10 questions to assess your job satisfaction

Are you happy in your job? How satisfied are you with your career? Do you agree that employees are happiest and most satisfied when they consider themselves fully engaged in their roles in the company?

Well, what could be making you to have such a good feeling? The 10 questions below can help you to perform a career audit and assess your job satisfaction. Ask yourself:

• Is the company capitalizing on my special talents?
• Does my supervisor have my best interests at heart?
• In the past six months, has my supervisor honestly evaluated my performance?
• Am I receiving challenging assignments at work to help me grow professionally?
• Do I have a mentor guiding me as I move up through the organization?
• Do I have friends at work in whom I can confide?
• Is there a career track to get me where I want to be in five years?
• Does my work give me a sense of higher purpose?
• Are my coworkers trustworthy and committed to excellence?
• Am I receiving the training I need to do my job well?

If you are an employee, the assessment above will help you in clarifying your career prospect and worthiness; If you are an employer or a human resource personnel, the assessment above can give you some clue in improving employee's relationship and hopefully reduce turnover rate; If you are a job seeker, don't be shy off to find out the answers from your potential employer.

If most of your answers to the above questions are "no" but you are still staying with your company, perhaps you are one of those not-so-happy employees who hang around mainly because of the 11th point: remuneration.

(Source of the above 10 questions are from Allyhunt, an executive sourcing company in Malaysia)

We are only liable for max RM250 after credit card lost or stolen

Do you know that pursuant to Sections 19 and 26 of the Banking and Financial Institutions Act 1989, Bank Negara (Central Bank of Malaysia) has issued a Credit Card Guidelines in March 2003 to all credit card issuers. The Guidelines were intended to promote active consumerism and consumers’ understanding of credit card usage and protecting their interest as card users.

Any party who fails to comply with the guidelines may be found guilty of an offense punishable under Section 104 of the Act.

Here is what inside the guidelines say:

• Clause 13.2: "the cardholder's maximum liability for unauthorised transactions as a consequence of a lost or stolen credit card shall be confined to a limit specified by the issuer of the credit card, which shall not exceed RM250, provided the cardholder has not acted fraudently or has not failed to inform the issuer of the credit card as soon as is reasonably practicable, after having found that his credit card is lost or stolen."
• Clause 13.3: "where the amount imposed on the cardholder for unauthorised transactions due to loss or theft of the credit card is in excess of the maximum liability limit, the issuer has to prove that the cardholder has acted fraudently or failed to inform it as soon as reasonably practicable of the loss."
• Clause 13.4: "the issuer shall ensure that the cardholder is not held liable for any unauthorised transactions charged to the credit card after he/she has notified the issuer verbally or in writing. The issuer shall take imediate action upon notification by the cardholder to prevent further use of the lost of stolen credit card."

In layman terms, it means that if your credit card is lost or stolen, and you informed the bank immediately, the bank has to suspend your credit card at once. You are only liable to a maximum of RM250 caused by unauthorised use of credit card after you found out your card was lost/stolen and before you report it to your bank. If the bank wants to charge for more than that, they need to prove that you were negligent in handling your credit card and/or didn't report the lost/stolen immediately. Once you've made the report to the bank, either by phone or by fax or any other means, you are no longer liable for any amount charged to your credit card thereafter.

You should remember this information to protect your rights and benefits, just in case (touch wood!) anything bad happened to your credit cards.

Malaysian household monthly income distribution

The pie chart below indicates the Malaysian household monthly income distribution. The information is sourced from MP Amirsham’s reply to Dr Michael J Devaraj's question during a parliament assembly in July 2008 recently.



The root source and period of the statistics is not provided, and the number of households surveyed is also not available. It is believed that this information should be not before 2004 and not later than 2007.

Which group do you stand in the pie?

If the same piece of information is represented by bars, it will now look like this:




And according to another survey done by the Statistic Department for the Economic Planning Unit recently, the Malaysian average monthly household income is RM3686, which falls in the RM3-4k group.

57.8% of the families are below this group, and 29.3% are above it. This shows that the families fall on the average is actually have a higher position than the median in the distribution, as the median falls in the RM2-3k group.

This mean majority of the households are at the poorer side of the income group, forming a triangular distribution graph (if you break up the RM5-10k bar into intervals of RM1k as in other bars, you should see the triangle clearly), but the income of the richer side is so much that it is still able to pull up the average income figure.

Now, can you sense the "M"?