For Career Builders

How to work from home and be productive?

2020-04-23T02:50:00.001-07:00

We live in turbulent times, but along with the new coronavirus, pandemic came to a lot of challenges.
How to best avoid mistakes and distractions if you work from home?
Home office becomes inevitable for a part of employees and for some this is a new and not so comfortable experience.

For some, it may look good at first sight as it means more time with your family and less time in traffic. However, it requires significant self-discipline, therefore self-awareness, and focuses to be able to be as productive as you possible at work.
And for sure you want to do this if you worked hard until now to find and do what you enjoy.
Here are some pieces of advice that we have selected and which we consider to be at use for the ones that are not used to spend their time working at home.

Create a daily routine and stick to it

The way you dress, a clear set schedule, and a firm work plan will help you concentrate on your work tasks. It is useful if you start each day at the same hours, you take regular breaks, even outside the house.

Use a To-do list, review it, and update it as you go. Review priorities and reward yourself for the hard tasks you finish. Especially the ones you tend to procrastinate, once that task is done, your day will go much smoother.

Use or build a separate and dedicated workspace

This may make you break your work routines.
Establishing your home workspace so you can feel comfortable taking conference or video calls and stay professional.
Also, this will help by setting you in the right mindset for work.

Communicate with your family and set boundaries to help you manage working tasks

Explain to your family about your working plans and ask them t give you a little bit of space
It may be easier said than done, especially if you have young children at home, but not impossible.
If you set clear boundaries and explain that having quiet time could mean better productivity and little time spend working.

This can be difficult but if you communicate clearly, thanking them for understanding and spending your break with the loved ones, can be awesome too.

When you are flexible and do not depend on fixed working hours, you can even take advantage and work during the hours when the little ones sleep or when they are out of the house. Of course, if you are allowed to do so by type of work you do.

Avoid distractions

At home you have many more distractions, that is clear! You have TV, Social Media, and access to the kitchen.

You need to avoid them as much as possible so you can focus on your work.

Getting things done with such distractions may not be easy. You can use them during your short break as long as you are conscious about time.

Keep communication going with your office

The hardest part of it for the ones that love the social component of offices, is to get used to working alone. You need to keep communication at its best.

Call daily your colleagues and make sure you network as much as possible. It is one of those times when, more than ever, team communication skills can show up.

You can see how well your co-workers do and they are managing to work from home. Maybe they can share more tips with you, on what is working for them.

It is important also to keep close with your managers and make sure that you are working in the right direction. Also, showing interest and reliability when you are away can bring you more advantages later on. Business continuity is critical to keep.

Keep close with your customers too, it is the case.

Working from home can be managed to our advantage. We can make from this period a productive one. Just make sure you plan some proper arrangements to help you stay more focused.

Of course, do not forget the critical setups like good Wi-Fi connection, a reliable computer, and needed setups for the systems and applications that you need to use.

Good Luck!

How to find and do what you enjoy

2020-04-20T07:03:00.001-07:00

Maybe, the hardest part of career-building is finding what you love and pursuing it.

Of course, this applies to you only if you want to make sure that you choose a career that suits you best.

When it comes to Career, almost all of us would like to

Enjoy what we do
Build a successful and rewarding career
Find the best Career path for us
Have the best work-life balance

But how we do get there?

Follow your dreams...

Easier said than done!

”Follow your dreams!” is an inspirational concept that does not fit everyone. We can now find more and more articles explaining why.

I would say it is safer to trust what inspires you most and not what inspires other members of society when choosing a career. After all, people are different. We all have different skills and interests, so we should have different ways of saying to the world who we are.

The naked truth about Career is that we should choose the right time to turn passion into a career and we should be prepared well in advance for it. Lack of proper skills and proper planning can make you end up regretting your decision to just follow your dreams. Some of us, the lucky ones, will be well prepared early on in their life to make good career decisions. However, for the majority of us, good career decisions can come later on, during a Career Change that is done after we learn the hard way how to make better career decisions.

It is a life long learning process, however. Career success may not last forever if we do not know how to manage it. Passion alone does not ensure success.

Factors that influence our Career Choices

Career Exploration

Before setting your career objective, the most important part is to work on self -awareness and, very important, to work on career exploration.
Career exploration, ideally, should begin as early as possible in our lives, for better results. This includes cultivating yourself with decision-making skills and getting information and exposure to a wide range of occupations.

We own the fact that we fail to obtain success in our career to a lack of self-understanding and of information about the work world.
Part-time and summer jobs, vocational educational programs are all career exploratory experiences that can define our later success.

Before setting your career objectives, you should first define your career preferences,
career preferences, and continuously make sure you do your part of research, evaluation, and learning about career opportunities.

Know your Personal Values

Our personal principles that give our life meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity.
Our core values may be different than the ones of the other but we need to be aware of them and use them properly and they will inspire us to keep going when it gets tough.

Knowing these values will help us respond to questions related to who we are, why do we make things in a certain way, and why we react sometimes the way we do.

Self -Awareness

Assessing your own interests and considering your skills, means you need to get involved in analyzing your Career choices and suitability well before making a Career Plan. Self-assessment helps you to evaluate your values, abilities, work, and learning preferences.
Learning about various occupations and their fit with your unique career preferences will help you choose your career aspirations that fit.
Matching between your interests, competencies, and qualifications is critical.
You would know at this point what is missing and what you should improve at yourself to achieve your career plan.
missing and to include it in your career plan so you can work in achieving the needed career step.

Take your time to explore your options so you can determine what is the best step for you. Only knowing what is missing you would know what you would have to do to be able to turn your dream, passion, or objective into Career.

Personal Interests

Another factor that may impact your career direction towards enjoying what you do is your own Personal Interests.
Using your Personal Interests and considering your considering your skills makes that our Career Choice fit for us. Personal Interests can work to our advantage and can help us in our work life, more than we can imagine.

It is in your own interest to understand that, for example, Sports, as Personal Interest can bring you also useful occupational skills such as being a team player, having leadership abilities, or being able to work well with others.

As well, for example, Child Care as Personal Interest can be used to illustrate that you are a responsible person who thinks of others.

Job satisfaction is closely linked to having an interest in the tasks you perform, Involvement with activities I which you are interested can make it easier for you to become successful, to help you determine your interests and the tasks that will bring you satisfaction, think about your current successes.

Start by making a list of your accomplishments, those actions or projects in which you did well, and from which you got a sense of pride, satisfaction, and achievement.

Family background and Education

We need also to understand the relationship between our family background and our education when it comes to the decision we make in our career. Sometimes we aim too high, too low or, we do not aim enough to direct our Career in the right direction.

The role that our Family and Education context are way more critical than we may think. It can influence our work values in ways that can make or break a career, that is why we need to understand the parental and educational influence if we want to attain meaningful career goals.

We value the opinions of family members so much, we consult and depend on their opinion when we make a decision. And that is great.
Some take from here the success drivers or even the example for how not to be later in life.
However, in some cases, we are even willing to compromise our own personal interests when we are making career decisions. And without even realizing it.

In many instances the family advice serves us well in our career, but what if it doesn't?

Why I write For Career Builders?

2020-04-16T10:52:00.012-07:00

About Me

I really love sharing opinions and experiences and I hope I will inspire as many people who seek to Build their Careers.

In fact, the way others feel inspired by me offline made me decide to do more of it online.

There are a lot of people who search for free inspiration on how to start, build, or change their career.

It is taken me long to get to this point when I have both energy and freedom to write this blog.

Now it is the perfect time for me as I am doing a career break., I know, I know how it sounds...

A Career Counselor making a Career break. I am certified as a Career Counselor, I have worked in this profession over the last years and I am confident that this is what I was supposed to do to put the best version of myself out there. I also know that we are biologically wired to talk about ourselves. This is not one of those blogs.

I write about my experience, my expertise my thoughts just because I know that I could help so many people. I have always asked my clients: What would you do if you would not need to work for money?

With what would you occupy your time?

This blog is my answer to this question. It is now time for me to Walk the Talk.

Career development, what the new generation should know

2020-04-13T11:18:00.014-07:00

Career development, what the new generation should know.

Career development should be learned in school. The definition says that is the process of managing learning, work, leisure, and transitions in order to move toward a personally determined and evolving preferred future.

How we all should be translated, is that represents one of the topics that should be important for all of us. Or, at least for the one of us who want to have in their life the learning, work, or leisure in alignment with their personal development.

I would say even that could teach us how to have a balanced and successful life but it would be a cliché.

Our life is full of context, factors, and events that could affect our success. The secret is just in the way we manage what is happening to us, how we respond, how we adapt.