"Helping you gain
.control of your career"

In this issue we’re going to look at your own personal selling tool – your CV; consider the importance of effective problem solving skills and discuss how to turn complaints to your advantage.

• Editor's Desk
• Bite 1
• Bite 2
• Bite 3
• Working Web
• Last Word

We’ve now completed our move to new premises – and what a mammoth task that was! We’ve tried to eliminate rubbish and unnecessary files that have accumulated over the past 32 years so that we’re leaner, cleaner and, most importantly, actually fit into the space our new offices provide! It’s a good job I’d edited our Effective Project Management Course a few months ago – at least it gave me some idea of how to plan for the big event.

So, things are now settling down to normal and it’s time to look at what we’ve got in store for you this month. Unemployment in the UK is rising and a recent article stated that many recruiters spend no more than 30 seconds looking at a CV before coming to a decision on whether to interview the person. This means you’ve got to learn to impress in a short space of time, and our first article Ensuring Your CV Does the Job provides plenty of advice. If you want to go into the subject of how to apply successfully for jobs in more depth, it’s covered in our Business English with Spoken English Diploma Course.

Next, good problem-solving skills are essential not just in business, but in all walks of life, so we provide you with a short test to see how good your current methods are and then give some tips on how to improve.

Finally, statistics show that:

• Every unsatisfied customer will tell 10 people about a poor product or service.
• Between 50% and 90% of dissatisfied customers will never do business with you again.
• It can cost up to five times as much to get a new customer as to keep an existing one.

When you think about these facts it is obvious what your approach to complaints should be, so we’re going to look at the professional way of dealing with unsatisfied customers.

Let’s get down to business!