Drawing from over 20 years of industry experience, gain valuable insights and expert perspectives from a trusted microbiology quality assurance leader and internal auditor.
I have experience developing training and presenting it to small to medium sized groups. Part of this process involves determining the way in which to present the training. Once such way to use some form of visuals in support of speaking. For my Microbiology for Non Microbiologists course, I used Microsoft Powerpoint.
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Recently a company’s HR representative contacted me regarding an “exciting” leadership opportunity in Sydney.
The phone interview went well and I was refered to “management”. They came back and said…. Continue reading
Let’s examine my traits and how they make me the best choice for your next employment opportunity.
In 2016, I took a DiSC assessment and scored a 6136.
Six for dominance. One for influence (hmmm). Three for steadiness and a final six for Conscientiousness. Continue reading
I have taken part in lots of training over the years. Training is great as if it is new, one learns new things. If the training has been done before, it consolidates or updates existing knowledge. In July 2016, I took part in communication training. Heading into the training, I was interested to see if my communication style had altered since the last time a DiSC assessment was used on me in 2009. As a trained trainer, I know all about communication styles and how to pitch training programs for effective knowledge transfer. Day to day communication is similar and I enjoy observing how trainers train.
In 2009 I took part in training using the DiSC model run by a company called Bridgeworks. From the discprofile website “DiSC is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork and communication. DiSC is non-judgmental and helps people discuss their behavioral differences.” Then I scored 5223, making me a “panther”. That indicated I had a dominant personality and summed me up as:
In January 2014, Company X advertised for a Lean Leader Microbiology role. My application was successful and I attended both a first and second stage interview.
Though I reportedly excelled during the interviews and seemed to have a good rapport with the interviewers, I “did not have enough team lead experience” and the role went to “an internal applicant”.
This is a little frustrating. I must not have conveyed my eight plus years experience leading teams of 3-15 scientists well enough. Maybe having never had a difficult customer (at least in my opinion) was seen as a weakness. Continue reading
Shortly after beginning my very first microbiology role, I discovered a program called Microsoft Visio was installed on the work computers and it could be used to create diagrams. I was performing a lot of viable environmental monitoring duties at this time and the room maps were in need of improvement. This was the perfect opportunity to improve some documentation. Continue reading
For a while now I have had the idea to turn a power point presentation I developed a number of years ago into an online learning module. A couple of weeks ago, I set up a domain specifically for playing with Moodle and installed it. I then had to uninstall it as my host’s server’s version of SQL is a bit long in the tooth to support the current version. Once I found a compatible version I unzipped it on my server, set up a database with a couple of test users and had a click around the installation.
I had no troubles creating a course directory structure, but how one went about adding content boggled my mind (it was probably 3 am when I did all this).
This evening, I thought I’d have a fresh look at things and after about 3 hours of referring to my old power point presentation, I’d ported enough information from it to make a fairly decent, but basic and no frills training package on how to control microbes in the home.
Looking at things, if (and when) I have a go at developing some more training modules, most of the fancy formatting will probably be done in Dreamweaver and then copied across to Moodle as I’m not too keen one the provided text editor.
If you want to check it out, click here to learn a little about microbiology. (link’s dead as I’ve removed the site – Jan 2016)