Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Developing Employability Skills.

Today, employers in every industry sector emphasize the need for employees with certain foundational skills. These include a strong academic grounding in reading and math, as well as individual abilities such as teamwork, problem solving, work ethic and integrity.

While employers rely on employees to have the same basic skills, they do not always talk about or label them the same way. This makes it difficult for prospective employees and educators to know exactly what it takes to be ready to succeed in any career path in any industry. Anishjai has brought together the organizations that represent employers from major economic sectors, and they have worked to identify the core set of fundamental skills that potential employees need in the workplace – and a common vocabulary to explain them.




Employ-ability skills, also known as key competencies or soft skills, are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. These are the skills, attitudes and actions that enable workers to get along with their fellow workers and supervisors and to make sound, critical decisions.
Employ-ability skills are generally divided into three skill sets: (a) basic academic skills, (b) critical thinking skills and (c) personal qualities. The three skill sets are typically broken down into more detailed skill sets.

The Anishjai has identified the Common Employ-ability Skills for all jobs, which benefit:
 • Employers, who can now identify the common skills that all their employees should exhibit.

• Potential employees, who know what basic skills employers expect them to have for any job in the workplace, and can better communicate their skill levels to employers.

• Educators and other learning providers, who know what foundational skills to emphasize.

Core Skills

Ø  initiative & problem-solving
Ø  communication
Ø  team-work
Ø  leadership
Ø  commercial awareness
Ø  organisation & planning
Ø  self-management


What Are Employ-ability Skills?

The two greatest concerns of employers today are finding good workers and training them. The difference between the skills needed on the job and those possessed by applicants, sometimes called the skills-gap, is of real concern to human resource managers and business owners looking to hire competent employees. While employers would prefer to hire people who are trained and ready to go to work, they are usually willing to provide the specialized, job-specific training necessary for those lacking such skills.

Most discussions concerning today’s workforce eventually turn to employ-ability skills. Finding workers who have employ-ability or job readiness skills that help them fit into and remain in the work environment is a real problem. Employers need reliable, responsible workers who can solve problems and who have the social skills and attitudes to work together with other workers. Creativity, once a trait avoided by employers who used a cookie cutter system, is now prized among employers who are trying to create the empowered, high performance workforce needed for competitiveness in today’s marketplace. Employees with these skills are in demand and are considered valuable human capital assets to companies.

Employability skills are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. These are the skills, attitudes and actions that enable workers to get along with their fellow workers and supervisors and to make sound, critical decisions. Unlike occupational or technical skills, employability skills are generic in nature rather than job specific and cut across all industry types, business sizes, and job levels from the entry-level worker to the senior-most position

Friday, March 13, 2015

Google will begin ranking mobile-friendly sites higher starting April 21

Big changes to Google’s search algorithms are coming: beginning April 21, the company will increase the ranking of sites that are mobile-friendly and surface app results much higher.

The company says that the change will have a “significant impact” on all mobile searches in all languages worldwide, but as a result Google says that users will find higher quality results.

Along with this change, Google will start to use more information from indexed apps as a factor when ranking search results for users that are signed-in and have the app installed.




These changes are great news for mobile users as it should help motivate those sites that still don’t have a mobile site to actually build one. Google started highlighting mobile-friendly sites in results last year.

Site admins who want to test their site’s mobile compatibility can use Google’s tools to quickly evaluate the status of a page.