A & Z

It’s now been 55 years since I started my first full-time job, at the Jiffy Carwash in Derby, England, for £4 (€4.70) per week. Since then, I’ve had 30 to 40 jobs — some wonderful, some dire (UK informal)hier: schrecklich, grässlichdire. I’ve worked for some excellent managers and some deranged(geistes)gestört, schwachsinnigderanged ones. For about half my working life, I’ve also been talking and writing about business communication and how to improve it. 

In issue 11 of Business Spotlight, I have put together an A to Z of comments and suggestions to help you to navigate the weird (informal)sonderbarweird and wonderful world of work. Here are A and Z. If you want to check out the rest of the points, then take a look at the printed version.

A

Alternative CV (curriculum vitae) (UK)LebenslaufCV. An American friend of mine in Paris helps unemployed people write their CVs. He tries to find out what really makes his clients different from everyone else. Since this is rarely evidentoffenkundig, klarevident in a conventional CV, he asks them what other jobs they’ve done and what they learned from them. He says people often to reveal sth.etw. offenbaren, zu erkennen gebenreveal qualities of leadership, courage and initiative that are completely absent from their official CVs. You may find it useful to think about your alternative CV, and how you can integrate more aspects of yourself into your job search.

Z

Zoom fatigueErmüdung, Überdrussfatigue. “Life is what happens while you’re wasting time in meetings,” as John Lennon might have said if he’d been an accountantBuchhalter(in)accountant. Why otherwise cost-conscious companies allow expensive man-agers to waste so much time and money in meetings is to be beyond sb.sich jmdm. nicht erschließenbeyond me. My feedback from managers tells me that most of them waste at least 20 per cent of their working lives this way. Covid and Zoom seem to have made matters worse. One answer is not to attend so many meetings. Another is to make them shorter. Yet another is to spend three minutes at the end of every meeting discussing how the next one could be better.