Getting Confident At Work-Place

Getting confident at workplace requires some personality traits. If you closely analyze successful and confident people at workplace, you will find some particular qualities. Let us understand few of those qualities one by one and also understand their impact on your confidence:

1. Highly successful and confident people are always result oriented. Your boss does not count how many work you started, but he does count how many work you actually completed. Completing your work is a matter of habit; you can start the same right from today.

2. Confident people have good communication skills. Communication is all about knowing nuances of communication and playing with words and voice through practice. If you can take little pain, you can start developing communication right away.

3. They are good in planning and time management. With practice you can develop these traits by and by. One of the best ways is find techniques on time management and planning on youtube.com and other sites and start applying those;

4. They are 100% focused on whatever they do. Now getting focused is just habit and practice. “Doing one thing at one time” is one of the best practices of time management also.

5. Success and confident people never hesitate. Just keep in mind through hesitation you will get nothing; if you leave hesitation you are creating 100% chances of getting things you really want.

6. They learn everyday to contribute better and have better market value. If you have a burning desire to learn and contribute, you can start learning new things and advance your existing knowledge right away.

6. Successful and confident people are highly disciplined. Observe yourself how many times you make calls, check mails, interact with others and roam around while completing a work.

7. Successful and confident people are proactive; they tend to do work without instruction and before deadline. You can do so by taking little pain and risk and this is one of the best ways to feel confident.

8. They are highly energetic and maintain their energy level. Having energy level is all about taking good diet, proper rest and work out; anyone can have this with little practice. 

Life skills training: infusing confidence in students

Growing concern over psychological problems faced by the students and the divide between school atmosphere and social issues has led to the introduction of life skills training in schools.

Educational reforms that focussed on holistic development of children by connecting knowledge to life outside schools was one of the key issues mentioned in the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (2005).

The need for life skills training was also pointed out by the Committee on School Health (Renuka Ray Committee, 1960).

World Health Organisation (WHO) defines life skills as ‘the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life'. WHO's Mental Health Programme supports life skills education in schools across the world.

Components

Problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication skills, decision-making, creative thinking, interpersonal relationship skills, building self-awareness, empathy, and coping with stress and emotions are the 10 basic skills focussed in the programme.

According to WHO, the three components of the programme are critical thinking /decision-making skills, interpersonal /communication skills, and self-management skills.

Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) had adopted the life skills training module from 2003-04. According to CBSE, life skills, school health and wellbeing are valuable indicators of progressive schooling across the globe.

Objective

The objective of the programme which focussed on children in the age group of 10-18 was to empower students by helping them to develop a sense of self-confidence, eco-sensitivity and right approach towards life.

According to P. Elango Jayaprabhu, district coordinator of the programme and lecturer at District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), Thirumoorthy Nagar, resource persons from the institute conducted training for one teacher and two students from each school, who would then organise the sessions in their schools. According to Elango, problem solving and creative thinking helped students address daily-life issues.

Students and teachers from over 560 Government and Government-aided schools in Coimbatore and Tirupur were trained under the programme, he said.

S. Ponkeerthana, Standrad IX, and N. Mohanapriya, Standard XI, students of Corporation Higher Secondary School, Ramakrishnapuram, said that the training provided them an opportunity to discuss many issues they faced without any hesitation. The training sessions helped to dispel a lot of misconceptions, especially on topics like HIV/AIDS, they said.

According to D. Prabhakaran, Principal, Kendriya Vidyalaya, Sulur, weekly two sessions on life skills were conducted for students of all classes.

Parents did not show much interest in the programme because it did not fetch the students any marks. This attitude should change and children should learn many of these basic values at their home.

Parents should play a more proactive role in moulding the character of children, he said.

But, lukewarm response from many schools had raised concerns about the effectiveness of the programme.

Many matriculation schools did not show much interest in the programme, Mr. Elango said.

Many CBSE schools said that they did not dedicate separate class hours for life skills education but instead integrated the life skills training into other co-curricular activities.

Preparations on for Board examinations

The Directorate of Government Examinations is busy gearing up for the upcoming Board examinations. A detailed plan has been chalked out for the conduct of the class XII examinations, to be held between March 8 and 30.

The revenue district of Chennai, for administrative purposes, has been divided into three educational districts – south Chennai, with 32 examination centres, east Chennai with 25 centres and north Chennai with 44 centres. A total of 50,293 students in Chennai will take the State Board higher secondary examination, according to a press release from the Directorate.

A meeting in connection with the conduct of the examinations was held at the Collectorate on Wednesday. As many as six flying squads will be headed by the Chief Educational Officer. Each of the educational districts in the city will have four flying squads. Nearly 2,800 school heads will be involved in different capacities such as chief examiner, department officers, flying squad members and invigilators.

Severe action will be initiated against students indulging in malpractices, the press release said. In case students are caught copying, they will be barred from taking the examination for the next two years. Students caught for misconduct could be barred permanently from taking the examination or police action could be initiated. In case of malpractices involving an examination centre, disciplinary action would be initiated against the head of the centre. In case of a private school, the school's recognition would be cancelled and arrangements would be made for students to take the examination at another centre. Cellular phones will not be permitted in the examination hall.

Parents have also been asked to take good care of the students giving them healthy food and ensure that they reach the centre on time and safely on all days.

Research papers will be available in public domain

2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.

The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.

What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.

Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.

Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.

While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.

Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says.