Get your CV on top of the pile

It’s time to write that winning resume. Here are some basic guidelines.

A poorly written curriculum vitae (CV), despite the glowing achievements it may contain, will almost certainly create a negative first impression on a potential employer. After all, your CV is the initial point of contact companies have for judging how well you present yourself. Here are some basic guidelines to create the best line of communication.

Watch your length
List personal information
Order your content
Prioritize your past experience
Include professional and academic qualifications
Remember your language skills
Concentrate on skills when applying for an overseas position
Limit personal interests
Provide detailed references
Double check and triple check

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How to win a fellowship

The table in this post describes the skills and experience (relevant to career stage) applicants should be able to demonstrate when applying for an MRC fellowship. Career breaks, part-time working and changes in discipline will be taken into account when assessing research experience to date and track record.

This can be used as guidelines by every researcher.

view the guidelines 

10 rules for being an exceptional leader from 'philosopher king' Marcus Aurelius

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius ruled from 161 to 180 A.D. and has maintained the reputation for being the ideal wise leader whom Plato called a "philosopher king."

His book "Meditations" has inspired leaders for centuries because of its timeless wisdom about human behavior.

It's a collection of personal writings from the chaotic last decade of his life. This turmoil inspired him to develop his interpretation of Stoic philosophy, which focused on accepting things out of one's control and maintaining mastery over one's emotions.

We've taken a look at a section from Book 11 in which Marcus reminds himself of leadership lessons he learned.

Using Gregory Hays' accessible translation of the ancient Greek (Marcus used the language of his philosophical heroes), we've broken down his 10 points into further simplified language, contextualized by the rest of Marcus' ideology.

Read the post

When three is a company -- SEBI consultation paper on equity-based crowdfunding in India.

As SEBI tries to regulate equity crowdfunding, the Internet promises to play disrupter.

Roughly a year ago, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued a consultation paper setting out its proposal to regulate equity-based crowdfunding in India. Comments were solicited from the public. Earlier this week, SEBI announced that it was working on the norms and that a decision may be taken soon.

A quick review of the SEBI paper gives us pointers to what the possible regulations could be. Under the proposed terms, three entities, namely, the crowdfunding platform, the investor, and the issuing company, would be regulated. The issuing company is restricted in terms of its size, the amount of funds to be raised and its age. The investor is restricted in terms of its accreditation, minimum net worth and, in case of eligible retail investors, the maximum investment that may be made overall or in a single crowdfunding event. Crowdfunding platforms are also restricted in terms of who may set them up and the checks and balances to be put in place.

Read the op-ed article in TH dt. 7th Jul 2015

Top 10 Reasons to Strengthen Information Security with Desktop Virtualization

The tension between security and business productivity has never been so acute. To operate at peak performance and competitiveness, organizations need workers to access enterprise resources in more places and in more ways than ever before—but the resulting proliferation of work locations, types of workers and access methods has pushed traditional security strategies to the breaking point. The consumerization of IT adds further complexity as a diverse mix of laptops, smartphones and tablets enter the environment, including both enterprise-owned devices and those purchased by workers.

While technologies such as firewalls, anti-virus, access control and perimeter monitoring remain an important base, they’re increasingly bypassed, as today’s skilled attackers directly target applications and data. What’s needed is a new security layer—one that makes it possible to manage risk more effectively.

According to Forrester Research Inc. “Proper management and control of user accounts, access permissions, and privileges is one of the most effective avenues to ensuring that data doesn’t walk out the door.” (“Twelve Recommendations For Your 2011 Security Strategy”, Forrester Research Inc. December 2010). Desktop virtualization provides that additional security layer, allowing full freedom for organizations to embrace workshifting and deploy personnel and resources wherever and whenever they’re needed, while fortifying information security and compliance in support of business and IT priorities.

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Online Handbook: Standards for Archival Description:

A Handbook describes technical standards, conventions, and guidelines used by archivists in describing holdings and repositories. They are applied in a variety of systems and products, including automated information systems, manual and automated catalogs, in-house finding aids, book and serial publications, and filing and storage systems. Detailed entries are provided for 86 standards, while another 157 are identified in summary lists. Introductions to each chapter discuss the historical development and interrelationships among standards used for particular applications. Detailed entries identify the developer(s) of the standard, describe how and why it is applied in archival practice, supply information on how to obtain copies of the standard, and provide sources for additional information or guidance on its use. When further information or the standards themselves are available online, a link is provided. Appendix A contains a list of standards developers, their addresses, links to their World Wide Web Sites when available, and the titles of the standards relevant to archival practice. Appendix B provides several tables to clarify the relationships among standards both within the U.S. and internationally.

Access it

10 Steps to IT Transformation

A few years back, EMC's own IT organization embarked on a journey of fundamental transformation.

No longer content with incremental improvements, the decision was made to refashion themselves into an internal IT service provider, and leave behind the traditional enterprise IT construct.

The story of their transformation -- motivations, challenges, successes and lessons learned -- has provided extremely useful insight for many hundreds of EMC's customers and partners. Yes, every IT situation is different, but time and time again we've seen that there's plenty that can be learned from their efforts.

Recently, they published a very insightful whitepaper: "An IT-As-A-Service Handbook: Ten Key Steps On The Journey To ITaaS". I think it does a superlative job of outlining the crucial steps needed to get organized and start to make progress.

While no recipe is perfect, once again there's plenty to take away from their experience and perspectives.

Read the post of the author Chuck Hollis.

113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability

While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper. One of the biggest values of a newspaper's front page is the priority given to top news items. All homepages would benefit from being treated like a front page of a major newspaper, with editors who determine the high-priority content and ensure continuity and style consistency.

Even small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. Consider the homepage for The New York Times. If you kept all design and writing exactly the same on this site but decided to show only local New York content on the homepage and link to all national and international news, it would inexorably alter the entire site. On closer examination, this change doesn't seem small at all.

While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here. You'll need to look at the individual site examples to see these guidelines used properly or, more often, overlooked. This is an extensively illustrated book, and it is only in the context of a visual example that you can fully appreciate the negative impact of ignoring these guidelines.

All said, these are just guidelines, not axioms. For all sites, there are surely exceptions. However, we've developed these guidelines from our combined 14 years of experience, running user tests on homepages and observing what makes them pass or fail user scrutiny. Although you can greatly improve the usability of your homepage by following these guidelines, you also need to involve your own users in the process through methods such as field studies and usability testing and incorporate iterative feedback into your development cycle. If you make a decision not to follow a guideline, do so based on customer information in the context of your homepage.

The guidelines are presented under the following broad categories.

Communicating the Site's Purpose
Communicating Information About Your Company
Content Writing
Revealing Content Through Examples
Archives and Accessing Past Content
Links
Navigation
Search
Tools and Task Shortcuts
Graphics and Animation
Graphic Design
UI Widgets
Window Titles
URLs
News and Press Releases
Popup Windows and Staging Pages
Advertising
Welcomes
Communicating Technical Problems and Handling Emergencies
Credits
Page Reload and Refresh
Customization
Gathering Customer Data
Fostering Community
dates and times
Stock Quotes and Displaying Numbers

Read the full list of 113 design guidelines

Ten Easy Steps for Email and Web Best Practices

Whether your organization is a mid-sized company, a small family business, or a publicly traded corporation, any time you allow employees to access the Web and email, you put your organization's assets, future, and reputation at risk. Accidental misuse and intentional abuse - of email and the Internet can create potentially costly and time-consuming legal, regulatory, security, and productivity headaches for any size employer. The ePolicy Institute and MessageLabs have created this business guide to provide best-practices guidelines for developing and implementing effective Email and Web Acceptable Usage Policies for the U.S. workplace. Access the guidelines

10+ things you can do to avoid ethical breaches

Enron… Worldcom… Something-gate… Hardly a day goes by without news of someone or some company in trouble because of ethical issues. For the good of the organization, and for the good of your own career, it’s important to avoid ethical issues — and conversely, to act ethically.

Here are some things to consider in this regard. The first two items are directed at the leadership of an organization, while the rest pertain to everyone.

1. Have a code of conduct
2. Model the behavior you wish to see
3. Disclose any conflicts of interest
4. Recuse yourself
5. Get consent
6. Find an alternate method
7. Avoid the issue or question
8. Focus on the issue, not the person
9. Stress the advantages of the ethical approach
10. Document key matters
11. Blow the whistle

Read the full article