1. Create To-do list
You cannot prioritise your tasks if you do not have a picture of your whole task in the first place. And during this process, if you identified some bigger tasks, make sure to break them down into subtasks. Afterwards, remember to add other information about due dates, level of urgency, and how much time you think they will take to keep tasks detailed and organised.

2. Adopt of tailor a task prioritisation method
There are some task prioritisation methods for you to choose, such as: Eat the frog, Eisen Decision Matrix, ABCDE method, Chunking and so on. You may directly select one or tailor them to suit the nature of your job, your team, and your work style.

3. Schedule your tasks
Recognising the time needed by each task from beginning to end may give you a clear time frame and ensure you will not freak out when it comes to changes in tasks and you will have to add and shift your priorities.

4. Communicate tasks’ progress with your teammates
When it comes to completing tasks with teammates, coordination and team efficiencies are always essential. It is highly recommended to proactively inform your teammates of the progress and updates or delay and changes in your tasks to reduce the time wasted on those requests and improve the team productivity and efficiencies.

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𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Building confidence

Confidence is key to showcasing your skills when it comes to selling yourself to the interviewer. How will you convince the interviewer that you’re fit for the job when you are not confident in yourself in the first place? Here are some tips to build that confidence to help you better showcase your skills.

1. Identify your skills
It all starts with getting to know more about yourself. In addition to the technical skills gained through study and experience, what human skills do you have? Human skills include verbal and non-verbal communication, cultural awareness, empathy, compassion, being inspiring and so on. What human skills make you who you are? Self-reflect and ask others for feedback.

2. Monitor your self-talk
Negative thoughts and self-talk are culprits of your diminishing confidence. Imposter syndrome makes us doubt our abilities and results in self-sabotage. It’s important that you monitor these negative thoughts and self-talk to identify their origins.

3. Make your skills real with evidence
This is part of showing, not telling. Feedback from others or examples of achievements you’ve accomplished with your skills are great evidence to back up your skills.
How do you build confidence during the job hiring process or at work?

Source: Seek

 

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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4 critical elements of effective company values

As a leader, did you find company values necessary?
Company values aren’t just fancy words shown on the organisation’s ‘about’ page. In fact, many professionals believe it is more worthwhile to work for a company that has clear missions and values.

How can you make effective company values?

1. Align your core values with the company’s values
It seems tempting to directly adopt other companies’ values, but your company values should be unique to your value systems.

2. Base them off real values
When it comes to defining your core values, consider the most important ones to your team. Because at the end of the day, you want your employees to reflect the company values.

3. Gain team’s buy-in
You can arrange a brainstorming activity to involve your team in the values and establish a process to better implement company values. This helps create shared values within the organisation and gives employees more sense of working as a team.

4. Make values simple and concise
Avoiding too many values and making them too complex helps the employees have a clear mind so that you wouldn’t scare them off.

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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What does the Graduate Recruitment Process look like?

Understanding the graduate recruitment process will aid you to prepare for the best in each step. Here’s a brief overview of what you may expect.

1. Cover Letter and CV
Tailor your cover letter to be relevant to the graduate employer you are applying for.

2. Online application through Application Tracking Systems (ATS)
This just involves filling out fields about yourself and uploading documents like your CV and cover letter. It’s an automated way for graduate employers for shortlisting candidates from thousands of applications.

3. Graduate phone interviews
A quick phone call that aims to validate if you are as good as you sound on paper.

4. Psychometric testings
Involves personality tests and cognitive ability tests.

5. Video interviews
Generally, you will be asked a set of questions for which you need to record a video of yourself answering them.

6. Graduate assessments centres and interviews
Generally involves group work and individual interviews.

Source: GradConnection

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Improve focus at work

Have you ever felt disorganised and inefficient at work?
Did you struggle to find the causes and solutions?
Did you then work late to finish the tasks on time?
Here are the top four main causes and their corresponding solutions:

1. Fail to manage important messages
Think of a scenario in which your team and the other team are involved in a project using different communication tools. It could either be easy to miss out on some information or difficult to concentrate on your current tasks with too many notifications and information piling up in your inboxes.

Solution: Establishing boundaries allows your team to know when to respond and where to manage projects and tasks.

2. Too much workload
When dealing with time-sensitive projects and large initiatives falling behind schedule, the unbalanced workloads lead to a high volume of work, stressing employees and making them lose their focus.

Solution: Using proper tools to plan for a busy period reduces the workload on your employees’ plates and brings them back to focus.

3. Seek approvals and feedback
Seeking approvals and feedback from others is one of the types of ‘work about work’, leading to staying up late for work.

Solution: Creating clarity gives employees a picture of each party’s duty and removes the guesswork.

4. Chase teammates to complete works
Constantly chasing teammates’ progress to ensure they can meet the deadline may cause tensions on both ends.
Solution: Training everyone on the same work management platforms aligns everyone’s work and enhances a transparent and communicative environment.

Source: Asana

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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How to find your passions?

Find a passion is the phrase that we always hear others suggest but defining your real passion can be challenging and time-consuming. It requires you to regularly self-reflect and take action to find tasks and industries that make you feel excited. Find the following four steps to identify your passion:

1. Explore high points in your day
Taking notes of both seemingly significant and insignificant high points in both your life and work allows you to collect details related to your career for future assessment, and to know yourself better.

2. Know where you consume your resources
Time and money, the two essential resources in your life, are meaningful to you. They will help find your passion if you pay attention to how they are consumed and if you find the hidden theme of your consumed items.
They could be any of your consumptions, for example, the movie you have watched, the topics you taught or talked about with others, and so on.

3. Think about your strengths
It could either be a hard or soft skill you have been cultivating or a natural one that makes you feel confident and motivated when completing specific tasks.

4. Examine the details
As you have gathered enough information on your record, you might also deeply consider some internal logic behind the scenes to figure out what motivates you. And this will help you to have a narrowed selection among jobs and industries and help you find job opportunities that align with your interests.

Source: Indeed

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Four strategies to boost team’s cohesiveness

1. Establish your team mission early
This is to make sure that you and your team members are on the same page and moving towards the same goals. And depending on the team nature and qualities of team members, you need to set a general mission statement and a project goal and clarify team roles.

2. Set a clear communication plan
A well-stated communication plan can serve different tasks, including methods to communicates important information to key stakeholders. Moreover, it allows team members to work effectively, follow the right direction, and a clear guide of how to solve conflicts.

3. Play to your team members’ strengths
“A successful person finds the right place for himself. But a successful leader finds the right place for others.” – John C. Maxwell
This is because when each individual’s strengths are brought together, it establishes a sense of teamwork and team comprehensiveness.

4. Confrontation with healthy approaches
As conflict cannot always be avoided, leaders are recommended to regularly give candid feedback and resolving suggestions in a 1:1 setting. This process contributes to a transparent and trusting environment.

Source: Asana

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000

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Methods of improving team’s efficiency at work

“Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.”

– Peter F. Drucker.

Team efficiency is essential because it directly influences the team’s productivity. What can managers do to improve it?

1. Set and track attainable goals

When assigned to a project, managers should first consider the key goals and team members’ capacity. This is to make sure that managers leverage each team member’s strengths to maximize team productivity.

2. Clarify roles and tasks

Especially when working on a large project, managers should break it into smaller tasks and allocate each task to the most suitable person so that the whole team will not be overwhelmed.

3. Prioritise works based on key results

Each day, managers may be given several tasks and deciding which one to start with is always a problem. Keeping the organization or department goals in mind helps managers prioritize and keep all the team members on the same page.

4. Communicate effectively

Productivity can be enhanced by communicating effectively. Building an environment based on truth and trust or using the right technology will help form a healthy and effective communication environment.

How about you, do you have any other methods to improve the team’s efficiency? Let’s share with us by commenting below!

Source: Asana, HR Cloud

 

𝗢𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲

CRICOS 03878K | RTO 45644

————————

 Phone: (+61) 261 018 650

 Email: enquiry.act@opc.edu.au

 Website: https://opc.edu.au

 Canberra campus: Mezzanine Level, 15 Moore Street, Canberra ACT 2601

 Melbourne campus: Suite 802, Level 8, 474 Flinders St, Melbourne VIC 3000