The probation period is designed to work two ways: the new employee has a chance to be part of the company, experience its culture, find out expectations and most of all, experience the job in 'real time' as well as working with the team of people with which the position is intended to interact with.

The company has a chance (through its management) to see if there is a match between the new employee and the team of people they are meant to work with. The probation period also allows the company the chance to see how their (the employee's) experience matches the expectations of the position, how well they perform on the job and in what ways could the company help them.

• Find your purpose in life.
• Update your resume.
• Give yourself time to grieve.
• Self-Promote!
• Save Money.
• Reconnect with friends and family.
• Go to school.
• Don't bad mouth your former employer.
• Surround yourself with positive and motivated people.
• Relish the present and look to the future.

One of the most important issues my clients bring to our coaching sessions is the building of structures that would help them perform better and more efficient.

Most of us have a series of tasks that tend to repeat themselves over time. Such tasks vary from putting together a tender document to making a sales call, from monitoring a sales cycle to putting together an implementation schedule; from interviewing people to writing job descriptions; from organizing an event to following up on it. The list is endless and is always a reflection of the job we are employed to perform.

While experience is a very important ingredient in the mix we can help build that experience following some very simple rules:

• Enquire if the company has policies and procedures manuals for the job you are performing. If there is such a document make sure you use it because it will most probably cover the main, if not all the aspects of a certain activity.
• If the company does not have such a material or if the material does not go in enough depth build your own documents that detail the activity you have to undertake. Such a document folder should contain an activity workflow (a simple flowchart would do), a check list of all the steps you need to take to make sure you cover all the necessary tasks involved, sets of templates for the documents you need to develop, a check list of follow-up steps.
• Ask someone who has experience in doing the tasks covered by your documents for input and at the same time continue to add to them as your experience with each of them grows.
• Make a habit of using these documents and of making changes to them as required. As your experience grows you will be able to improve them and fine-tune the processes.
• Be always aware of what new tasks you can develop structures for. This will not only help you but will also allow anyone new to the job to become efficient faster.

Not only are you helping them but you are also helping grow our community.

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