All in a day’s work
March 12, 2019
To paraphrase a popular saying: You cannot truly understand someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Even with all the research and theorizing on the plight of working moms, fully grasping the experience of raising children while maintaining a career requires actually living it, or the next best thing truly listening to those who do. Executive spoke with working moms from different industries, at different career stages, and with children of varying ages, and asked them how they manage to do it all. While these mothers only represent a fraction of the working moms in Lebanon, we hope that there are enough shared experiences for our readers to identify with or learn from.
Caught between home and the office
March 11, 2019
A typical week-day in the life of a woman with a career and children looks something like this: She gets out of bed at 6 a.m. to get her children ready for their day, then goes to work for at least nine hours (often working through her lunch break) before picking up her children from daycare or their grandparents and being fully engaged with them and their needs until they sleep at 8 p.m. She then spends the remaining few hours before going to bed either catching up on small household chores or work, spending some quality time with her husband, or doing things that interest her and the next day she gets up to repeat it all again.
On the job
June 7, 2017
Banking is such a constant in Lebanese existence that you can pretty much set your watch by its heartbeat. Of course this only looks effortless. In reality, there are a series of arduous and vital balancing acts in progress, primarily at the central bank and then one tier lower at the commercial banks. After all, the sector’s steady performance in the safe annual growth of assets and deposits is entwined with global realities of the most fragile political, monetary and economic sorts. This inconvenient and undeniable reality was underscored by the months-long hullabaloo over Banque du Liban (BDL) Governor Riad Salameh’s term extension, announced at the end of May.
Banking on training and education
June 12, 2017
Besides having to dispatch their staff to rigorous regular training programs required under central bank stipulations, banks provide employees with a variety of opportunities to participate in continuous education. Training extends from honing soft skills to mandated skill checks, acquisition of professional certifications and pursuit of academic degrees. Executive spoke to five banks about how they approach the issue.
Each of these banks provided Executive with similar figures, stating that their training budgets represent 1 or 2 percent of their payroll and reporting between 20 and 30 average annual training hours per employee. But the breadth of approaches, offerings, and perspectives on the benefits of training show that both job seekers and banks would do well to give training and educational support as much attention as their remuneration packages.