Executive Secretary

We are looking for a competent Executive Secretary to support high-ranking officials in our company. You will be the one to organize and maintain the executive’s schedule and assist them by performing a variety of administrative tasks.

Executive secretaries must be quick professionals with great time-management and multitasking abilities. It is with their diligence and competence in their work that executives can focus on their managerial responsibilities without worrying for other tasks.

The goal is to contribute to the efficiency of the overall business by ensuring all assigned administrative duties are carried on timely and efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Maintain executive’s agenda and assist in planning appointments, board meetings, conferences, etc;

• Attend meetings and keep minutes;

• Receive and screen phone calls and redirect them when appropriate;

• Handle and prioritize all outgoing or incoming correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.);

• Make travel arrangements for executives;

• Handle confidential documents ensuring they remain secure;

• Prepare invoices or financial statements and provide assistance in bookkeeping;

• Monitor office supplies and negotiate terms with suppliers to ensure the most cost-effective orders;

• Maintain electronic and paper records ensuring information is organized and easily accessible;

• Conduct research and prepare presentations or reports as assigned.

Requirements 

• Proven experience as executive secretary or similar administrative role;  Proficient in MS Office and “back-office” software (e.g. ERP);

• In depth knowledge of office management as well as technical vocabulary of relevant industry;

• Familiarity with basic research methods and reporting techniques;

• Excellent organizational and time-management skills;

• Outstanding communication and negotiation abilities;

• Integrity and confidentiality;

• Degree in business administration or relative field.

(Adapted from: https://resources.workable.com/executive-secretary-job-description)

Read TEXT 3 and answer question.  

TEXT 3  

THE PAPERLESS CLASSROOM IS COMING  

Michael Scherer

Back-to-school night this year in Mr. G’s sixth-grade classroom felt a bit like an inquisition.

Teacher Matthew Gudenius, a boyish, 36-year-old computer whiz who runs his class like a preteen tech startup, had prepared 26 PowerPoint slides filled with facts and footnotes to deflect the concerns of parents. But time was short, the worries were many, and it didn’t take long for the venting to begin.

“I like a paper book. I don’t like an e-book,” one father told him, as about 30 adults squeezed into a room for 22 students. Another dad said he could no longer help his son with homework because all the assignments were online. “I’m now kind of taking out of the routine.”, he complained. Rushing to finish, Gudenius passed a slide about the debate over teaching cursive, mumbling, “We don’t care about handwriting.” In a flash a mother objected: “Yeah, we do.”

At issue was far more than penmanship. The future of K-12 education is arriving fast, and it looks a lot like Mr. G’s classroom in the northern foothills of California’s wine country. Last year, President Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids online simultaneously by 2017. Bulky textbooks will be replaced by flat screens. Worksheets will be stored in the cloud, not clunky Trapper Keepers. The Dewey decimal system will give way to Google. “This one is a big, big deal,” says Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

It’s a deal Gudenius has been working to realize for years. He doesn’t just teach a computer on every student’s desk; he also tries to do it without any paper at all, saving, by his own estimate, 46,800 sheets a year, or about four trees. The paperless learning environment, while not the goals of most fledgling programs, represents the ultimate result of technology transforming classroom.

Gudenius started teaching as a computer-lab instructor, seeing students for just a few hours each month. That much time is still the norm for most kids. American schools have about 3.6 students for every classroom computing device, according to Education Market Research, and only 1 in 5 school buildings has the wiring to get all students online at once. But Gudenius always saw computers as a tool, not a subject. “We don’t have a paper-and-pencil lab, he says. When you are learning to be a mechanic, you don’t go to a wrench lab.”

Ask his students if they prefer the digital to the tree-based technology and everyone will say yes. It is not unusual for kids to groan when the bell rings because they don’t want to leave their work, which is often done in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. Instead of telling his students to show their work when they do an algebra equation, Gudenius asks them to create and narrate a video about the process, which can then be shown in class. History lessons are enlivened by brief videos that run on individual tablets. And spelling, grammar and vocabulary exercises have the feel of a game, with each student working at his own speed, until Gudenius – who tracks the kids’ progress on a smartphone – gives commands like “Spin it” to let the kids know to flip the screens of their devices around so that he can see their work and begin the next lesson.

Source: TIME- How to Eat Now. Education: The Paperless Classroom is Coming, p. 36-37; October 20, 2014 

Read TEXT 2 and answer question

TEXT 2  

Zainab Akande

May 13, 2013 

‘It seems not a lot of people are impressed with TIME's latest magazine cover, dubbing millennials as the "ME ME ME" generation: 

Although there's a subtitle that suggests despite selfies and living in the basement with parents, past the narcissism, millennials have the power to save the world. I tried reading the article to get a sense of how, but sadly I was blocked by a paywall to Joel Stein's article. (The journalism industry needs to do what a journalism industry has to do in order to survive, after all.) 

Still, the nature of the cover itself can be easily interpreted to suggest that millennials are the only generation to have suffered from crippling egotism, when that simply isn't the case.The only major difference now is that millennials have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to highlight their meness.’  

Source: Available <https://mic.com/articles/41419/me-me-me-generetion-top-5-time-magazine-cover-paroidies#.sX0pzb9yt> Accessed on 10 November 2016. (Adapted).  

TEXT 1  

WHY MILLENIALS WILL SAVE US ALL  

By Joel Stein

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Here’s the code, hard data: the incident of narcissistic personality disorder in nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are fame obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a senator, according to a 2007 survey; four time as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation as that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right. Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clarck University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the non-profit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did.

Millennials consist, depending on whom you ask, of people born from 1980 to 2000. To put it more simply for them, since they grew up not having to do a lot of math in their heads, thanks to computers, the group is made up mostly of teens and 20-somethings. At 80 million strong, they are the biggest age grouping in American history. Each country’s millennials are different, but because of globalization, social media, the export of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to one another than to old generations within their nations. Even in China, where family history is more important than any individual, the internet, urbanization and the onechild policy have created a generation as overconfident and self-involved as the Western one. And these aren’t just rich-kid problems: poor millennials have even higher rates of narcissism, materialism and technology addiction in their ghetto-fabulous lives.

They are the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they’re trying to take over the Establishment but because they’re growing up without one. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful - they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution has further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. Nation-states, YouTube directors vs. studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. Millennials don’t need us. That’s why we’re scared of them.

In the U.S, millennials are the children of baby boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exarcebated. Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their genetic data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group. This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else.

They got this way partly because in the 1970s, people wanted to improve kids’ chances of success by instilling self-esteem. It turns out that self-esteem is great for getting a job or hooking up at a bar but not so great for keeping a job or a relationship. “It was an honest mistake,” says Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University and the editor of Self-Esteem: The puzzle of Low Self-Regard. “The early findings showed that, indeed, kids with high self-esteem did better in school and were less likely to be in various kinds of trouble. It’s just that we’ve learned latter that self-esteem is a result, not a cause.” The problem is that when people try to boost self-esteem, they accidentally boost narcissism instead. “Just tell your kids you love them. It’s a better message,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, who wrote Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. “When they’re little it seems cute to tell them they’re special or a princess or a rock star or whatever their T-shirt says. When they’re 14 it’s no longer cute.” All that self-esteem leads them to be disappointed when the world refuses to affirm how great they know they are. “This generation has the highest likelihood of having unmet expectations with respect to their careers and the lowest levels of satisfaction with their careers at the stage that they’re at,” says Sean Lyons, co-editor of Managing the New Workforce: International Perspectives on the Millennial Generation. “It is sort of a crisis of unmet expectations.”

What millennials are most famous for, besides narcissism is its effect: entitlement. If you want to sell seminars to middle managers, make them about how to deal with young employees who email the CEO directly and beg off projects they find boring. English teacher David McCullough Jr.’s address last year to Wellesley High School’s graduating class, a 12-minute reality check titled “You Are Not Special,” has nearly 2 million hits on YouTube. “Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you,” McCullough told the graduates. He says nearly all the response to the video has been positive, especially from millennials themselves; the video has 57 likes for every dislike. Though they’re cocky about their place in the world, millennials are also stunted, having prolonged a life stage between teenager and adult that this magazine once called twixters and will now use once again in an attempt to get that term to catch on. The idea of the teenager started in the 1920s; in 1910, only a tiny percentage of kids went to high school, so most people’s social interactions were with adults in their families or in the workplace. Now that cell phones allow kids to socialize at every hour – they send and receive an average of 88 texts a day, according to Pew – they’re living under the constant influence of their friends. “Peer pressure is anti-intellectual. It is anti-historical. It is anti-eloquence,” says Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). “Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers. To develop intellectually you’ve got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they’re just hanging around other 17-year-olds.” Of all the objections to Obamacare, not a lot of people argued against parents’ need to cover their kids’ health insurance until they’re 26.

Millennials are interacting all day but almost entirely through a screen. You’ve seen them at bars, sitting next to one another and texting. They might look calm, but they’re deeply anxious about missing out on something better. Seventy percent of them check their phones every hour, and many experience phantom pocket-vibration syndrome. “They’re doing a behavior to reduce their anxiety,” says Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills and the author of iDisorder. That constant search of a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my status update!”) reduces creativity. From 1966, when the Torrance Tests of Creativity Thinking were first administered, through the mid-1980s, creativity scores in children increased. Then they dropped, falling sharply in 1998. Scores on tests of empathy similarly fell sharply, starting in 2000, likely because of both a lack to face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism. Not do only millennials lack the kind of empathy that allows them to feel concerned for others, but they also have trouble even intellectually understanding others’ points of view.

So, yes, we have all that data about narcissism and laziness and entitlement. But a generation’s greatness isn’t determined by data; it’s determined by how they react to the challenges that befall them. And, just as important, by how we react to them. Whether you think millennials are the new greatest generation of optimistic entrepreneurs or a group of 80 million people about to implode in a dwarf star of tears when their expectations are unmet depends largely on how you view change. Me, I choose to believe in the children. God knows they do.

Source: Time. Available at http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/ Accessed on October 24, 2016.  

                                 LARGEST AIRCRAFT IN THE WORLD

      We have lift-off. The world's largest aircraft has taken to the skies for the first time.The Airlander 10 spent nearly two hours in the air, having taken off from Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire. During its flight, it reached 3,000 feet (914 meters) and performed a series of gentle turns all over a safe area.

      The aircraft is massive – as long as a football pitch and as tall as six double decker buses and capable of flying for up to five days. It was first developed for the US government as a long-rangesurveillance aircraft but was scrapped following cutbacks.

      Each one cost 25 million pounds and can carry heavier loads than jumbo jets while also producing less noise and emitting less pollution. The makers, Hybrid Air Vehicles, believe it‟s the future of aircraft, and that one day we'll be using them to get places.

      But we're a while away yet. The Airlander will need to clock up 200 hours‟ flying time before beingdeemed airworthy by aviation bodies. If it passes though, we can hope we'll all get some extra leg room.

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Does an Email Hacking Software really Exist?

  With my experience of over 10 years in the field of ethical hacking and information security, all I can tell you is that there exists no such ready-made software program (as shown and advertised on many websites) that can break into the service provider’s database and hack email passwords. This is just a myth! This may seem a bit disappointing for many, but this is the fact. However, it is still possible to easily hack email passwords using some of the alternative programs and ways as discussed below:

  Working Ways to Hack an Email Password:

  Even though it is impossible to hack the database and instantly crack the email password, it is still possible to trick the users so that they give away the password by themselves. This can be done using a handful of methods like keylogging, social engineering or phishing. However, the easiest and most effective way is by using keyloggers.

  A keylogger is a small program that records each and every keystroke a user types on the keyboard of a specific computer. So when you install a keylogger on the computer from where the target person is likely to access his/her email, it is possible to capture the password. Though keyloggers are not designed to hack email passwords, they can still be used to accomplish the job. Here is a list of some of the interesting facts about keyloggers:

  EASY TO USE: A keylogger does not require any special skills. Anyone with basic computer knowledge should be able to use it.

  REMAINS UNDETECTED: A keylogger will remain undetected after installation and operates in a total stealth mode. So, you need not worry about being caught or traced back.

  REMOTE INSTALLATION: In addition to installation on a location computer, keyloggers also support remote installation. That means you can also install it even on those computers for which you do not have physical access.

(Adapted form: http://www.gohacking.com/email-hacking-software/) 

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