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Keeping Your Skill Set Current Can Be Key to Keeping Your Job Small and midsize companies can’t afford to not keep up with technology, and neither can enterprise-level companies. This past fall, IBM notified employees, who it had determined needed additional training, they were required to step up their technological game, and that they would receive only 90% of their salary while embarking upon this additional training. Talk about an incentive to stay on top of changes in technology ! According to the article in the New York Times covering this move, some IBM workers received an email letting them know that an assessment had determined certain members of the team had “not kept pace with acquiring the skills and expertise needed to address changing client needs, technology and market requirements.” While some criticized the move, the reality is that employees can no longer be complacent when it comes to their grasp of technology and how to use it to help their businesses grow. That’s something to keep in mind, for sure, whether you’re just embarking on a career or whether you’re already in the workforce and want to make sure you have the skills you need to stay marketable.

The Modern Worker Needs to Be Constantly Learning

The internet has also played a big role in the more uncertain fate for modern employees as it much easier for businesses to outsource which enables them to get the best value for their money

constantly improving your skills to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the modern employee.

Identify The Skills You Need

Wainhouse Research, a consulting firm in Duxbury, Mass., estimates that a knowledge worker — one whose job focuses on handling information — in the United States spends an average of 104 minutes each month in conference ca

lls. Such calls have become an orgy of multitasking, serving as a backdrop for a free-for-all of household chores, personal hygiene, online shopping and last-minute income tax filing

Mr. Reece asks his clients to use videoconferencing. He says there are always people who will resist, telling him their Internet connection is too weak, for example. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he asks that they put up a still photo. “Even if you only get a photo, it’s more humanizing,” he said.

When I ask people close to Zuckerberg how, exactly, he has pulled off these achievements, I don’t hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into small, doable victories. "Most of our conversation was about long-term strategy, and then we’d backtrack from there to what we should do over the next month," says Bret Taylor, who worked as Facebook’s CTO from 2009 to 2012 and who was at the company

or all of us who work with him, it’s like, Man, he is so good at improving."

Aim ridiculously high, and focus on where you want to go over the long term.

To Get a Job in Your 50s, Maintain Friendships in Your 40s

researchers found that older people on average had smaller social networks than younger people, Professor Wanberg said. This is not necessarily bad — as we age, many of us find that the quality of our relationships is more important than the quantity. But in the job search process, the number of connections we maintain in our professional and personal networks is often critical.

Once you hit your early 40s, even if you are not looking for a job, work to learn new skills and stretch yourself, Professor Wanberg said. Also, keep your networks strong by staying in touch with former colleagues and classmates, along with current co-workers and clients whom you don’t see regularly, she said.

1. “Hybrid HTML5 development will gain enterprise momentum.”

2. “Enterprise mobility will become more widely adopted. We will see more mobility and digitalization projects.”

3. “A fragmented industry will continue to consolidate into fewer, better platforms.”

About two million people a day now use Slack, mainly to chat with others at work. On Tuesday, the company is unveiling a couple of initiatives that will add new capabilities to the system. The first is an app store that will let developers of business software more easily plug their programs into Slack. Together with its investors, the company is also creating an $80 million fund to invest in apps that can be integrated with Slack.

Atlassian makes HipChat, one of Slack’s chief rivals, which also offers integration with other applications.

In its first incarnation, the directory will feature 150 apps that are compatible with Slack, including programs from Google, Twitter, Dropbox and Box.

The key trends

1 – Learning focuses on increasing business results

2 – Strategic talent management becomes essential

According to a study from the Girl Scout Research Institute, 73 percent of girls are interested in STEM-related fields, but girls are more likely to “drop out” of STEM fields once they get to college. It also found that about half of all girls don’t think STEM is a typical career path for women, and 57 percent agreed if they went into a STEM career, “they’d have to work harder than a man just to be taken seriously.”

In 2014, GSUSA revolutionized its cookie program when it introduced Digital Cookie, which allowed Girl Scouts to sell cookies online via a personalized website or in-person using a mobile app..

Girl Scouts teaches the five essential skills of goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics,” Chávez said. “It’s all part of Girl Scouts’ legacy of teaching cutting-edge skills relevant to today’s girls, while staying true to the core values of our mission. Digital Cookie 2.0 is allowing us to do this on a whole new level, which will help girls in school, in their careers, and in life.”

You have to be together long enough to get over the academic pose ("Heh, I’m the expert here") and learn to listen. Love is important, and often overlooked. Love makes it possible for the writer whose work is being tested to accept criticism gracefully, since she knows it is meant in love. Men don’t grasp it, usually. They are so busy competing that they don’t realize that what actually works is cooperation. Whoops — sorry: gender candor alert.

Don't dismiss delegation as an outmoded concept that's part of the "command-and-control" model of years past. You may not believe in rigid, hierarchical organizations. But even the founders of flatter, more collaborative young businesses must ensure that every employee can acquire higher-level skills and duties.

Delegation is not task assignment. You're not simply assigning work to employees that falls within their job duties and responsibilities. To delegate, you must give someone the responsibility and authority to do something that's normally part of your jo

Delegation involves three elements: responsibility authority accountability