13 Steps to Advance in Your Career

As you contemplate your career, where do you hope to be in five years? Three years? Next year? Do you want to advance your career? If so what are you waiting for? Start taking the steps needed to advance your career today. It’s not going to happen unless YOU make it happen.    Create a leaning plan and share it with your boss. Employees who proactively share their plan with their manager will be more likely to receive the support and guidance needed to advance their careers than those who do not. Involving managers early and often ensures that employees ...

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10 Tasks You Can Do As a Virtual Assistant

There are a lot of tasks that a virtual assistant can do from home to shave ours from the employer’s workweek. The number of virtual assistants are growing. They can work with a contract or freelance doing administrative jobs similarly to an executive assistant or a secretary. Vendor and customer service calls to sending out thank you cards to prospective clients are other activities performed by virtual assistants. Here’s a list of tasks that can be delegated to them:   Click through for more PAs career advice.    Bookkeeping: Keeping tabs on bills and other bookkeeping matters can be one of the ...

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10 Ways to Become a Better Leader

Ever wondered what makes an effective leader? Or what it is about some people that inspires others to follow them? How does a leader bring out the best in others? It starts with having Emotional Intelligence. Leadership is a significant aspect of management. In order to ensure organizational success, co-operation from subordinates as well as greater efficiency, it is important for a manager to be a great, effective and a true leader.   Click through for more PAs career advice. Explore what it takes to be a good leader   The required aspects of effective leadership are as follows: Motivation Integrity ...

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Take Control of Your eMails Now

  This is one area that tops the list of time-killers for many small business owners. Because email is an ongoing form of communication, and we don’t have complete control over the incoming flow, we need to work on improving our productivity in how we receive, organize, reply to and even think about email. The tips below will help you create a system for managing your email in a way that supports productivity instead of eating away at it. Here’s some effective email management tips that will save you time so you can focus on higher priority tasks. See here for ...

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13 Ways to Improve Your Attention to Detail

“Detail oriented” and “pays attention to detail” are requirements you see on nearly every job posting. This makes sense, since being observant about details means you can avoid costly mistakes. The modern workplace is full of distractions. Don’t let your big-picture thinking stop you from caring about the small stuff. Paying attention to the details could give you a competitive advantage.   Check out  our PA Privé careers page for personal assistant jobs and London PA jobs and more.   Develop these 13 simple strategies for ensuring greater attention to detail:    Pay Attention  Really listening means abandoning the multi-tasking for a moment.   Consistent attention ...

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Get Noticed at Work

  There is a need to show to your colleagues and seniors about your skills and the reason why you exist in the company – whether it’s a large organization or small. You need to enhance your visibility to get more responsibility and recognition. Getting noticed at work – in a good way – is usually key to getting promoted. And while that’s not news to anybody, surprisingly, few of us really know what it takes to stand out from the pack. Here 10 great tips that you can put to practice right away and BOOST your confidence at work.   ...

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How to Write a Curriculum Vitae

A good curriculum vitae – or CV – is vital when looking for work, especially when there are numerous candidates for the same job, so what should it contain?   It takes recruiters an average of “6 seconds before they make the initial “fit or not fit decision” on candidates based on CVs, according to research conducted by The Ladders.   Click through if you need advice with personal assistant interview questions or PA interview questions.    What to include Always accompany your CV with an introductory covering letter giving relevant information about how you would suit the job.    Tips to keep in mind. ...

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Dec 10, 2013

How to Deal with Difficult Conversations

Click here for our guide on how to improve communication skills When having a difficult conversation, it’s easy to get wrapped up in what you need. You’re angry so you respond with anger. You’re frustrated so you respond with frustration. It makes sense, but it’s not effective. Instead of reacting, ask yourself a question: what is going on for the other party?    Start with respect. Hold tempers in check by having all participants in the conversation agree at the beginning to respect each other and the problem you are discussing.    Know your objective. What do you want to accomplish with the ...

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Top Tips on How to Negotiate a Better Salary

  Click here if you need advice with personal assistant interview questions or PA interview questions.   Finding out what you are worth requires research, self-reflection and networking. The salary negotiation is a tricky step for most job seekers. You don’t want to undercut yourself, but you also need to determine how far you can push without offending hiring managers.    Do your research – Know what you’re worth. Go to PayScale or Vault and get as much data as you can on the current salary range.    Know your bottom line. What is the minimum salary you would accept? Before investing too much time and energy on ...

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Popular Outlook Tips & Tricks to Improve Productivity

Outlook offers some powerful features for managing your e-mail, meetings, and contacts. The problem is, it offers so much that learning to use it all efficiently can take time. Some options are buried several menus deep. Others just aren’t as intuitive as they should be. Below is an outline of Outlook tips that will assist you in maximising productivity:   Click here for our guide on how to improve communication skills    Public Holidays. If you don’t want to miss public holidays, Outlook can automatically add them to your calendar and it has nearly 100 different locations to choose from. To enable this, simply ...

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