Blog posts for Executives

Competence gaining

Last time, we looked into why competences are important for your job and your salary. Now, we are taking the opportunity to discuss how to actually gain competences. I recently put up the website for competences and this post here is a part to get some more focus on the competence matter as announced.

Generation Y and their resigning habits

Recently, I have not been happy concerncing my work environment: The work load and interactions with my superiors. So I resigned, without a job offer already at hand. I tried beforehand to explain my reasoning, however, without a future job offer, for the old generation’s boss this looked more like blackmailing and bluffing. Thus, let us analyse the mindset of generaion Y a bit.

EU ruled: Employers are forced tracking working time

We work to earn money, so we change time for money. In most small and medium companies it is not common tracking working time. I have seen many times what happens when people work and do not track their times. They accumulate a non-neglectable amount of overtime and this is never paid back by holidays or moneywiese. So, we can see here a benefit. But what disadvantages might occur?

Unique competences are poisonous

How interchangable are you? Think about it: Where can you go right now in your organisation and still help out to at least 80 % of your actual position capabilities. I have had some thoughts about it and would like to share them. Let us talk about unique competences and why they hinder more than help.

Leading by example

I have recently read an article about the art of leading by example. Leading by example is something great – in theory. In this blog entry, I would like to discuss the issue of what this means in an organization and how it is a key to protect your coworkers by a certain standard.

Team Leader: First year reflection

The jolly ol’ christmas time brought a lot of something one rarely sees these days: Relaxation. I tried to use this time of year to reflect my doing and undoing of the last several months. The end of the year is perfect because you are drained heavily to family and friend events and get away from your job time. The distance to the rat race is gold, let us talk about how I used the calmer season.

The skill of failing – lessons learned

Our society celebrates victories and success. These successes are often celebrated after project milestones. But nobody likes to talk about the stories behind them. The story of careful planning, focusing for goals, fighting against all odds and failing multiple times. I think failing is a very important skill and hugely underestimated as a soft skill. I consider it as the one of the most important skill for research and development.

Wrong stimuli: The German Employment Bureau and what businesses can learn from it

One of the most renowned measures of the state of a national economy is the unemployment rate. Luckily, living in Germany we have had some luck during the biggest financial crises in 2008/2009 which resulted just in a slight increase of unemployment rate. Nowadays, the unemployment rate is as low as ever: Five percent was announced several days ago. Surely, there were some measures in place at the right time. The most effective measure was the reduced-hour work helping to buffer the layoff of the workers. This is something for another blog entry. Nevertheless, it is interesting to take a peek into the stimulus of the German Employment Bureau (Arbeitsagentur). What is their aim? How do they handle their goal? And why is the way they do it usually wrong? A small discussion about wrong stimuli in fixed processing systems.

Value your employees by investing

Being the team or group leader is sometimes a bit narrowing the view concerning the needs of your employees. You will be faced with the budget. The budget is limiting your possibilities for solving the every days work issues. Whether your budget has a volume of 1 million bugs or 1000, you still have to think first about the needs of your team in my opinion.

Bachelor or Master? What is enough?

I have studied in Germany and Great-Britain in two of the leading engineering universities. So I know the different systems quite a bit. While the anglo-saxon education system tends to go for Bachelor graduations, then skips masters mostly to aim for PhDs, in Germany the master level is the standard. I want to challenge the master level here to some extend and encourage students to leave university earlier. Also, I would like employers to rethink their expectations to graduates in this article.