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Is Your Workplace Making You Happy?

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Is Your Workplace Making You Happy?

The last week of September marks ‘International Week of Happiness at Work’. The initiative began in the Netherlands in 2018 and has grown to include 350 companies in 50 countries by 2024. “Happy employees are healthier, more engaged, work better together, and are more productive,” say the organisers, Happy Office.  They encourage organisations and their employees to take stock of their workplace wellbeing – and whether they need to make happiness a priority.  

What is International Week of Happiness at Work?

International Week of Happiness at Work is a time for focussing on job satisfaction whether you work for a boutique company, family business, or large conglomerate. With so much of our lives spent at work, it’s worthwhile cultivating a positive work environment for yourself and those around you – even if you work from home.

Happy Workers, Happy Business

Many cultures drive the “all work and no play” philosophy. Long hours, demanding jobs and tight deadlines can lead to low employee morale and even burnout.

Belgium and Portugal have led the charge against invasive work practices by banning employers from contacting their workers outside office hours – bar genuine emergencies. The “right to disconnect” is also recognised in Ireland, France, Italy and Spain. Employees’ personal life away from work is ringfenced. 

These European employers recognise that investing in workplace happiness gives you a positive ROI in the form of:

  • Increased productivity
  • Loyalty to the organisation. Your employees will go the extra mile to help the company achieve its goals.
  • Positive effects on mental health leading to improved attendance
  • Engaged staff who are willing to give time and energy to work projects
  • High employee retention.

Clearly, happy employees are great for business.

Start Your Journey to a Happier Workplace Now

Happiness at work is not solely the responsibility of employers. Everyone can contribute to a positive company culture. There are things you can commit to doing daily, weekly, and monthly to help improve your workplace wellbeing. 

If you aren’t sure where your satisfaction levels lie, take Alison’s Workplace Wellbeing Assessment. This free psychometric test is designed to help you to understand and improve your cognitive, emotional and physical wellbeing and workplace stressors.

Small Changes, Big Impact

Add to your ongoing professional development with a course like Supervision Skills – Managing Employee Performance. It is packed with tips on encouraging and motivating your teams. You can also:

  • Celebrate events, milestones, achievements and occasions. Employees need to know that they just aren’t work-horses but are seen and valued as individuals. 
  • Provide feedback. When you give your employees constructive feedback, they know what areas to focus on and improve. Your team feel acknowledged and appreciated and ultimately, happier. 
  • Host social gatherings. This will help strengthen relationships and a sense of connection. Why not consider letting staff knock off early on Fridays, typically the least productive time of the week?
  • Host webinars. Prioritise mental and physical wellbeing by inviting guest speakers to give talks or workshops.
  • Ask staff what they need to be happier at work. An anonymous survey is one option. Be open to receiving feedback about changes to the workplace culture.

5 Steps to Happiness for Employees

When you’re happy at work, you’re well on your way to having a healthy work-life balance. There are some simple steps you can take to improve your situation.

  1. Help someone. There’s a proverb that says, “It’s better to give than receive.” Research supports this and shows that when you help others, it can help your self-confidence and boost your level of happiness.
  2. Set goals. Focus and prioritise your goals and tasks. This will help reduce your stress levels, which can add to feeling unhappy.
  3. Socialise. Have lunch with friends, family or workmates, away from your desk.
  4. Take breaks. Long work hours can take their toll on you, both mentally and physically. It’s important to take regular breaks during the workday. Also take your annual vacation to rest, recharge, and rejuvenate. A rested mind, body, and soul lead to happiness.
  5. Invest in yourself. Study further if you want to advance at work. Exercise. Practise mindfulness and maintain a healthy and nutritious diet.

Happiness is not a destination, but a journey. Be intentional about cultivating a happy life – at home and at work. If, on reflection, you decided that you need to shift direction to find fulfillment, Alison’s comprehensive Career Guide provides information on thousands of career pathways, including average salaries and course recommendations. If you need help with your CV, the free Resumé Builder has everything you need.

As the late Steve Jobs once said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” That just may be where we can find the seeds of happiness. 

Free Resources from Alison

Realise your career dreams with a free Workplace Personality Test. Explore your character; discover your professional strengths and weaknesses and find your perfect career match. Upskill with personalised course recommendations.

Aptitude Test – Assess your verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning skills. Course recommendations will help you improve in your areas of weakness.

Word of the Day: satirist

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This word has appeared in 23 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

142 Picture Prompts to Inspire Student Writing

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A school year’s worth of short, accessible image-driven posts that invite a variety of kinds of writing.

Word of the Day: purportedly

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This word has appeared in 124 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Curious about digital marketing? Read on

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Curious about digital marketing? Read on

Welcome to another career spotlight! This week, in celebration of the newly launched Unilever Digital Marketing Analyst Professional Certificate, we’re shining a light on digital marketing—what it is, who should learn it, and where to begin.

First, what is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a catch-all term for all areas of marketing that exist in a digital space, including:

Much like digital spaces themselves, digital marketing types and techniques are ever-evolving. For example, several years ago, affiliate marketing strategies were likely heavily structured around blogs. More recently, the same teams have presumably added social media influencers to their strategy, incorporating platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Today, user-generated content (UGC) is becoming yet another aspect of affiliate marketing.

To stay current with digital marketing strategies, it’s important to be able to recognize digital trends and understand where and how your brand fits into those trends. That’s where digital marketing analysis skills come into play. Whether you are a specialist or a generalist, working for a company or marketing your own brand, you can (and should) use data to strengthen your digital marketing strategy.

Who should learn digital marketing?

Anyone who wants to promote anything online should learn digital marketing.

Consider learning digital marketing if you want to:

  • Pursue a career in marketing: There are plenty of digital marketing jobs, both in specialized and general roles. (And as far as salary goes, digital marketing managers in the US earn an average base salary of $86,125, as of February 2024, according to Glassdoor—learn more in our salary guide.)
  • Find a part-time digital role: If you’re looking for a more flexible path, many companies hire freelance digital marketers to work on campaigns. Since these are primarily online roles, they tend to be amenable to remote work.
  • Start a business: Especially if you’re launching an e-commerce business, you can use your digital marketing skills to find your audience and communicate directly with them. (In this case, consider enrolling in the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate.)
  • Build an online brand: Whether a personal brand or a professional one, people with a prominent online presence tend to use digital marketing strategies to build their brand.

Where to begin

For a broad overview, try the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate. To begin your digital marketing journey, explore the marketing funnel and learn how to create a successful customer journey.

For key data skills, try the Unilever Digital Marketing Analyst Professional Certificate. Data can be a very powerful tool when you’re aiming to scale and grow your marketing efforts. Here, you’ll learn how to use it to your advantage.

For a specialized social media skill set, try the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate. Digital marketers need to understand several different platforms in order to build a strategy that will effectively reach their intended audience. Learn about many of those platforms and how to use them.

That’s all for this week. Next time, we’ll dive into some more AI skills.

‘Is Friendship Becoming Obsolete?’: The Week 6 Winner of Our Summer Reading Contest

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Alex Cox, 16, writes about the importance of human connection, especially for older people, in the age of artificial intelligence.

Word of the Day: sluggish

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This word has appeared in 245 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

This Is the Most Popular Programming Language for Learning to Code

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This Is the Most Popular Programming Language for Learning to Code

Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey just dropped, with Python ranking the most popular programming language among people learning to code. This finding tracks with our Codecademy community’s taste: Our Learn Python 3 course is the most popular in our catalog, meaning it’s the course learners visit and enroll in the most.

Millions of experienced developers and newbies choose Python. This year, the annual Stack Overflow Developer survey looked at over 65,000 responses from people in 185 countries. Most respondents are full-time professional developers, but the survey also includes people learning to code, hobbyists, and folks who write code sometimes as part of their work or studies.

Learn something new for free

Why Python is the most popular language for learners

Survey participants were asked to name the programming, scripting, and markup languages they have extensive experience with, and select the ones they’d like to keep working with. In the category of people who are learning how to code, 66% said they like Python the most.

Folks at the start of their learning journey gravitate towards Python since its syntax is clear, concise, and reads like plain English. The creator of Python, Guido Van Rossum, intentionally designed the syntax so that a total newbie could easily grasp new programming concepts. Here’s a Python code snippet for a program that calculates the factorial of a number. Take a look at the straightforward syntax:

def factorial(n):
    if n == 0:
        return 1
    else:
        return n * factorial(n - 1)

# Example usage
number = 5
result = factorial(number)
print(f"The factorial of {number} is {result}")

Another Python perk is its versatility across web development, machine learning, data science, and financial analysis. When you’re first learning to code, you may not know which programming domain interests you the most. With Python, you can go in learning the basics of web dev and have the flexibility to expand to data analysis and machine learning later on. Plus, Python has tons of pre-written libraries, tools, and frameworks that boost what you can do with the language. 

The survey responses from professional developers were slightly different than the group of learners, with 65% claiming JavaScript as their favorite followed by SQL, HTML/CSS, and then Python. Professional developers often use lots of different languages based on their organization’s tech stack or their own expertise and job responsibilities. If you’re a professional developer looking to refine your skills in one of these languages, be sure to check out our intermediate and advanced courses.

More programming languages for learning to code

So, what are the other programming languages that people (like you!) learning to code rank highly? Here are the most popular programming, scripting, and markup languages, according to those who are learning to code (plus beginner-friendly courses to get you started):

Python

Try it: Learn Python 3

HTML/CSS

Try it: Learn HTML, Learn CSS

JavaScript

Try it: Learn JavaScript

Java

Try it: Learn Java

C++

Try it: Learn C++

SQL

Try it: Learn SQL

C

Try it: Learn C

Bash/Shell

Try it: Learn the Command Line

TypeScript

Try it: Learn TypeScript

C#

Try it: Learn C#

If you’re overwhelmed by all of these languages to choose from, the free Codecademy course Choosing a Programming Language can help find the right fit for you. We’ll cover key factors and guide you to the best Codecademy courses and skill paths.

Start learning Python today

Ready to take the Python plunge? We recommend kicking things off with our introductory course Learn Python 3, then taking the free course Getting Started with Python for Data Science for hands-on experience working with real datasets in Python. If you want to get into web development, try Build Python Web Apps with Django or Build Python Web Apps with Flask. Explore our 130-plus Python courses and projects to get a sampling of everything the language has to offer.

For more in-depth findings, be sure to read the full Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey.

From Concerned to Optimistic: What an AI Strategist Learned from Generative AI with Large Language Models

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From Concerned to Optimistic: What an AI Strategist Learned from Generative AI with Large Language Models
GenAI: from concerned to optimistic

Generative AI (GenAI) is poised to transform work, but what that looks like remains unclear at the moment. While the International Monetary Fund believes 60 percent of jobs may be impacted by AI, other organizations estimate that the number could be closer to 70 percent. 

Knowing how to use AI as a tool and developing key skills around this technology will be critical in the coming years. Yet, as of today, less than 30% of professionals use GenAI at work on a daily or weekly basis. 

With AI technologies evolving at a rapid clip, it’s important to hear how professionals use it the world over. Coursera spoke with Mohammad, a Senior AI Strategist at a German consulting firm, who was initially both excited and skeptical  about the performance of large language models (LLMs)

 Mohammad worried about how he could use LLMs reliably in business because they seemed particularly volatile with outputs that could vary widely. He also feared that only big tech companies could afford to develop the most powerful models, potentially leaving smaller players behind. 

However, in an effort to learn more about this rapidly advancing technology and dive deeper into the technical aspects of GenAI, Mohammad turned to Coursera and enrolled in Generative AI with Large Language Models from DeepLearning.AI. 

What were your initial thoughts about GenAI?

As someone with technical expertise in data science & ML, who also experimented with earlier generative models (e.g., GANs), I was quite excited and a bit surprised about how well LLM applications were performing. However, I had concerns about using GenAI, especially LLMs, reliably in real-life business applications. The volatility and limited explainability of these models, caused by their complexity and massive training data, worried me especially as I guide clients as a Senior AI Strategist at a German consultancy.

Which course did you take?

The “Generative AI with Large Language Models” course by DeepLearning.AI not only solidified my knowledge but also addressed my concerns while highlighting budget-friendly ways teams can apply GenAI.

How are you thinking about GenAI now? 

Surprisingly, the course gave me more hope regarding the democratization of GenAI. It demonstrated how small, open-source models could perform very well in certain use cases with adequate fine-tuning and alignment techniques. This approach gives developers and companies more control over their models, making GenAI accessible with a reasonable budget.

Are you still concerned?

The course deepened my knowledge in aligning LLMs with human values and introduced the latest evaluation metrics. While my concerns on trustworthiness remain, learning about these metrics was crucial. It’s an active field of research that needs more attention, especially considering upcoming AI regulations like the EU AI Act.

How does what you learned impact your work?

As a consultant and AI strategist, this knowledge allows me to better evaluate the suitability of various models and approaches for specific companies and use cases. It filled some knowledge gaps, enabling me to more confidently explain LLM concepts to colleagues and clients.

What advice do you have for others?

For those unsure about GenAI’s place in the workplace, this course offers a great mix of theory and practice. It provides the understanding needed to leverage GenAI effectively in business settings. So, if you’re looking to boost your knowledge in generative AI and large language models, my advice would be to go ahead and take this course ;).

Note: This interview was condensed and edited for readability.


Ready to take the next step with GenAI?

Get hands-on experience from industry leaders like IBMGoogle CloudMicrosoft, and more so you can apply GenAI practically in your role—whether you’re a product manager, marketer, or leading a team. Discover how to save time with GenAI and distinguish hype from reality, all while earning certificates that showcase your GenAI expertise.