Employee Attributes

Assignment 2 Task 1

Rainbow Light is a small charity that supports clients who have problems with their sight and need help in using ICT.  Rainbow Light employs 5 full time staff but relies on volunteers to carry out a lot of the work with clients. Some volunteers help to create ‘talking books’ which are saved on CD then loaned to clients. Others visit the clients and show them how to load and listen to the Cd's. 

Your role requires you to work alongside the Manager of Rainbow Light.  Her job role involves managing a team of volunteers, recruiting new volunteers, keeping staff up to date with IT and ensuring that staff are able to communicate with clients using IT.  She maintains a database of clients and a schedule of volunteers.

Your line manager has asked you to create a blog called Communication and Employability for IT.  This blog will be used as a means of keeping everyone in the charity informed of important areas in Communicating and Employability in the area of IT.

Attributes

An attribute is a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of someone or something.

Specific attribute

 

A specific attribute is an attribute which relates to a particular cause or source. An example of a specific attribute would be technical knowledge.

Technical knowledge

Rainbow Light’s employees must know what their job involves and have the necessary skills in order to be able to do it. If they do not have the necessary skills in order to do their job then the job will not be done correctly.

They need to know basic ICT skills such as; how log on, set up folders and have basic typing skills. They must know how to record their voice using a microphone as they will be required to create talking books. They must also know how to burn files onto a CD as they will be required to burn the talking books they create using a microphone onto a CD which will then be loaned out to clients.

They will have to be able to create labels so that they will be able to identify the different Cd's that they make.

Rainbow Light employees need to also know how to use Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel and Access. Tasks such as writing a report or creating a database would require the employee to use these programs. They may also have to update client information or add a new client to the database.

Employees may have to communicate with their fellow employees or clients through email. Therefore, it is essential that the employees at Rainbow Light know how to create, edit and send emails as well as add an attachment to an email.

In order for Rainbow Light to be able to identify whether a potential employee meets these requirements, Rainbow Light will request certain qualifications. These qualifications could come in the form of a GCSE, an A-Level or any other equivalents in ICT.   

General attribute

Organisational skills

Rainbow Light’s employees must be well organised and be able to stay on top of the work they are given. In order for them to be organised they must take a number of things into account; prioritising, task management and task tracking. Whenever an employee is prioritising, they must determine which tasks are the most important and therefore allocate the most time to those tasks.

Employees need time management skills to keep track of the tasks they have been set and when those tasks are due in. Time management will help the employee to stay on schedule with their work and prevent them from having to rush through their work at the last minute which could lead to them making mistakes which could have a negative impact on the business

Whenever Rainbow Light sets an employee a project, that project may contain a number of individual tasks. Each task will have to be completed for a certain date in order for the employee to meet the projected deadline. Therefore, they will have to keep track of each task to ensure that they will finish the project on time. To do this, the employee may decide to write down the date each task is due in for in a diary or store the date on the calendar on their desktop so that they do not forget the date.

Personal Attitudes

An attitude is a  settled way of thinking or feeling, typically reflected in a person's behaviour. Attitudes that a person may have are; confidence, ambition, determination, self motivation, hard working and leadership.  

Hard Working

If Rainbow Light has volunteers who are hard working they will get more work done. As Rainbow Light depends on their volunteers to get the majority of their work done it is vital that they are hard working. Rainbow Light could motivate their volunteers to work harder by rewarding those who work the hardest by entrusting them with more important tasks or even giving them a cash reward to show their appreciation. Examples of volunteers at Rainbow Light being hard working are:

• Coming into work on time;
• Coming in on their days off to get work they need to finish finished;
• Finish each task on time;
• Working late to finish work.
  

Leadership

If Rainbow Light has volunteers who show leadership they will be better organised and get more work done. If there is no leader among the volunteers, then there will have no structure and they may not know exactly what work they have to complete. 

One of the managers within Rainbow Light should appoint a leader who oversees the volunteers. In order to pick the best leader among the volunteers each volunteer who wants to lead the group should be interviewed or else a vote should be cast to see who the volunteers want to be their leader.

Qualities a leader should have are; integrity, dedication, openness, creativity, fairness and a sense of humour. The volunteer who becomes leader would need to plan out the tasks, arrange events among the other employees and ensure that everything is done on time.