GET STARTED - July 2021

WORK OPPORTUNITIES

Customer Support Expert – Newcastle

£24,000 per annum, Full-Time

Working from their award-winning contact centre within the Cobalt Business Park you’ll be helping Sage customers get the best out of their Sage products.

You’ll be doing this over the phone with a professional attitude and making sure you are giving the very best quality advice. It is all about amazing customer service.

Sound like something you could see yourself doing?

Click here to find out more.

Royal Mail Apprenticeship – North Shields//Gateshead

Age specific pay, Full-Time

We’ve all heard of the Royal Mail, perhaps you’d like to work for them too?

If you’re a fan of the great outdoors no matter the weather (and let’s be honest, this is the UK – it can be BAD) then this apprenticeship could be the one for you. There are currently two positions available in the North East one in North Shields and the other in Gateshead.

To find out more and apply to the North Shields role click here, and for the Gateshead role click here.

Business Event Centre Receptionist – Newcastle

£21,249 per annum, Full-Time

Working for the Civil Service can be a career for life, with great internal progression possibilities (and I know it is way too early for all of us to be thinking about this, but a great pension too).

Your roles and responsibilities in this opportunity with HMRC will include providing a professional front of house reception service and ensuring the area is set up and ready to use to help customers deliver their key objectives.

You’ll also need to be a proven communicator and have a good knowledge of Microsoft packages and excellent customer service skills.

To find out more click here.

Retail Advisor – Hartlepool

£9.50 per hour (plus unlimited bonus), 30-40 hours per week

Looking to start you career working for a reputable company? Vodaphone are looking to recruit a Retail Advisor to their Hartlepool store.

Working 30-40 hours a week your role will see you interacting directly with customers helping them to resolve their needs and providing a fantastic customer experience.

Click here to find out more.

Retail Sales Assistant – Sunderland

£17,311 to £17,712 per annum (pro rata), 15 hours per week

Are you based in Sunderland and looking for some part-time work? Then why not join National Glass Centre as a retail Sales Assistant.

Based in Sunderland University you will need to be comfortable talking to the general public, selling and providing a great customer experience.

To find out more click here.

SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-EFFICACY 

‘Self-awareness and self-efficacy’ is one of the fifteen EntreComp competencies and can be characterised as ‘knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Taking the time to reflect on your needs, aspirations and wants in the short, medium and long term and believing in your ability to influence'.

We've probably all heard of self-awareness, but what is self-efficacy?

Self-efficacy can be described as the perception of one's own ability to reach a goal. This is unlike self-esteem which is your sense of self-worth.

For example a person who is a terrible singer would likely have poor self-efficacy in regards to their singing ability, but could still have high self-esteem if they didn't rely on their singing ability to determine self-worth. 

On the other hand, someone might have incredible confidence in their singing ability, be setting way too high of a standard and base enough self-worth on singing that their self-esteem is low.

And someone who generally has high self-efficacy but is actually a pretty terrible singer might have some misplaced confidence or even believe improvement is possible (which sounds a lot like me after a few beers on the karaoke). 

Don't worry if this is all terribly confusing, as we are going to map out four ways you can increase your self-efficacy below.

STAY IN THE STRETCH ZONE

You’re probably asking yourself what is the stretch zone? We’ve all got three personal zones of achievement – the comfort zone, the stretch zone and the panic zone and highly productive folk tend to sit in the stretch zone which is a place they can make the most out of their abilities.

When we are in the stretch zone, we are more likely to take reasonable risks and we’re more resilient to setbacks and failures. Unlike when we are in either the comfort or panic zone. Being in the stretch zone allows us to gain an insight to ourselves and increases our overall likelihood of reaching self-contentment.

You can try entering your stretch zone by:

• Setting goals (which we talked about back in January)
• Trying new things and facing challenges
• Doing things you enjoy
• Accepting failures and criticism positively (harder than it sounds I know)
• Approaching your goals slowly, and not over-stressing about results

SET SIMPLE GOALS

Having low self-efficacy can make us doubt our abilities or believe a task to be larger and more difficult than it is. As a result of this perception, we go on to make too little effort, blame ourselves for our under achievements (boy does that sound similar) and destroy what trust we have in ourselves.

Setting small goals and approaching them one by one is a good way to build and sustain your self-efficacy. You can even break these goals down into smaller incremental goals and work on achieving those one at a time.

By going through a process like this we can celebrate our smaller wins and our bigger goals become much more manageable.

LOOK AT THE BIGGER PICTURE

Have you faced a setback today, or in the last week? Did you dwell on it for way too long and stayed up hours past your bedtime lamenting on how that one small setback ruined your life?

Don’t worry, me too – but folk with high self-efficacy have the power to overlook these short-term losses and to not allow themselves to break their self-trust. Remind yourselves you have higher goals to achieve and stick to this perspective, doing so will help you maintain a high sense of self-efficacy.

This high self-efficacy will allow you to sort out your priorities, make better plans and focus on them more efficiently.

REFRAME OBSTACLES

A practical psychological tool to increasing self-efficacy is to identify the obstacles in your life and attempting to reframe them or replace them with positive interventions. By being able to reconstruct the way we look at our failures and how we feel about them can help a tremendous lot in changing the way we think about ourselves.

An individual with high self-efficacy is not like to perceive a loss as a personal shortcoming, but rather try to cope with it and find ways to handle it positively. A failure suddenly becomes a learning opportunity for example.

Challenges and failures are inevitable – we are not perfect. By building self-efficacy we can learn to recognise this, and continue to believe in ourselves and our abilities helping us on the journey to fulfilment.

Do you want to learn more about self-efficacy? Check out this Tedx Talk from Mamie Morrow.

SUPPORT

• Talking Therapies - If you are struggling with mental health, but feel you don't want to trouble your GP then you can self refer yourself. Don't suffer in silence contact talking therapies for free, friendly, confidential support.
• Samaritans - If you or anyone you know may be at risk of suicide you can call their free listening service for free 116 123 .
• Campaign Against living Miserably CALM - Provides listening services, information and support for men at risk of suicide, including a web chat.
• Kooth - Counsellors available until 10pm every day. Free, safe and anonymous online counselling for young people. Check whether this is offered in your area.
• Cruse – Cruse offer bereavement and counselling for anyone who is going through loss. You can contact them via their website or by calling 0808 808 1677.

Don't forget all adults in the UK aged 18 or over are now eligible to book their vaccine and if you have yet to do so, you can do so here.

Thank you for joining us this month and make sure to return next month for our hand-picked opportunities chosen especially for you! Remember, that if these opportunities aren't right for you, they may be relevant to a friend or family member so give them a nudge and send them our way.

If you'd like to join our Newsletter so that you can get a monthly reminder direct to your inbox the first Saturday of every month please sign up here.

Finally, if you're a business or organisation and would like us to shout out about your opportunities you can contact us here.