Friday Analysis

River/Brook that runs through Haverhill, sun
today is glinting of the water also

Started

Moving bulk of blogging to Social and Micro Enterprise sites 


The career change mode has now reached a stage where part of the efforts now need to be directed to establishing a presence in the blogs

2pointfiveageofman 

and
kritirecharge.co.uk

The free blog will continue, but in cut down form on Monday and Friday.  The phrase is very true in that if you are blogging you may not be doing other equally important things.  "Oracles" R Not Us, maybe attempt to be some of the time.

Wednesday and the light at the End of the tunnel

A triffid?

Started Wednesday 09 March 2011 0645 GMT
Words 420
S.I.= 84%

New career starts today... not tomorrow


A sense of purpose is starting to develop as each way point is reached on the voyage of career change.  I have now reached the stage when I can start to write about the new career rather than the plan about how it will take shape.  So far planning has been effective for my futurology skills.

The sense of purpose  that I had when I started teaching had died a number of years ago.  This was a something at the time I did not realise since at the end of each year my benchmark Stats the SATS tests indicated the effectiveness of what I was doing compared to the internal results of Maths and English (usually 20% or in some years 40% difference between Science and the rest) and favourably compared to county and national data .  This was all done without the massive input of advisor/consultant, resources (many years I had no budget at all when a nearby middle schools head of science had 5 GBP per pupil per year to teach science to 9 to 13 year olds this is a paltry investment considering how even 1 inspired scientist engineer can generate millions of tax pounds for the future).  Plus I did not have the same staff and advisors (which came out of school budget) and we still for many years remained on special measures, I even had to do the washing up as I had no technician for many years, well over half, of the 13 I was in teaching.  Yes I persisted against a lot of obstacles because I realised that the pupils we had in front of us were our pension scheme so against the odds of the way the National Curriculum was being run, I continued.

Now I am bringing that same sense of purpose and drive to my new career, working for myself.  This time however, the organisation is mine and will be run primarily with Wellbeing as the foundation block (see Monday's blog).  As the loads get heavier at times in the year the the Wellbeing will be subject to compressive forces, but if the block is suitably robust the business' most important asset (me, have to think that way from the start) should survive as dynamic loading should be within my stress coping envelope.  That is the philosophy behind my actions.  the next few years are going to be interesting as I build a sound economic future independent of banking gamblers!

Tomorrow's bog about Wellbeing!!  

Monday Week 2 Chinese Lunar Year

Started Monday 14th February 2007
Words 431
S.I.= 86.2 %

Big Day for the Big Society


Big Society is going to be prominent not only today but also in the coming weeks and months.  The BBC have been running a few stories today with Big Society as the theme.  David Cameron is announcing the next part of the vision of how we transform the fundamental way that we run the society of Britain.

Announced today will be the all important framework of how the Big Society in action may be funded.  A £300 million fund or bank for social entrepreneurship is to be announced.  This may not sound very much but it is a start.  We have to remember that a lot of the function of the National Lottery before the Olympics was won for London was to help local charities and groups.  The micro-management culture of central government has affected the accessability of small groups to this money.  I have had many conversations with local groups who have basically given up applying because the criteria and time involved to access funds is beyond volunteers.  The money pool will hopefully expand as the Olympic projects reach completion, the contractors are paid, and more importantly "snagging" of the finished work is carried out without extra costs that appear to be outside the terms of reference (hopefully PFIs have not been used as an example of good contractual practice).
  
I find the idae of an ISA quite an "exciting" concept.  I have put thoughts on this in my blog 2pointfiveageofman.net.  I will certainly invest in this ISA but it would be even more supportive if the normal ISA was also available so there was a double tax benefit.

Public spending cuts are perceived as a  threat to this process. We have many competing service providers in my local town.  A gym has just been created in a local school that allegedly will have state of the art gym,  it is not apparrent who their customers may be or who pays yet.  The local authority may be competing against itself or another level of local government who has established a outsourced gym provider for the town.  In the   light of crossing patrol people being made redundant I do wonder about the priorities of the people involved and the number of competing entities that seem to be chasing the same people.  The price may not be cheaper since the excuse for price levels is  that this is the market rate because everybody else is charging the same.    

This week 40th Anniversary of Decimalisation.

Monday Morning Week 1 of Chinese New Year

Started Monday 7th February 2011 0651 GMT
Words 507
S.I. = 101.4 % Aspirational Target not met (but it is only aspirational)

First Monday of being self-employed.  This has not been as much of a worry waking up this morning as it may have been when I left my teaching post officially at the end of April.  All told it has been 9 months in gestation.  Five months to combat the post traumatic stress of working for 13 years in a school that did some very good things but experienced special measures (2 and half years worth or was it more?) and transition to Locally Managed Status (essentially outsourcing of schools by LEAs, so free schools and academies are not really that radical).

The final chapter was the closure of the Middle schools in Haverhill and Lowestoft (happening in July 2011).  However, the programme of moving to a two tier system county wide would appear to scuppered.

So the week ahead.  By the end of the week I will hopefully have cleared  target of an average rate per hour. Surprisingly, when you actually do the analysis after stripping away the deductions a teacher has to have from their salary and equate the annualised hours to a 40 hour week the amount need to have the same lifestyle not unrealistic.  The trick comes in figuring out how the tax system works, how National Insurance contributions can effectively be managed and also how to structure your working week for your own personal wellbeing as a home worker offering flexible hours for working  with customers' needs.  The real trick is to do this without paying others for expert advice. If you can ask the right questions of an "expert" while only  having to pay a  little or nothing success may be in sight.   The "expert" advice is the sometime unnecessary business expense that squashes the Golden Goose that would have laid the ordinary egg (that is what I am after, the ordinary egg).

I am going through the process of doing my own Performance Management Review to set the targets for the coming trading year.  I have experience of doing this with my own staff when I was coordinating Science and ICT so will aim for three targets.  Two that are operational targets and one personal target.  The tasks to achieve them may be many but three targets for devlopement and personal growth are acheivable.  I have set on my personal Google Calendar the date 5th May 2011 (3 months) for the first review.

My personal target I have selected as a Wellbeing aspiration to have my Gym induction today and still be using the gym twice weekly on the 5th May 2011.

Back to East Asian customs I am also going to buy a Malabar Chestnut (Pachira aquatica) and a few pieces of red ribbon, to be added to the tree as each profitable customer pays their bill.  If the tree is festooned with red in three months time I will know my cunning plan may be working.

I will be updating the career change  courses on offer along with other services and goods on offer at  www.kritirecharge.co.uk. throughout the week.

Week 2 A River runs through

Started Monday 10th January 2011 Started 9.20 pm

Words 350

A very large amount of water flowed past the bottom of my street.  Still the artery is now cleansed, still has the odd shopping trolley here and there.

Previous post set the aspirations of what turned out to be a busy weekend putting the finishing touches to the structure of this blog page.

The next steps for this week are to publish details of the courses I am making available on Schoolsforeverything.  The link you will see in the bar below the article title.

The structure of the blog is such that all information on this page is free.  Links away from the page may lead to opportunities to buy services from or via me.  Alternatively they may just be informative or empowering allowing you to also benefit economically  ie the pay free links to the FSB and Teleworking Association.  My aim is to provide links to websites that promote those aspects of social and micro-entrepreneurship.

This is not about who has most desirable shiny objects and charging the Earth for said baubles. As I have tried to explain in some of my previous blogs (the demise of the role of the middle manager being one example) how managing the change that many people are experience in the UK is a challenge but only another a mole hill.  The trick is to step over the molehill.  If you are feeling extremely small and put upon by the systems you have been working under I can empathise in the true sense of the word.

So by the end of the week one brick in the new foundations of my personal wealth and wellbeing (wellbeing being the more important) should have been put in place. I will repeat the mission statement I made in last night's blog.

In 2017 I will take home the same salary as Steve Jobs.

I will earn $1 salary for the work style and incomes I am involved in at this instant.  This will be more than just enough.

Tomorrow's blog as promised last week will be part 2 of Web 2.0 for Educators.

   

Meerkats in Suffolk show entrepreneurial way

Fresh fields, right preparation leads
 to green shoots, hopefully
Allotment society I have been involved with in the past

Started 5th January 2011  2.30 pm
Words 852

The secret is out.  The Meerkats website has been gathering dust in Suffolk all along. Reported in the East Anglian Daily Times today Aleksandr Orlov's latest kinematic extravaganza (advert) was filmed in Suffolk at Kersey.  I noticed this story as I leafed through the paper having a look for  the those events and news on social and  micro-entrepreneurship and the general job market.  If it's good enough for Mr Orlov to do business in Suffolk. then .......... Simples.

Joking apart this blog has started a little later in the day then intended.  This is not due to any technical mishap but a success in the use of social networking in generating business opportunities.   The Strategy I have been employing has started to generate conversations that can lead to income generating activity.  Owing to technical problems with BT, my strategy of generating content in a dynamic blog backed up with  non-identical twinned static sites really only started on 21st December 2010.

Since that day (16 days ago) the blog has generated 500 page views.  Which is not too bad on a free website that I am only starting to optimise for journalistic style so that it is search engine friendly.  It also has to be remembered that people have not been at their desks. The majority of blog surfing that is attributed to company time has not been available. 

From the traffic that has visited the site 4 new opportunities so far have presented themselves since yesterday morning when people returned to work. These have not been solicited by me writing letters, emails or sending CVs.  People have seen something in the Blog that has made them think the skill set on offer may add value to their activities and to make the first step and contact me.

Using traditional methods to generate five hundred opportunities for people to  view the skill set would have taken 2 to 3 hours of company research, adapting CV typing a cover letter etc.  So 1000- 1500 hours ( 25 to 37.5 working weeks of 40 hours duration) would have been required to generate that number of view opportunities.  In the terms of time spent blogging under the revised strategy the 500 view opportunities have taken 8 hours (half an hour targeted time).  The validity of the strategy therefore would appear to be tenuously proven.  Refining of the content and the style of the Blog to optimise the yield of contacts to view opportunities is the next step.

The application of these techniques therefore appear to be a good additional tool in the armoury when considering career change.  The principles also are applicable to marketing of products that have added value that is price independent, ie the cheapest is not necessarily better than somebody elses. 

So as I leafed through the paper I came across an event that if I was not otherwise pre-booked I would have attended,  This is the University College Suffolk (UCS) Event Social Entrepreneur.  A very laudable event being held at Trinity Park a show ground I have been to on a number of occasions.  The only slight problem is that booking is recommended, but there is no contact details to book in the advert. I cannot find anything on the show grounds' events board or at the UCS site.  I hope this is just a slight oversight as it does look as though it may provide a handle on what social entrepreneurship might look like.  

On this blog I am going to include a new to me site I have found called Dipity.   This allows timelines of events to be put in a social network format.  This is useful not only for education in the traditional sense of making timelines but also in running a diary.

So next few hours will be spent brushing up my HTML skills (they have got a bit rusty recently).  I have both a Dummies guide (I'm not proud!)  to just remind in almost bullet points of the key skills.  I do not often watch James May just in case I recognize some of the Last of the Summer Wine type activities in myself that he seems to be slipping into.  However, he did in his programme about his sister's toys show the Ladybird book How computers work that the Ministry of Defence ordered with plain brown covers to instruct people in the basics of the new technology.  The Dummies series is much the same ilk, so I'm quite happy to follow the MOD's lead.

If you would like a more detailed explanation of some of the techniques I am starting to use in social networking follow the link to 2pointfiveageofman.nett or kritirecharge.co.uk.


Open the email page or contact us.  Supply your details and I should be able to send you a PDF file in the net few days.

Tomorrow's Blog is about topics related to Wellbeing.  This is the last topic of the week in the new Strategy plan.  So I will start again on Friday by looking back over the week.

Micro entrepreneurship. What has worked well

Taking the Bull by the Horns,
Minoan Bull

 Started 7:30 am Friday 30th December 2010  
Words 577

Micro-entrepreneurship  is the sub-theme of this blog.  After evaluating the blog yesterday (Blog content) this is the first part of the new cycle.  So what have I discovered and achieved this week?

First is that small can be beautiful.  The danger with a lot of social networking tools is that they can take over and become a means to themselves.  Many businesses are finding that employees are spending a lot of time on Facebook, for example to the detriment of productivity. 

Personally, I do not visit Facebook all that often, owing to the fact that I do not want to know everything that a person is thinking.  Mystery and secrets can be wonderful things.  Also not clever if a recruiter wants an insight into your character.  A small blog article when written well and focusing on a single topic may be  more effective than a display of all your knowledge.  This often leaves a reader a little overwhelmed much as it does in a conversation. The discipline of micro blogging via Twitter removes a lot of the stunned and wonder factor.  However, my experience of Twitter is that there is a lot serial twittering, how do they get the time, whose message sometimes becomes diluted because of the sheer volumes of tweets.  From some sources it is almost like spam email, especially teacher recruitment agencies.  Do they not realise that if you are teaching you only have a small window of opportunity to indulge in tweeting?   

Linking activities and drawing almost Chinese walls between web presences is another conclusion from this week.  Why repeat the same information in a blog (dynamic presence) that could be better served by a static  presence,  a web page?  After all a blog should be like a reflective diary.  It should not be an out and out sales pitch.  Written in a journalistic style it can intrigue and lead people to want to know more.  They  interact and find the information you want to give them.  Then you can do the micro-entrepreneurship from your static presence. It is about time management.  What is the most effective use of your time for producing income streams as a micro-entrepreneur?  

I have spent a bit of time this week looking at a number of areas. Use of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing and how to make people come to you for your services (which will appear on Tuesday).  Institutions for professional development, which will appear next Wednesday.    On Thursday, those tricky work-life balance issues.  As a Wellbeing Facilitator/champion in a former employment I have over the years acquired some knowledge of this often murky topic.  Which brings us to the free running or free blogging of the weekend, general on Saturday and Lunch on Sunday.   Monday is for that aspirational moment and the intention to ski uphill.

So how long should it take.  About a half-hour per day.  You can always go back to important issues at a later time.  They won't go away, if they do they are not as important as you thought.   This time frame is not difficult, as a teacher I have used reflective practice on occasions.  The trick is to focus on the positive benefits of the experience to best practice.  An Australian technique that was championed by pupil behavior gurus many years ago (do not hear about it too much now) was the ratio of positive to negative comments.  This also applies to any form of communication.  Nobody likes a miserable basket!