Thursday, June 28, 2012

Don't Like Your Job? Change It (Without Quitting)

 
Sometimes you know your job just isn't right for you. Maybe you're in the wrong field, don't enjoy the work, feel surrounded by untrustworthy coworkers, or have an incompetent boss. Most people would tell you to find something that's a better fit. But that may not be possible. There are many reasons you may not be able to leave: a tough economy, family commitments, or limited opportunities in your field. So what do you do when you're stuck in the wrong job?

What the Experts Say
According to Gretchen Spreitzer, professor of management and organizations at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and coauthor of "Creating Sustainable Performance," people are highly dissatisfied when their job has no meaning or purpose to them, provides little opportunity to learn, or leaves them depleted at the end of the work day.

Whatever the reason you are unhappy, you don't have to just live with it or quit. In fact, even if you are able to find another job, staying put may be the best option. "Job searching and changing jobs is not a trivial matter. It is often costly to career momentum and earnings as much as it is a boon," says Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management and coauthor of "Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want." The good news is that there is usually more leeway to alter your job than you think. "There are often real areas for movement and change that people tend not to recognize," she says. Here's how to make the most of an imperfect job situation.

Look at yourself
Whether or not you are satisfied with your job often has to do with your disposition, says Sigal Barsade, the Joseph Frank Bernstein Professor of Management at The Wharton School. Some people are naturally inclined to be unhappy, while others have a brighter take on life. Before you declare your job a bad fit, take a look at yourself. Barsade says it's worth asking: Are you just the kind of person who tends to be dissatisfied? This understanding may not make you like your job better, but may make you think twice before you look for a new position.

Find meaning
Speitzer's research shows that finding more meaning in your work can dramatically improve job satisfaction. Barsade agrees; she recommends looking at your job responsibilities through a different lens. For example, if your position involves menial tasks, try to remember they are stepping stones to a longer term goal and you won't be doing them forever. Or, if you are in a field that is emotionally taxing, like nursing or social work, remind yourself that while you are tired at the end of the day, you are helping others. It also helps to connect with colleagues. Seek out opportunities to show compassion and express gratitude. Spend time with coworkers you like. "Stronger emotional connections at work lead to a myriad of positive physiological and social effects," says Barsade.

Alter what you do
If you can't change your perspective, you may be able to shift your job responsibilities. And you don't necessarily have to transfer departments or get a promotion to do it. Spreitzer and Wrzesniewski suggest using a job crafting exercise to redesign your job to better fit your motives, strengths, and passions. "Some people make radical moves; others make small changes" in how they delegate or schedule their day, Wrzesniewski says. While the former might require approval from your manager, the latter often doesn't. For example, if your most enjoyable task is talking with clients, but you feel buried in paperwork, you might decide to always speak with clients in the morning, so you're energized to get through the drudge work for the rest of the day. Or you might save talking with your clients until the end of the day as a reward.

Change who you interact with
If it's not the work you dislike but the people you work with, you may be able to change that too. Wrzesniewski says she has seen people successfully alter who they interact with on a daily basis to increase job satisfaction. Focus on forging relationships that give you energy, rather than sapping it. Seek out people who can help you do your job better. Wrzesniewski gives the example of workers at a hospital who were responsible for cleaning patients' rooms. They relied on a centralized dispatch to tell them when rooms were open and what products were safe to use based on the occupant. But dispatch didn't always have the most up-to-date information. This meant the workers couldn't do their jobs as well as they wanted to, leaving them dissatisfied. When they developed relationships with the clerks on each ward, they received more accurate information and were able to do a more efficient job of cleaning. Of course, if your relationship with your boss or your coworkers is especially difficult, you may not be able to work around them. "Job crafting can't turn around any job situation. It's not a cure-all," Wrzesniewski says.

Resist complaining
When you're in the wrong job, it can be tempting to moan about it to others. But it's not advisable. "Complaining about your job is a recipe for trouble. You never know how the complaints may be shared with others in the organization," says Spreitzer. Plus you may drag others down with you. If you are unhappy, it's better to focus on what you can change not grumble about what you can't.

Keep options open
The improvements you make to your job situation may make things more tolerable, but you should always be open to the next thing. "You can improve your job but you can also be on the lookout for new opportunities," says Speitzer. Be sure your resume (e.g. your LinkedIn profile) is up to date and that you are continually meeting people in the field you want to be in.
Principles to Remember
Do:
  • Make connections with people you like at work
  • Assess what you don't enjoy about your job so that you can minimize the time you spend doing unwanted tasks
  • Keep your options open — you may not be able to leave your job now, but circumstances may change

Don't:
  • Assume that the job is the problem — you may be prone to being dissatisfied
  • Think you're stuck — there is usually more leeway to alter your job than you think
  • Complain incessantly about your job and bring others down

Case Study #1: Integrate your interests into the job
Thomas Heffner is an engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, a university-affiliated research center that contracts with the Department of Defense. When Thomas took the job eight years ago, he started off doing purely technical work focusing on radio frequency design and radar analysis. He knew pretty early on that this work wasn't his passion. "So much of what we do is done in isolation. We have classified labs where I might be the only person typing away," he says. About five years into the job, he took on a project manager role, thinking it would allow him to interact more with people. Still most of his tasks — managing schedules, developing contracts, reviewing documentation — involved working alone. Thomas thought about looking for another job, one that suited him better, but he couldn't. He and his wife were having a second child and it wasn't a good time to make a move, especially given the tough job market. Instead, he started taking classes in positive organizational psychology and found ways to integrate this interest into his work. He offered to do presentations on positive organizational scholarship. He first spoke to his own group and then at brown-bag lunches, which were open to everyone in his 5,000-person center. He also approached his company's training and development office about developing a course that uses positive psychology to teach innovation and creativity. The staff in that office encouraged him to create and teach the course. While these new projects are outside of his scope of work, he still does all of the things his project manager role requires. And, he has been able to reduce his administrative workload by delegating certain tasks to his team members who were eager to take them on. "I was able to make room for the things I wanted to do," he says. And it's paid off. "Before I started making changes, my job satisfaction was probably about 3 [on a scale of 1-10]. I'm making small changes; it's nothing earth shattering, but it's now up to a 7." By finding other ways to spend time doing what he enjoys most — learning, teaching others, spending time with people — he believes he can boost that up to an 8 or 9.

Case Study #2: Start doing the job you want
Nine years ago, when Shammy Khan took a job at a contract manufacturer based in Texas, he knew it wasn't the perfect job for him. The position was in account management and required Shammy to handle routine, day-to-day work related to one of the company's clients. Shammy felt his strengths lied elsewhere. "I was more interested in growing businesses and putting deals together than servicing existing clients," he says. Yet he was spending less than 5% of his time doing that. After a year on the job, he completed a job crafting exercise, which helped him realize that he would be happier focusing more on new customer deals, which he saw others doing full time. He approached his manager and explained why he was the right person to cultivate a potential client in a market — large scale electromechanical integration services — the company had never served. His boss was convinced. Shammy's title and role didn't change but he shifted his attention to developing and acquiring the capabilities needed to win the account. The client is now one of his company's top six customers. Based on that success, Shammy was promoted to vice president and is now focused exclusively on new ventures, strategic markets, and business development.
More blog posts by Amy Gallo

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Embracing Risk in Career Decisions

HBR Blog Network

Risk management is critical for business decisions — but may not be healthy for making decisions about your career. In fact, if you want your career to take off, you may need to do the opposite of what risk managers try to do: Instead of focusing on how to reduce risks, you may need to embrace and enhance them.

In organizations, the basic purpose of risk management is to rationally identify and analyze threats that might compromise success, and then recommend steps to mitigate them. Since many risks are invisible until after-the-fact, the risk management function uses its tools and analytical abilities to uncover them early to reduce their impact. Because human judgment is involved, this doesn't always work — as in the case of JPMorgan Chase's trading losses — but in many cases the process is effective.

On the surface, career decisions should follow the same process. There are multiple sources of risk in making a decision to change jobs or enter a new field: economic considerations, future potential, family, relationships with co-workers, the need to learn new skills, stability of the employer, and many more. Obviously all of these issues are part of the decision process, and it would be logical to think that reducing the associated risks would be a good thing.

However, for many careers, minimizing these risks is much less important than considering two other major parts of the decision:
  1. Happiness criteria: At the end of the day, your career success is determined not just by tangible indicators (compensation, title, reputation) but also by the underlying enjoyment you derive from your work. Though highly subjective, this "happiness" factor often overwhelms all other career issues; to the extent that a person can have an apparently stellar career but still be miserable, or vice versa.
  2. The attitude factor: Also driving your career is your ability to learn and adapt over time — to deal with new situations, different personalities, and ongoing surprises — and make the most of them. Although people can paint logical pictures of their career paths in retrospect, in reality most careers are unpredictable — influenced by particular people, seminal moments, or unique opportunities. Having the attitude to grasp these surprises and leverage them is critical.
Because career success depends so heavily on happiness and attitude, you need to treat these factors differently, and not just as two more parts of an overall risk-mitigation model. This means that career decisions need to start not with risks, but creating a prioritized list of "happiness criteria," or aspects that will critically determine your long-term satisfaction. The second step is to think through which of these criteria are non-negotiable and — if compromised — would force you to make a trade-off that could increase your risk in some other area.

Here's a quick example: After several years of leading the flagship product of a fast-growing technology firm, Rachel* was asked to lead the company's largest division. Although this was clearly a pathway to the C-suite, she turned it down because it would have meant relocating away from her extended family and spending too much time away from her children, which were non-negotiable "happiness" criteria. As a result, Rachel took a staff job with less responsibility and status, but that passed the happiness test.

But starting with happiness doesn't mean that your career needs to be compromised. That's where "attitude" comes in. As long as you are focused on what is important to your long-term satisfaction, then the challenge is to grab other opportunities that might otherwise seem risky or even crazy. Rachel, for example, used the staff job to reinvent herself as a leader for innovation, and eventually helped the company build a replicable process for starting new businesses. Her success in this area opened up other opportunities that never would have emerged otherwise.

The key point here is that career success is not about reducing risks. Rather it's about maximizing your happiness in a way that also allows you to find surprises and push yourself into new territory. To do that you may need to maximize your risks rather than manage them.

How do you manage the risks in your career?
by Ron Ashkenas

Monday, June 25, 2012

3 Reasons to Rely on Recommendations More Than Resumes

Are job seekers really who they say they are? It is the responsibility of the hiring manager-turned-investigator during the recruiting process to answer this question, but where can you turn for help?
Personal and professional recommendations complete the picture that resumes start — and recommendations can sometimes even be enough in the absence of resumes. For example, some people will lean entirely on a recommendation depending on the source. If a highly trusted person said, “Hire this person and don’t think twice about it,” you might just do it out of fear of losing an “A” player.

For the following reasons, recruiters should take recommendations into account — even more so than resumes — to determine the truth behind a potential hire’s credentials:

1. Trusted vs. biased sources
Though job seekers often do not tarnish their resumes with blatant lies, many inconsistencies have been discovered on these self-written testimonials. Remember the Yahoo! CEO resume scandal?
When taking into consideration the materials presented to you by the job seeker, it is important to identify the source and their motives. In a sense, a resume is a biased document by the candidate manipulated to meet the job responsibilities of the open position. Clearly, job seekers will strategically place themselves in the best light to be a convincing force for the company.
On the other hand, recommendations are written or rated by trusted sources with reputations of their own to uphold. Along with providing a referral comes responsibility. The recommender has to be confident enough in the candidate’s ability to succeed or else they will lose their credibility along the way.

Given two resumes with equal work experience and a similar educational background, the one with a solid referral from a trusted source should have the upper hand, every time.

2. Actions speak louder than words
A potential hire can talk the talk, but can they walk the walk? If a person is a great articulator and communicator, they will be able to sell themselves in an interview over and over again. However, you need to know if they can really communicate consistently and in different situations and that can only be determined by a testimonial from a trusted source. Talking and doing are two different things. With the power of recommendations, the written skills and accomplishments on a resume are brought to life.

For example, the potential hire may have been the team leader for launching a successful product based on their resume, but what kind of experience was it for those surrounding the leader? Was the potential hire easy to work with and diligent with all other responsibilities? With recommendations, these questions can be answered by a trusted source confirming their actions. Recommendations are the proof in the pudding when it comes validating the candidate’s written qualifications.

3. Time saver
So much time is wasted during the recruiting process reviewing resumes and checking references — time that you will not get back if the job candidate does not work out for one reason or another. By recognizing the value of recommendations in the recruiting process, distinguishing between top candidates and the average Joe or Jane becomes simplified.

Consider the resume as your initial filter of candidates. Within 6 seconds of examining a resume, you have already started to determine if the candidate is the right fit for your company. Using specific keywords you’re able to filter through the candidates, focusing on the key characteristics in their resume. However, do you still have enough information to determine the “A ” players? By adding personal and professional recommendations revealing the personality, determination, and intelligence of your next potential hire, you can speed up the process and be certain if an in-person interview is the next appropriate step.

Resumes and recommendations are not mutually exclusive, but relying on one more so than the other can give undue justification of the candidate’s qualifications. The resume is the sketched outline and recommendations create the full, colorful portrait.

Do you consider recommendations when landing top candidates? How do you strive to paint the full picture of a potential hire?

By: Jesse Gant

Friday, June 22, 2012

Surveys Say Tech Hiring Is Accelerating

A raft of new surveys from as varied a group as Dice, CFO magazine, and Silicon Valley Bank all say the same thing: Tech hiring is accelerating. To put that another way, if you think it’s hard hiring IT professionals now, just wait a few months.

From startups to mature firms, companies say they’ll be adding tech workers now and into next year at a faster pace than they have been. Even CFOs, who say they expect their overall company hiring to increase by 2.5 percent, predict they’ll be hiring tech workers at twice that rate.

Among startups, 83 percent told Silicon Valley Bank they’ll add IT staff in the next year. The survey found 90 percent of startup software companies will be hiring, with smaller, but still high numbers of hardware, and life sciences startups also planning to add tech staff. Most of their recruiting will be local to their home state, reports the bank. But over the next two to three years, software startups in particular expect they’ll have to look beyond the local geography, even going internationally for talent.

“This may reflect their more robust growth expectations, greater flexibility in accommodating workers spread across locations, and/or the level of competition for skilled software engineers, which may be forcing startups to cast their hiring nets wider to attract workers with the skills they need,” says the report.

With tech professionals already at a premium, the hiring plans will put upward pressure on salaries, as companies compete for the ever-shrinking pool of talent. Dice, which found 73 percent of the tech recruiters and hiring managers it surveyed expecting to hire in the next six months, said 58 percent report salaries will increase.

Other hiring inducements haven’t changed all that much since last year, but where they have, the most commonly mentioned were bonuses of all types. Other benes being offered are more vacation time and telecommuting.

Despite the growing competition for tech talent, getting professionals to jump ship isn’t easy. Only 37 percent of the surveyed managers say their voluntary departures have increased this year.

“Our customers tell us it’s hard to entice tech professionals out of their current positions,” said Tom Silver, SVP North America of Dice. “There is just not enough confidence for professionals to leave what they know behind and take a chance with their careers.”

by John Zappe

Thursday, June 21, 2012

12 Reasons Why You Need an Interview Coach

Interview coaches are increasingly becoming an important part of the job search process. Yet many job seekers still fail to realise the value of investing in one. They often look to their recruiters to provide them with impartial advice on how best to improve their CV/resume or interview technique.
Whilst many recruiters take this part of their role seriously, not all of them do. Within the context of the current global economic downturn and a job market flooded with candidates, it is important that as a job seeker, you leave as little to chance as possible and do everything in your power to set yourself apart from the crowd.

An interview coach can spend one on one time with you to understand your experience, strengths and weaknesses and then coach you on how to draw these things out during an interview. They can also provide you with basic and advanced interview preparation techniques and equip you to deal with tough questions.

A good interview coach should not give you run of the mill answers. Instead they should spend time getting to understand you and help you tweak your existing technique.
Here are 12 reasons why an interview coach is an important part of improving your prospects during a job search.

1.) You have been gainfully employed for a long time and so have had no need to interview for a new role. However, you have recently been made redundant and have no idea about how well you could perform in an interview.

2.) You keep coming out of interviews thinking that they went very well, only for you to be rejected time and time again. To make matters worse, your recruiter is not giving you detailed feedback and you are not clear on where you may be going wrong.

3.) Your interviews never last beyond 30 minutes and/or you never get to meet all of the interviewers you are scheduled to meet. It seems like your interviewers are suddenly dragged into emergency meetings that they cannot get out of to interview you.

5.) You are a new graduate and are entering the work force for the first time. The market is touch and you want to ensure that you make the most out of the few opportunities that open up to you.

6.) You want to switch industries or job functions but no one is giving you a chance to interview and on the rare occasion when you are interviewed, you get rejected for lack of relevant experience

7.) You want to relocate and have never historically struggled with interviews but things haven’t quite clicked this time. There may be nuances in business etiquette that you may not be aware of that a good interview coach could help with

8.) Speaking in front of people or a person overwhelms you, you sweat profusely, and become incoherent. An interview coach can provide valuable constructive feedback to help boost your confidence and give you the opportunity to practice in an encouraging environment.

9.) You are unsure about how best to explain long gaps on your CV or less than stellar academic results.

10.) You consistently make it through to the final stage of interview only to lose out to another candidate, even though everyone said you were the ideal candidate for the job and as far as they were concerned, you were highly likely to secure the offer

11.) You are seeking a move to a new company as a team. An interview coach will help you structure your pitch/presentation and help develop a strategy that allows all team members to shine

12.) You just want to know that you have done everything in your power to maximise your chances for a new job.

Written by: Ada Offonry

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

5 Toxic Beliefs That Ruin Careers

People who hold these beliefs tend lack the energy required to create their own success. Don't be one of them.

The Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is, in my opinion, one of the best business books ever published. One passage, in particular, contains a world of business wisdom: "As a man believes so is he." (23:7)

In the past, I've written in this blog about the beliefs that make people more successful. However, I've observed that there are five other beliefs that consistently make people less successful. Make sure you don't subscribe to any of these

1. My self-worth is based on what others think of me.
Some people define themselves based upon how they guess their boss, co-workers, relatives and friends see them. When they are convinced that others think poorly of them, such people lack the self-confidence necessary to consistently take action.

2. My past equals my future.
When some people experience a series of setbacks, they assume that their goals are not achievable. Over time, they become dispirited and discouraged, and avoid situations where failure is a risk. Because any significant effort entails risk, such people are then unable to make significant achievements.

3. My destiny is controlled by the supernatural.
Some people believe that their status in life–or even their potential as a human being–is determined by luck, fate, or divine intervention. This all-too-common (and ultimately silly) belief robs such people of initiative, making them passive as they wait for their "luck" to change.

4. My emotions accurately reflect objective reality.
Some people believe that their emotions are caused by external events. In truth, though emotions are determined by the perception of those events, combined with preconceptions about what those events mean. Such people find it difficult or impossible to "get out of their own heads" and see situations from another person's viewpoint.

5. My goal is to be perfect or do something perfectly.
Because perfection is unattainable, the people who seek it are simply setting themselves up for disappointment. Perfectionists blame the world (and everything in it) rather than doing what's necessary to accomplish extraordinary results. That's why "successful perfectionist" is an oxymoron.
If you're suffering from any of these five beliefs, I strongly recommend expunging them in favor of better beliefs. I explain how to do this in this post "How to Be Happy at Work" (in the post, I call them "rules", but that's the same thing as "beliefs.")

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Friday, June 15, 2012

Entrepreneurship Is The New Women's Movement

Women are leaving the workforce in droves in favor of being at home. Not to be a homemaker, but as job-making entrepreneurs.
By Natalie MacNeil

A quiet revolution is taking shape right now among women. Unlike the Quiet Revolution that began in the 1970s which saw women leave the home and enter the workforce in droves, women today are leaving the workforce in droves in favor of being at home. But unlike generations of women before, these women are opting to work in the home not as homemakers—but as job-making entrepreneurs.

Women have been starting businesses at a higher rate than men for the last 20 years and tend to create home-based micro (less than 5 employees) and small businesses. Women will create over half of the 9.72 million new small business jobs expected to be created by 2018 and more and more are doing this from home offices across the country. It’s a surprising statistic, especially considering that women-owned businesses only created 16 percent of total U.S. jobs that existed in 2010.  Read complete article.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Why aren't companies hiring?

The U.S. economy’s paltry addition of 69,000 jobs in May has intensified the political finger-pointing, but the truth is that no one really knows for sure why the economy is growing yet too few jobs are being created, said Sageworks CEO Brian Hamilton.

“The jobs report is disappointing because, at this stage of the recovery, the economy should be generating more jobs,” said Hamilton, who is also co-founder of the financial information company. The sluggish job growth is a paradox, he said, “because privately held companies, which actually produce the vast majority of new jobs, are performing quite well.”

Indeed, Sageworks’ data shows privately held companies’ sales have increased by an average of 8.08 percent in 2012, on the heels of 8.25 percent sales growth in 2011. Net profit margins, meanwhile, have increased to an average of 6.84 percent so far this year, compared with 5.87 percent during 2011.
Through its cooperative data model, Sageworks collects financial statements for private companies from accounting firms, banks and credit unions, and aggregates the data at an approximate rate of 1,000 statements a day. Net profit margin has been adjusted to exclude taxes and include owner compensation in excess of their market-rate salaries — adjustments commonly made to private-company financials in order to provide a more accurate picture of the companies’ operational performance.

The federal government said Friday that U.S. unemployment edged up to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 percent in April, sending Wall Street stocks skidding and inflaming worries about a global economic slowdown. Stocks faltered again Monday as the debate over what’s keeping job growth slow continued.

Hamilton has said that business owners remain nervous about where the economy’s been, where it is now, and where it’s going in coming quarters. A recent Sageworks survey of accountants, bankers and others who work closely with private companies found that about 32 percent of these professionals believe their clients aren’t hiring because they are concerned about the economy in general. Another 22 percent of those surveyed said private companies have become more risk averse because of lingering anxiety from the last recession.

In addition, technology and other productivity improvements have helped boost per-employee sales and profits in recent years, which could reduce the urgency for some companies to hire. In the Sageworks survey, 23 percent of respondents said their clients’ efficiency has reduced the need to hire additional people.

Recent Sageworks data has also shown that later customer payments and slower moving inventory have combined to tie up private companies’ cash 16 percent longer than just three years ago. That’s money companies don’t have in the bank to hire new people or buy equipment.

Other data sources have blamed the lingering employment woes on a gap in the skills needed and those available, geographical constraints tied to the still-difficult housing market and the increase in the number of people dropping out of the workforce, a trend that is tied to an aging population.

Sageworks, a financial information company, collects and analyzes data on the performance of privately held companies and provides financial forecasting software.

Written by: Mary Ellen Biery

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Why Boards Need More Women

Diversity on boards is critical to sustaining performance. Broadening the composition of the board increases the size of the candidate pool and, more importantly, helps expand perspectives at the top. While most CEOs recognize the importance of appointing directors of different ages and with different kinds of educational backgrounds and functional expertise, they tend to underestimate the benefits of gender diversity.

Two days ago, the Italian government had to pass a law requiring listed and state-owned companies to ensure that by 2015, one-third of their board members would be women. Only 6% of directors in Italy are currently women — one of the lowest rates on the continent — compared to 14% in the European Union and 16% in the U.S.

There are several benefits to appointing more women on boards. When Fortune-500 companies were ranked by the number of women directors on their boards, those in the highest quartile in 2009 reported a 42% greater return on sales and a 53% higher return on equity than the rest, according to a recent study conducted by Lois Joy, Nancy Carter, Harvey M. Wagner, and Sriram Narayanan.
Experts believe that companies with women directors deal more effectively with risk. Not only do they better address the concerns of customers, employees, shareholders, and the local community, but also, they tend to focus on long-term priorities. Women directors are likely to be more in tune with women's needs than men, which helps develop successful products and services. After all, women drive 70% of purchase decisions by consumers in the European Union and 80% of them in the United States.
Research by Catalyst — a not-for-profit that seeks to expand opportunities for women — shows a strong link between the presence of women on boards and corporate reputations. Female directors serve as role models, and therefore, improve female employees' performance and boost companies' images. Several rating agencies and investment funds, such as CalPERS and PAX World, use the extent of gender diversity as one of their investment criteria.

Yet, in Europe, barring a few exceptions such as Norway, women lack representation on boards. Research by the Cranfield School of Management shows that the percentage of women in FTSE 100 companies has risen slowly from 6.9% to 12.5% over the last decade. The percentage of women directors seems to be correlated with geography, with the Scandinavian nations having over 20+% women among board members; the U.K., Ireland, and Netherlands being in the low teens (10% to 12.5%); Germany, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium in the high single digits (7.5% to 9.7%); and the Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece reporting low single digit (2% to 6.5%) representation, according to a recent study by Egon Zehnder's Laurence Monnery.

In Turkey, where I live, the participation rates of women in the workforce are among the lowest in Europe, indicating major barriers to entry into the work force. However, there's neither discrimination in terms of pay nor a glass ceiling that prevents women from getting to the top. Turkey has the second-highest percentage of female CEOs (12%) among the OECD countries as well as Brazil, China, and Russia. In fact, 22.2% of board members in the country are women. This includes the members of Turkey's business families, but even in the case of independent women directors, the country ranks among the top in Europe. Two women CEOs have led the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association in just the last five years, and the heads of several Turkish business groups, such as Sabanci, Dogan, and Kale, are all women.

Studies show that the presence of at least three women is necessary to change boardroom dynamics. In fact, an analysis of FTSE-listed boards found that operational performance and share prices were both higher in the case of companies where women made up over 20% of board members than those with lower female representation.

A new Turkish initiative seeks to increase the numbers of women directors by getting 40 business people to coach 40 next-generation women leaders in the skills of board membership. That's an example other countries may well wish to follow, especially since the European Commission is soon likely to introduce quotas for women directors in every member country.

by Yilmaz Arguden
Harvard Business Review

Friday, June 8, 2012

U.S. Employers Add 69,000 Jobs, Fewer Than Forecast

The American jobs engine sputtered in May as employers added the fewest workers in a year and the unemployment rate rose, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects and raising the odds the Federal Reserve will step in to boost growth.
Payrolls climbed by 69,000 last month, less than the most-pessimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, after a revised 77,000 gain in April that was smaller than initially estimated, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median projection called for a 150,000 May advance. The jobless rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent. Read the complete article.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Federal employment drops after years of explosive growth

The federal government has started to trim its workforce, ending several years of explosive and controversial growth that came at a time when private companies and state and local governments slashed jobs.

Federal employment has fallen for seven of the last eight months, the longest sustained drop in more than a decade. The decline is tiny: Just 9,900 fewer workers in May compared with a year earlier, excluding postal and temporary Census workers, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a fraction of the 2.2 million civilian federal workforce.

Nevertheless, the reversal marks the end of a period of enormous employment growth that spanned the end of George W. Bush's presidency and the start of President Obama's term.  Federal employment grew 13% — 250,000 jobs — from the recession's start in December 2007 to a peak last September. During that time, private employment fell 5% and state and local governments cut staffs by 2%.
Political and financial pressures have stopped federal hiring growth, says John Palguta, vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, which promotes a high-quality federal workforce. "Budget challenges are becoming real," he says. He predicts the federal workforce will shrink through 2013 and maybe longer.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has proposed cutting the federal workforce by 10%. Obama's budget calls for a small increase in federal workers.  The four-year boom in federal hiring added to nearly every government department, rather than a few high-priority missions. The recent hiring plateau is a similar government-wide phenomenon, with a few key exceptions.  Among the hardest-hit: The Internal Revenue Service cut employment 6% last year to 90,904. The IRS attributes the decline to a flat budget and a hiring freeze.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also shed workers last year. However, the shrinking agencies, including the IRS, still have more employees than before the hiring boom.  The number of government lawyers held steady at 35,600 last year, after adding nearly 6,000 during the hiring boom. The number of prison guards, park rangers and librarians fell slightly. The number of doctors, dentists and nurses rose at a slower pace than in past years.

Federal employment trims are done without layoffs. When workers quit or retire, the government hires fewer replacements.

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY

Monday, June 4, 2012

BLS: Staffing Employment Holds Steady in May

Staffing Up 8.5% From a Year Ago Seasonally adjusted jobs data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that staffing employment remained relatively unchanged, up 0.4% from April to May (9,200 jobs). In a year-to-year comparison, temporary help employment for the month was 8.5% higher than in May 2011.

Overall U.S. nonfarm employment showed little growth, increasing by 69,000 jobs from April to May. During the first three months of 2012, the average rate of monthly job creation was 226,000; by contrast, the monthly average for April and May was 73,000.

“A disappointingly dreary start to the summer jobs season, but not a surprise because overall employment lags economic trends, and gross domestic product for the first quarter has been adjusted downward,” said Richard Wahlquist, president and chief executive officer of the American Staffing Association. “The nonseasonally adjusted numbers for temporary help employment, which provides a real-time snapshot of what’s going on in the economy, suggests continued—albeit agonizingly slow—improvement.”

Nonseasonally adjusted BLS data, which estimate the actual number of jobs in the economy, indicated that the staffing industry added 73,000 jobs (up 3.0%) from April to May. On a year-to-year basis, there were 8.4% more staffing employees in May compared with the same month in 2011.

BLS also provides employment estimates for search and placement firms, but those are nonseasonal only, and reports lag one month. Friday, BLS reported that search and placement employment in April was up 2.3% from March, totaling 283,300 for the month. In a year-to-year comparison, April employment was up 7.1% from the same month in 2011.

For more information, visit the ASA newsroom. You can also follow ASA on Twitter.
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The American Staffing Association is the voice of the U.S. staffing industry. ASA and its affiliated chapters advance the interests of staffing and recruiting firms of all sizes and across all sectors through legal and legislative advocacy, public relations, education, and the promotion of high standards of legal, ethical, and professional practices. ASA members provide the full range of employment and work force services and solutions, including temporary and contract staffing, recruiting and permanent placement, outplacement and outsourcing, training, and human resource consulting.

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Friday, June 1, 2012

For the 1st Time Ever, a Majority of the Unemployed Have Attended College


Everybody is looking for the next big "bubble". Maybe it's bonds. Or tech stocks. Or ... college? With tuition soaring and job prospects not, a growing chorus thinks higher education might just be too big not to fail. The calculus is simple. If college costs keep rising, but job prospects don't improve, eventually higher education won't be worth it. Pop goes the campus bubble -- or so the story goes.

That brings us to one of the more inauspicious recent headlines. For the first time ever, the majority of the unemployed have attended some college. Does this mark some kind of inflection point? Is it time to ditch the classroom for the office? Not exactly.

First, the gory details. The chart below from Business Insider shows the twenty-year educational trend among the jobless. (Remember: This shows what percentage of the jobless have ever set foot on a college campus -- or not. It doesn't show what percentage of high school grads or college enrollees are out of work).

This is not as bad as it looks, and it doesn't mean what you might think. Here are the three numbers that tell us why: 7.9, 7.6 and 4.0. Those are the unemployment rates among people 25 and older for high school grads, for college dropouts, and for college graduates -- all courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The chart above isn't a story about a college degree no longer paying off. The chart above is a story about more people going to college, but not nearly as many more people finishing college. As my colleague Jordan Weissmann recently pointed out, only 56 percent of those who start on a bachelor's degree finish within six years. Only 29 percent of those who start on a associate's degree finish within three years. And consider that this is happening while college enrollment is at an all-time high. Too many students are getting the worst of both worlds: debt without a degree. Their finances get worse, but their job prospects don't get much better. That's how we get a world where most of the unemployed have attended at least some college.

But there's something of a chicken-and-egg problem here. More students would finish school if they could afford it. That's certainly not the only reason our college dropout rate is so high, but it's certainly one of the reasons.

In other words, the high cost of college is disguising the payoff of college. There still aren't many better long-term investments than a college degree. Graduates have lower unemployment. They earn more. And the gap between what college and high school graduates make is only growing. But you know what they say about the long-run. It can be awfully hard to get there when the short-run costs are so high. That's why reining in college tuition is so critical. It will both help young graduates struggling with the terrible economy, but also help more people become young graduates.

Of course, it's not obvious how we can do this. If we knew, we'd be doing it. But it's worth remembering: That's how you win the future.

Written by: Matthew O'Brien - Matthew O'Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.