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You literally expand your brain through use. In
a real sense you are the architect of your own
brain. You can develop your own intelligence.
Barring injury or major illness, you do not
lose brain capacity as you grow older, so long
as you keep learning and keep seeking new
experiences – through hobbies, reading, work,
sports, art, music, etc. The brain thrives on
novelty and only declines with lack of stimu-
lation.
The motto is: Use it or lose it!
The choice is yours.
The more you use your brain, the better it gets. At any age. The less you use it,
the fewer brain cell connections you make, and eventually its capability will
decline.

- Accelerated Learning Techniques

An Inventory of Interview Questions taken from “It’s Your Move” by Marge Watters

Position Related
* What did you enjoy most (least) about your last position?
* What would you like to have done more of in your last job?
* What are the most important things you look for in a job?
* Describe your understanding of what is required to fulfill this role?
* What objectives would you set for your first 12 months in the position?
* What aspects of your current job do you consider to be most critical to your success in the role?

Working environment
* How would you describe the culture of your current (most recent) organization?
* What would you consider to be an ideal organizational culture?
* After working with the same organization for as long as you have, what obstacles or challenges do you anticipate in trying to adapt to a new organization?

Leadership Style
* How would you describe your leadership style?  Please give an example of a specific action you have taken that would illustrate this style.
* How do you stay current on what your team or work group is accomplishing?
* In what ways has your leadership style changed as you have gained experience?

Operating Style
* Please describe how you handle the following activities and give examples to illustrate:
- organizing your time
- managing your priorities
- bring new ideas forward
- communicating with others – subordinates, peers, senior managers, clients
- managing issues
* Tell me about a work experience you have had that you found to be particularly frustrating.  How did you deal with it and what was the outcome?  How could you have handled it differently?
* What has been the most difficult management responsibility you have handled?

Team Skills
* What type of people do you work with best?  Why?
* How do you handle conflict with co-workers?  Please give me an example.
* Tell me about a time when you were on a team that was successful in accomplishing a particularly difficult task.  In what ways did you participate and contribute to this achievement?
* From your experience in working as a team member, tell me about a time when the team objected to your ideas.  How did you attempt to influence or persuade them to accept your views?  What results did you achieve?
* Looking back on the team experiences, have you ever assumed the role of team leader?  How did you act when you were the leader on various projects?

Negotiating Style
* Please give me some examples of different approaches you’ve used in persuading someone to help you accomplish a work priority.
* How would you approach and prepare for dealing with a complex issue requiring you to negotiate with one or more people?  Please give me an example?
* Please describe a particularly successful negotiation in which you took part.  What did you do to contribute to the success?
* Please describe a negotiations that did not produce the results you wanted?  What went wrong and what would you do differently next time?

Decision-Making Style
* Please describe the process that you generally follow to make decisions?
* To what extent do you provide opportunities for your subordinates to participate in making decisions?
* Describe a poor decision that you made.  What might you have done differently to produce a successful result?
* Tell me about a time when you changes a decision you had made or an opinion you had made or an opinion you held because you were persuaded that you were wrong.

Accomplishments
* What would you consider to be your most significant career-related accomplishment to date?  Why?
* Name three or four of your proudest accomplishments.
* What would you consider to be the biggest disappointment or failure in your career to date?  How did you handle it?  What did you learn from it?  What should you have done differently to produce a more satisfactory outcome?
* How do you define and measure success?

Personal Characteristics
* What characteristics would you say are thFrom It’s Your Move by Marge Watterse most  important for a good manager (sales executive, senior economist, CFO, etc.) to have?  Can you describe some accomplishments that would demonstrate how you have displayed these characteristics?
* How do you react to criticism?
* How do you handle pressure on the job? Stress?
* What did you think of your last boss? Your last organization?
* What would you consider to be your three strongest assets?  Please give me an example of a time when you demonstrated these strengths to achieve successful results.
* How would you describe yourself?  Tell me about some if the people or events in your life outside work that have had the greatest influence on you.
* What makes you unique among your peers?
* What areas of your skills and abilities do you feel need more work in order for you to become more effective in your career?
* How do you stay plugged into what’s happening in your current organization?
* How do you stay current on new developments in your area of expertise?
* Tell me about a time when you had to take a stand on an unpopular position or issue.
* Have you learned more from your success or from your failures?  Please give examples.
* Describe three elements of your  personal code of workplace ethics.
* Why have you changed jobs so frequently/infrequently

The salesperson who has taken the greatest amount of time to acquaint himself or herself with the most specific needs of the customer is the one who builds the highest level of trust and the best sales relationship. Thorough preparation is the essential precondition for successful selling.

- Brian Tracy

http://www.expertsacademy.com/frameworks

November 15, 2010

Time Management Tools and Techniques
By Brian Tracy

There are five time management tools and techniques that you should practice for maximum productivity and good personal organization. Each of them takes a little time to learn and master, but pays you back in greater efficiency and effectiveness for the rest of your life.

1.  Use a time planner. The first time management tool that you need is a time planning system that contains everything you need to plan and organize your life. The best time planners, whether loose-leaf binders or electronic versions, enable you to plan for the year, the month, the week, and for each day. A good time planner will contain a master list where you can capture every task, goal, or required action as it comes up. This master list then becomes the core of your time-planning system. From this master list, you allocate individual tasks to various months, weeks, and days.

2.  Always work from a list. Every effective executive works from a daily list. It is the most powerful tool ever discovered for maximum productivity. When you create your daily list, you begin by writing down every single task that you intend to complete over the course of the day. The rule is that you will increase your efficiency by 25 percent the very first day that you start using a list. This means that you will get two extra hours of productive time in an eight hour day from the simple act of making a list before you start work, of everything you have to do that day. You can bring order out of chaos faster with a list than with any other time management tool.

3.  Organize your list by priority. Once you have a list for your day

4.  Use any time management system you like. The variety of personal digital assistants (PDA’s) and computer-based time management systems available today is absolutely wonderful. No matter what you do, in whatever field, there are digital time management systems that you can tap into or load onto your personal computer or mobile device to help organize every part of your life.

5.  Set up a “45-file system.” There is a simple method of organizing your time and your schedule for up to two years in advance. It is called the “45-file system.” This is a tickler file that lets you plan and organize your activities and callbacks for the next twenty-four months. This is how it works. First you get a box of forty-five files with fourteen hanging files to put them in. The forty-five files are divided as follows: There are thirty-one files numbered one through thirty-one for the days of the month. There are twelve files for the months of the year. January through December. The last two files are for the next two years. This is a wonderful system that you can also use with hanging files in your desk drawer.

Action Exercise
Get a time planner of some kind, whichever format you are most comfortable using (eg digital or paper), and invest the time necessary to lean how to use it. The payoff in saved time and increased productivity will be enormous.

• “Success is not having to worry about things.”
• “Success is having the time to do what you want to do.”
• “Success is giving your kids the confidence and esteem to allow them to do whatever they want
to do.”
• “Success is figuring out what is most important to you and then sticking to it.”
• “Success is being able to travel wherever and whenever I want.”
• “Success is being able to retire early.”
• “Success is loving my job.”
• “Success is not wanting anything.”

1 . Don’t equate happiness with money. You can adapt to income shifts relatively quickly. The
long-lasting effects are basically zero.
2. Exercise regularly. Taking regular exercise generates further energy and stimulates your mind
and body.
3. Have sex (preferably with someone you love). Sex is consistently rated as among the highest
generators of happiness. So what are you waiting for?
4. Devote time and effort to close relationships. Close relationships require work and effort but
pay vast rewards in terms of happiness.
5. Pause for reflection, and meditate on the good things in life. Simple reflection on the good
aspects of life helps prevent “hedonic adaptation” (to be defined in a bit).
6. Seek work that engages your skills, and look to enjoy your job. It makes sense to do something
you enjoy. This is turn is likely to allow you to flourish at your job, creating a pleasant feedback
loop.
7. Give your body the sleep it needs.
8. Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake. Enjoy the moment. Faulty perceptions of what makes
you happy might lead to the wrong pursuits. Additionally, activities might become a means to
an end, rather than something to be enjoyed, defeating the purpose in the first place.
9. Take control of your life, and set achievable goals.
1 0. Remember to follow all the rules. (This comes from England, after all.)

• Regular exercise, more-than-regular sex, socializing, and so on.
• Trying to see the glass as half full (and imagining it getting fuller), taking
the time to review how fortunate you are, and so on.
• The process of resolute

People Should Pay You to Work Your Passions

Never do what you don’t enjoy. Doing so is like saving sex for old age. Not a very good idea.

1 . What is your mission? Passion
2. What can the whole and impassioned you be the best at? Proficiencies
3. What is most important to you, where you are in Life? Priorities
4. How do you bring yourself to market? Plan

5. How do you fund your plan? Prove

Passion + Proficiencies = Work or “Career” Options

Proficiencies + Priorities = Work Life Prioritization

Passion + Proficiencies + Priorities = Journeys and Niche  Plan

• What am I innately good at doing?
• What do I absolutely love to do?
• What are my personal values?
• What life experiences do I want to leverage and fulfill?

- Passion at Work: How to Find Work You Love and Live the Time of Your Life

http://www.employmentdigest.net/2008/01/hints-for-working-with-a-headhunter/

Some tips for working with headhunters include:

• Practice your elevator pitch. This means that in the time it would take you to promote yourself to a company CEO on an elevator ride, you should be able to clearly and concisely explain to a recruiter why you would be a valuable employee. Don’t worry about job titles and dates of employment. Speak about how you saved your company money by implementing a new system, or how you’re often brought in as quality control on important projects, or how your creative energies led to several industry awards.

• Don’t lie. Headhunters are savvy enough to check up on your background, and they’ll catch you in untruths, whether it is exaggerating your contribution to a company’s bottom line or what university you attended. They’ll not recommend a less-than-honest candidate to any employer.

• Do your homework. It’s fair to ask the headhunter about other clients and how much expertise they have in your area of interest. You can even ask to talk with someone with whom they’ve worked.

• Be realistic. Do your research about salary norms in your area so that you’re not making unreasonable demands to the headhunter.

• Trust your gut. Do you communicate well with the headhunter? Face-to-face meetings may not be possible, but you should develop a rapport with the recruiter so that you feel comfortable with that person’s knowledge of you and of the industry. Even though the recruiter is working for the employer, you need to feel comfortable that you’ll be treated fairly and professionally throughout the interview and hiring process.

• If you choose to work with multiple headhunters, let each of them know what you’re doing. Otherwise, more than one might promote you to the same employer, and that can be a problem when it comes time for them to collect their fees.

Your resumé is not only your gate pass to go past this tough sentry, but it is also
the tool that creates the fi rst impression. You use this tool to demonstrate your professionalism, tout your achievements and most importantly make obvious the fi t
between your strengths and the organization’s needs. Thus, a good resumé:
 Is a vehicle for crossing the fi rst big chasm of screening
 Provides quick reasons for selection
 Demonstrates your professionalism
 Highlights a fi t and synergy between (prospective) employer’s needs and your
strengths.

PRINCIPLES OF WRITING A RESUMÉ
In order to achieve the above objectives, the basic tenets or principles to be kept on
mind when writing a resumé can be summarized by the Five Fs:
 Fit
 Focus

 Futuristic
 Formatted
 Factual

First, you research about the company, their
business and their strengths. Ask yourself some of the following questions:
 Is the business of this company something that interests me?
 What have been the company’s strengths?
 What are the technology focus areas of the company?
 What has been the recent press coverage about the company?
 Do I know anyone in the company? If so, can I talk to him to fi nd out some
more details?

Laying out: The layout of the resumé is the next key factor. The layout should be
compelling enough to highlight the right things at the very fi rst glance. Laying out
the resumé entails:
 Deciding the headings that are most relevant for the job: In the next section
we would see various headings in a resumé—like objectives, accomplishments,
etc. Not all would be relevant for each job. Having known the fi t factor from
the previous step, you can now decide which of the headings would be more
appropriate.
 Sequencing the resumé giving the most important details fi rst: For example, if
you have multi-faceted experience that covers development in several technologies, you can use the knowledge about the company to decide which experiences
and skills you will highlight fi rst.
 Deciding the formatting so as to use meaningful highlights like fonts, bold,
underline and so on: Deciding what to highlight and how to highlight at the
outset, sharpens the focus, leads to better formatting and increases the fit

THE STRUCTURE AND CONTENTS OF A RESUMÉ
In general, a resumé contains the following sections:
 An objective section
 Highlights/summary
 Accomplishments or unique selling propositions
 Substantiating facts, made up of professional experience, academic achievements and other accomplishments.

- The ACE of Soft Skills: Attitude, Communication and Etiquette for Success

How to pass the CCNA exam

By davidfernandez, eHow Member

I want to do this! What’s This?

http://www.ehow.com/how_5338396_pass-ccna-exam.html

Pass the CCNA Exam

http://www.cce.edu.om/course/images/img_CCNA.jpg

User-Submitted Article

Passing the CCNA exam will help give you a leg up on the competition whether you are just starting out or an IT veteran. I’ve outlined 3 straightforward steps below that helped me pass the CCNA exam, and will hopefully do the same for you.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You’ll Need:

• Study Material
• Test Simulator
• CCNA Books
• Lab Simulator

1. 1

   SET A GOAL TO PASS THE CCNA EXAM AND SCHEDULE THE TEST

   I know that this sounds pretty basic, but you would be surprised at how many of my associates have said that they’ll get a Cisco certification some day and never do. Every person whom I know who has earned this certificate has made it a goal to pass the ccna test before any of the really intense studying begins.

   I suggest that you schedule the test as soon as possible. This will do two things; create a deadline so you can budget your time, and it makes you commit to taking the test.

   There are a couple of links below which will show you test centers near you.

2. 2

   GATHER YOUR STUDY MATERIAL

   There are a couple of things you will have to have for to prepare for the test.

   1. If you don’t have access to Cisco equipment you’ll need to purchase a CCNA simulator. There are several available out there and they are well worth the investment.

   2. Books… Save your money and look on eBay, many times people will sell their books right after passing to recoup some costs. Visit www.ciscopress.com to see what the latest versions are.

   3. Study Guides. There are several companies out there like Test King, etc. which bundle a simulator with additional “guides”. My experience has been that these guides use sample questions that are pretty close to the exact answers you’ll find on the test. i.e. they come from Brain Dumps. (This article won’t get into whether or not people should do this, just informing the reader as to what’s available.)

3. 3

   STUDY STUDY STUDY!

   Everyone has their own methods, so I am not going to get into the details. With that being said, here are some tips that helped me pass the CCNA:

   1. Read the material and do the labs! That’s right, I read the CCNA books from Cisco at least two times and did all of the accompanying labs.

   2. Find a study buddy. This one’s invaluable, you need someone who you can be accountable to and who can explain a difficult topic in a different manner

   3. Look for study material online, there are forums and calculators which are available for free.

4. 4

   LAST MINUTE PREPERATIONS TO PASS THE CCNA

   I agree with many forums out there which suggest taking CCNA practice exams several times, especially in the last couple of weeks leading up to your test. Find a good simulator so that you can get use to the testing format. Set aside plenty of time and try to mimic as close as possible the testing center by choosing a quite location where you will not be disturbed, using only a #2 pencil and blank piece of paper, following the time closely.

Read more: How to pass the CCNA exam | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_5338396_pass-ccna-exam.html#ixzz15Gcx4adm

====================================

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-pass-CCNA:-6-Steps-to-Success&id=105206

• 1. Getting ready mentally: First thing you need to do is mentally prepare your self. What I mean by that is that you have to seriously think about on why are you getting CCNA and why do you want to be CCNA certified. You have to firmly decide and believe that you will get CCNA within next 3-6 months or so. Try to budget your study time well. If you a very social person (like me) you will have to give up some of your social time for the next couple of months. Your friends and family will understand. Trust me: it is well worth it. Once you get that cert you can make up for the lost social time.
• 2. Getting the right study material: Second thing you need to do is to get proper study material. There is lot of controversy around this and some people go overboard with study guides, books, simulators and such. I believe that two Cisco Press books INTR and ICND by Wendell Odom are enough as far as the books go. They are really well written and easy to follow. So sign up at [http://www.ciscopress.com] and get those two books. Make sure you got the latest version. You will also want to get some kind of a simulator that will let you practice commands and that will also build up your confidence. You can buy real equipment but that could get expensive. I highly recommend that you become member of Cisco Certification forum. Forum is huge and you will get lot of helpful answers, tips and advices pretty quick. (I know I did)
• 3. Approach and diving deep: There are many different approaches to studying from books but I will tell you about mine. This step will take the most of your studying time. -Before you even start reading any of the books I suggest learning binary math (really easy) and subnetting so you can do it in your sleep. http//www.learntosubnet.com is excellent resource. -read both books casually once from front to cover (make sure you cover introduction and practice questions too). This will give you good overview. -Install both CD’s that came with books and practices some of the questions. Don’t worry if you get lot of them wrong. -Now, you will ready both books again but this time you will have to read it to truly understand the concept and how things work. Master one chapter and do questions from just that chapter until you sick of it. Then move to the next chapter. -Once you mastered all chapters do lot of questions and labexercises. Those two CD’s will give you ability to do that. 4. Schedule the test: You’re not done yet with studying but it is really good to schedule the test after you completed step 3 in this article. Here is why: If you schedule the test a month in advance right after you completed step 3, you won’t be able to slack and make excuses not to study hard until tests and it is also good to give your self a headline. I have seen people working on their CCNA for 2 years. They master one or two chapters, then they rest for 2 two months and right when they think they are ready for the next chapter, they forget what they have learned in the first chapter. 5. Read both books one more time to refresh. This is optional, but I highly recommend reading the both books one more time. If you read both books in a three week that will give you one more week before the test to cram which is subject of the next step. So by now you should’ve read both books three times over. I also suggest re-reading questions and answers from both books one more time. 6. Cram, Cram and Cram -This is the last part of your study and there is no turning back. Deadline is hanging around your neck like a noose. You should cram Q&A for no more then 10 days before you take the test. At this point it is really important that you get fresh and different questions then those included with your CD’s. Some people claims that brain dumps or Q&A are bad and evil. I tend to disagree with that. At this point you already firmly grasped the whole CCNA concept and Q&A will only help you. So get some Q&A exam question and cram, cram and cram them for a week. Don’t use books or CD’s anymore. There is no looking back. No worries, material from the books will return to you at the right time. -Don’t do any studying a night or a day before the test. Go out with your wife or significant other to a dinner and a movie. Relax. It is very important to relax and get a good night sleep since one of those testing boots could really be intimidating. If you did all the steps above and read books with intention to understand the topics and how stuff works (no pun intended), and not just to pass the test you should be more then ready by now. We came to an end of this short tutorial. I hope this article give you at least some ideas on how to approach studying for CCNA. If you fail CCNA first time, don’t get discouraged. You will have more knowledge and confidence when you attempt it the next time then the person who passed it on the first try. Whatever approach you take I wish you good luck and prosper career.

Vanja Buric is Network Engineer, and works for Charter Communication Business Engineering Department,and also owner of the http://www.vanjaburic.com website, where you can get latest networking news, articles,tips, free e-Books, virus alerts and lot more… as well as purchase IT Exam study guides.

Organizations have unique personalities and characteristics that profound  affect the way work is done and determine what type of persons feel comfortable working there.  If you are not compatible with the true personality of your workplace, it can be major struggle for you.

An oragnization’s culture is revealed in what get done, what is said and how its people think.  Culture affects the way employees interpret their experiences.  It makes some behaviours praiseworthy and others taboo.  It governs the way individuals relate to one another and to customers, suppliers and competitors.  The true core values of an organization are exhibited in its culture

- Marge Watters, “It’s Your Move”, p 49