January 28, 2008

What's in store for your salary in 2008
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:49 PM

The economic news has been anything but pretty so far this year, with wildly gyrating global financial markets and incessant talk of a looming recession here on the home front. So what does that mean for you and your paycheck in 2008?

Let's see what our friends at Salary.com have to say:

Though salary trends generally follow the economy, there is a silver lining: despite a pessimistic economic and hiring outlook, employees can reap benefits in the form of training and recruiting initiatives, better work/life conditions, and a relatively favorable climate for retirees and entrepreneurs. Below, a breakdown of what you can expect.

Here's one of the eight trends:

Retirees Get a Second Salary Wind (Or Career)

As Baby Boomers approach retirement age, human resource departments will begin to find ways to retain the expertise and experience of their senior staff members as board members or consultants, or attract those retirees looking for new, second "style" careers altogether. Due to lifestyle and aspiration changes, these workers aren't necessarily looking to climb the corporate ladder and generally seek positions with flexible schedules. This will be the beginning of a huge boom for retiree jobs as the U.S. labor market begins to mine this new resource. Coleman encourages retirees to capitalize on demand for experienced workers to augment income and benefits, "Position yourself this way. Use it as a marketing pitch and market your unique strengths–and never be apologetic."

Read the full story on Salary.com.

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January 24, 2008

New Year, new color: green collar jobs
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:54 PM

Forget white and blue. The hot new collar color for the New Year is green:

A growing number of midlife career-changers like [nonprofit founder Jeff] Horowitz are trading in their nine-to-fives for jobs more in line with their convictions and concerns for Mother Earth. So-called "green-collar jobs" are on the rise -- the current tally of 8.5 million U.S. jobs in renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industries could grow to as many as 40 million by 2030, according to a November report commissioned by the American Solar Energy Society.

And the burgeoning industry is claiming scores of experienced workers who can put to use the skills they've acquired in more established fields such as construction, finance, and marketing. In some cases, the high demand for green career-changers translates into a larger paycheck. But more often, the satisfaction of making a positive difference in the world is enough of a boost.

Read the full piece from Business Week on Yahoo HotJobs.

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Job market tips for a recession
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:55 AM

As Boston Globe "Climb" columnist Penelope Trunk points out, we don't know for sure if we are headed for a recession. But all the talk and crazy market swings are certainly enough to make one nervous. So why not be prepared?

Here's a sample of one of her five tips on how to cope with the job market in a down economy:

2. Specialize.People think that if there are fewer jobs, a wide range of skills makes someone more employable. It's not the case, though.

In a tight job market, employers can hold out for the perfect fit. And if you are not clearly defined as a specialist, then you are not going to be a perfect fit for anything.

Read the full column from last Sunday's Globe.

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January 22, 2008

SBA is thinking small when it comes to women and business
Posted by Diane Danielson at 11:39 AM

Thanks to Janelle Shubert over at Babson's Center for Women and Leadership for bringing this to our attention.  The SBA rules for women getting government contracts were finally released in Dec. yet fall far short of what they should have been. 

Women who own small businesses — about a third of all small businesses in the United States, in fact — have been pushing for years for a bigger piece of government contracts, which now total $400 billion a year.

But few were happy when the Small Business Administration finally announced new rules in December to ensure that 5 percent of the contracts would go to female-owned businesses.

First, the critics noted, it took seven years for the S.B.A. to develop the rules after Congress ordered the agency to create them in 2000. But perhaps more important to the critics, among them Congressional Democrats and some business groups, the agency listed only four industries — out of 140 — where female-owned businesses could be preferred for contracts.

The best known of those was national security and international affairs; in addition, the list included coating and engraving, furniture and cabinet manufacturing and a motor-vehicles category.

Click here to read the full story on the NYTimes.

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January 16, 2008

How to sell yourself in an interview
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:01 AM

As part of the Big Help going on all this week here at Boston.com, our wizard content producer has been busy churning out message boards, chats, photo galleries, and more to help give your career the boost it needs early in the New Year.

Exhibit #1: a gallery that provides expert tips from career management consultants Hayden-Wilder on how to sell yourself in an interview. Here's tip #1 to get you started:

1. Think like an interviewer

Before you answer an interviewer's question, think about your answer from the person's point of view. If your interviewer says, "Tell me about your college education," ask yourself, "Is he really interested in what I did in college, or does he want to know what I learned from the experience?"

Spend a little time thinking about what the interviewer is really looking for by asking a given question, and then critique your answers from the other side of the desk. It will make you a much more effective, and memorable, interviewee.

Check out the gallery here, as well as all the other resources provided through The Big Help.

No excuses now - get out there and get that job!

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January 10, 2008

The Big Help is coming!
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:51 PM

The Globe and Boston.com's bi-annual mega-event for job seekers is almost here.

First, this weekend in the Boston Sunday Globe, the special Big Help Careers section will be packed with hundreds of new job listings from top Boston-area employers. It will also carry expanded coverage of the latest career tips and trends.

Then, next week we will continue the fun online with a variety of live chats, photo galleries, message boards, polls and other features and resources on Boston.com, so you can really get your career off to a great start in 2008. On Monday, for instance, you can chat live with Guitar Hero developer Greg LoPiccolo and ask him how he got such a cool job.

In fact, you can start right now by reading our web-exclusive article on job candidates' New Year's resolutions by staffing firm expert Dave Sanford of Winter Wyman. (For an extra hoot, catch Dave and me live on NECN around 4:30 today.)

Get the schedule and keep up on all the action here at our Big Help home page.

The only downside: now you've got no excuse. So get off your #$*#*&, get out there, and find that job!

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January 7, 2008

What your online first impression says about you
Posted by Diane Danielson at 3:14 PM

I found an interesting article from the New York Times about how people need to think about the impression they are giving others who find them online.  While the article focuses a bit on online dating and the whole age-lowering/5-year old picture thing ... there was some content about how this can affect you professionally. 

Keith N. Hampton, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said the notion of impressing "everyone out there" is the fundamental problem of networking sites. They are designed so that millions see the same image of a member.

For online impression management to be effective, Mr. Hampton said, the sites should be redesigned to allow people to reveal different aspects of their identity to different users. You should be able to present one face to your boss, and another to your poker buddies. "We have very real reasons for wanting to segment our social network," he said.

Click here to read the whole story.

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January 4, 2008

From queen bees to office piranhas?
Posted by Diane Danielson at 12:09 PM

I caught this bit on Feministing about the Telegraph and the Daily Mail running stories about how women only want good jobs to meet and marry rich men.  Feministing makes a good point that the stories were rehashes of a Financial Times story that ran last year.  But, here's an excerpt from the Daily Mail:

Male bosses who unexpectedly hit it off with a female employee over the festive season were given a stern warning yesterday.

You might have caught yourself an office piranha.

The name of the man-eating South American fish has been borrowed by lawyer Diane Benussi to describe women who use the office party to snap up a high-flying colleague, whether he is married or not.

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She said piranhas "want a highearning, high-flying, high-virility man" who will place a ring on their finger.

The mere fact that such a candidate might already be married merely confirms those characteristics.

"Office parties are a brilliant opportunity for them to lead a colleague astray. The alcohol is flowing, they can wear sexier clothes and they just generally loosen up.

"There are women who join companies with large amounts of male employees with the sole intention of looking for a partner, and by that I mean an equity partner - one of the owners of the business."

She said that for such women, joining a large firm of accountants or solicitors can be more advantageous than signing up with a dating agency.

She warned: "A piranha will hang on for the kill and will rip any man to shreds."

Click here to read the full Daily Mail story.

The article goes on to discuss how these women hunt down these helpless men. So much for men are hunters, women are gatherers. Oh dear. I'm not sure I can comment further on this one and keep a straight face.

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January 2, 2008

Flexible work in 2008 - and beyond
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 1:12 PM

Happy New Year from The Job Blog!

Your esteemed editor took a nice long break, in keeping with his British wife's everything-shuts-down for-Christmas-and-New-Year's dictum. I happily succumbed.

Which leads me directly to the latest Maggie Jackson "Balancing Acts" column that offers some encouraging news about the emerging flexible workplace of the future:

In brief, they [Deloitte-Touche] realized that workplaces still operate largely on Industrial Age models of uninterrupted, male careers and mom-based care giving. These days, Generation Y wants time off to volunteer and dual-earner parents struggle to do it all, and yet "flexible work" -now available to 65 percent of employees nationwide - is largely treated as an exception to the norm, granted if you have a willing manager.

Instead, Deloitte's "Mass Career Customization" program, despite its rather clunky name, assumes that flexibility is the new norm. Deloitte now talks of a "career lattice," not a ladder, with many paths leading to different kinds of success. Scale back to care for an elderly parent, for instance, then return to the fast track. By the end of next year, all 40,000 US-based Deloitte employees will be able to customize their careers by periodically adjusting their work pace, job setting and schedule, workload, and company role under the program.

Jackson says this trend will gradually emerge across the workplace, so that every worker will be able to manage his or her own career flexibility, according to their own personal needs, over the course of their working lives.

Read the full piece - and take heart in the New Year. Who knows, you might even get your life back.

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