Do you long for a new or accelerated career, but don’t want to commit to a four year degree program? Surprise, you don’t need a bachelor’s degree! Today’s associate degree programs take only two years and you can acquire one through an online education college. Amazingly, there are 3.2 million higher education students in the United States who are taking courses online and you could be one. (Sloan Survey of Online Learning, Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States).There are many exciting and well-paid careers that require only an associate degree. Consider graphic design, radiologic technology, licensed practical nursing, paralegal, and dental hygiene. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects these jobs to be among the fastest growing in 2006. Here are some facts about well-paid careers that require only an associate degree.Graphic DesignMany people are unfamiliar with graphic design. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that graphic designers have the most job opportunities in the field of design. There is a 9 to 17% projected increase in employment opportunities between 2007 and 2014.”Success in this industry is based purely on creativity and skill so if you have natural artistic ability, there’s a lot of potential,” says Jason Rich, career expert and author of 202 High-Paying Jobs You Can Land Without a College Degree (Entrepreneur Press 2006).A two year, associate program will help develop your artistic skills and either start a business or find a position in a corporation. A graphic designer earns $29,400 to $50,800 per year. If you love art, this is a great career for you.Radiologic TechnologyA radiologic technologist (RT) is part of a health care team, able to assist in the diagnosis of internal problems and illnesses. An radiologic technologist involves interactions with patients and, in some ways, is similar to being a nurse. The RT tales x-rays and injects non-radioactive materials into patients’ bloodstreams to help diagnose illnesses. This area of study can also lead to further study in CT scanning, MRI technology, and radiation therapy. The earnings of an RT are $36,200 to $52,400 yearly.Physical Therapist’s AssistantThe need for physical therapists’ assistants is expected to increase by 27% or more over the next eight years. This career can prepare you for moving into massage therapy or sports medicine also. The average yearly pay is $31,000 to $44,000. As the baby boomer population ages, there will be a huge need for physical therapists’ assistants. If fitness and sports are your loves, consider this career as a gateway into those arenas.Medical TranscriptionistA medical transcriptionist listens to and transcribes dictated recordings made by doctors and other health care workers. The information is turned into medical reports, letters, and other documents. The BLS expects this job to grow 18 to 26% in the next eight years. Hourly wages run from $11.50 to $16.30. The greatest fact about this career is that it can be done at home! If you have children to care for, this may be the career for you.Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN)Licensed practical nurses work in hospitals, home health care, nursing homes, doctor’s offices, and outpatient care centers. They do many of the jobs registered nurses do. This job is expected to grow at an average rate for LPNs working in hospitals, but for those working in other venues, the job growth rate will be around 27%. The salary rate is $34,000 to $40,600 per year and is expected to rise.Paralegals and Legal AssistantsJobs for paralegals and legal assistants are also expected to increase by 27% or more in the next eight years. They earn from $39,000 to $50,000 per year, which is extremely well-paid for someone with an associate degree. Top paying jobs will be found in the federal government and large law firms, but are available in most cities.When considering an online education, consider the opportunities the online associate degree can provide. Your career possibilities can include business, education, information technology, health, law, and many more. According to the National Science Foundation, more than a fifth of individuals employed in science and engineering fields hold less than a bachelor’s degree, with 17% holding an associate degree. If you’re not sure how much education you want to commit to, an online associate degree is a good, first step. Students often choose an online, associate degree in order to specialize in a field, or to acquire a well-paid career while considering further online education college degrees.(Statistics Source: The Occupational Outlook Handbook 2006-2007, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Accelerate Your Career By Acquiring An Online Education Degree
Get and Stay Younger Looking and Slow the Aging of Your Body – Nutritional Supplements Can Help
Are you aware that many of the diseases the American public gets can be prevented with nutritional supplements? Even the aging process can be slowed by having a good balance of nutritional supplements.You may ask, “Why do I need nutritional supplements?” Most Americans have a hurried life style. This is evidenced by the number of drive through windows at the fast food restaurants. As a result, we do not eat a balanced diet. This is why food supplements are needed. Nutritional supplements do exactly what their name means. They supplement the nutritional value of our diets.Eating a variety of meats, vegetables, and fruits is definitely encouraged. However…what is the nutritional value of our food? The nutritional value has decreased as we have refined and process our foods. Unless you grow your own, you need nutritional supplements to make up the difference.Not having enough of the right vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants affects the ravaging effects of the aging process. Insufficient nutrition contributes to poor cardiovascular health, poor eyesight, and a weakened immune system. Good quality nutritional supplements can help in all these areas.Radiation exposure, cigarette smoke, and exposure to sunlight are some factors. The nutritional supplements must contain the right ratio and quantity to be beneficial. Adding nutritional supplements to a well balanced diet and adding exercise to your routine will greatly influence how our bodies stay healthy. Good quality nutritional supplements can even affect the aging process.We have seen advertisements about free radicals in diets lately. There is good reason for this. If free radicals are not neutralized they will ravage our body at every level. Nutritional supplements with antioxidants are needed to fight against these processes. The aging process in our bodies shows up in heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis to name a few. That is why our nutritional supplements must contain antioxidants.Nutritional and health experts agree that the basis for a good cardiovascular system is a nutrient rich diet, exercise, cholesterol level monitoring, and watching of blood pressure. The nutritional supplements added to your diet will help all of these. Your nutritional supplements should contain a garlic extract. Garlic has been shown to be of greatly effect the cardiovascular system and has helped decrease the instances of cardiovascular disease.Did you know that almost every eye disease that affects our vision CAN be linked to poor nutrition? Blood shot eyes, blurred vision, and nearly every irritation to our eyes can be prevented. The nutritional supplements you choose should contain Vitamins A, B, C, and E. You get these from of dark green leafy vegetables. Examples of these are: Kale, mustard, and collard greens. (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take nutritional supplements that contain the nutrients than eat those leafy greens.) Orange fruits and vegetables like oranges are carrots are also sources.I’ve named a few diseases nutritional supplements can help and prevent. I think these alone are reason enough for me to add nutritionally supplements to my diet. (I’m still working on the exercise part.) Nutritional supplements that you chose must contain sufficient quantities of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. Read the label and check the sources of the nutritional supplements you are getting.Also, don’t just take single vitamins or minerals. Just taking one, vitamin, and or an antioxidant and ignoring all the others is not suggested. The vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants in the nutritional supplements work in concert to promote a healthy body.Your health care provider can provide you with a list of those needed in your diet. Make sure your nutritional supplements have those, as well as sufficient quantities of others needed. Armed with all this information you can read the labels of the nutritional supplements you are considering (check several brands). Your health is too important for you NOT to check into these. Get a high quality (Pharmaceutical grade if you can) and you will be well on your way to eating and being healthierFind a game plan, implement it, and STICK to it. I did! You can too.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.