Tag: passion

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Pick Teaching As A Career

Teaching is never easy and it can seem like a thankless task when you spend the whole weekend marking, only to be mocked by friends who joke that you get too many holidays. However, there are many reasons why you should pick teaching as a career and undertake a teaching qualification such as Middlesex University PGCE courses.

1. Holidays. Let’s get that one out the way first. We know you didn’t choose to be a teacher just because of the holidays. We also know that, despite what your friends and family think, you will spend a large chunk of your holiday marking papers and writing lesson plans. But all those holidays are nice and even when you are working, it is a luxury to be able to work from home.

2. Rewarding. There’s nothing like seeing your class finish a long and complicated project or put on a play. You will watch your pupils learn and grow as people as they get older. You will feel almost as proud as the parents when the day comes for them to leave your school and take their next step in the world.

3. Changing Lives. Not many careers will give you the opportunity to have a positive influence on children and shape their future for the better. You may spot a creative talent in a pupil and give them the confidence to pursue their dream when they would have otherwise decided to opt for a safer career instead.

4. Getting To Teach A Subject You Love. Whether it’s art, English, science or maths that is your passion, nothing will give you more joy than being able to work in this field everyday. You will also be able to share your love for a subject with others and have the reward of watching them enjoy learning about it too.

5. Job Security. Not many careers provide jobs for life these days, but a good teacher will always be able to find work in their chosen area. There are also a number career progression opportunities available and you can choose to move up to be the head of department, head of year or even head teacher.

6. Job Opportunities Away From The Main Cities. This can enable you to find work away from busy cities and avoid the high house prices and traffic hell that city dwellers have to endure.

7. Work Around Your Family. Even if you don’t have a family now, you may consider starting one in the future. As a teacher, you will be off school at the same time that your children are so you could save a fortune in child care costs and spend more time with your children too. You also won’t have to worry about asking a nagging boss for time off because your holidays are set out for you each year. You can’t grumble about that!

June 10, 2012
Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Need To Survey Your Employees

If you own your own business, or you manage a team of people, your days are probably filled with meetings, mountains of paperwork and trying to keep on top of your email inbox. However, if you’re responsible for a team of employees, you have a responsibility to be a good manager. You not only need to demonstrate strong leadership skills, you need to be able to track their progress, set goals and help them develop.

But how can you do that when you’re completely snowed under? Well believe it or not and employee survey is a perfect way of measuring your employees’ happiness and how they view you as their manager.

Not convinced? Well here are seven reasons why you need to regularly survey your employees.

1. You Measure Morale. By surveying your employees the first benefit you get is that you will be measuring their morale. If you have unhappy workers, you have an unproductive workforce – plain and simple. If you can measure their morale and identify the reasons why John from accounts is feeling down, you can put measures in place to improve his morale and boost his productivity.

2. You Measure Passion. On top of measuring morale, an employee survey will measure passion. Every business wants a passionate workforce which cares about its goals and objectives – whether it’s a private company out to make money or a local government organisation providing housing. If you don’t have a workforce committed to your goals you don’t have much to go on.

3. You Measure Sentiment. Employee surveys, if conducted anonymously can reveal a great deal about how your workforce feels about your business itself. Do they think you’re heading in the right direction? Do they feel your goals are realistic? Do they think they are working for a business which cares for them? By asking questions like this you could unearth some hard truths which may be hard to take at first but will be beneficial for you in the long-run

4. You Can Make More Money. This might be fourth on this list, but it’s certainly no less important. Employee surveys can actually help you to make you more money. Why? Because if your employees feel that they are listened to, that their opinions are respected, that you are a manager who cares about them and that they are working for a caring company they will be more motivated to turn up to work and perform. If you’re all about the bottom line it’s proven that more passion = more sales = more turnover.

5. You Can Save Money. Even if you’re not in the business to make money, all employee surveys can help you to save money. How? Well if your employees are asked about their welfare, their aims and their goals and monitored on their performance, they will be more likely to stay at your organisation. If someone feels like they have room to progress through promotion and identified development opportunities they won’t be hunting job websites to look for the first chance to escape. This will save you on recruiting costs and the costs through time of reading CVs and conducting interviews. When it’s put like that you can save quite a bit of money!

6. You Measure Performance. After all the interpersonal and business benefits of employee surveys, another key reason is that you can measure an employee’s performance. Anonymous employee surveys, such as 360 feedback, are a way for organisations to find out how colleagues perceive their workmates without fear of being identified. This gives an accurate reflection of your workforce’s performance, and lets you set individual goals to work on. This will not only help you track their progress it can help identify certain weak areas or parts of their jobs they need to work on

7. You Find Out About Your Management Quality! A final benefit of employee surveys is that, as a manager, you can find out about you. Think about it, if you were to ask your team for what they honestly thought about your management style do you think they’d give you an honest answer to your face? By using 360 feedback you can find out precisely what your team thinks about your leadership and management style. You may not like the results, but if it identifies some areas for you to improve on you’ll benefit your business no end.

Author Bio: ETS plc provides 360 degree feedback surveys for businesses. For more information about how 360 feedback can help your business, please see the website.

May 6, 2012
7 Reasons That Love is Important

It’s Valentine’s Day!!! On Monday. Apologies for any panic we may have caused there, but the 7 Reasons team have decided to jump the gun and celebrate St Valentine’s Day prematurely. Because we’re lovesick. Well, one of us is in love and that just makes the other one feel sick, but that’s near enough. So, in honour of the patron saint of pink stuff everywhere, here are seven reasons that love is important.

1. Make Love Not War. It’s a tired expression, but – short of a nuclear missile – love really is the one thing that can end conflict. For good. We are not interested in truces. Like a dirty weekend in a Travelodge outside of Leeds, it won’t last. Real love means complete acceptance of what others believe and how they choose to live. A marriage of acceptance if you like. Not that I’m suggesting we should accept or indeed make love to radical extremists. That would be extreme. And quite dangerous if their grenades are dangling above your head. If you do find yourself in this situation we suggest you wear a helmet. Just in case.

2. Passion. That’s what love is really. Whether it’s passion for your partner or passion for your team or passion for passion fruit, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you feel something for something. Because it’s those feelings that keep us alive. Without emotion we’d be robots. And if you read yesterday’s post you’d realise that’s not a good thing.

3. Compromise. I guess I got lucky. The person I fell in love with also loves what I love. No, not myself. Sport. Which means we don’t have to do the, ‘You can watch Eastenders all week so long as I can watch the rugby all weekend,’ thing. Claire gets to watch Eastenders and the rugby and I get to do the ironing and watch the rugby. But we know we are in the minority. Other people really do have to compromise. And while it may mean missing England beat Wales, you do it because you’re in love. And I admire that. I admire it because I couldn’t do it. Which is why I told Claire before we even started dating that watching England play cricket or rugby comes before anything else in my life. A year later I still haven’t missed a game. And that just makes me love her even more.

4. Inspiration. Throughout human history, love has acted as a spur, a stimulus, a motivational factor in many of mankind’s greatest accomplishments. The life’s work of Thomas Aquinas; Shelley’s One Word is Too Often Profaned; Shah Jahan’s construction of the Taj Mahal, the historical examples of great works inspired by, and created out of love are almost boundless. Essentially, if we didn’t have love, we’d still be slimy-fish creatures or animal-bothering Neanderthals living in caves or swamps or our own poo or something. But thanks to love, most of us aren’t.

5. Tennis. I don’t think anything in the world explains love better than a tennis match. As I am sure you are aware, ‘love’ in tennis is the equivalent of zero. Zilch. Nothing. In other words, it is valueless. And that is what love outside of tennis is too. You can’t put a value on love. Unless you are in Amsterdam. Though between you and me I don’t think ten minutes* with a Dutch girl called Helga really counts. Love is the most valuable commodity in life and yet it is free. I have always thought that is a rather wonderful intricacy. We pay our taxes so that the NHS and the Police are there for us when we need them, but the people who are there for us when we don’t need them are free.

6. Popular Song. If it weren’t for the eternally prevalent theme of love, pop music would be wholly different. There’d be no Renée and Renato’s Save Your Love, there’d be no Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love in my Tummy by Ohio Express, and there’d be no When We Collide by Matt Cardle. This might initially seem like a spectacularly good anti-love argument, but it’s quite the reverse, because when repugnant, saccharine dross like this is being played, you might just find that across a crowded room, someone else is also covering their ears with their hands and bellowing, “What is this shit!?” And at that moment, your eyes may meet, and that’s when you’ll find true love. And all because of love songs, which really do begat love. However circuitously.

7. Emotional Intensity. Love – and this is important in these straitened economic times – is free. Your other half loves you because you’re you, not because of what you can give them. Love – true love – transcends the baser human tendency toward being fiscally and materially acquisitive in favour of devotion to and acceptance of another person; no matter what their circumstances or their idiosyncrasies. When you have found your true soul-mate you will have found unconditional acceptance. Which is why my other half is going to love her Valentine’s Day card this year, no matter how much it cost.

She's gonna love this.

*Okay, two and a half.**

**This never happened.***

***Well, it probably did to someone exciting.

February 11, 2011