Abbott is to invest €440 million and create 1,000 new jobs
The project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.
The new 250,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, which will be located on the IDA Business and Technology Park in Loughboy, Kilkenny, subject to planning permission, will give Abbott the capacity to substantially increase production of its FreeStyle Libre technology for people with diabetes.
Speaking about announcement, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said: “This new investment by Abbott in Donegal and Kilkenny is hugely welcome news, bringing up to 1,000 highly-skilled jobs and expanded Medtech manufacturing capacity.
Abbott has a long and successful history, first establishing operations in Ireland in 1946, and this new investment is a great vote of confidence in the workforce here, and in this country as a place to invest. I wish all the team at Abbott every continued success in its endeavours in the years to come.”
Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar said: “This is really fantastic news from Abbott. It’s a real vote of confidence in Kilkenny and Donegal and what those counties have to offer. We are working hard every day to create job opportunities in every county in the country, investing in every region to create a welcoming environment for the kind of opportunities we are seeing here today. It’s a major priority of mine as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. These 1,000 new jobs are a huge boost and really speak to the strength of Abbott’s 5,000 existing staff here. We never take this investment for granted. Thank you to the Abbott team.”
IDA Ireland Executive Director Mary Buckley said: “Abbott has had a longstanding presence in Ireland spanning over 75 years during which the company has made a substantial and valued contribution to regional economies. This significant and transformative investment in a new greenfield manufacturing facility in Kilkenny is fantastic news for the South East Region and for Ireland. It is also most welcome and demonstrates continued commitment to its Donegal site that it will benefit from further investment and new jobs as part of this investment and jobs announcement. IDA Ireland’s strategy to win investment for regional locations across Ireland includes encouraging and supporting established companies to develop additional regional sites and this is a prime example of that. This new manufacturing facility will deliver a substantial boost to the economy of the South East. I wish the company continued success.”
Reinvigorate Your Career by Taking the Right Kind of Risk
Successful careers don’t come without risk. In this piece, the author offers several suggestions for how leaders can think about taking smart risks — whether that’s exploring an underserved area of your industry and crafting a new role for yourself using your distinctive strengths to fill that niche, staying in your current role but inventing a new product or service, or changing industries entirely to look for new roles far afield from where you are now, where your skills might be more rare and valuable. Ultimately, it’s all about taking the long shots: identifying and pursuing opportunities that offer you new and better ways to leverage your skills.
Read the full article:
https://hbr.org/2018/04/reinvigorate-your-career-by-taking-the-right-kind-of-risk
5 Ways to Stand Out in Your Next Job Interview
Nailing a job interview takes more than preparation and practice. If you want to get hired, you need to tell a story about why you’re the perfect person for the role. Here are five pieces of advice to help you.
- Avoid talking about what you’re not.
- Tell a story about yourself.
- Allow yourself to be vulnerable.
- Don’t hide who you are.
- Pose thoughtful questions to the hiring manager.
Read the full article:
https://hbr.org/2022/07/5-ways-to-stand-out-in-your-next-job-interview
How to Design a Better Hiring Process
Many standard interview processes rely on outdated behavioural questions like “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” to evaluate prospective hires. But more often than not, these types of questions fail to reveal useful information about a candidate’s competencies. A better approach is to immerse job candidates in unconventional scenarios to gather the most useful insights about their critical-thinking abilities, tech savviness, and interpersonal skills. For example, if you want to test their ability to prepare, let them know the questions you’ll ask beforehand. If you want to test their technical skills, give them a problem to solve in real-time. And if you want to see if they’ll be a good cultural fit, have them play an interactive game with your employees.
Read the full article:
https://hbr.org/2020/06/how-to-design-a-better-hiring-process
The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why
Communication isn’t as simple as saying what you mean. How you say what you mean is crucial, and differs from one person to the next, because using language is learned social behaviour: How we talk and listen are deeply influenced by cultural experience. Although we might think that our ways of saying what we mean are natural, we can run into trouble if we interpret and evaluate others as if they necessarily felt the same way we’d feel if we spoke the way they did.
Read the full article: https://hbr.org/1995/09/the-power-of-talk-who-gets-heard-and-why
How to Avoid a Job Switch You’ll Later Regret
No one wants to feel regret after taking a new job. And yet, it’s something that happens. Here are some steps you can take during the job search process to avoid that sinking feeling that you’ve made a career misstep.
- Structure your decision-making process. Identify what’s most beneficial for you and your career long before you get to a decision point. Outline your career goals and which criteria you’ll use to decide whether to accept a job.
- Ask exploratory questions. During your interview, ask about employee engagement, growth potential, expectations, and how long people historically stay in their roles.
- Beware of your cognitive biases. Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms what we already believe, like noticing and buying into stories that align with our current views. Be careful you’re not overlooking any clear warning signs.
- Seek an insider’s perspective. Make it a priority to network with employees who work for the company you’re interested in joining, and get their view of what it’s really like on the inside.
Read the full article: “Switching Jobs? Here’s How to Make Sure You Won’t Regret It.”
The power of understanding the needs of others
Good leaders must uncover the basic human desires of their teams so together they can reach greater heights. Here’s how to do it.
Many leaders struggle with gaining insight into what their teams really want. They find it difficult because the power that comes from their rank and authority often creates a distance and mistrust that prevents people from opening up. This decreases the leader’s motivation to pay sufficient attention to them.
Yet it is essential for you to uncover what matters to people so that you can become a better leader. It’s a matter of responsibility and of power. As we define it, power is the ability to influence the behavior of others. But what determines this ability? The answer is surprisingly simple. What enables one person to influence another is control over access to resources that the other person values. Take this idea seriously, and you will realize that influencing others in any situation requires answering a not-so-simple question: what do people value?
To read the full article click:
https://iby.imd.org/magazine/the-power-of-understanding-the-needs-of-others/
Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better
In numerous studies, diversity — both inherent (e.g., race, gender) and acquired (experience, cultural background) — is associated with business success. For example, a 2009 analysis of 506 companies found that firms with more racial or gender diversity had more sales revenue, more customers, and greater profits. A 2016 analysis of more than 20,000 firms in 91 countries found that companies with more female executives were more profitable. In a 2011 study management teams exhibiting a wider range of educational and work backgrounds produced more-innovative products. These are mere correlations, but laboratory experiments have also shown the direct effect of diversity on team performance. In a 2006 study of mock juries, for example, when black people were added to the jury, white jurors processed the case facts more carefully and deliberated more effectively.
Under increasing scrutiny, and mindful of the benefits of diversity on the bottom line, many companies are trying to recruit and retain a more diverse workforce. Success has so far been marginal. With so much at stake, why aren’t these companies making more headway? One reason could be that, despite the evidence about their results, homogenous teams just feel more effective. In addition, people believe that diverse teams breed greater conflict than they actually do. Bringing these biases to light may enable ways to combat them.
To read the full article click:
https://hbr.org/2016/09/diverse-teams-feel-less-comfortable-and-thats-why-they-perform-better
Reinvigorate Your Career by Taking the Right Kind of Risk
Whether you’re an NBA player or a corporate executive, successful careers don’t come without risk. In this piece, the author offers several suggestions for how leaders can think about taking smart risks — whether that’s exploring an underserved area of your industry and crafting a new role for yourself using your distinctive strengths to fill that niche, staying in your current role but inventing a new product or service, or changing industries entirely to look for new roles far afield from where you are now, where your skills might be more rare and valuable. Ultimately, it’s all about taking the long shots: identifying and pursuing opportunities that offer you new and better ways to leverage your skills.
To read the full article click:
https://hbr.org/2018/04/reinvigorate-your-career-by-taking-the-right-kind-of-risk
How to Use Your LinkedIn Profile to Power a Career Transition
Are you raring to change careers? Break into a whole new line of work that makes you leap out of bed, happy to go to work every day? Parlay personal passions into professional endeavors? Or focus on a different clientele, type of product, or service?
We all know the power of LinkedIn for job hunting and networking. But how do we use it to help change careers—to make sure we’re found by the right recruiters, hiring managers, colleagues—not ones from our past, but from our future careers?
It’s tempting to create an “everything under the sink” profile that makes you look qualified for both the job you have and the one you want or for a variety of new functions, industries, or roles. But that’ll just confuse your readers and send them running—to others’ LinkedIn pages.
Instead, focus your profile on your new career direction, just as you’ve tailored your resume to specific jobs. In both cases, you highlight your most relevant experiences and minimize or omit the rest. Here’s how to do that on LinkedIn:
Headline. Focus first on your headline. LinkedIn auto-populates this field with your current position, but don’t let it. Instead, use the 120 characters to write your own eye-catching headline.
Why is this so important? If I’m searching for someone like you on LinkedIn, my search results will reveal only your name and headline — and I could easily overlook you. But if you write an irresistible headline, I’ll take the time to click to your entire profile.
Let’s look at how one mid-careerist uses her distinctive headline to attract the right people and opportunities.
Kristi Sullivan’s been a successful marketing executive for over 15 years. While still very committed to her current Marketing VP role, she also wants to add a new direction to her career path: marketing small businesses in the health and wellness industry. And she’s a devoted yoga practitioner and instructor. So this is her two-part headline:
Holistic health/yoga instructor, consultant, connecter * Marketing executive for small businesses & nonprofits
She immediately distinguishes herself from other marketers by putting health and yoga first. And she attracts people needing help with their holistic health and yoga businesses.
Check to see how distinctive your headline is by searching LinkedIn for people like you. Kristi found lots of “marketing executives” but no one else with holistic health and yoga in their headlines—a very good sign.
Summary. Now that your headline has attracted the right people, keep them reading. Tell a compelling story and write it in the first person. Unlike resumes, your LinkedIn summary gives you much more space (up to 2000 characters) to highlight past accomplishments and connect them to what you want to do next.
This is especially important if you’ve changed careers before. Craft a cohesive narrative that pulls together what might otherwise appear to be fragmented pieces of your professional past. This will avoid leaving your profile reader wondering what the heck you’re trying to do now—or why you appear scattered and unfocused.
Here’s how Kristi accomplishes this. She stitches together three areas of her professional and personal endeavors: marketing small businesses/nonprofits; women’s business success; and holistic health/yoga instruction and business consultation.
She immediately hooks her profile readers with this opening statement:
I am devoted to and excel in three areas—each area strengthening the others: marketing small businesses and nonprofits; women’s business success; and holistic health and yoga. Let me expand a bit on each:
She makes it easy for readers to quickly skim her summary by including headers that call out each of the three areas. And she introduces each area with a sentence that ties it to the others. For example, in the Women’s Business Success section, she connects to her 15 years of marketing at the economic development resource center where she’s been working:
Because I’m passionate about enabling women to make positive differences in the workplace and the economy at large, I launched the Farmington Valley chapter of B.I.G. (Believe, Inspire, Grow).
And then in the Holistic Health/Yoga Instructor and Consultant section, she makes connections to her work in economic development and women’s business by noting:
I see holistic health as a critical component of individuals’, organizations’, and communities’ wellbeing.
Finally, she ends her summary with an invitation to specific types of people:
I’m always interested in hearing from holistic health business owners and women entrepreneurs, as well as economic development professionals. Please contact me via InMail.
Experience. Once you’ve nailed your headline and summary, tailor each of the positions in your experience section. Here’s how:
- Continue to write in the first person—to provide continuity with your first-person summary.
- Focus on accomplishments, not responsibilities, as you would in any resume or profile. But highlight only the accomplishments most relevant to the new type of work you’re seeking. Make those accomplishments concrete by noting the problem you solved, how, and the specific results you generated.
Here’s an example of how Kristi focuses on some of her most relevant accomplishments—fund raising, client acquisition, and social media:
I’ve brought in $.75M in new funding and over 20 new clients… I established this Connecticut nonprofit’s presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, growing its followers by 150% in the first year. I also conceived an e-newsletter, blog and vlog to enhance our social media presence and website…
Recommendations. As with any LinkedIn profile, sparingly add recommendations to selected positions — the ones most relevant to the new type of work you’re seeking. Invite one or two people to recommend you. And don’t hesitate to direct their testimonials; you’ll make it easier and faster for them, and more effective for you. Tell them exactly the type of positions you’re now targeting and the skills you’d like them to highlight.
Images and Media Samples. Again, as with any LinkedIn profile, use images and media samples to draw attention to your most impressive accomplishments. Add them only to the positions you want your new profile readers to focus on. For example, Kristi added her colorful business card to her summary section, a video screen shot and link to her presentation about internal social media strategies, and a photo of her teaching yoga on a stand-up paddleboard.
When you’re trying to get into a new line of work you have to prove that you have skills in a new area when you’ve always focused your career elsewhere. With a targeted profile that catches readers’ attention you’ll position yourself well to make that change.
(Source: https://hbr.org/2015/05/how-to-use-your-linkedin-profile-to-power-a-career-transition)