Top of the Blue Mountains. Large mountains with lush green trees, and a blue haze over the mountains in the horizon

Hecticness of Leave

I’m on leave. The day before I went on leave, everybody wanted everything from me, because I was going on leave, even though I’m only away for three business days. In order to go on leave, I had to deal with a request for a “quick trial,” providing advice on null results, and managing staff remotely.

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Recruiting Teachers Into Regional Schools

A peer-group program encouraged more student teachers to take up their professional placements in rural and remote schools. This post reflects on the project management lessons that would help organisations to attract professionals into regional jobs.

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Supporting Employers and Apprentices

Our research shows that apprentices who cancel their employment contracts do so because they lack support at work. They are subjected to tough working conditions for little pay. They are given menial, repetitive tasks. They work long hours. They receive little guidance about their progress on the job. How can behavioural science help?

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A Brown Latina smiles and holds her fingers to her head as she looks at her laptop

Website and Graphic Design in Applied Research

I’ve been away a long time and I wanted to restart my series on A Day in Applied Sociology, to shed light on what it’s like to be an applied sociologist. First, I wanted to show you how I manage my public sociology with my paid work. Second, I wanted to reflect on what it’s like learning website and graphic design for business, research and social policy audiences.

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A Black man is out of focus in the background, he holds out his glasses, which are clear in the foreground

User Testing

Today, I incorporated the feedback that we received overnight on our draft materials for our randomised control trial. I’m going to discuss user testing, and why it’s a big part of the applied sociology work that I do, running randomised control trials for social policy.

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Balloon floating with trees in background

Communication and Celebration

In between the trial work I shared with you last time, I’ve also been doing other work, of course, mostly on our communications.

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Reflection on a rainy footpath, of a person standing with an umbrella

Downtime

I did absolutely nothing on my day off . I just lounged around and read in the morning. In the afternoon, I went for a walk while I was talking to my family over video.

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Woman's hands typing on a laptop

Preparing for an Executive Presentation

Quite a lot do, and yet the day ended up not working out quite the way I planned. I had some leave planned from 12:30pm leading into a long weekend. I started off with a meeting that went longer than scheduled, but it was very productive. We’re trying to finalise the message frames that we’re thinking of testing in our online experiment.

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Hand holds a mobile phone with a laptop in the background

Media and Research Planning

We had a meeting with our privacy commission team who is providing us some advice on our recommendations to improve data systems and processes for people disability.

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Mug in the foreground with a laptop showing many blurred faces in an online meeting

Online Workshops

I attended the committee meeting for our research grants and it went really well. It was a three-hour meeting. It was interesting to do it online, as it was very intense but it was a great workshop with great people.

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