Personal branding
I recently had the great pleasure of introducing the concept of personal branding and online identity management to a group of psychologists from the Maltese Psychological Association – emphasis being on the need for professionals to manage their online presence. As anywhere else there was a typical bell-curve distribution when it came to their familiarity with social media in general, and the effective use of social media in specific. This resulted in a marvellous and engaging session where I was also amongst those learning.
As promised I am posting the slides used during the session. Do not be afraid of leaving me a message, commenting, or contacting me should you have anything to add/ask.
Job insecurity associated with depression
Thinking you are on the way out?
I recently came across yet another study confirming the aversive effects of enduring job insecurity on staff. This recent longitudinal study found an association between job insecurity and the use of antidepressants, suggesting that job insecurity is related to depression. This was even more so if the participants had a previous history of job loss. In other words, the fear of losing your job will make you sick! Another study confirming the negative health effects associated with job insecurity can be found here.
If you are managing people you can imagine what debilitating effects this can have on your staff’s performance. Whereas not necessarily a paradox, it is a concern that in the age where the “job for life” concept is long gone the lack of job security has potentially even greater averse effects than ever before on an organisation’s business performance. This is especially so seeing how dependent businesses now are on people processes compared to tangible resources such as materials and machinery.
So what can we learn from studies like these? One potential learning point would be that it is not necessarily working in a stressful environment that can lead to burn out related symptoms, but rather the fear of losing your job! Rather than worrying about whether they give employees too many things to do (some unions would argue that this is not happening in the first place), employers might want to spend more time looking at increasing levels of transparency in their structures and processes such as communication.
Comments are welcomed
Evaluation of training
I am an active user of social media (something we will explore here in more detail later), and one of the places I enjoy spending time is at LinkedIn. There is this very useful function where you can ask and answer questions about more or less about anything. The other day there was an interesting question put forth regarding how to evaluate training, and I gave a short outline of best practice as I see it. In short I rely on the model of Kirkpatrick, but use a more updated and business focused approach than what he originally postulated.
I am going to keep this short and straight to the point!
Ideally you plan the evaluation of training at the same time as you plan the training itself. As for the evaluation itself, best practice is to evaluate it at five levels.
Level 1 – Reactions : Immediately after the training session is finished you should give out “happy sheets”. Basically allowing the participants to give their feedback on what they thought of the training, the setting, the trainer and similar. Whereas this doesn’t tell you whether the training itself was effective, it is useful as it can help improve the training, and also as it gives the training face validity.
Level 2 - Learning: At the start and end of the training you need to give the participants a test that is reliable and valid on the topic they are receiving training on. With the pretest you will establish a baseline level of KSA. Any positive changes to the test scores when doing the test after the training should indicate that the training was effective when it comes to knowledge.
Level 3 – Application: After some time you would also want to evaluate whether the skills learned during the training is actually put in use. One thing is to establish straight after the training whether someone knows the training material. Another thing is actually whether someone is using the knowledge while at work. You would want to look at how often at to what extent a skill/knowledge is being used.
If you manage to evaluate training at these three levels, you are already doing a much better job than the great majority. However you still would want to look at level 4 and 5.
Level 4 – Business impact: You should also evaluate whether the training actually had a positive effect on the business. Did the sales training actually increase someone’s sales?
Level 5 – ROI: Let’s be honest, this is the real question in many cases. Did the business get a return on investment?
There is of course much more to each level of evaluation, and I should return to this topic later, but feel free to contact me should you need any more guidance right now.
Update
So, it has been some time now since the last time i added any content of value to this site. Believe me, this is not because i have lost interest in communicating my insights when it comes to psychology applied in an everyday setting – but simply an uncontrollable variable called reality 
I am not the one for complaining since the reasons i have been absent are all related to successes in other areas. Still, i have missed the opportunity to use this blog for reflection. So for those of you who have contacted me directly to ask whether i am to return from this self imposed blog exile, I owe you all a big thanks for making me remember that my time spent here is of use for someone else
I cannot promise weekly entries, but going forward i do promise to become more active again.
Thanks again for encouraging me to keep going,
Omar
