Hello 2014 and to you, our valued reader! Happy New Year to you and welcome back to the Cullen Scholefield blog.

A new year means a new start and here at Cullen Scholefield we’re embracing the challenge of change and improvement. We have plenty of new ideas and plans and we haven’t waited for the New Year to put these in motion!

We have welcomed Vickie Atkins to the team and the enthusiasm of a new employee is easing us back into the working spirit after a very good Christmas and New Year. She also presents a small challenge for herself and our current Vicki. We predict a few confusing phone calls in the future as we get used to our abundance of Vicki/ies.

We didn’t stop completely over the holidays and are happy to have signed up a few new candidates ready to begin their qualifications now in January. We are hoping to help even more HR professionals to gain their qualifications in 2014 and encourage our completed candidates to consider a new qualification to enhance their careers even further. Whether you want to upgrade your CIPD Membership to Fellow or tackle an ILM Coaching and Mentoring Level 7 qualification, we’re happy to help!

Feel free to call us or submit an enquiry (at the bottom of this page) if a new qualification is part of your New Year’s resolutions.

Our Circle of Peers dates are already set and planning has begun to make sure that we provide you with great topical speakers who will help benefit your role in HR with their knowledge and expertise. We plan to continue with our Circle of Peers Roadshows, so Maureen and Carol will be travelling between London, Isle of Man and Gibraltar throughout the year. Maureen and Carol will be in the Isle of Man on Tuesday 28th January for the Isle of Man Annual Awards Presentation and our first Collaboration event in London will be Friday 14^th February so make a note in your diaries.

These are just a few of our plans for the New Year, but what about our New Year’s resolutions you ask? Well as a team we have decided, although some of us reluctantly, to take part in a Dry January. I’ll confess that I had a glass of Champagne on New Year’s day but it was a holiday! We’ll be raising money for Alcohol Concern so that our hard work goes to a good cause. If you’d like to donate then please visit our fundraising page. We’ll see how all of us last throughout the month and let you know who falls off the wagon as we go, so follow us on Twitter for all the gossip!

As for my personal New Year’s resolution I want to increase and involve the readership of this blog. So please comment and let me know what you think about the blog. I want to know which blogs were your favourite, what topics you are interested in, when you like to read the blog in fact anything that will help make your reading more enjoyable.

To encourage your involvement we’ve devised a little game for you all! It’s a sentence competition using this infographic.

Word Challenge

There are three different tasks with three different winners.

1. The best sentence using the three words from one of the six segments
2. The most innovative sentence using as many words as possible
3. The worse possible sentence using all words available

Keeping in theme with Dry January the prizes will be a bottle of bubbly or a donation to our featured Charity: Alcohol Concern. Please comment your answers below and good luck.

And finally,  please let us know what your New Year’s resolutions are for 2014. Comment below, funny or serious, we want to know what you are up to! If you feel like you will benefit from a professional chat then fill out the form below.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year from Eleanor and the Cullen Scholefield Team.

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