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Five ways to take control of your career in 2013By Guest Contributor | December 11, 2012, 6:42 AM PST Employees, particularly IT pros, can no longer afford to rely 100% on their employers to help develop their skills, talents, and competencies. But continuous development is critical if you want to get ahead in your career, let alone keep current with technology. Here are five practical ways you can take control of your career. 1. Start a performance journalDo you regularly keep notes on the highs and lows of your performance? Now I don’t mean that weekly or monthly report you’re required to write for your manager. I mean making notes on things you observe about your day-to-day performance: the accomplishments you’re most proud ofthe things you consider failures or sub-par performance, and what you learned from themthe thank you’s and other forms of acknowledgement you receivethe criticisms you received, justified or notCollected, this information helps to give you perspective on your per…

Towards an index of education outputs In addition to the Data Bank, an important goal of the Learning Curve project has been to create a comparative index of educational performance – the Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. The results are meant not only to be interesting in themselves, but to help identify likely sources of good practice. First, a caveat The exercise has not been simple. One hurdle was determining how to measure performance. While it would have been desirable to include broader labour market and social outcomes on which education arguably has an impact, this proved impossible. Even were it demonstrably clear that education played a definite role in these areas, it is impossible to determine a way – consistent across time and geography – to isolate and measure the impact of that effect. While more direct measures of educational results abound, robust, internationally comparative ones are rare. PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS testing has had such an impa…

School choice and accountability: caveat scholacticusThe choice debate In the English city of Guildford in 2011, every final-year student in the Royal Grammar School earned at least three A-levels, the highest secondary-school subject qualification. The equivalent figure for the city’s Kings College for the Arts and Technology was just 69%. Neither figure was a surprise, nor is such variation exceptional. In most places, it is simply accepted that specific schools – like individual teachers – have different results which tend to persist over time. A natural conclusion is that giving parents, and through them students, the ability to choose better performing schools should lead to better outcomes. Unfortunately, this issue is far more complex and not just because of the range of systems through which choice operates across the world – including both publicly and privately funded options. Whatever their specific strong and weak points, all these arrangements need accurate information. …