Guru

This week’s guru

Naked truth about dreams

Research released last week reveals that more than half of us have
nightmares about our jobs.

The study, sponsored by the Government’s Learndirect campaign, reveals that
57 per cent blame general stress for their work-related bad dreams.

Dreams expert Craig Hamilton-Parker reveals that if your nightmares feature
you arguing with your boss you are stressed, while dreams about being late for
a meeting signify an inability to switch off from work.

If you wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming of walking into work naked,
you are worried about your place on the career ladder.

However, Guru has some doubts about the depths of Hamilton-Parker’s insight.
Apparently, he claims if you dream of getting the sack, you’re worried about
redundancy, and if your nightmare features your computer crashing, you don’t
like IT – Never!

Guru challenges Hamilton- Parker to explain why in his recurring nightmare
he is being pecked repeatedly by a giant penguin who is dressed in a tutu and
is carrying out his annual appraisal.

Guru’s lurve-in failed to rank social standing

Guru was inundated with e-mails from
disciples anxious to make contact with contrib-utors to his HR pre-Valentine’s
Day lurve-in featured in last week’s issue.

He has big hopes for the Welsh duo, numbers 6 and 13, who each
expressed an interest in each other’s message.

However, research just published by the University’s of Essex’s
Institute for Social and Economic Research reveals that if their relationship
is to blossom, it is important that their ‘human capital’ or career potential
matches.

According to the authors, humans looking for a mate in the 21st
century are most interested in finding someone whose human capital potential
meets or exceeds their own. We assess education, motivation and commitment
because subconsciously we want to find someone who will help us maximise our
own potential.

The report cites the coupling of the Blairs. Cherie’s career
has helped Tony present himself as the very image of the modern family man,
while his has boosted her legal profile.

Many romantics will surely dismiss this human capital theory as
cynical rubbish – Guru for one.

Sentimentalist that he is, he proposed to Mrs Guru one special
night after too many glasses of cider and because she was the only girl in his
small Dorset village he wasn’t (that closely) related to.

TV adverts fail to sell the job

Guru hears the police have got it all
wrong when it comes to recruitment. TV funnyman Johnny Vaughn told Guru at the
recent RAD Awards that the advert that shows boxer Lennox Lewis – the
heavyweight champion of the world – doubting whether he could cut it as a
copper will never attract new staff. If the hardest man on earth isn’t tough
enough, he surmised, then what chance have the rest of us?

The Army haven’t got it right either. Vaughn says the average
18-year-old isn’t interested in whether they are going to develop lots of
skills and have loads of career opportunities, as the advert on the box
suggests.

It needs to involve firing guns, driving tanks, having fist
fights after the pub closes and getting lucky with nurses. Guru thinks he might
be on to something.

Porn writer past could be useful

Guru is no prude but even he was shocked by an e-mail from a
disciple who responded to his appeal to hear about unusual jobs readers had
before entering HR.

The lady concerned, who understandably would rather remain
anonymous, explained: "My weird and wonderful job opportunity was a
request from Men Only in the early 1970s to write about my sex life as well
as  my neighbours! I was meant to openly
discuss sex via the medium of their magazine; what it was like for working
people, with children, in the post ’60s era."

Guru is glad to hear she eventually turned her back on a career
as a porn writer and instead used her skills to secure a job in the HR
profession. Although no doubt knowledge of 360-feedback, personal appraisals
and performance management would have been extremely useful during certain
social gatherings in the swinging ’70s.