Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
Online courses for learning a new language
Excerpts from article by Sage Anderson, published in rollingstone.com
While travel has been severely affected during COVID-19, that doesn’t mean it’s not the right time to start practising your foreign language skills. Whether you’re planning your post-pandemic getaway, or just trying to reinforce a language you’ve studied before, there are a variety of online resources that can help you develop your dialects.
Practising a skill while staying at home can help your mind stay sharp and keep your mental health from dipping.
How to choose the right course?
When you’re looking for the best language learning programmes online, think about what your goals are for learning a language in the first place. What skill level you start at will also inform where you want to start, since some programmes are better for beginners than someone more advanced.
Different online courses use different teaching methods too, depending on how casual or serious you are about your studies. Some language courses use interactive exercises, or tools like flashcards and games to keep you engaged. Others put more emphasis on audio learning and connecting with native speakers.
Here are some language-learning programmes that can help:
1. Babbel
Babbel is the best app for beginners who don’t want to commit to something highly-intensive. Their quick lessons only take 10-15 minutes. Expertly-designed by linguists, the interactive dialogue will keep you engaged with conversations that actually feel like real ones.
2. Pimsleur
Pimsleur is designed for users who are looking to speak and understand conversations fluently, and works wonders for getting your pronunciation just right. You can listen, learn and practise dialogue along with prerecorded video clips of conversations for a more immersive feel.
3. Rosetta Stone
Equal parts intuitive and immersive, the app’s courses will help you learn about every facet of the language (speaking, listening, reading and writing) as well as cultural elements from the country of origin. It helps beginners understand the cultural nuances of languages.
4. Coursera
If you want comprehensive language lessons, but like the feel of traditional classroom more than a game-like app, Coursera offers thousands of online video courses for a wide range of foreign languages. Its taught by experts & the courses range from one-off lessons on specific grammar subjects, to full-blown lectures with assignments and discussion forums.
Career
Reset your work-life boundary
Excerpts from article by Shani Harmon, published in Forbes
Now that home is the office, work-life balance has become an impossible dream. Leaders need to shift their focus away from the unachievable goal of balance and establish a work-life boundary instead.
It sounds easier than it is. There are constant signals coming from organisations and their leaders that suggest it’s just not OK to disconnect, like:
- Emails come in around the clock with an implicit expectation that you’ll respond prior to the next workday because your leaders do
- Urgent meetings are scheduled outside the boundaries of the standard workday even when all of the participants are in the same time zone
- Text messages have become the norm so even if you’ve left your computer behind, colleagues can, and do, reach you
These habits create a culture of overwork, not better work. It’s time to take a hard look at how you manage your own boundaries and the impact your decisions make on the culture of your team.
Here’s how to lead the way in resetting your team’s work-life boundary:
1. Declare your intention
It’s not sufficient for you to merely reset your own boundary, particularly if the culture has dramatically different expectations. You’ll need to say it out loud probably more than once for your team to trust that you mean it.
2. Define what constitutes ‘urgent’
Many organisations have adopted responsiveness habits such that fire drills are the norm rather than the exception. As a leader you can curb these behaviours by setting specific expectations for the level of urgency of any request. When it is truly urgent, provide the team with guidance on what can be slowed down to make space for the new priority.
3. Demonstrate that you mean it
Resist the temptation to send emails outside of reasonable business hours. While many of us prefer to catch up on email during the post-bedtime quiet or over the weekend, it’s not healthy for our teams to witness our off-hours work habits in real-time. Your draft folder is an easy way to store your responses until Monday morning and then hit send. It’s a small act with giant benefits.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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