Three UK universities have lost their place in the top 200 of a global higher education league table.

The universities of Reading, Dundee and Newcastle slipped out of the top 200 of the Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings for 2014-15.

Five others – Heriot-Watt, Keele, Liverpool John Moores University, Loughborough and the University of Surrey – are no longer in the top 400.

However, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London remain in the top 10.

Holding on to the top spot for the fourth consecutive year is the California Institute of Technology in the United States.

Harvard University is in second place and the University of Oxford is in third.

Capital appeal

London has the greatest concentration of first-class universities with four in the top 40 – more than any other city in the world – and seven in the top 200.

Leading Asian institutions are continuing to rise up the rankings.

Asia now has 24 universities in the world top 200, up from 20 last year. Two Asian universities – Tokyo University and the National University of Singapore – now make the world top 25 and six others make the top 50.

The rankings rate universities worldwide on 13 measures including teaching, research and international outlook – such as numbers of overseas students and staff.

Phil Baty, the editor of THE World University Rankings, said that, while the UK had more top-200 universities than any other nation except the US, the new data raised a number of key concerns.

The rankings rate universities worldwide on 13 measures, including teaching

“Overall, the UK’s representation among the world’s leading universities is declining – three leading names fell out of the top 200 this year, and two others occupy 198th and 199th place.

“Five UK universities lost their top 400 places. This loss of power and influence is not good for the UK’s overall competitiveness in the global knowledge economy.”

Mr Baty also raised concerns about the dominance of the south-east of England in the rankings.

“The five top UK institutions in the world are all from the South East ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Indeed, of the nine English universities in the world top 100, six are from London and the South East.”

Reading University Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell, said although the placing was disappointing, “we do remain ranked among the world’s best universities.

“We do world-class work on issues of critical global importance like climate change, food security and public health. And we have long-term investment plans in place as we seek to return to the top 200 as quickly as possible.

“One cannot read too much into a single year’s rankings. Global league tables are highly volatile indicators. The fact that some UK universities have risen and fallen up to almost 40 places year-on-year shows it is much more important to look at longer-term trends over time.”

Sir David said pressure from overseas institutions showed “the critical importance for government to sustain research funding and implement a clear immigration policy so we keep the doors open to talented overseas students and staff.”

A spokesman for Dundee University said: “This latest result comes in the context of improved standings for Dundee in several other league tables, including the 2014 National Student Survey, in which we achieved record results, and the latest Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey, which rated us top in Scotland and joint 4th in the UK.

“The THE World University Rankings demonstrate the increasing competition facing UK universities from higher education institutions in emerging economies across the world.”

A Newcastle University spokesperson said: “It is of course disappointing to drop down to 202 in the Times Higher rankings, but, in the case of THE there does seem to be a sector-wide effect with many more UK universities losing ground to Asia-Pacific institutions.

“This may be as a result of the methodology, or the simple fact that other universities have improved at a faster pace than the UK as a result of increased government investment.”

Levels of research income for the university were more than £120m, student satisfaction was high and 94% of Newcastle graduates were in work or further education within six months of leaving Newcastle, the spokesman added.

The general secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, said: “We have to recognise that our standing is under threat if we don’t match our competitors.

“The Asian countries are seeing their universities climb the table because of strong support from government, while we face further cuts. Unless we wake up to this reality, we risk falling behind.”

 

Ref: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29429466

If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else?

You’ve no doubt heard motivational messages like this one before, maybe from your manager; perhaps a parent. When you’re clearly in need of some kind of motivational boost and someone rattles off a line like this, it’s easy to shrug it off as a corny, slightly patronising gesture. Thanks, but no thanks!

The thing is, we do need to believe in ourselves if we want others to. We are our own harshest critics; the first to call ourselves stupid or beat ourselves up about missing an opportunity. We put immense pressure on ourselves to achieve the unachievable, and when we don’t; stress about how we could have done things better. These thought patterns are poisonous and slowly sabotage our chances at success. As much as we’d hate to admit it, often we are actually to blame for bringing ourselves down.

The good news is it’s never too late to pep ourselves back up. Sometimes all it takes is a little self-reflection and resistance. If you want to start achieving great things, these are the toxic habits you’ll need to break first:

1. Comparing yourself to others

If you look around your office or scroll through your Facebook news feed, it’s easy to convince yourself everyone’s more successful than you. When you start to feel like you’re lagging behind your peers, friends or family members, you need to stop right there. Everyone is leading totally unique lives, full of different challenges and successes. Nobody likes to broadcast their troubles; so you’re probably comparing your bloopers to their highlight reel anyway (as the saying goes). Stop focussing on everyone else, and start concentrating on reaching your own potential.

2. Taking too much on

Living life on the verge of a major panic attack from being overworked is incredibly unhealthy; both physically and mentally. Stop saying ‘yes’ to everything, and learn how to say ‘no’. Taking on an unrealistic workload and over-committing yourself will leave you feeling exhausted all the time, and will strip the enjoyment out of everything you do. You’ll start resenting everything that eats into your precious energy stores and things you used to enjoy will likely become burdens. Recognising your tendency to burn yourself out is the first step in breaking this habit. Stop letting guilt pressure you into spreading yourself thin.

3. Failing to switch off

Mastering the art of relaxing outside of work hours is difficult to do, but imperative to your success. If you want to start each day feeling refreshed and motivated, you need to learn how to switch off when you leave the office. Stop checking your work emails at 10:30pm before you go to bed; stop taking client calls at dinner time. Remember, you work to live; not the other way around. The sooner you prioritise ‘switching off’ when you’re not on duty, the sooner you’ll start to feel your energy levels and drive at work increase.

4. Holding onto your mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes; no one is perfect. Holding onto past slip-ups and misfortunes will only prevent you from moving forward. If you keep referencing your failures and obsessing over how and why you let it happen, you’ll only feel lower about yourself and hold yourself back form accepting new challenges, for fear of failing.

5. Making self-deprecating comments

This one’s not really a silent habit, as it involves talking, but the quiet mental fallout that occurs after you’ve brought yourself down is where the real damage manifests. Stop selling yourself short and making jokes at your own expense. A cheap laugh like this will cut into your confidence. The moment you start taking yourself seriously and supporting your own goals is the moment others will follow suit.

 

Originally published here: http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/silent-habits-sabotaging-success/

When you’re sitting in a job interview, you’re going to be fielding a lot of questions from a hiring manager. However, many applicants forget that the interview is the ideal time for them to ask some questions of their own. While the hiring manager wants to ensure that you’re a good fit for their organization, you also want to get a sense of what this company is all about too. To do that, make sure to ask the following questions:

What’s the biggest issue facing the company and how might I be able to help?

This gives you some insight into how you can be most useful should you get hired. It also gives you a look into where the company’s main areas of focus might be. For example, if they’re telling you that they’re in desperate need of a new website, you can then speak to your familiarity with working on this type of project as you go about the rest of the interview.

How does your company define success?

This will let you know whether the organization is a good fit for you. It also allows you to get a sense of how to get ahead should you get hired. Whether success is measured in numbers, an attitude, ideas, or all of the above, having this information in advance is valuable.

Do you offer opportunities for further training or professional development for your employees?

You want to work for a company that invests in its employees, and this is one way to tell if this is the case.  As an added bonus, it shows that you’re interested in continuing to improve yourself and learn more.

Do you have plans for new products or services?

Make sure to research ahead of time so you know that there’s nothing in the news that you should know about before you ask this question. If it’s clear there’s not, ask away, as it can give you some insight as to how your time with the company may be spent if you get the job. This is also another question that lets you tailor your answers so that you can show off your skills and illustrate how you’d be an essential part of that new product they’re hoping to launch.

What is the next step in the process?

It’s okay to ask the hiring manager to demystify their process for you a little bit. Depending on the person, you may get a lot of clarity—they tell you they’re interviewing three other people and will get back to you in a few weeks, for example—or they may be more vague. Either way, you’ll leave with a better sense of what to expect.

 

Originally published at: http://blog.sparkhire.com/2015/07/18/the-questions-you-absolutely-must-ask-during-a-job-interview/

As we’re growing up, we’re often asked what we want to be. As small children our answer is obviously always incredibly basic and typically influenced by the careers we are frequently exposed to: doctor, police officer, trash collector, etc. Even after we’ve reached adulthood sometimes our ideas of career opportunities can be pretty narrow.

For many, it isn’t until we reach college (and sometimes after) and begin exploring the realities of different careers that the job opportunity door blows open. We suddenly realize that there is so much more to becoming a doctor, a scientist, or even a lawyer than we previously thought; there are specialties within specialties. It is around this point when many of us acknowledge there are multitudes of ways in which to achieve projected career goals.

Same Dog, New Tricks

To elaborate this point with a medical example, the majority of us tend to think broadly of the medical field as limited to doctors and nurses. However, this is certainly not the case. Healthcare facilities have administrative staff, HR personnel, maintenance crews, medical technicians, and more. Even doctors and nurses can vary widely based upon their specialties which can range from pediatrics, to neuroscience, to gerontology.

Depending upon the specialty, the lines between doctors and nurses can even begin to blur. In fact, the rift between doctors and nurses has gotten progressively smaller over the past few decades. For this reason, if your career goal is to help people with health conditions have a higher quality of life, limiting yourself to only becoming a doctor could greatly reduce your career opportunities.

Lines of Gray

By delving even further into the nuances of all the opportunities to help people within a medical career, you soon realize that even choosing to become a nurse still leaves a great number of options on the table. For instance, if you prefer a fast-pace lifestyle where quick decisions are key, you may prefer becoming an emergency room nurse. If you are more drawn to working with a specific condition you might focus on becoming something like an oncological nurse. There are even options available to those that would like autonomy to develop treatments for patients as a nurse practitioner.

Often times, we are unaware of the many different career choices out there when we enter the job market. Failing to see these lines of gray can limit the types of jobs we search for and apply to, which in turn can make finding a career we love more difficult. This can be the case in nearly every industry if we look properly.

Freedom to Choose

Sometimes finding an alternative path to your career goals can have a number of additional benefits. For instance, some physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners make almost as much as normal doctors. However, these two alternative careers have the added benefit of fewer years of higher education and far fewer student loans.

Additionally, these alternative careers may have more flexible schedules that suit your lifestyle a bit better than a traditional nine to five. They may offer slightly different and unique opportunities to you as an employee as well.

Becoming aware of the vast array of differing career opportunities is a great way to find alternative ways in which to meet your career goals. Frequently, we are unaware of a number of job openings that are available that meet these goals because we are unsure of the variety of similar positions out there. As you step into the job market be sure to keep an open eye for these potential alternative careers.

 

 

Originally published at http://blog.sparkhire.com/2016/05/15/alternative-ways-to-reach-your-career-goals/

“Where do you see yourself in five years time?” is one of the most infamous interview questions, yet it’s difficult to answer without resorting to dreaded cliches like “I just want to be doing something I enjoy”, or “I’m not really sure”.

Why are employers so keen on asking this? Probably because it’s one of those sneaky interview questions to which your answer can reveal much more than you might imagine: from whether you’ve got a solid career plan and know what you want to do, to how well you understand the position you’re applying for and how you define success.

For all these reasons, this question has a tendency of throwing interviewees into panic mode. Here are some pointers on what interviewers really want to hear:

Be ambitious, but realistic

Employers will always be attracted to ambitious candidates – after all, nobody wants an employee who feels apathetic about their job. That said, you need to be realistic in terms of how quickly you can rise through the ranks. For instance, if you say that you want to be leading a team of 20 within three years’ time, and this would only usually happen within a 10-year period in the company you’re talking to, you risk being perceived as a little arrogant and unprepared.

To avoid voicing wildly unrealistic aspirations, do your research. Search the company website and the LinkedIn profiles of current employees before your interview to look for any hints about how long members of staff have taken to progress.

Talk in terms of achievements and responsibilities

Another common mistake candidates make when answering this question is to talk about money or company perks. For example, “I want to be earning £50,000 or more, have a company car and a life-insurance policy.” In the vast majority of careers, perhaps with the exception of recruitment or sales, motivation to make large amounts of money or get company perks isn’t always going to be seen as an attractive quality. It will make an employer think you’re more interested in the things that come with the career they can offer, rather than the career itself.

Instead, your answer should focus on your professional development. Speak in terms of skills you’d like to acquire or ones you’d like to be using, qualifications you’d like to have completed or responsibilities you’d like to have.

Be specific, but flexible

Giving a vague answer to is another familiar faux pas. For example, “I’m not sure, five years is such a long time away. I could see myself working my way up in marketing, but I’m also interested in finance.”

Employers want to know that you know what you want. After all, hiring, training and developing people is an expensive business – if you’re going to leave in six months, your employer will have lost both time and money.

While you certainly shouldn’t lie about your plans, you can be less than candid if you’re considering several career options – only ever speak about your interest in the industry in which the company you’re interviewing with operates.

Although specific aspirations will be well received, rigidity in your ambitions won’t be, so choose your phrasing carefully. Rather than saying, “I need to have been promoted within a maximum of three years and I’ll be really disappointed if I’m not working with high profile clients in five years’ time”, you could say, “I’d like to have more responsibility in the next three to five years, ideally I’d be working on some of this company’s fantastic high profile accounts.” The first answer implies that if the company can’t fulfil your ambitions, you’ll be dissatisfied, while the second answer suggests a little more compliance on your part.

Talk about your professional, rather personal, ambitions

Unless an interviewer specifically asks you to comment on your personal ambitions, the safest option is to avoid mentioning them altogether. Saying that you want to be captain of your local tennis team, to have visited Japan or that you hope to be married with two children may not be well received. Employers want to hear about where you see your work self in five years’ time, anything else is irrelevant and can make you seem unprofessional and ill-prepared.

Emphasise the value you can bring to the organisation

While at first glance the five years question seems like it is probing your ambitions and wants, you should never miss an opportunity in an interview to subtly emphasise what you can do for your potential employer. It can be shrewd to end your answer with something like: “Overall I want to be making a marked difference to X of your company, helping to secure and add to its current reputation as a leader within Y and contributing to the company’s overall growth and success.”

Originally published at: https://jobs.theguardian.com/article/where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years-avoiding-interview-cliches/