Office Socializing for All Its Worth

The office social scene is also much like school. There’s a group of pretty girls who gossip during lunch break, there’s a group of guys who joke around and treat everybody as their buddies, and there are also loners, coworkers we find too weird for our simple minds. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you’re all in executive jobs.

Some feel that it’s not worth it to get involved in cliques and groups within a team. However, it is important in different levels. For one, socializing in the office will contribute significantly to how you are perceived as a coworker. Moreover, your next promotion may be based on who you know and who you hang out with. Lastly, you spend a whole day with these people, might as well find a few friends whom you can talk with, whether to ask a work-related question or just to run a recap of Desperate Housewives with. Here are some unwritten rules that will help you have beneficial relationships in the office.

The Wrong Crowd
These are the guys who speak of nothing else but jokes, which may sometimes be borderline offensive; or the girls who do nothing but wear stilettos and exchange makeup tips. Although somehow they give life to the office, it may get distracting. If you want to produce more results than jokes and quips, plug in your earphones and focus on your tasks when these kids start talking.

The Right Crowd
If you will observe closely, there are other employees in the office that you get to know or recognize immediately, and not for anything like being noisy. Instead, they are popular because they’re nice and very easy to be around with. Although it seems that there are more accounting jobs than nice people, there are in fact a lot of guys who can help you out in your career by just being friendly.

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Thriving in a Job You Don’t Love

While it is relatively easier now to turn down job offers and resign from a current job, this does not mean that you can do so all the time. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to survive, nay, thrive in whatever job position you currently are in. There will come a time when you will not be able to afford resigning, when job opportunities will be scarce. Maybe you are in that situation right now.
 

You have your reasons why you don’t love your job anymore (or not ever), but there are also different ways through which you can somehow enjoy it, at least until you find the one that will make you happier. Whether you are in one of the most coveted bank jobs or finance jobs in the country, not liking a job is sometimes inevitable. Here are some tips:

Identify the reasons why you don’t like your job anymore. Maybe there are many reasons, maybe there’s only one reason. You may be surprised to find out that the thing/s you don’t like about your job can easily be eliminated. For instance, you may be getting stressed about the volume of tasks that are being dumped to you. Simply talking to your supervisor may be enough to eliminate some of the tasks, instantly giving you fewer reasons to hate your job.

Try your best to be more positive at work. If you dread going to the office, if you frown upon stepping into your building, you aren’t giving yourself any chance to become happy for the day. Although it may be difficult for some people who are in offices that are toxic and full of gossiping, it can be easier to achieve. Simply choosing to keep quiet when the gossiping starts can help you take on a more positive attitude, and can also help your other workmates to adopt the same attitude towards work.

Talk with your supervisor. Have you ever experienced wanting something and gathering the courage to ask for it? One of the best, most relieving feelings is when you are given what you want so easily, without any struggle or justification. Bring up your concern to your supervisor, he might be more than willing to help you with it and even give you more.

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New School Job Tips

Do you remember what your teachers told you when you were in school? Things like “Take care of the job that you get” and “The job market is very volatile, you need to be careful and cautious.” Although there is some truth to those statements, there is also a big danger in sticking to those lessons, and it’s that you might never be able to reach your full potential because you choose to not step out of your comfort zone.

Sure, the job market is volatile, and you need to take care of whatever position you hold right now, whether it is an in-demand accounting job or one of the coveted executive jobs in Singapore today. However, nothing is certain now. Sometimes, no matter how much you hold on to something, things do not happen according to plan.

Is there a foolproof way of succeeding in a career? If our old school job strategies are dangerous, what type of job moves should we adopt?

Well, start with this: know what you want. You shouldn’t be out there trying to please the job market. Instead, you should be doing a job because you want to pursue something that you like. The next thing you should do is to acknowledge the fact that you can take matters into your own hands. Here are some tips:

Know what you can do, and then work around it. Come on, you’re not that fresh graduate, fresh out of college kid who doesn’t know what he can do yet. At this stage in your career, you already know very well what you can do. List them and you will see whether or not you are able to maximize your abilities in your current position. This will also give you an idea of what the ideal job is for you.

Change your perspective. If you have lived your life as a professional living inside the walls of doubt and worries, you are missing out on a lot! Take a more positive outlook and adopt a braver attitude towards work and you will clearly see opportunities that will give you new avenues to explore and more chances to grow and improve as an executive.

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Success Advice from the Successful

Who would believe and take heed the advice of somebody who hasn’t gone far in life? No one aside from his family, we’re guessing. So today we’ve rounded up quotes by successful and popular people, in the hopes of encouraging you to just believe that you, too, can experience being at the top.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. – Henry Ford
How many times have you given up on an idea just because you are afraid to fail? Fear of failure is crippling; you don’t need it. Besides, you won’t even be where you are right now had it not been for what you can do. You have to give yourself more credit than how much you give. What do you want to do? Do it despite the fear, lest you want to see the obstacles.

 

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word — excellence.  To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. – Pearl S. Buck

One of the best feelings an executive can have is the feeling of accomplishment, of excellently executing something. When was the last time you felt proud of an output? When was the last time that you took the time to step back to look at your accomplishments, and gave yourself a pat on the back? If you forget about giving yourself the credit that is due you, you will also forget about going for excellence. Think of work (whether in a finance job, a banking job or one in the media) as something that you do not for the company that you’re working for, but for yourself and for your professional growth.

Hard work spotlights the character of people:  some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all. – Sam Ewig

Being an executive means that you would have to work harder than everybody else. Not only do you need to accomplish big tasks, but you also need to make big decisions, represent your company in different events, and manage your staff. Check yourself – are you able to accomplish things by giving them your best, or are you only going from one thing to another, halfheartedly turning in outputs? You will be separated from the rest by giving your best and not walking out on tough jobs.

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Still Dreaming about that Dream Job?

A lot of professionals find themselves at a loss because they feel that they still haven’t landed their dream job. Not surprisingly though, these professionals may already be in the corporate world for five years or more, getting promoted every year and becoming successful at what they do in their executive jobs.

But let’s focus on the term “successful”. If you, even after years in a certain industry, still feel that success is far along the way, maybe you haven’t really found success in its truest sense. Definitely, it is not getting promoted or making lots of money. So let’s start by defining success, and then follow through with other things that can help you determine your dream job. Pursuing it will all be up to you.

Success, to other people, is all about earning a certain amount of money. Some even set a goal for themselves. To some, it is working in a dream company. Still to others, it may be becoming a director or a manager. One thing is for sure, success differs from one person to another; it is relative. So don’t conform to what your college schoolmates are now doing. Spend time to think of what your idea of success it, and then work your way towards it.

Of course, you also need to factor in your skills. You have to see the big picture. Go beyond what you have accomplished. You may have capabilities that have remained untapped just because you haven’t had any experience using them. For instance, you might have spent your career life jumping from one accountant job to the next, never realizing that you ave strengths in analysis as well. So list your skills and see how they relate to your quest to success, to finding that dream job. If you see that a lot of your skills have been unused for the past years you’ve been working, then maybe you chose the wrong career path.

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Tech Tools for the Executive

Everybody has achieved the always-on presence. In fact, it’s very normal for everybody to be reachable even after office hours that there has been no more excuse for not being able to reply to email as soon as possible, or not being able to return a missed call immediately. And don’t get us started on not answering a phone call. We know very well that your smartphone is very much part of your life (of your body, even)  that it’s near impossible for you to say sorry about not being able to notice that your phone was ringing.

Now that we have established the importance of always being in the loop of communications and information, let us now discuss the different things that you can use to ensure that you will not find it difficult to keep up:

Project management tools. As an executive, you are responsible for managing people, projects and tasks. And with a busy office, you need not only a reliable secretary, but also a system that you can use to ensure that you are always in the know. A project management software can help you ensure that things are always on the right schedule, budgets are always on track, and communication access points can easily be tapped in case you need to. It is as useful to a sales job as much as it is for most marketing jobs.

A tablet. Gone are the days when having a tech gadget is a thing of luxury. Owning a tablet, in fact, is now vital to most executives. As you go from one place to another, you will find it much easier to take out a tablet for a quick review of your presentation, instead of lugging a bulky laptop everywhere. With tons of useful apps you can use for work, you will soon find that a tablet is one of the most functional tools that you can have.

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Freelancing? Prepare First!

In anything, you need careful preparation, especially when it comes to things that relate to our career and more especially when you plan on freelancing. Why, you might ask? Because freelancing for executive jobs is very much like putting up your own business. Sure, you’re your own boss. But you will also do all your accountant jobs, be your own secretary, manager and messenger.

Surprise, surprise, freelancing is not as easy and convenient as you think it is (unless you think convenience is all about staying at home). Here are some requirements for freelancing that you need to develop before you dive in the freelancing cloud 9.

Discipline. If you think freelancing requires the least amount of discipline on your end, you are gravely mistaken. Freelancing will require you to be on your most disciplined self so you can finish tasks without supervision, and resist the temptation to turn the TV on and watch a movie, two movies, three.

Marketing. Hey, it’s time you sell yourself! Another misconception about freelancing is that there is no more need to show up in interviews and zero need to send a job application. Clearly, the people who say this haven’t tried freelancing yet. When you’re a freelancer, you would always have to sell yourself and prove to your prospect clients that your output will give their company the best. Make sure that you’re ready to search for clients, cold-call them and throw a sales pitch for yourself.

Strategy. This is something that you will inevitably learn as a freelancer. Being on your own will require you to come up with a gameplan that is uniquely yours. You will figure it out all naturally, don’t worry. You will be able to develop package deals, maintain relationships, providing contracts and designing a working schedule that is beneficial both to you and to your client.

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