Rules in Resigning

If you have wanted to switch jobs but still haven’t done so, you need not only to submit a resignation letter. It takes much more than that to leave a company. First, you have to talk with your employer. Second, you need to make sure everything is in the right order when you step out of the door. So before you resign, make sure you’re properly prepared. Here are some tips.

• Honor your contract. Check the number of days you have to render before you leave. Some companies require only two weeks, while some ask for a full month. When you resign, try to make sure that your employment in your new company will not start until you finish your required number of days in your current employer. This will not only save you from financial and legal consequences, but it will also ensure that you don’t leave the company with a tainted reputation. Even though you are transferring from a sales job to amarketing job, your reputation in your previous employer is still as valuable as when you are taking a move within your current industry.

• Do not give more than a month’s notice. Don’t let your boss know that you are leaving way before it happens. This may be detrimental to your productivity, your relationships in the company, and your relationship with your boss. You don’t want everybody to be anxious about your departure. Also, some bosses facilitate transition only on the last week of the employee, and prior to that dump a lot of work on them.

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How to Improve Office Communications

As in any relationship, communication is vital. It improves the work flow; it helps the whole team to have a more unified process of handling things. And as a result, the office is a happier and more productive place. What’s great about the office today is that communications is much easier to facilitate today because of technology. Before, a large office is limited by its physical phones and the employees’ ability to spend time in meetings. But today, nobody has any excuse anymore. Those who are in executive jobs carry the task of ensuring that communications is at best at all times, within the team most especially. Here are some ideas you can use to improve communications in the office:

Meetings

Hold regular meetings that will encourage employee outputs. Make sure that each one presents his or her idea. Require your team to come with a fresh idea every month or so, and ask for updates on the ideas that you have decided to undertake or implement. This helps create an atmosphere of openness, and it effectively sends the message that everybody’s opinion matters. It doesn’t matter whether all of you have accountant jobs or you’re in the more creative side of the spectrum. Communication through meetings is always healthy.

Accessibility

You are busy; your employees are busy. Most of the time, what would help ease their workload is a question or a conversation with you. That said, it is important that as an executive, you keep an open line of communication with every employee. If your office room has a door, allot a certain hour or more during the day when employees can come in and have a consultation with you.

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Productive Time Killers

Time is what you make of it. And even though executives in Singapore jobs seldom find extra time in the office, they come once in a while. If you feel uncomfortable about spending one hour doing nothing on your desk, congratulations. You are a true professional. Here then are some ideas on how you can maximize your office time.

• Read. Place a book on your desk, and grab it whenever you have extra time.Learners are readers, and spending time with a book is one of the best ways you can stretch your brain muscles. Who knows? The next best idea for your company might come from reading a Jane Austen novel.
• Read some more. Another idea is to compile magazine articles in a folder. Take out one article at an idle time until you run out of things to read. If your readings are mostly on the Internet or the computer, bookmark them or create a folder so you can access them easily. If you have a gadget that is equipped with a reader, you can even read during your travel time.
• Make calls. If you need to call clients or business contacts but you can never find time to do it during the day, don’t worry. Wait for an idle time and tick off one contact at a time. It’s no guarantee that you will have zero pending calls, but at least you will have less calls and more pleased contacts. You might even find a great break by making a single call without having to conduct a full-blown job search in Singapore.
• Arrange your files. Perhaps the more relevant advice is to arrange your digital files. Hardly anyone ever keeps hard documents, except for signed contracts and the like. You owe it to yourself to have a computer storage system that makes it easy for you to find documents and pieces of information. Zen out by arranging your files.

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The Path of Consultancy

Anyone can be an entrepreneur. It does not have to mean that you need to leave your manager job or register a business name and do all the works. It can mean being a consultant, which means doing freelance work. A consultant carries his own name, creates his own brand, and only has himself to blame if anything goes wrong. The up side of that is that when you do something great, the credit also goes all to you.

A lot of executives, even those with director job positions, are a bit skeptic about consulting. They feel that doing it fulltime is risky, and so they forget doing it altogether. However, consultancy does not have to be a fulltime commitment. Here are the different paths you can take when doing consultancy projects:

Full-time

Being a consultant has a lot of benefits, as much as it has a lot of challenges. First and foremost, you have to be confident on yourself if you want to make consultancy your bread and butter. Second, you need enough connections so you can sustain the number of projects you can get. Third, but not the last among the many other must-haves you need to have so you can go full-time into consultancy, you need discipline. Imagine you are your own boss. When you obey when you tell yourself to focus on your work and skip watching a movie? As elementary as it may seem, it is still often a hurdle many consultants need to face.

Part-time

Thanks to the powers of the Internet and communications in general, a lot of opportunities are now available for executives who want to do extra work. This is ideal for professionals who are not so keen on jumping off the cliff and committing to a brand that is only his or her name. When you choose to accept consultancy gigs on the side, both your day job and your projects will serve as your safety nets. If one of them falls apart, the other can provide temporary financial relief. Moreover, both will assure that your career will continue to grow even though one ceases to exist.

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Are You Ready to Level Up?

Everybody wants to get promoted. The reasons are obvious – more money, higher position, ego-booster. It basically means that at least a couple of people appreciate and recognize your efforts in the company and they trust that you can do more. But can you really?

Promotion is not only about changing your title. It is also about pushing your abilities as a professional by taking on new (and most likely harder) responsibilities. Moreover, you are expected to do more than what you’re tasked to do. Can you move away from your sales job for a leadership position?

This means that you have to really think about a promotion. Before you wish for it, evaluate if you are up for the challenge of going for it, and when you get the promotion, if you can sustain it. Understand your current job position vis-à-vis the requirements of the position you’re after. Can you do things beyond your current load to prove that you can handle more? If you can, then it’s an indication that you can indeed go to the next level.

Your company

Do you understand the nature of your company? If you are in the IT jobs industry, do you see the company advancing along with the others? Are you willing to go with it, or to bring it, to where it aims to be? If your career goals are not aligned with your company’s, you might find it difficult to accept more jobs, let alone be considered for a higher job. Observe your boss and see if you can handle the kind of schedule and challenges that he or she faces every day.

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Corporate and Creative

Most people have a creative side. Perhaps, if we live in an ideal world, everybody would choose a craft, master it, and live doing it. Creativity is always more fun than routine and set processes. And in the corporate world, it seems that the creativity area of the brain is put to rest most of the time. It can be one of the reasons why most professionals don’t like coming to the office. Their creativity and uniqueness is suppressed because of the need to conform to rules.

However, that is only one big misconception about the corporate world. Just because we come to work wearing neutral-colored matching outfits does not mean that we are not entitled to creativity. In fact, even with what you wear, you can express yourself; you can be unique. More offices are giving easy to flexibility and freedom of expression, and one aspect of it is the dress code. It can be safe to say that a company that allows employees to dress how they want to are most likely companies that will allow you to grow in your creativity. If the one holding thedirector job is in khakis and loafers, you can assume that that company will give you more room for expression and in turn, for creativity.

But why the need? The non-creative may pose that question, and the creative may suspect. Creativity breeds new ideas, and has a lot of other advantages for both the employees and the company. If an employee is freer to contribute to the team or to the office with his own formulated ideas, he would have more room for growth. And a growing employee is an asset to any company. After all, a firm can only go as far as how its employees can take it.

So how can you promote creativity? More importantly, how can you be creative yourself? Tweak some things in the office and take these advice pieces to be creative in the corporate world:

• First, accept the corporate mindset. This is especially true with large corporations which have strict rules and stringent compliance to branding, design and procedures. Only when you are fully aware of unchangeable things can you maximize yourself to touch base on areas that can be changed.

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Building Professional Relationships

The whole world thrives on relationships. This is reflective on most everybody’s life, including their career. From clients to bosses, professionals are building and maintaining relationships. From these relationships, you can earn referrals, get advice and develop your professional skills.

You have to know, however, that building professional relationships is not about marketing yourself. If that is your only goal in talking to the next person you encounter in a trade fair or a conference, you will only end up tiring yourself. People can easily differentiate those who aim to build genuine relationships from those who are only after something for themselves.

Perhaps you should come from a viewpoint that sees relationships as something healthy and contributive to your growth, not something through which you can earn. From this vantage point, you can have a healthier approach to building relationships. It will soon come naturally to you and will not require you to think of things to say to somebody you just met.

That said, the most important thing to remember in building professional relationships is to be yourself. You will only fool yourself if, as a banking consultant, all you talk about are banking jobs and finance jobs available today. You will more likely have a fluid conversation if you show who you really are and just talk about anything that you feel may interest you and somebody you want to build a relationship with.

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How to Behave at a Company Party

Company parties are interesting avenues for everybody to let loose and get to know each other better. The lights, the more relaxed atmosphere, and the non-requirement of blazers and suits put everybody in a different mood. As killjoy as it may sound, a company party can make or break you as an employee, especially if you are holding one of the executive jobs in the company. That said, you can either use a company party to improve your reputation, or you can let it be the highway to career hell. Here are some tips you should remember the next time a company party is set.

The Do’s

• Act in an orderly manner. Even though you’re all wearing shirts and jeans, it does not mean that you can behave rudely or act silly. You will see your officemates the next day, and anything you do that you might regret the following day will turn your weekdays into awkward days.
• Watch your words. Imagine that you are still in the office, but with drinks and no need to check on reports. This will help you make sure that you always use the right words and avoid letting out steam about the company or the boss.
• Enjoy! Your company spends large sums of money to show you that you are loved and that they value your enjoyment. Maximize it and have fun.
• Keep your drink on your left hand and keep your right hand free. This is so that you can give dry handshakes anytime.

The Don’ts

• Don’t decline the invitation to the company party. Even though you feel that it will only be a waste of your time, that you’d rather be at home spending time with your family or your TV, a company party is still a significant event that you should not miss. It is your chance to mingle and build professional relationships with your colleagues, or even level with leaders and top executives.

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