polinotraining - Tumblr blog

[polinotraining]

Employability Skills Mini-Series Prologue - End

Hello readers! I hope you enjoyed the read for the previous blog.

Before I dive into the meat of the series, this blog serves as another prologue to why I wanted to do this series in the first place. I have worked at many training centres in the past and the one qualification that popped up in all of them was ‘employability’. For Polino UK (Polino Training or just simply Polino), it is no different and remains as one of the qualifications we provide here. Employability Skills is our bread and butter and has remained as one of our staple qualifications for many years. The reason for this is because we believe that Employability Skills are quality of life skills: skills that will help you out not only when looking for and when being in employment, but also in your everyday lives.

While you are young, these skills will be useful to have. As you get older, they instead become necessary to, at least, be a functioning adult in society. Having these set of skills will also widen your opportunities and may give you chances at things that you otherwise might not have had before.

There was a time in the past that I will always remember, where I was observing a tutor taking a class full of students that were unenthusiastic about learning Employability Skills. Most of the students had wondered why they were even there. The tutor asked the students: 

“Why do they think they need employability skills?” 

They were unable to provide him with a concrete answer. His answer to them was :

“I agree. When you compare them to academic qualifications, like GCSEs and A-Levels, it is of little significance. It may also be a waste of time. There is, however, one difference that separates the two. GCSEs and A-Levels test you on your knowledge of the subject but does not provide you with the skills and knowledge needed in the place of work. You could choose to learn this now or to learn it later, but if you do not learn these skills now, it may be too late for you when an opportunity for employment arises. You may be in your 20s or your 30s and still not have found a job yet because you either did not have connections or did not have the skills needed for employment. The last thing you would want are feelings of regret where you look back and say ‘Oh, I wish I had paid attention and decided to take that class back then more seriously.’”

Since that moment, the students began to change. We want to create moments like this where students start to take their time and what they do seriously, so that they do not think, even for a single moment, these skills they learn were a waste of time. This may also turn into something enjoyable for them as well once they begin to understand what it is, they are learning and are able to think for themselves.

Earlier I had mentioned about how employability skills will also be useful for you in your everyday lives. The three main things employability skills will teach you are:

How to be independent/dependable

How to get along with and work with others

How to be open to learning to new things

While you are young, it is okay to be dependant on your family and friends. When you are, again, in your 20s or 30s, do you really want to be completely dependent on them, both resourcefully and financially, for the rest of your life? The correct answer is ‘no’. As such, I would recommend you to take employability skills while you are young. If you are not already doing employability skills, then I would recommend taking your classes with your homeroom teacher more seriously.

We believe that the best way to thank your family is to be able to provide for them is to be in a position where you are financially stable and can support them back for all of the years they have raised you for as long as you can.

This concludes the end of the introduction to the series. Let us know your thoughts on the blog so far!

[polinotraining]

Employability Skills Mini-Series

Welcome back, readers! It has been a while since my previous post. I will be starting a miniseries on Employability Skills where I go through what Employability is.

You may ask: What are Employability Skills?

Employability is made up of two words, employ and ability. To employ is the act of giving someone work and ability are skills or having the capacity to do something. When you put all these together, Employability Skills are the ‘transferable’ skills, knowledge and understanding needed in an individual in order to make them ‘employable’. These skills will not only be useful for employment, but in your everyday lives which I will go through at some point later.

We want more people to appreciate and understand the usefulness of Employability Skills. This will be the first time we do something like this. By the end of this series, we will hope you have been able to develop an understanding and a mindset where you can think for yourselves. If, by the end of this series I have not been able to, yet, then this will hopefully serve as food for thought. The series will be in the point-of-view of an employee who has worked in an office, but you may apply this to similar situations in your place of work as well.

This is just an introduction to the series and serves as a prologue to the series. The series will be released in a specific order, however, if there are any specific parts of employability that you are interested in, leave a reply in the comments.

We hope you enjoy and look forward to this series!

[polinotraining]

The impact of social media on employment

Depending on how you market yourself as a person on social media, it can either have a positive impact or a negative one on your current or future employment prospects. Your online profile for your social media account plays as much as a role as your offline one.

When you create an online profile, you are also creating a brand. There is known quote “think before you speak”, or in this case, “think before you type”. What you say can create a thin line of how people will view you online. Saying something without credibility can label you in a negative image where the opposite will create a positive image of you. It will cause unnecessary trouble in your life that could have easily been avoided. Thinking before you speak helps you to become more thoughtful and possibly think of solutions to offset what would have otherwise been negative. These small details affect and help you shape your brand. Even so, this does not always guarantee that people will always agree with you, but you can only do your best to be as credible as possible.

There is also the fact that, depending on how businesses have marketed them, job prospects for specific businesses can only be found on social media as it is becoming a platform that is best for connecting businesses with current and prospective customers.  With how developing businesses are moving forward with technology, your social profile will be one of the deciding factors for if they are willing to hire you or not. Your online profile is going to be a reflection of the organisation that hires you. A profile with a negative image creates a negative image for the organisation. Social media accounts also store a timeline of what you have done since creating your profile. It may not exactly reflect who you are today but for some businesses when hiring a person, they will want to see a transition of how you have improved your behaviour if you started with a negative profile.

This can however be averted by creating two types of social media accounts, a personal account where the contents of your social media profile are only shared between you and your close ones, and a professional account that is used strictly for work-related purposes only.

Luckily, there are various social media platforms that you can use to help you decide which to use for personal purposes and professional as well. I will be giving my recommendations on what is best suited for which.

Facebook – a platform that allows you to post texts, photos and multimedia, and communicate via instant messaging with those you are connected to. You can also send and receive private messages from people you have not added as well but this will carry a risk on your safety if you do. While it does have settings that allow you to create a business profile page, it is most suited for personal use.

Instagram – a platform that is used for sharing photos and videos. It contains features which allow you to perform some basic editing to the photos and videos. It is most suited for personal use but can be used for business that would benefit from photos or videos being taken like artists (illustrator, music), vloggers, hair salons, and any up-and-coming businesses that need some quick exposure

WhatsApp – a platform used for communicating with contacts that you know. You can choose to communicate through sending messages, making calls (like using a regular telephone), using icons/gifs/stickers. The contacts you can communicate with on WhatsApp are restricted to people you have included on your contact. This gives you the advantage of only speaking to those you know. This can be beneficial for businesses but again is more suited for personal use because of the features available.

Twitter – because of its simplistic design, like Instagram, it is one of my personal favourites. it is a platform that is used for posting small texts, photos and multimedia. There are also options to share the content which others have created. You can also like posts that other people have created as well. There is also the option to ‘follow’ people. Posts that you like, and share will appear on your feed, which will allow people that follow you to also see for themselves, and they in-turn can follow the other person as well. Celebrities use Twitter which make it suitable for personal use as you can follow them and see what they do on their personal life. However, almost, if not all of the organisations that have an online presence will also have a Twitter account. They will do the same thing as users with a personal account will do, with the exception that they will also answer to customer enquiries as well. With Twitter, you are likely to get a faster response from customer service as well because when you write a public post to the business, people you follow are also able to see it. They in turn may also ask the business to reply to your original inquiry that you made and we know that unless the business answers quickly, they start to create a negative image from customers, which is why they will aim to answer as soon as possible.

Tumblr – a blogging website and one that I am using to post this blog. Tumblr allows you to post texts, photos and multimedia, and allow you to communicate via instant messaging and private messaging. This sounds very similar to that of Facebook, which I agree to, but the difference comes down to the layout of the platforms. Tumblr is designed for blogging which allows writers to post diary-style text content. For businesses, this is a great way for customers to read the content that they create and allow them to see a side of a business that they normally wouldn’t see. This is great for businesses that are trying to sell a product, but rather than talking about a product, they will be writing up a solution to a problem that the reader may have and will be trying to promote their product as a solution.

I would like to know what are your thoughts on this?