Here are some fundamental stress solutions as outlined by NIOSH:

Balance work and family life
A support system that includes co-workers as well as friends
Striving to maintain a relaxed and positive outlook

NIOSH also lists the early warning signs of stress as being:

Headaches
Sleep problems
Having trouble concentrating
A quick temper
Upset stomach
Dissatisfied with job
Morale that’s Low

NIOSH has listed a summary of items to help Prevent Job Stress:

Building awareness of Job stress, such as the causes, the costs, and possible solutions Having top management committed to supporting programs that solve stress issues
Allowing the employee to be involved in stress solution programs
Using Job Stress Consultants or hold in-office training

Solving the work related stress issues of today must involve thinking outside the box. Some companies have already started seeking solutions by implementing flexible work programs for their employees, such as teleworking options. As per the Telework Coalition, more than 22.2 million americans Teleworked in 2005, meaning they worked at home or other location away from the office.

According to  “Commuting in America” a study for the National Academies, based mostly on census data, telecommuting, or working from home, is one of the fastest growing trends. The author of the report believes it will only increase in the future.

Fascinating statistics from the July 2006 Hudson Highland Group:

23% of workers work at home or are given the choice
59% agree that working part time is an appealing option
(includes 38% who think having the choice to come into to the office or work from home is ideal, and 21% who say the best option is working at home)
73% rarely or never get work done during their commute
(despite technology permitting employees to work when heading
to and from work)

Productivity tools such as implementing Remote PC Access, Online Meetings, or Computer Phone Calling, are practical options available to employers and employees so who want to structure optional work-at-home programs. Companies must then learn to manage virtual workforces and utilize technology tools necessary for employees to stay connected. To summarize, in 2005 44% of US Companies offered some type of telecommuting option, which was up from 32% in 2001. The International Telework Association and Council (ITAC), estimates that there will be over 40 million teleworkers in the US by 2010. It’s safe to say that practical job solutions for work stress will involve the use of teleworking tools.

Due to this expansion, there is now a broad range of franchise business ventures becoming available on the market and profitable opportunities with realistic and provable income opportunities are in high demand as eager potential business owner look for the right Franchise opportunity.

But a question often asked will be is the franchise business right for me?

Suddenly putting your life savings or even your property on the line in the form of collateral or initial franchise deposit can seem like the edge of a massive abyss for some budding business people, especially if they are not endowed with a reap and sow mentality right from the outset. But this is the beginning of the path one must go down if they are to change from employee to employer.

When deciding on a business franchise, select the type of business that fits your interests, skills and financial needs. Everyone has a different lifetime skill set so it is far easier to slot into what you are comfortable doing or a business that you can adapt your existing skill set to meet the needs of the franchise.

Most people will dismiss starting their own business or a franchise business purely because they have a lack of experience in any form of business management, but then this is what separates the men from the boys so to speak. Many successful business owners had no previous experience but they have become successful none the less, so don’t let the lack of experience dampen your enthusiasm.

As with any pursuit in life your mental attitude will separate you from the masses so if you have an “it always happens to me” mentality or are easily knocked down and take a while to get back up again, then in reality you need to ask yourself if you should even begin to consider running a business. A positive attitude will always prevail.

As to what types of franchise to choose in a recession? Well, choosing a franchise will depend on you, but in difficult climates often personel franchises do well as both partners may need to work to meet the monthly bills.

Great Resume Writing Tips

The first step is to have a CV / Resume that gets you through the interviewer’s door.

Therefore I want to sow the seeds of some of the behaviour and competency characteristics that you will need to demonstrate in your CV / Resume in order to win the interview.

How can this be Vital? – This stuff is CV / Resume gold dust as it injects your unique personality, making your document stand out from the crowd (most CVs / Resumes are lists of responsibilities and dates, devoid of all personality)

And …

If you’ve researched your target career or job correctly, you will ensure that not only does your CV / Resume demonstrate your unique personality, but also aligns it with the characteristics required of your target role.

Guaranteed to win you the interview!

Behaviours and Competencies of Successful People

Employers are looking for behaviour and personality characteristics that have been proven to work successfully in the past, and these tend to break down into the following:

Note: They are thankfully not expecting you to have all of them. But you have to show the ones you have got.

I like Robert Lawrence’s ebook “Killer Interview Secrets”, and his acronym “STAPLES” for putting these into a memorable form.

S – Skills and competencies

Personal Competencies:
Adaptability
Risk Taking
Flexibility
Decisiveness
Independence
Integrity
Tenacity
Compliance
Stress Tolerance

Decision Making Competencies:
Numeracy Ability
Problem Analysis
Judgment
Creativity
Vision
Entrepreneurial

T – Team Player

Interpersonal Competencies:
Sociability
Spoken Communications
Teamwork
Writing Skills
Listening
Persuasiveness
Interpersonal Sensitivity

A – Attitude

Motivation Competencies:
Commitment
Energy
Work Standards
Self-Motivation
Initiative
Service Orientation
Resilience
Tolerance of Ambiguity

P – Professionalism

A subjective description for a coming together, of a number of characteristics and competencies that the interviewer will be looking for.You reflect the branding of your employer. Employers want the best to represent the company, and are looking for individuals who are mature, articulate, and have good people skills. Being “professional” means that you know how to “handle yourself” as an employee of the company. Your timely, diligent and respectful of your colleagues.

L – Leadership

People & Organisational Competencies:
Delegation
Task Leadership
Management Control
Planning & Organising
Staff Development
Organisational Sensitivity
Organisational Process Design

E- Ethic

Having a good attitude, being proactive, and possessing a willingness to do whatever is needed to get the job done.

S - Security

Employers are looking for people who truly want to be part of the company. They want individuals who desire to be active participants for the long-term.

It’s vitally important that you interpret and highlight the specific behaviors and competencies that the role you want demands. And then link this ability with your unique characteristics and skills.

What’s the great tip then?

The great Resume writing tip I refer to is to use the fantastic online Motivation Appraisal for Personal Performance Test (MAPP Test).

If you have never taken one of these tests, I think you will find it fascinating, as it will provide you a printable report that will highlight, your personal work related motivational preferences.

And though you may think you know what does and doesn’t motivate you, I can almost guarantee you will be surprised by some of the findings.

If you have previously done one of these tests, I suggest digging out the report, or doing it again.

These assessments show an detailed and honest summary of activities that motivate and activities that don’t interest you.

In my experience these reports can also be highly uplifting, as many people have a slightly negative perception of their skills and value.

These reports often highlight that your performance is not hampered by any lack of skill, but simply by doing work that contains a high component of tasks that don’t motivate you!.

Once you have your report, highlight the behaviour and character descriptions (the report uses powerful, compelling language which will bring your CV to life) that fit your target role and ensure you include them in your CV Resume.

Don’t let your battery run low on your phone, because you are going to get a ton of interview invites!

But even with all the information that can be obtained online, some college students still find it hard to begin a career after graduation. There may be several explanations here but the major reason why some graduates still find it hard is because they do not know where to begin. If you are a college graduate seeking a job, then you have probably asked yourself these questions - What do I want to do for a living? What type of company do I want to work for? Am I willing to relocate?

Tough questions? Perhaps. Understand that every journey begins with a first step, which in this case is creating an impressive resume. Here are some great tips on how to write your perfect resume.

• Before writing your resume, you have to take into consideration the type of job you are applying for. Think of specific keywords that your employer might search for in your resume. Here are some examples:

1. Ability to (uphold, delegate, supervise, etc.)
2. Analytical ability
3. Detail oriented
4. Problem solving skills
5. Result driven
6. Communication skills
7. Team leader

• Personalize your resume:

1. Create a positive first impression. Showcase your communication skills and make sure your resume is easy to read. In most cases you won’t get a second chance to impress the employer so you better do it right the first time.
2. Tell who you are. Inform the reader about your most prominent qualifications and why they should hire you for the job. Bear in mind, though, that you do not have to lie. Most employers, if not all, would rather have you hand them an honest resume so they would know what to expect from you.
3. Describe what you have learned. It is best to highlight courses, seminars and projects that you have participated in and attended if you, as a fresh graduate, do not have any work experience.
4. List your accomplishments. Do not be modest at this point. Show your employer the achievements and awards you have acquired in the past and list them down accordingly.

• After writing your resume make sure to:

1. Adjust and edit as needed.
2. Print out the resume that you have created to see how it would look like on paper.
3. Always bring your resume to a job interview so you can leave a copy if needed.

Once you have finished creating your resume, do not confine yourself in just one job opening. Give yourself options. It’s a big wide world and there are plenty of places to start your career. UK, for one, offers many opportunities for fresh graduate students to begin their career. Choosing a good conducive environment as well as colleages whom you can work harmoniously with at the early stages of your career reduce the chances of you feeling regretful later on. It is quite vital that you get on track right from the start.

Whether it is Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals, Industrial and Engineering, Banking and Finance, Technology or any other sector, graduate jobs in the UK prove to be the best starting point for one’s career. Taking into consideration the fact that fresh grads still don’t have any job experiences, the UK offers college graduates with the best job postings from top employers. Why settle for unpaid experiences when you can get hired and paid by top companies, adding up work experience as you travel down the road of your chosen career?

Whatever sector you choose in the UK; from graduate jobs in sales, graduate jobs in retail, graduate management jobs, graduate consultancy jobs or graduate leisure and travel jobs, you got to choose the ultimate resource for discovering your future. It is imperative to gain knowledge about leading companies, industry news, emerging sectors, salary terms and much more, so you can make an educated decision.

This article is about the advantages behind recycling businesses. You can ease the waste disposal and reduce the associated costs using recycling equipment, like waste balers and compactors.

Managing Waste: Recycle, Reduce and Reuse

Managing waste is not easy . Transporting heaps of disorganized waste will cost much and will also affect your profits. Nonetheless, there are so many alternatives for you to avoid enormous waste disposal expenditure . You can have the best approch for avoid huge expenditure that goes behind waste removal by recycling, reducing and reusing waste materials.

Reduce the Level of Waste: Producing Wire-bound Stacks for Recycling Purpose

While packaging, a considerable amount of commercial waste is involved. What you can do in such case is to condense the amount of packaging . Getting in mass or using refillable containers is also helpful to you.

When it comes to reducing the level of waste, compactors and cardboard balers are helpful. You can also crush materials like plastic, paper or card into neat bales. Surprisingly you can save space around 80% smaller than it’s former size. It is thus simle to make neat and wire-bound stacks usable for recycling purpose.

You may come across the waste that cannot be recycles and baled. Compactors can do a great job for such task. By using compactors, you can squash the waste and reduce the level of waste which helps you in saving space. As a result , you can keep away the chances for having pricey bins and collections.

Convert Your Waste into Revenue Generation

You can transform your waste into revenue generation using recycling equipments. If you afford to purchase equipments, do it and manage your waste in proper way . Since many companies offer recycling tools like compactors and balers on rental basis, go for the right ones as per your recycling tasks. Look for reliable resources that offer the equipments and services so that you can make the most of your waste.

If you are a medical student, you may be wondering what you should focus on in the medical field in the near future. While there is a wide variety of choices for you choose, one option you should not readily discard is that of going into the field of pathology.

As you should by now be aware of, pathology consultants are physicians who are not into dealing with the patients directly. Most of the pathology services they give are done in the laboratory. Should you be interested in becoming a pathologist, you have to have a Doctor of Medicine citation first.

If you have already finished your medical studies, you have to finish residency in pathology, which takes about five years. There after, you need to be in a fellowship in pathology for one year. The choices for fellowship include the following:

• Blood banking 
• Transfusion medicine 
• Cytopathology 
• Forensice pathology 
• Hematology 
• Immunopathology 
• Laboratory informatics or information systems 
• Medical microbiology 
• Neuropathology 
• Pediatric pathology 
• Selective pathology

After the residency, you will start the practice and provide the very vital pathology services required by the physicians in the hospitals and private clinics.

Most pathology consultants have good salaries and fairly live fulfilling lifestyles. There may not be a huge supply job offers like that of an Internal Medicine resident or Family Medicine resident, but you can definitely secure a job.

Most generally suggest that you take up both anatomical and clinical pathology and practice general pathology since that will increase your market value. Further and more specialized training is needed if you decide to enter the forensic pathology service.

The salary of a person involved in pathology services is dependent upon the experience, the specialization, and the area where he or she is working in. The usual salary is usually around $80,000 a year if you decide to teach the field. The more experience you have, especially the doctors, the higher the salary range, which could go over $200,000 annually.

Many organizations think it is important that the tool they choose is ITIL version 3 compliant or if it is only suitable for version 2, but when choosing Help Desk software, you should review how much you can customize instead of it being compliant with ITIL 2 or 3. To make your help desk solution fit every ITIL version, you must be able to customize your help desk tool.

Open source help desk is what most companies should aim for, depending on size of the company. This actually means that you can customize any way you whish, because it is the programming language that sets the limits and not features in the actual product. One of the best free help desk solutions are called HESK and is a web based help desk solution, ready for implementation with your existing PHP intranet. The service management software can be modified almost without limitation and because it is you that are designing it, you can save a lot of money by not needing expensive vendor training.

If you are a mid-size company and looking for are more proven software with vendor support, you should take a look at software called asp help desk software. This is one of the cheapest, yet very customizable and easy service management tools on the market. This software is very easy to implement and for smaller companies, it can be managed by a single employee.

A web based help desk, describing the best choices is easily found on the internet. You should read a few of the recommendations and decide what fits your company.

So why don’t all companies build up a brand. Well there are a few reasons for this. For starters building a brand can be very expensive. It can cost millions of dollars of investment to establish even a modestly recognizable brand. That brand is fragile and can be destroyed by a few stupid mistakes or poor products. Secondly, not all companies want to establish a band. For example if a company makes a low-quality product they don’t want people to think they are going to buy another junk product from that company. Why would you want to build a brand in that case? Simply you wouldn’t.

Another great type of companies that like to build their brands are stock market companies. These companies typically have very strong brands because that is all they have to go by, their reputation. People allow investing companies to handle their money because they have had strong returns in the past. If companies didn’t have this type of reputation they could just do it alone with some simple stock trading software.

Anyway you slice it, branding is important to many companies. It is the only way they can properly market their brands and make the sales they need. That is why the law protects company brands so strongly.

Using home bases businesses to create high paying home jobs are one of the fastest growing industries out there. Last year it is estimated that more than 500 billion was paid out through different affiliate programs, home based businesses and opportunities on the Web. You must follow a solid strategic plan and be committed to succeed in this industry. The people that go in without conducting research, without exercising real commitment, and failing to place their goals in front of them, are the people who give up, fail and quit. Those are the people who end up hating the industry; they write negative blogs and articles on the web, they create web sites and more, therefore, giving the home based business and other online opportunities a bad stigma.

Why is it that so many people fail in this industry? The answer is real simple. They never learned or were not properly taught how to correctly target the market and put their product or opportunity in front of people who are ready to buy or are in need of the perfect opportunity. You must commit to learning how to market online, not only what you offer, but market and brand yourself as well, That is the way to go if you consistently want to generate leads and traffic to your site. The kind of prospect you are searching for, want and get to have on your team, are the kind you have talked to, educated and impacted in a positive way. This is what it takes to succeed in your own home based business.

With increasing regularity, the press reminds us that bird flu is the prime suspect to cause mankind’s next pandemic. Pandemic sounds terrifying. It is. That’s when a highly contagious virus goes global, in a very negative sense. The worst pandemic on record was the Spanish flu in 1918 which is believed to have killed 50 million people worldwide! That was blamed on the H1N1 virus which was only recently confirmed on 5 October 2005 by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be a bird flu virus.

Do I have your attention now? Is it time to PANIC?

Not just yet. Updated on 10 Sep 2008, WHO statistics shows the death toll at 245 from 1996 when the H5N1 virus was first identified in China. So what’s the fuss? The greatest nightmare for scientists monitoring the bird flu virus is to see it attain human-to-human transmission capability. As I write, there has been only one probable case of human-to-human transmission recorded in Thailand in September 2004. But if (it seems the virus has not reached the “when” stage) the dreaded virus mutation takes place, you can expect pandemonium on a global scale.

Quietly but conscientiously, many countries are preparing for the worse (more on this in a later post). At our individual level, we should start doing some homework too.

Ok, so what has the Sharp ionic air purifier to do with all this. Is it not just another ionic air purifier? It is ordinary in that it performs the usual functions of the run-of-the-mill air purifier by getting rid of dust, dirt, smoke, dander, pollen, cuisine and pet odours, pollutants, allergens etc. But if we can get protection from all these and more in one ionic air purifier, especially one that is a tested defense shield against a potentially deadly virus, why not? The complete package is promised in Sharp’s Plasmacluster Ion Air Purifier.

Obviously, for the value-conscious, the next logical question would be “yes, that makes a whole lot of sense but at what cost”? At no extra cost, Sharp claims! Sharp asserts that it is cheaper than any other ordinary ionic air purifier when measured over 5 years. Hey, that’s great value for money! But, how is this possible in this nothing-is-for-free world?

Yes, its possible, claims Sharp. For instance, in its Plasmacluster Ionic Air Purifier Model FP-N40CX, Sharp contends that it is undoubtedly better value for money as there is no filter replacement costs for the first 5 years. At first sight, the typical competitor’s upfront cost of US$160 looks cheap compared to Sharp’s US$399. But add in the annual replacement filter replacement costs of US$100 and the total outlay for the competing ionic air purifier comes to US$560.

Since I have only started on this study, I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the numbers quoted by Sharp. Please drop me a note if you have actual experience.

My next move would be to seriously investigate the Sharp Plasmacluster Ion Technology. Now is the time to research, while bird flu is still not quite at pandemic proportions.

Its never too soon to get ready. Experience is a good teacher. Recall the last disaster movie when you saw people with terror in their eyes, many with the famed N95 face mask covering their noses as they commute to work. But it was no movie but real life in motion in many Asian cities. Those who could not find the scarce N95 face mask could only pray that they were not the next victim of the near-pandemic scenario that swept across Asia. For those of you who did not hear of it, it was the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus that hit 8,096 people around the world and resulted in 774 fatalities. We all know that being well prepared is half the battle won.

Watch this space as we track exciting developments in our pursuit of safe, pure and clean air with nothing more than an ionic air purifier.

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