We often hear this concern: “My current job is not my Dream Job” – this is what we hear whenever there are talks about employment, change of careers and even resignations.

However, what exactly is a dream job? This article will attempt to understand the parameters linked to the so-called Dream Job.

The following statements may shed a lot in order for people to understand the specific components that make up a Dream Job.

“I love my Job.” – Have you heard this statement from people lately? This is the first indicator or parameter that shows that you excel in whatever is your job in the company, in the industry that you evolve in or with the people you work with.

“I am passionate in what I do.” – As you may notice, this statement involves a certain “cause.” Regardless of how important it is to the world outside of you, it means a lot to you. Naturally, you have exerted a lot of effort and dedication in what you do to make you good at it – as shown in the passion you put in what you do.

“I would not trade my job for anything.” – While many people still believe that money is the first and foremost motivator, this is not necessarily the case. It has been tried and tested over time that Job Satisfaction and Recognition are considered more important than money.

“I have a fantastic boss.” – People feel miserable at work because they get to deal (miserably!) with bad bosses. Inquire about people’s working relationships with their bosses or supervisors. Employees that enjoy a positive relationship with their superiors are always motivated to perform better and better. On the other hand, employees who are constantly threatened by their superiors are mostly under producing or not being productive at all.

“I will continue doing what I am doing even if I win a lottery.” – This reflects a whole lot about the employee as well as the job, the company and in many ways, the boss.

“I look forward to a Monday.” – Things like these still occur – that people actually look forward to their work on Mondays without insinuating that they have boring lives or that they have to escape from home. There are really jobs that fulfill.

These aforementioned insights are the ones that lead to people knowing the makings of a Dream Job. If you identify with any of the aforementioned descriptions, then it is not difficult to say you too have a dream job. If you do not, it is time to ask yourself if you love what you are doing. If you feel you can no longer take it, it is time to go and move on. Believe me, you dream job is waiting for you.

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Sky Scout is very powerful as well as fragile. This is a very costly piece of equipment and it needs to be handled just like glass. You find Sky Scout cover that is made of top grade polyurethane material and protest the sky Scouty from dust, dirt and moisture.
Sky Scouty is used to identify heavenly objects with just a click of a button and it can locate an amazing 6,000 stars, planets and constellations from its database and can provide highly scientific information about each of object in its database. It also provides a comprehensive history with text as well as visual descriptions. You can also have a customize list of the most viewed objects and you can go for a guided of all the stars and constellations with the Sky Scouty. You can actually see onscreen maps of the constellation that is built into the system.

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Being in a new relationship can lead you into two different roads. One guides you to the “together-forever” road. And the other unfortunately heads down the “heart break boulevard”. Whichever highway you may be headed, make sure that won’t get hit badly. That is why checking road signs is a must! These things will definitely save your heart from further road kill. So check out these 3 tips that will surely make your new relationship get on the right track.

1. Draw the line

Your partner should know your future plans and what kind of relationship you want. Before getting into any relationship, you must bear in mind the things you wish to have. It is important that he/she knows your goals and intentions in a relationship. Discuss with your partner, that you want a relationship that is based on respect, love and affection. Be clear and specific with the things that you like. You need to act on it and choose what is convenient for both of you. Whatever you have decided and agreed on will determine the future you have with that person. If you disagree and fight over it, then chances are you are heading down the “heart break street”. If you are having a hard time resolving this issue, then this is the time to really think twice.

2. Don’t get too intimate

Intimacy has its own place and time; definitely not the place for new relationships. Being intimate is sharing your soul too easily with someone is not a good signal. You have to be consistent and be firm with your convictions. Taking time and enjoying each other’s company will make both of you stronger and not just base your relationship on a physical level of attraction. And besides getting intimate right away will only show your intentions in a relationship. Respect and love should be one of the main foundations of your relationship.

3. Think of your relationship as if it was your last

By doing this, your partner will feel that he/ she is important in your life. And as for you, treating them better is a must thing to do. You have to realize that by changing your mentality from a short term relationship to a long term can change your view and attitude towards your partner. Instead of looking around trying find someone better, make them feel as if she/ he is the most significant person in your life. This is actually a stumbling block in any relationship. Playing around should never be an option. If you want to have a successful relationship, one night stands should be crossed out on your list.

The best advice will always come from couples who are happily married and have survived the storms in their relationships. Getting a handy tip from them can give you guidelines on how to react on situations. Always remember that there is no such thing as perfect relationship. The only time you can say that a relationship is strong, is when you realize that both of you are not perfect and that you are willing to fill in the shortcomings of the other.

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As we all know nobody is immune to stress. It affects quite a large population and everybody has their way in dealing with stress. They have their own means to cope with stress. Some people might like to watch a movie or listen to music and some might even like to have a drink at the bar. Every person has their own ways to dealing with stress but the new EM Wave Personal Stress Reliever is one latest discovery in the field of stress relief. This technology helps in balancing ones emotions, body, and mind. This has undergone rigorous evaluations, which was quite approved by the scientists.

This device was developed in such a way that it can be handheld and was developed by Doc Children, and the CEO of Quantum Intec, apart from a team of brilliant scientists and engineers. This has only been possible because of the institute’s 15 years experience in this field of innovative research and development.

http://www.emwave.com/

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You can read part 1 here.

Cold Calling – An Effective Method of Finding Job Leads

There are a couple of significant methods of accessing vacant positions in the hidden job market. The first one is the method of cold calling into an organization in an attempt to get directly connected with the person making the hiring decisions. Almost 10%-20% of job seekers land up into their jobs by way of cold calling. A cold call is usually made irrespective of whether a vacant position is available or not.

The main objective of cold calling is to locate companies that are open to absorbing talented individuals based on their merits, competencies and geographical location. One must begin by getting acquainted to someone already working in the prospective organization. Once you’ve established a relationship with an already working employee, you stand a good chance of getting an audience with the hiring manager as and when a vacancy surfaces.

Prospecting for job openings is same as prospecting for a sale. However, in the former, one is marketing himself/herself instead of a product. If researched well, one can find several methods to locate leads into many companies. Visit any public library and you can lay your hands on abundant resources that can be utilized to gather all relevant information on a certain company or industry and their hiring decision makers as well.

A few indispensable resources to locate such information are The Corporate Directory (U.S. Public Companies), The Hoovers, Directory of Consulting Organizations, Thomas Register of Manufacturing Firms, Gold Book of Venture Capital Firms and the Corporate Finance Sourcebook. One can also approach professional research firms like FTT Research that can make the task of locating hiring decision makers in several companies easier beyond imagination.

Networking to Bag Your Next Job

This is the second and one of the most productive methods of sourcing jobs in the hidden job market. Networking helps as many as 70% of the potential employees to find their prospective opportunities. At its core, networking is basically all about building relationships and sharing valuable information. While you network, you essentially try to get acquainted with new people, share with them some useful information about yourself, learn something about them and be available to them whenever any assistance is required.

Successful networkers are always ready to help others in spite of not having anything to gain from the assistance provided. Such individuals are very forthcoming in sharing their contact information and secrets to help others inch closer to their respective professional and personal targets. Networking isn’t about asking for help regarding jobs. Rather, one must never seek such help while building ones network. Such step might put an unfortunate end to your budding relationship with people due to their discomfort in dealing with such situations.

People good at networking try to extract information about the companies, industries or individuals to gain proximity with the decision makers. However, one common problem that all networkers face is the stagnation of their contact list due to their own lack of initiatives. However, it’s never too late to revive your contact list by taking fresh initiatives.

Job searchers can catalyze their networking process by starting with identifying individuals in their immediate environment. This would include close friends, local community members, relatives, doctors, religious bodies etc. It goes without saying that every individual in your network must be acquainted to several other people. The purpose of networking is to spread your branches as deep into a network as you can.

Further, make a list of companies that interest you and follow it up by scouting for people who work for these companies. They need not be individuals who are related to your field, but can merely bridge the gap between you and the concerned hiring authority in the target company. They can assist you with useful information about the company’s vision, work ethics, business systems etc.

They may further introduce you to individuals who are a step closer to the hiring managers. Such indispensable acquaintances can be found at online social/business network websites like Ryze, Facebook, Ecademy, LinkedIn etc., professional associations, corporate alumni portals like BrightCircles.com and CorporateAlumni.com, school alumni portals for example, Classmates.com.

Regardless of you being an already employed individual or planning to make a career move, it goes without saying that it is essential to keep in touch with the hidden job market. Such initiatives will help you greatly when you decide about making a switch to another organization in the future. It is imperative for a good career strategy to be imbued with a comprehensive networking plan. Not only will it help you land the desired jobs, but will also assist significantly in expanding your social circle.

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And back in Mac and iTunes commercials. Whether you are a fan of Mr. Bean or not, these are just hilarious.

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The Hidden Truth Behind Open Job Market

Many job seekers depend heavily on the open job market for the prospective employment opportunities. Such means include the regular search on the ‘wanted’ advertisements in the local newspapers and myriad job posting boards. While such options may look very tempting, in reality there are only a few people who get successfully placed through these leads. The placement percentage through these two methods combined stands at a dismal 5% – 10% only. One of the primary reasons for such bad ratio is the limited means for the job seekers to differentiate their abilities among a huge number of competing candidates. It is quite common for the hiring managers to receive 500 plus resumes for every position that is posted. In the absence of any personal interaction with the hiring team, the job seeker is left to the whims of technology. It is only if his application has enough keywords and features matching the profile that he/she stands a chance to get audience with the hiring manager. The sad part is that among the various companies that post their requirements through such mediums, less than 25% acknowledge the receipt of the candidates resume. Much less, only the exceptional 5%-10% receive subsequent information regarding the job profile.

How to Get Maximum Returns from the Time You Spend on the Open Job Market?

There are several job searchers who waste valuable time by sending out their resumes to various non-reliable job search portals. Many of them, in fact, shoot their CVs to all the job placement portals and then wait endlessly for that rare interview call. Ideally, no more than two hours must be spent per week for posting ones resume on various job websites. One must instead opt for time saving methods like posting on the aggregate boards, for example, SimplyHired, Jobster and Indeed. These websites gather precious job related information from various online boards and then send job alerts to the subscribers based on their profile.

Reasons behind the Hidden Job Markets’ Tremendous Opportunities

Besides the couple of hours dedicated to the weekly online job search, the candidates have many hours available to adopt different methods. As much as 80% of the jobs taken up through the hidden job market are the ones that are filled by the word of mouth method.

There may be several reasons for open positions not making it to the online job boards. In all likelihood, the company might’ve had a sour experience searching for candidates via online method and is looking at offline resources now. It may also be the case that the company doesn’t have the required finances to post for jobs online.

A large number of companies constantly use the employee referral method to save on the hiring costs. It is a very effective method to hire in situations where an individual is on performance counseling and may soon vacate his/her position in the company. It may not be feasible for the organization to go through a longer hiring procedure just to fill up one vacant position.

Vacant positions are also filled up by the method of internal job postings. This method not only results in a cost effective fulfillment of a vacant position but is also a great motivator for the existing employees. Many a times, a company opts for internal job postings to avoid public attention associated with a new venture. No company would want to loose out on the early starter advantage in an unexplored market. All these are valid reasons for a company to abstain from posting its job requirements online.

Part 2 

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Recently, I was a part of yet another discussion on cost of quality. It gets quite confusing for the individuals in quality business when they come across such questions related to the cost of quality. All quality enthusiasts agree in unison that quality comes free, it’s only when it is absent that company has to incur some cost. We can’t disagree with quality expert, Philip Crosby, can we? However, let’s do some brainstorming. Is this really true? When we refer to quality as something whose presence is free and absence is costly, we’re actually giving it a tangible form. In a way, we mean that quality is something that can be physically added and subtracted from our services and products. This isn’t true.

When quality is dealt with as an entity separate from operations and regarded as a cost center, we comment that “they” will never understand quality. We perceive quality as our expertise since we vociferously argue its implementation across all the business systems of an organization. But even while arguing about it that way, we’re accepting the fact that quality is capable of being left out or included in the business processes by one individual and not by another.

Quality is not an option that you can either top up your products with or not. It isn’t either an extra value added service that you can complement your offerings with a special fee attached to it. Quality must always be integrated and inter-twined with every product or service that you offer. Just like the taste of the food or texture of the cloth, it’s an inherent property that all products and services must be offered with. It’s not an entity that can be removed or added from a product/service without altering its nature. Like a food item that can either taste great or bland, a cloth type that can be comfortable with deep colors or uncomfortable with fading colors, quality too is an inherent property of a product or service.

Thus, if quality can neither be included nor excluded physically, what actually is quality? If quality is defined as an inherent component of the service or product, how does one measure it? How do we interpret quality? This is definitely a great challenge that penetrates well into the theory of business concepts and their implementation. If the present education system of our society incorporates quality as a subject taught in every school, we’d surely have a great breed of performers in all spheres of life in the years to come. Even if quality were taught more comprehensively through various mediums, we’d still be dealing with conundrum pertaining to its meaning and nature.

Quality is invisible yet very real. It is product centric and yet omnipresent. Quality isn’t a tangible thing, it’s a mere idea. Whenever anyone is taught about quality, the individual is taught mainly about its expectations and customer specifications. Usually a range of performance is defined within which the quality of work is ascertained. It is important that we graduate to novel concepts associated with quality.

Quality is all about living up to your organizational goals. If you are employed with a profit-oriented organization, your goals would be directly or indirectly related to the revenue and profit of the business. They’ll also in some way affect the shareholders, the market share, the customer satisfaction and other related parameters. Even non-profit organizations are driven by specific goals. However, they’re not necessarily commercial in nature. Though, they do focus on increasing revenues and lowering costs, their primary focus revolves around increasing the count of people they can serve. For many organizations, quality only means regularly achieving such goals. To grow their revenues and profitability, the company must produce and sell as many products/services it can, irrespective of the inherent properties of the service and products. It must also concentrate on reducing its bottom lines. To do all this in an efficient manner, the company must have excellent business systems in place. Such business systems must have clearly defined inputs, outputs and value addition parameters. It is also important for the leaders of the organization to continually engage in innovation and improvement of the operations. This is imperative to stay ahead of the competition.

Quality is in fact inherent in all such activities. It can never be viewed as a distinct activity. One cannot say that an organization has a high quality business planning process. The organization either has a planning process or it doesn’t. It is either efficient or not. An efficient plan is one that clearly outlines the expectations and the path to achieve them. The same principle holds good for the service delivery or the production system. It can’t be said to be either a quality system or not. It is either an effective system or it isn’t. An effective system contributes significantly in increasing revenues and decreasing costs whereas an ineffective system does just the opposite.

When quality is viewed separately from all these business systems, it indicates that we are yet to comprehend the nature of these systems; that such systems exist only to contribute to the organizational goals. Business systems can be only termed effective when they help us in achieving the organizational goals and ineffective when they don’t. In the event that there is scope for improvement in a system, product or service, it in no way indicates that such system/product/service lacks quality, it only means that the organizational goals are either not properly defined or have changed.

The primary task that any organization must engage in must be the identification and definition of its goals. Thereafter, a plan must be laid out to achieve those goals with the business system, products and services. If the products, services and business systems help in the attainment of the goals, they can be termed effective. They cannot be said to be lacking in quality. In case you find great consistency in achieving your organizational goals, it means that it is time to re-work them and make them more challenging. Don’t try to segregate quality from the system. It’ll only create confusion and extra work burden.

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Several surveys conducted all over the world have revealed time and again that public speaking is considered to be the most prominent fear among general populace. Many recent surveys, however, revealed a different story. The most prominent fear is “Failure.”

Just like ones disability in public speaking, failure is nothing to be ashamed of. We’re conditioned in a manner to avoid coming face-to-face with failure, however, it isn’t a Herculean task top alter that perspective. Following are real advantages of failure:

Failure is a great teacher. Failing at certain things narrows down the options to achieve success. We all know about the scientists’ heavy dependence on the trial and error method while conducting research. Every failure helps them inch closer to groundbreaking success. Consider your own attempts as experiments that are taking you closer to success. Learn from your failures and keep moving.

Failure determines our abilities. How else can you determine your weight lifting limits other than by hitting the gym and dropping a few weights during your attempts. If one avoids testing ones limits, one can never gauge ones abilities. It is said that many a times the fear of failure makes us stop well before even taking that first step. One mustn’t be afraid of failure as it only helps us in getting better.

Failure strengthens us. The weight lifters who lift heavy weights to failure know that it is the only way to build quality muscle power. The stubborn tissues may tear apart in the beginning. But later they heal and turn huge and strong than before. The same holds true for our goals. When we fail during their pursuit, we strengthen our resolve and bounce back with even more vigor.

Failure serves as an inspiration. When we disallow the setbacks to discourage us, we actually catalyze the fire within us to burn even more brightly. Often, such setbacks work as a shot in the arm. Very few know that Michael Jordan was chucked out from his schools’ basketball team. He revealed to Chicago times that it fired him up to succeed and he learnt how one felt when disappointed. He never wanted to experience that disappointment again and hence worked even harder. If failure generates the spark of hard work and perseverance in your life, it can be termed as a great value creating experience.

Failure Pulls Up Others. Leaders have to take risks. Even on occasions when they fail miserably, they can inspire others with their conduct. In the year 1980, an 18-year old boy named Terry Fox ran through the complete length of Canada on a prosthetic leg to create awareness about cancer and raise charity of one million dollars. He successfully covered 3339 miles before a cancer relapse cut short his quest. Even though he lost his life, his efforts never went in vain. His feat has generated over $340 millions in donations till now. His “failure” was actually a great victory.

Failure Develops Courage. Once familiar with failure, one can afford to take risks. If you have the stomach for it, you’ll no longer be intimidated by it. I once used to involve groups in daring rope adventure activities almost 30 feet off the ground level. It was quite usual to see the participants fail during their first attempts. Some of them felt demoralized, while others took it as a challenge. The ones who faced it boldly did very well in the following events. They derived their courage not from being successful, but from their efforts to challenge their limits. If you’ve failed once, you’ll feel more comfortable about taking chances.

Failure is any day better than regret. The opportunities that I have let go by have hurt me more than the ones that never became available. When we fail, at least we feel re-assured by the fact that we tried. However, if we do not try at all for the fear of failure, we’ll only be left with regret later.

Failures open up the gates of better opportunities. I was once rejected for a job that I thought only I could do justice to. Rejection is much worse than unemployment as it can be a very humiliating experience. In a matter of few weeks, I was given an offer for another position that I hadn’t thought of earlier. In the end, the new opportunity turned out to be better paying and more interesting. One can easily give into the thoughts of self- pity after failing, without thinking of the bigger picture. Perhaps it’s the natures’ way to allot whatever is best suited for every individual to him/her alone.

Success tastes even better after failure. No one can explain the sweet taste of success better than one who has dealt with failure. Life will get very boring if everything worked out exactly as we wanted. Failure is just a part of the bigger game of life. Instead of fearing failure, try embracing it once and you’ll find that it is the primary ingredient in the recipe for success.

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The message is very clear:
Don’t let your dog drive!

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