October 31, 2005

Nail polish and networking?
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:02 AM

While I'm all for women networking in whatever format suits them, I still question what message the Globe is sending by putting an article about businesswomen getting their nails done on the front page.

Enough with the Celtics games and cigar bars.

That's what female partners at the law firm Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo were thinking when they planned a networking event exclusively for women. No sports outings, no poker nights, no golf tournaments, no guy talk, no men. Instead, they chose a venue they suspected would be uniquely appealing to the fairer sex: a spa.

So at the G Spa on Newbury Street last Thursday, life sciences attorneys and technology executives enjoyed an evening of complimentary boutique services, wine, hors d'oeuvres, and dessert. For many women there, the goal, besides socializing, was to engage in some deal-making. Why not combine patents with pedicures, mergers with massages?

Although, if you caught Maureen Dowd's realistic, yet depressing essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, you can see how this might fit in with her views on the backwards momentum of the gender equality movement.

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October 30, 2005

Claire Huxtable or Edith Bunker?
Posted by Diane Danielson at 6:44 PM

The Boston Sunday Globe BostonWorks' section reports on a Boston Club survey of successful Boston business women and found that a large number had mothers who encouraged them to work, and half had working mothers.

Of those surveyed, 50 percent said they had working mothers, and two-thirds said their mothers' decisions influenced their own career choices. At the same time, the Boston Club's report cited statistics from the Census Bureau, which showed that only 38 percent of women worked between 1960 and 1970. While no statistics were taken then on how many of that group were working mothers, that number is believed to be much lower, the report said.

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October 27, 2005

A new generation of job boards
Posted by at 6:13 PM

There are some interesting new players in the world of online job boards. Here's an article from bizreport.com about two upstarts that are getting attention for their Google-like approach to helping people find jobs.

Simply Hired and Indeed...do for job listings what Google does for general information -- crawl or "scrape" listings from thousands of sites and create a free, searchable index in one spot.

The key difference between these sites and leading job boards Monster and CareerBuilder is that employers don't pay to be listed. Simply Hired and Indeed base their results on a crawling of the Web and mathematical formulas that attempt to judge the relevance of each job opening to a user's query, much as regular search results are presented on Google. As a result, Indeed ( http://www.indeed.com/ ) and Simply Hired ( http://www.simplyhired.com/ ) offer many more listings than Monster or CareerBuilder -- including some found at those sites, at specialty recruiting services and the sites of individual employers.

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Is your office haunted?
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 5:00 PM

We usually think of our homes and neighborhoods at Halloween, but perhaps we're focused on the wrong place:

Many people describe their place of employment as a horror story. But some try to claim it's the work of a ghost.

Read the piece from Forbes.com.

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October 26, 2005

The mom blog
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 7:00 PM

At the risk of turning The Job Blog into the "Mom Blog," I'm going to piggyback on a popular theme here over the last few weeks - women in the workplace - with this link to "Job opportunities grow for mothers who reinvent themselves and set goals" from The Globe. The article points out how moms returning to work can improve their career choices by being flexible and open-minded.

"Opportunities are burgeoning for mothers who have the will and wits to reinvent themselves. Those who have clear goals, know how to market themselves and how to build bridges to the employers who want and need them will land back in the work world."

The funny thing is, this lesson doesn't apply to just moms. For anybody looking to make some headway in their career, a little bit of creativity and flexibility will go a long way.

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The best and worst of everything
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 7:00 PM

If you love job-based top 10 lists (and let's face it, if you're reading this you probably do), I implore you to check out the "Best Places For Business And Careers" section on Forbes.com. The page abounds with lists on everything from "Best place to jump start a career" to "Worst Business Costs". My personal favorite thus far? Boise, Idaho, ranking as the top place to start a career - and not just for potato farmers.

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October 25, 2005

Where the girls aren't .... wanted
Posted by Diane Danielson at 6:14 PM

The ad world's lack of females on the creative end was showcased by former WPP exec Neil French earlier this month. Former, because his little "aside" about why women didn't get ahead, led to his abrupt resignation. The following is from the NYTimes article.

A well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director at WPP Group resigned his position yesterday amid an uproar over remarks he made at an industry event about female creative executives. The comments, by Neil French, 61, drew attention to the absence of women at the highest levels of the creative side of the ad industry.

Mr. French told an audience in Toronto on Oct. 6 that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to," saying their roles as caregivers and childbearers prevented them from succeeding in top positions.

His comments infuriated some executives in the audience of more than 300 people, prompting one of them, Nancy Vonk, the co-chief creative officer of Ogilvy Toronto, a unit of WPP Group, to write a column for a Web site denouncing his comments.

"I kind of felt that Neil was saying out loud what a lot of people were feeling," Ms. Vonk said in an interview. "It's undeniable that women aren't getting far enough in the creative part of agencies, and I thought we were looking at the reason why."

Here's a little more detail from News.telegraph:

According to the city's Globe & Mail newspaper, when asked to explain the dearth of women in advertising, the cigar-chomping Mr French said: "Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to. They're crap."

He added that women inevitably "wimp out and go suckle something". During the discussion, Mr French, 61, had a waitress wearing a French maid's uniform serve him drinks. His comments provoked several people to walk out and one of his senior female colleagues later to write an angry rejoinder on the internet that was sent around the advertising world.

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October 24, 2005

The making of an ICU nurse
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:28 AM

Would you have what it takes? Check out this Boston Globe special report, a 4-part series on the training of an ICU nurse at Mass General Hospital:

M.J. and Julia had been thrown together for an extraordinary crash course in the ways of the Intensive Care Unit — Mass. General’s answer to the national shortage of veteran nurses. M.J. had just eight months to turn a trainee fresh out of school into a nurse ready to care for the most gravely ill patients at one of the nation’s leading hospitals.

The coverage on Boston.com also includes access, from the same article pages, to photo galleries with audio voice-over.

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Your own jobs on the BostonWorks homepage
Posted by Jason Butler at 10:55 AM

We just launched a new little widget on the BostonWorks homepage, allowing you to pull in jobs that are perfect for you. Go to the homepage and personalize, then let us know what you think.

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October 21, 2005

The latest top ten list from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Posted by at 3:35 PM

Last month, fellow blogger Jason Tuohey referred to the 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

In the spirit of teamwork (yes, I'm a boomer who believes in teams!) here's a companion list from the Bureau of Labor Statistics citing 10 of the jobs expected to decline between now and 2012.

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October 19, 2005

Teamwork
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 3:16 PM

According to this week's BostonWorks, an ability to work in teams is one significant characteristic that separates Generation Y from its predecessors.

"Even though reams of research show the effectiveness of teams in the workplace, baby boomer management has had a tough time with implementation."

Could this group blog be a good example?

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October 18, 2005

Resource for local mothers
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 5:00 PM

We don't often plug competitor Internet job boards, but this service seems worthy of mention. Further to Diane's earlier post on this, here's a link to New England Mothers Organization. As the founder, Jeanne Girard, says:

I founded this site this year to aid seekers in finding flexible, family-friendly employment. The site connects New England parents to flexible job postings. It is free to members to search a weekly updated job board that lists tele-commute, part-time, job share, and flexible job listings.

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October 17, 2005

Opting to retire with a touch of class
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 9:51 AM

Retirement ain't what it used to be. That's good news, as those facing "the golden years" have more options beyond living their final years in an age ghetto, including the growing trend toward living near college campuses:

Spurred by growing research suggesting that mental activity fights off dementia, college-affiliated retirement communities have sprung up in 50 college towns across the country, linking the retired set with schools such as Notre Dame, the University of Florida at Gainesville, the University of Michigan, and Lasell College in Newton, according to Leon A. Pastalan, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Michigan.

''If you look at traditional retirement communities, they do not provide much for personal growth," said Pastalan, who studies housing issues for older adults. ''They provide you with a nice place to live, but there is really nothing for the soul or for self-enrichment. I view this as an extremely important movement that is really just beginning."

Moreover, as the article from today's Boston Globe points out, such campus retirement communities are a two-way street, a new kind of win-win for the universities:

In turn, colleges perceive these educated and affluent retirees as ready-made mentors, teachers, cheerleaders in the football stands, and, perhaps more important, donors.

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October 16, 2005

More on the future of the media
Posted by Diane Danielson at 6:21 PM

While technology and the media is not my normal beat here at BostonWorks, I had to follow up on Doug's post because I found this great media project called EPIC 2014 which is an eerie look at the future of the media.

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

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October 13, 2005

Extra! Extra! Read all about it - online
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 12:49 PM

Sticking with the journalism theme of the previous post by Jason Butler (and with my own changing technology theme from last week), you, dear reader, are part of the evolution of the world of news.

Simply by reading these words in pixels, not ink on paper, you are among the pioneers, pushing the industry toward smaller and perhaps disappearing newspapers. Yesterday's news about The Wall Street Journal shrinking their famed flagship broadsheet's width by 3 inches drew notice throughout the industry, and beyond:

The new domestic Journal, to appear in January 2007, will go from about 15 inches wide to about 12 inches wide and will remain about 22¾ inches long. It will be roughly the size of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, other daily newspapers that have reduced their widths.
- - - - -
The Journal plans other changes as well, including shorter articles that do not continue on another page and the elimination of certain statistical information and routine news that are available in other places, including The Journal's Web site.

The paper will move more information to its Web site, allowing the print version to highlight the analyses and exclusive news that Journal editors say their readers value most.

If you just tried to click through to The New York Times story and needed to register to read it (one-time free registration required at nytimes.com), that's part of the trend, too, as newspapers' websites (such as this one, Boston.com, home of the Boston Globe) further their role in the evolving format mix.

News and the appetite for it won't go away. But how it gets delivered to you the consumer, out of central electronic databases, will continue to change. As will the organizations that create and deliver the news, including who they employ, required skill sets, etc. For those in the news business, truer words were never spoken: the only constant is change.

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10 journalists who can make a difference
Posted by Jason Butler at 12:26 PM

Here is a really interesting article from our friends over at the Phoenix about ten young journalists who could make a difference.

With the news industry at a confusing crossroads, one thing is certain: no matter how information is delivered, the future belongs to skilled journalists who can report, edit, and deliver it. The people on this list -- culled from many sources --may not be household names. Some may be known only in their own households. But they are ambitious, committed, and talented. They have made their mark at a young age, have the potential for bigger and better things, and may well have a role in helping set the course of the media industry in the years and decades to come. We talked to them about their lives and careers, hopes and concerns.

I needed a little inspiration on this drizzly Thursday morning in the city of Boston.

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A mother's little helper
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:57 AM

With all the focus on the women "opting out," not much has been done to help the women "opting back in." Well, now there's www.momcorps.com and their blog, A Day in the Life of a Working Mom.

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October 12, 2005

Look before your leap: how to evaluate your motivations before changing jobs
Posted by at 4:26 PM

While it's hard to believe some days, the job market is getting stronger. While a better market means more job opportunities, it can also make for some tough decisions. A recent article from The Wall Street Journal Online outlines some of the things to consider before moving on.

Over the summer, Michele Houde faced a dilemma. The 35-year-old Atlanta executive enjoyed her marketing post at a big media company. Then a software company offered an intriguing job, with more responsibility and the chance to build her own staff. But the software company was smaller, and the offer didn't include a big raise. Ms. Houde wondered how to decide.

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"The grass may look greener, but in fact, it may be the wrong job," says Jan Cannon, a career adviser and author in Boston. She recalls a client who was miserable in a market-research job, moved to another employer without adequately considering the reasons for her unhappiness, and was miserable again. She is now training to be a teacher. The problem, the woman now realizes, wasn't her former employer, it was working in market research, Ms. Cannon says.

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Your life as...
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 9:52 AM

For good fun, check out the Your Life section of Boston.com's new feature, "Your Life as...". It follows a day in the life of someone with a unique, interesting job -- the latest examples include a professional dog walker and Miss USA.

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Boston is TOO EXPENSIVE
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 9:13 AM

It's official, Bostonians feel the city is too expensive. In September the Hub was ranked the most expensive city in the country. Later that month, the Northeast Human Resources Association published a study showing that the city's high cost of living acts as a blockade to hiring for many recruiters, a point further echoed in this week's "Out in the Field." Finally, this week's BostonWorks poll, which asks "If you didn't live in Boston, would the cost of living scare you off?" has 82 percent of respondents answering "Absolutely, it's too expensive." Sounds like a consensus to me.

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October 10, 2005

That's not just a wage gap, that's a gaping hole in your wallet
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:01 AM

Evelyn Murphy weighs in even more on the Wage Gap in her new book, "Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men--And What To Do About It," and in an editorial in yesterday's Boston Globe:

Let's look at the economic losses a woman will suffer over her lifetime:

A high school graduate loses $700,000. A young woman who graduated from high school last spring and went straight to work would, over her lifetime, make $700,000 less than the young man who graduated next in line.

A college graduate loses $1.2 million. A young woman who graduated from college last spring and went right to work would, over her lifetime, make $1.2 million less than the young man who received his diploma next to her.

A professional school graduate loses $2 million. A young woman who got a degree in business, medicine, or law would, over her lifetime, make $2 million less than the young man at her side.

That graduate may be you. Or she may be your wife, daughter, niece, granddaughter, or friend. Whoever she is, the wage gap will take a heavy toll. That missing 23 cents is a personal loss: vacations not taken or dental work that's put off or health insurance that cannot be afforded.

Few women think this way about the wage gap. Women don't talk about what they should have earned, or how each year's missing lump of money -- whether $1,000, $10,000, or $50,000 -- would have added up over a lifetime. Have you ever heard a woman let herself add up how much she was deprived of overall or how much more her male coworker could afford that she could not?

Now that's a lotta Prada we're having to forgo. But, seriously ladies, women need to consider the gap as it will make a huge difference in how the two genders spend their retirement years. While the men may have the option to be out there swinging their golf clubs, the gap in retirement savings might leave the women inside, slinging hash and doing other odd jobs just to keep a roof over our heads!

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October 9, 2005

Mom's staying connected, not "opting out"
Posted by Diane Danielson at 9:29 AM

Despite the media promoted a massive trend of women opting out of the workforce, BostonWorks writer Maggie Jackson looks at a number of resources helping working mothers stay connected with corporate America.

While the number of moms who work and have children under the age of six has dropped from 65 percent in 2000 to 62 percent last year, this trend doesn't herald an ''opt-out revolution,'' as some pundits trumpeted. Most mothers who take time off for family reasons later want to return to work, research shows. The trouble is that women who have been home face an uphill battle. Their Rolodex is rusty, so networking is tough. They feel out of touch. And they face real discrimination, says Shelley Correll, a Cornell University associate professor who coauthored a recent study showing that job-hunting mothers are often penalized, even when they have no gaps on their résumé.

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October 8, 2005

Gender gap leads to retirement gap
Posted by Diane Danielson at 2:34 PM

Teresa Heinz makes a pretty good point in the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe regarding the long-term price women pay for the gender gap.

Women are not only shortchanged when it comes to wages -- their retirement years look less than golden, as well. Lower wages leave women with less to save or contribute to a employer's retirement plan, and only 30 percent of all older women can count on a pension, compared with 47 percent of men. In addition, more than half of all women 65 or older are widowed, divorced or never married. On average, these older women rely on Social Security for 71 percent of their income, compared with 64 percent for men in similar circumstances. And, less than 10 years ago, women working full time raising their children were prohibited from contributing more than $250 into an Individual Retirement Account.

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October 5, 2005

Digital killed the celluloid star
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:27 PM

For twenty years I have gone to my local neighborhood Photo Quick. When my children were born, when they had their first day of school, when we went on family vacations, when the kids went to camp and we outfitted them with disposable cameras, I took all the exposed film in to my friends at Photo Quick. And they gave me back beautiful prints, expert quality and color, usually in an hour or two. We’ve got them all, thousands of photos, that document the story of our lives.

And then, I stopped going. As did everyone else. Why? Not because we stopped living our lives or creating memories, or even capturing them. Because digital cameras hit the market, and celluloid-based film basically went away. Almost overnight. Occasionally I’d go in to have my PQ buddies crop and enhance and print a blow-up of an image I’d burned to a CD. Or maybe I’d buy a new frame or two. But I wasn’t dropping off any film. Those days were over.

Now my images are all stored on my PC’s hard drive and printed out as needed - by me - on a 4 x 6 printer next to the computer. If I need a big batch, blow-ups, or multiple prints, I upload them to Kodak's EasyShare Gallery and get them back in the mail, Kodak-quality processing, in a day or two. If I want other folks to see them (family, friends), same thing: upload to the gallery and invite as many folks as I want, via e-mail, to view the album.

Then, one day last week, I drove by and saw a big sign on Photo Quick’s front door, to this effect: “Thanks for your patronage! We are now closed. Come visit us at our Waltham store!” Well, thanks anyway, but this was all about convenience, and not too many folks in Natick and Wellesley are about to burn up that $3.00/gallon gas traveling to Waltham to go to Photo Quick, which we stopped frequenting anyway. Photo Quick, sadly, has passed out of our lives. Digital killed the celluloid star.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because along with the departure of the store went the departure of the employees who worked there, and the nice young man who owned the franchise. And now they are out of work and presumably looking to find a new gig. Are their skills transferable? Hmmm. . . Sitting at a chemically-based machine all day processing images (I always wondered if they got loopy on all the fumes)? All because of a change in infrastructure technology. Still the imaging business, as the Great Yellow Father Kodak would see it. But you reach the destination via an entirely different route.

Jobs. Work. Technology. Companies. Markets. Consumers. Changing habits. The future. See the big picture, plan for disruptions and change. It’s disquieting and unsettling, but even the seemingly stable does not stand still. Maybe an industry or technology works for years or even decades, has a good long run. But can it last? Witness second generation Internet businesses now threatening the first.

Welcome to the 21st century. Possible sequels: what’s going on at Kodak, and how has the quaint 19th century game of baseball managed to maintain its popularity well into its second century?

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Katrina's destruction not finished
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 1:47 PM

As if Hurricane Katrina's annihilation of New Orleans wasn't bad enough, the residual effects of the storm have caused massive layoffs to the city's government workforce.

New Orleans will lay off 3,000 city workers -- about half the workforce -- because of financial constraints caused by Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday.

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Who's more likely to play hooky?
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 1:47 PM

This week's BostonWorks reports on which gender is more likely to skip work. Take a guess, you've got a 50/50 shot at being right. Also, read why employers feel it's necessary to perform background checks.

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Mass. job status
Posted by Jason Tuohey at 1:36 PM

Despite uneasiness with the local economy, 41 percent of small businesses in Massachusetts plan on adding staff in the coming year.

At least half of companies surveyed plan to increase capital expenditures in the coming year. While 5.5 percent expect job cuts, 41 percent intend to hire more employees.

In the larger scope of things, Massachusetts has seen overall job growth in 11 of the past 12 months, but has still only recovered a quarter of the jobs lost since 2001, according to a recent Associated Press report.

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Afraid of outsourcing? Check out these jobs
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 9:37 AM

The stats are there to prove the trend: the outsourcing of US jobs overseas is happening at a frightening pace. But an article from the current TIME magazine "Inside Business" Bonus Section takes a look at some areas of the workplace where jobs may be more secure:

According to a new study by the McKinsey Global Institute, 2.3 million service jobs will have moved offshore from the U.S. by 2008, up from 900,000 as of 2003. So how do you protect yourself?

First, look for jobs whose supply outstrips demand, for which companies in the U.S. need qualified workers from anywhere on the globe. But most important, says Hans Gieskes, CEO of recruiting firm H3.com, is to find a job in which you need to "smell, see and touch the culture you're working in." Here are five surprisingly hot fields where you must use your senses.

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October 4, 2005

Part-time prof and mom - and loving it
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 10:24 AM

As today's Globe reports, college professor Elena Irwin, now tenured and the mother of two young boys, is part of a growing work trend in academia:

Irwin, an economist at Ohio State University, felt overwhelmed, working 60 hours a week while caring for her 9-month-old, Isaac. She wanted to spend Mother's Day at a barbecue with Isaac and her husband, but she had to prepare for a seminar that week. She decided to stay home and work.

Soon after, Irwin recalls, she told the head of her department, ''I'm at the point where I'm willing to quit."

Instead, Irwin learned about an unusual option at Ohio State to work part time while remaining on the tenure track. Now, four years later, she has received tenure, has a second son, and still works part time.

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