Career change

If you’re thinking of changing careers, you may need to meet with a career counselor at your previous college or one in your area. Career counseling can give you an idea of the opportunities available, the income potential and the courses you will need to qualify for entry level jobs.

Update your education

Making a career change may require that you return to college for another degree or attending graduate school of an advanced degree and specialization. Visit with campus financial aid and scholarship representatives to get an idea of costs and how you can qualify for any school aid or federal loans to pay for your education. If you are working full-time, you may want to consider the many online graduate degree programs or online undergraduate offerings. These online universities will also help you determine fees and see if you qualify for aid, scholarships or low cost loans.

Look at trade schools

Many fields today don’t require a university degree but are taught at the trade school level. Careers that require medical billing training are popular trade school subjects as are computer repair training, bartending school and cosmetology school. Some of these trade school offerings may be located in your area and have classes that you can attending during evenings and weekends. Check out the possibilities available so that you do not have to quit your day job.

Real Estate agent or broker

If you have always wanted to sell real estate, this is an area you can study for an possibly even get started with while you’re working your regular job. Find out where you can take classes in your area such as attending a local community college. You can contact the school to learn about testing and licensing requirements for your area and state.

Starting a business. Do you dream of owning your own business? With the affordability and easy access of online, Web-based businesses, you can be a small business owner while working your regular job. This is a great way to get started, build up your business and profits before you quit your day job. Consider the pros and cons of starting an online business versus as “bricks and mortar” business with a fixed location. Do plenty of research on the type of business you want to start, talk to others in the same industry and then give it a try. If you need to learn business basics, check into the community college in your area for available classes.

If you are motivated and wanting a change, you can get the training you need to jumpstart your career or change careers and begin something new. Whatever you do, have a solid plan and learn the skills you’ll need before taking the plunge. Then you’ll know you are setting yourself up for success.

Not because you’re already hired it means you can just relax. Instead, this is the beginning of the most difficult but the most important part of having a new job. It is because you need to prove to your boss and your self whether you are capable to do the job right.

Most of the time before you land the job you have to undergo on training. The length of the training depends on the company’s policy. So, here are the things you should remember.

Before The Training

Sleep early and be sure that before you go to bed all your things are ready for tomorrow.

Important things to bring

• A pen (bring an extra pen too)
• Note pads
• Extra money (for emergency purposes)

Eat properly before you leave

It’s like you’re going to school, right? But it is important for us to go to work full and lively.

Leave early from your house

To avoid traffic and some unwanted situations along the way. If you live far from the office, you have to allot at least one or two hours or more.

During the training

Be on time

Don’t ever, ever be late on your first day. You are rated from the first day you came until the last hour of your training period. Also, you can still have time to look for the training room or even relax and meet new people that you are going to be with.

Be alert and listen carefully to your trainer.

Make sure that you absorbed all the things that your trainer is saying in your mind.

If there are things that you don’t understand don’t be shy to ask

In this way you can easily familiar with the job you are supposed to do.

Think, behave and talk professionally

 Be it a degree holder, college level, or a high school graduate. You need to behave yourself professionally with civilized attitude. The trainer is not just entitled to train you on your job but he is also the one who’s going to asses you as a person so it is very important that you know how to respect a superior or co-workers. He has your ticket to your deployment.

Follow the company’s rule

If there are old employees who don’t follow just even one rule, don’t do the same thing.

How to make an excuse?

There are some situations that you can’t control such as emergencies. If you are going to be late call or send a message to your trainer or your superior right away so that he would give you some consideration depending on your reason. If they think it is valid enough to consider, then you might as well be given another chance but, next time, give more extra effort.

If you really need to be absent the next day, inform the management before hand or few hours before the time. And make sure you relayed the message carefully and the message has been received by your superiors.

Never send a message to a friend or co-workers

 You can be sure enough that you’re message will be passed on to the right authority. Be sure to have a copy of your superior’s mobile number or the office number.

It is necessary for a new trainee to impress their boss. It goes with the saying ‘first impression last’. But don’t make that impression fade away once you are officially hired as an employee in the company. You have to prove to them that you are a good catch!

Disaster will occur whenever visitors are in the room. This is a given truth for any teacher, new or old. Your colleagues come along to see your best teaching practice and it is that day when young Johnny decides to throw a tantrum (his mum is on the Board of Governor’s – what can you do?). Or the class splits in to two and decides to do their very best impression of the Jets and the Sharks, twenty first century style and with real weapons, just as your line manager walks in. Or that science experiment you are sure will impress your visitors blows up in your face and rips off three of your fingers. It could also be that it is the week your whole institution is being inspected and you reckon that the Inspectors won’t bother you first thing on the very first day – least of all because your class is tucked away at the far end of the building and it takes ages to get there. Oh no, my dear! Yours is the very first class they will decide to inspect! When visitors are around, always assume that they will knock on your class room door first.

A subject interesting to the teacher will bore students. Silly. To death. Getting anything out of them will be like retrieving a needle from a supermassive black hole. A teacher can spend a weekend, a month, a year preparing for that ultimate class. One of the universal truths of teaching is that these classes are most likely to bore the students in to a state of catatonia from which not even a horse-bucket sized bag of E numbers can revive them. If it means nothing to them, if they cannot relate it to their lives of their experiences then it will fall flat. Get to know your students as well as you can without breaking any laws and adapt and evolve your teaching to suit them, not yourself!

Some of the best lesson plans – and therefore lessons – are scribbled down on the back of a cigarette packet during one of those sneaky breaks you are not supposed to take – and five minutes before you are suppose to teach it.

The time that a teacher takes to explain something is always inversely proportional to the information that will be retained by the students. We like the sounds of our own voices – otherwise we wouldn’t become teachers. That’s why so many who despair of the profession go in to acting. Repeating something three times in a row (a.k.a the Tony Blair School of getting things to sink in!) doesn’t work with those who you are attempting to educate. Explain it once and then get them to do it. Then explain it again in terms of what they have just done you. Going on and on and on will only bore them (see number nine) and give you a sore throat.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by teachers that when your students do better, it is the students who are credited with working harder. Of course, if your results are poor, it is the teacher who gets the blame! To paraphrase the youth of today, this may suck – and indeed it does. However, it is only the bad worker who blames his own tools and to blame one’s students for their poor results is the next best thing to this. Do not always expect too much praise when things go right either. Both your institution and your students will expect precisely this and educators can feel more than a little deflated when the results come in – even when they are fantastic! At the end of the day it’s your job – go work in the city if you want a bonus!

Oh and don’t expect presents from students when they do really well in their exams. Your day is over, old timer; move over for the next generation! Oh, and if you do get a present, their mother will have bought it.

The real truth here is that the length of a meeting will always be directly proportional to the boredom the person who has called the meeting produces.

So, you went in to teaching to teach did you? Your poor deluded thing! They didn’t tell you about the meetings when you were training, did they? You know, the meetings that take place before, during and after the working day? The meetings where others teachers you don’t know talk about students you have never heard about – interminably, without pausing for breath or comment. The meetings where you are being trained “in service” and the trainer thinks that photocopying a few pages from “Teaching Today” then sticking them up on the smart board as a PowerPoint presentation is training. The meetings where Senior Management pretend they are business people and tell you about the dark financial clouds ahead. The meetings where Miss Smith who has been in the profession forty years waxes lyrical about the good old days when students knew how to behave and had respect for their elders and betters. They just go on, and on – and on.

Choose well and occasionally have dental appointments, ill children or radiator leaks at home so you can duck out every now and again. Do not miss too many as to attract suspicion but when you successfully dodge one, do something just as useful with the time, like go to a bar.

There are two truths to remember here that will always happen. Firstly, when you take on a new student they invariably come from a place that did not teach anything. Secondly, that good students move away. Usually to Canada. It’s always the ones that you pray will leave who stay forever. Then, just as soon as you are able – to your satisfaction – to describe them as remotely civilized and “classroom ready” they move up a year to a new set of teachers. These teachers then ask you why you ranted on about little Billy so much because he is such a lovely kid to have in the class.

Take an aspirin and consider that although food prices may be rising booze seems to getting inexorably cheaper.

Time will always run more quickly during your free time. The worst thing in teaching is invigilating exams, where time almost comes to a standstill. It goes so slowly that when you look at the students doing the exam it seems as if they are writing in slow motion. Often you realize that, yes, they actually are writing in slow motion, the little devils (see number 7 – reward) and your heart sinks. Then you feel like crying.

This aside, it is the teacher’s free time where the laws of physics seem to go truly haywire. This is where time speeds up to such an extent that if you are lucky enough to get an hour for your lunch, it seems more like five minutes and the bagel you promised yourself you would savor and enjoy goes half eaten as you dash to your next class. A solution here is proffered – physically leave the institution when you have a break. Time returns, miraculously, to normal.

Although the backlash has begun, there is still a certain linguistic political correctness that the new teacher must follow in order to get on. So, when you are speaking to your institution’s psychologist (if you are lucky or unlucky enough to have one, whatever your point of view is) there are a few rules to follow. Do not refer to the student as a “weirdo” – it simply won’t do in this day and age. The correct term is “emotionally disturbed”. Do not refer to a student as a “retard” – what you really mean to say is “educationally challenged”. Someone you may describe in the daylight as a “mouthy little git” should be referred to as “excessively loquacious in the learning environment”. Finally, remember if the sweet little chap or chapette indicates an immediate attack on your person they are not guilty of “abusive and threatening behavior” but are “socially maladjusted”. Bless.

You have taught a subject – and you think you have done it well! One of the ways to measure the success of teaching and learning is to give the little angels a test. Here comes another truth about teaching. On a Monday with no test, if you have twenty students you may well achieve the magic one hundred percent attendance. All twenty will be there, attentive, punctual and brimming with health.

Tell them that they have a test the next day and you will be lucky to get seventeen. At least three will suddenly go down with bubonic plague, typhoid or cholera. Take heart – at least you will be able to take some satisfaction in the fact that they have digested their “plagues of the world” class of the previous semester. Do not despair – take number six in to account and be pragmatic. Console yourself with the fact that they cannot escape you forever, cackle maniacally and proceed with the day’s activities.

This list is not exhaustive! Every teacher will have their own experiences. Please use the comment box below to add your own suggestion for inclusion. Keep it clean, folks!

Included is mind work, ways to capture your thoughts and share them with others, the best tool around for learning the languages of the internet, brilliant marketing resources, and ways to off-load the stuff you don’t know how to do or don’t have time to do.

In short, this list makes you smarter, faster, and more clear so you can grow your business.

1. Mind42

   This is still in beta, but for mapping out your thoughts and allowing those thoughts to “spin off” and go down tangents, it’s terrific. Mostly because, after you’ve gone down the tangent, you are able to recall what you were originally working on! For a business owner, this is a priceless commodity.

2. Jott

   This one is also in beta (public beta). Remember when you were driving in to work and you had a GREAT thought, so you either tried to text it to yourself as you were going down the road (dangerous!!) or just told yourself you’d just remember it? Then, when you got to your destination, you discover – *drat* – that you either hit all the wrong buttons to text the message or you’d completely forgotten the great part of the thought? Enter Jott.com.

   How’s it work? Sign up, they give you an 800 number to call. You call the number, they ask, “Who do you want to jott?” You say, “Myself.” Then you hear a beep. You say your message and hang up. When you get to your destination and check your email – it’s there, waiting for you in your inbox, already transcribed and ready to go! Brilliant!

3. ITeamWork

   ITeamWork is wonderful for collaborating on a project with others, but it’s also terrific for keeping yourself on a schedule. It does take a little bit of time to set up, but the rewards (the emails you get reminding you of what you promised to do today) are tremendous! Rather than dropping the ball on your own projects, you keep working at them, a baby step at a time, until the whole project is complete. This also works nicely with those honey-do lists!

4. Didyousmellthat/Intern

   Dave Ledoux is an internet marketer extraordinaire. For the business minded, he’s a gem because he’s willing to train you to do internet marketing with his intern program. It helps him – interns do the work, after all, but you gain priceless knowledge to apply to your own website. You can go through his 90 day internship and do only the things he asks you to do, or you can do the stuff he wants you to do and mimic it parallel for your own websites and blogs. This is a remarkable experience and the information sharing he’s willing to do is a breath of fresh air.

5. DoMyStuff

   With owning a business and trying to work, comes a time squeeze and YOU are the one squeezed! Domystuff.com lets you find a personal assistant for the things you’re willing to release for someone else to do, at a price you both agree on. It’s like eBay for your time instead of for your stuff.

6. W3schools

   You can certainly hire someone to do all your websites and make them function, pretty, and all that, but when it’s complete, you’re still at the mercy of the Techie who put it together in the first place. It’s time to learn some of the basics so you’re not so lost – to protect your, your business, your customers, and your future. Take the basic HTML course and learn what’s going on behind the scenes.

7. TheInternetWizards

   This is more marketing stuff. Bonnie Boots puts out a gift every month: an internet magazine that’s just chock full of insights and leading edge marketing viewpoints.

8. Guru

   This site is an enormous collection of geniuses. Where that’s not quite accurate, it does make it easy to find the genius in the crowd. If you need techie stuff, artsy stuff, copy writers stuff, just other people doing your stuff – try this spot. It’s the first place I go when I need an artist for my business!

9. GoogleDocs

   Most people know about some Google offerings. One of the most useful sites Google has in it’s public offerings is Google Docs (beta). With GoogleDocs, you can create an document or spreadsheet, then you’ve got three choices. 1) Keep it to yourself. 2) Collaborate with other(s) by sharing it. 3) Publish the document and make it public, then share the direct link to it with the world.

10. Silva UltraMind System

    Silva UltraMind System is perhaps the most valuable of all this list. We began the list with the mind and capturing thoughts, now let’s generate some individual genius thought from YOU! It can be done, you just need the will to do it. If you have the will, follow their simple email course and get going. You’ll be amazed at the things you were thinking and never noticed you were even thinking them!

Together, these sites create a truly brilliant business owner. With these tools in your arsenal, you can think new thoughts, capture them for later, share the creativity with others, keep yourself on target, delegate the little stuff, keep the wool from falling over your eyes and create the kind of businesses that people want to share.