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Top Careers to Pursue If You Want to Help People

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Helping people is one of the noblest things in the world, and if you decide you want to pursue a career that focuses on offering people guidance, support or any kind of healing, you’ll be able to change people’s lives for the better. However, you need to have in mind the fact that you’ll need to be empathetic, considerate and most of all patient if you truly want to give your maximum to the people that need your help. If you’re ready for that kind of commitment, then browse through some of the following career options and you’ll certainly find your cup of tea.

Teaching and education

A career in teaching can be rewarding and exhausting at the same time, so before you decide you want to spend all of your working time around children or teenagers, think it through well. While this career allows you to help individuals very directly and see how they grow and progress before your very eyes, sometimes the kids will be so mischievous that you’ll have to put an extra effort into making them behave. Furthermore, schools for pupils with disabilities and special needs are also some of the places where you can pursue your career and help others.

Psychology

Psychology offers various types of careers you can pursue in this field of medicine, starting from health psychologists,to clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, and to counselling psychologists. If you’d like to help people give up smoking, for example, or some other bad habit, you should consider health psychology. Mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety are the problems that fall under the specialty of clinical psychology and counselling,while neuropsychology deals with problems such as brain injuries. If you’d like to work with prisons to reduce re-offending then forensic psychology is your cup of tea.

Aged care

If you’ve always thought that helping the elderly is something you could be good at, then a career in aged care is something you should definitely consider. Working at a nursing home, or an aged care facility is a great way to take care of the seniors and make their golden years safe, fun and secure. Offering the elderly specialised aged care support will require you constantly being around them, helping them dress, walk, maybe even bathe if they’re facing disabilities. Just as children, older people can sometimes be a lot of work, because the fact that they can’t take care of themselves anymore isn’t always the fact that they accept lightly. 

Social work

When individuals and families need support, one of the options is to turn to social workers. They will do everything in their power to help adults with learning disabilities, mental or health issues,and elderly people live independently. Children in care or families in which there is a child protection concern of any kind are all taken care by a social worker. Fostered children or those that are going through an adoption process all spend a certain amount of time with social workers who manage all of those processes. 

Nursing

Should you choose a career in nursing, you’ll be able to work with different types of people. From assisting surgeons and visiting people in their own homes, to being a specialised children’s nurse, or a neonatal nurse working with newborn babies, there’s a myriad of possibilities to help people. 

Charity career

There are so many people in need nowadays ,so becoming involved with charity work can really be an amazing way to help the less fortunate. You might interact directly with people, if you start working for a charity, or you might have an office-based job. Your job can be related to anything from lobbying parliament, to campaigning, marketing and fundraising. So, you need to be prepared to speak your mind and raise awareness often, so you can help those in need the best way possible.

From education, through aged care,psychology, social work, and to charity, there’s a full spectrum of amazing careers that’ll allow you to help people. Therefore, think well before you opt for the one you’d like to pursue, and make your dream a reality.

Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in latest business news and new social media trends. In her free time she enjoys exercising and preparing healthy meals for her family.

Chief Challenges Business of Today Must Face

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Getting operations off the ground is a daunting challenge. Yet, it is just the beginning of a series of trials and tribulations: the process of navigating the market and outmaneuvering the competition. The pace of economic and technological change has never been greater. Great uncertainty and volatility loom over entrepreneurs. It is never easy to discover what customers want and do a better job at delivering that to them than the next company.  This can only come through long-term strategic planning and the ability to solve dynamic challenges on the fly.

Cash flow management

Cash is the king of the business realm and maintaining a steady flow of itis the lifeline of any business. Running dry is always a risk in a less-than-ideal lending climate we operate in, which is to say that businesses need to come up with a rock-solid financial plan. What is more, money management and bookkeeping may require them to hire professionals versed in dealing with financial tasks and obligations, including accounting, taxes and invoices. This can help businesses acquire enough capital, pile up reserves,and anticipate downturns and emergencies ahead of time.

Finding your audience 

Barriers to entering the market are as low as ever. That may be a good thing, but staying in the business long-term is a different ball game entirely.Companies are facing immense competition and consumers are enjoying a wide selection of products and services across different industries. Hence, it is extremely difficult for a new business to find and carve out a profitable niche. What gives you a real fighting chance is extensive market research. It paves the way to a highly-focused approach to catering to people’s wants and needs (your target market).

Marketing on a budget

Marketing wilderness out there is getting rather complex and incredibly crowded. A new channel or tool comes to life almost every day. The bulk of modern brands have an online presence and they are trying to make waves in social media and other booming hubs. Well, the key challenge is to pull it off without breaking the bank or spreading oneself too thin. In other words, you need to figure out which channels hold the biggest potential to arrest and retain the attention of consumers. Then, you craft optimal brand messages to build trust and cultivate loyalty.

Building the right team

People are the glue that holds companies together. To harness the full workforce potential and assemble the best possible team, you have to create a sound recruitment policy, your road map. Look into, but also beyond just skills and experience. Make sure candidates fit your business culture and relate to your vision. Find out what drives them and foster a positive and healthy work environment. Offer enough perks and benefits to attract and retain talent. Keep the engagement, productivity and motivation going.

Reducing the overheads

Expenditures tend to quickly add up and they can melt the budget in no time. The best way to prevent this disaster from shattering your entrepreneurial dreams is to keep the spending in check. So, calculate exactly how much money is coming in and out of your business. Next, identify major problem areas, where you can make savings. There is no shortage of tactics here: working from home, outsourcing instead of hiring full-time, improving power quality to trim electricity bills, buying supplies in bulk, increasing water conservation, etc.

Sow the seeds of success

If you really mean business, you have to compete on more than just price or product quality. Never succumb to the temptation to cut corners or fight on all fronts at once. Take your time planning and fleshing out strategies. Assess risks and tackle problems before they spiral out of control. Get to know your audience and adapt to rapidly-changing preferences. Keep up the pace technological advancements and market trends. You should be able to tap into a steady stream of cash and propel your whole organization forward. 

Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in topics related to marketing and latest business trends. In her free time she enjoys exercising and preparing healthy meals for her family.

How Agile Changed Project Management for Good

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Depending on who you ask and how liberal with your definition of Agile you are willing to be, agile project management has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Simply put, the common sense tenets behind agile project management are just too common sense to be limited to just one industry, country or era.

However, when we talk about agile project management today, we mostly see it in terms of agile software development with a bit of lean manufacturing that directly preceded and influenced agile.

In that sense, we really can talk about a more direct and obvious way that agile changed project management in the last 20-odd years, with far-fetching consequences, both good and bad.

Agile branching out

Agile project management, as discussed today,was born in the software development industry as a way to address certain inherent problems observed when trying to deliver better, more valuable software. A number of methodologies, frameworks and approaches developed over the years, with many of them already having large numbers of proponents when the term Agile was actually chosen to denote this new approach to handling software projects.

Due to the positive effects of agile project management on the quality of software being delivered by the teams and companies that adopted it, agile slowly but steadily started to creep into other industries and it is currently present in industries and fields such as healthcare, manufacturing (where its roots lie), marketing, HR and even sales.

But, what is it exactly that makes agile project management so interesting and beneficial when done the right way?

Improved adaptability

One of the biggest benefits of agile project management over more traditional PM approaches is the improved adaptability, a true cornerstone of agile. Namely, agile accepts uncertainty and change as an inseparable part of any project and actually welcomes it. Planning done in agile is kept to a realistic minimum and the project is allowed to inform itself, so to say. The team estimates, inspects and re-estimates every aspect of the project as it is going on, making them more adaptable and reducing waste.

Emphasis on communication

The value of constant communication is one of the main themes in agile, extending beyond just communication within the team.Communication in agile entails communication with customers, other organizational groups and individuals, partners, suppliers, end-users and anyone else that could be considered a stakeholder. While all agile approaches preach this, some of them, such as Scrum (the most widely adopted agile framework)even prescribes events that are aimed at boosting communication.

Empowered teams

Another way in which agile changed project management is that it re-introduced the world to a very common sense concept – grown-up people do not require round the clock babysitting to do their work. In fact, they will be much more efficient and innovative if they are treated like adults and given autonomy. Agile project management therefore promotes self-organized teams that make decisions on their own, pull in work as they feel comfortable, but also adopt a shared and more pronounced feeling of responsibility for their work.

Better customer outcomes

At the very core of agile is delivering a superior product (originally a piece of software). In other words, we are talking about a product of high quality and high business value to the customer. The points we covered above all lead to this – adaptability which ensures the end product/service makes sense in the marketplace; communication with the customer and other stakeholders which also informs a valuable product and empowered teams that see this product as their own and do not just ‘put in 8 hours at the office’.

A few considerations

Agile project management has become an ecosystem of its own, with its own theory and the inevitable debates, its various approaches, certifications, roles and specifically developed Agile tools.If you are interested in adopting agile for your company, you would do well to learn more.

Also, you should remember that it takes some time and a lot of effort and dedication for agile to work. Just saying you are agile does not mean that you are – it is a huge shift in the way your business does things.

Finally, sometimes agile simply isn’t the best approach due to the nature of the work your company may be doing, your customers or the makeup of your organization. However, even in those cases, agile principles can be a welcome addition, if only in the company culture sense of the word.

AUTHOR: Jug Babic is a marketer at VivifyScrum, a company behind the eponymous agile project management software. You can find him on Twitter – @BabicJug.