6. Employers who insist on knowing your salary history but won’t reveal what the job pays. Employers regularly insist that candidates name their salary history or expectations up front, while simultaneously refusing to divulge the range they plan to pay. There’s no reason for employers not to share that info, other than to make the hire at a lower price. It’s unfair and they usually get away with it, but we’d all be better off if employers simply shared the range they plan to pay and put an end to the drama and coyness.
2. Learn another job. It’s an unfortunate fact that many corporations in the throes of restructuring won’t think twice about piling additional work on the employees who survive the layoff rounds. So knowing how to fill more than one position in your office can be a surefire way of getting a survivors’ edge.
"With a kid on the way, I really need to earn more.” Your request needs to be about your value to the company, not about your finances."
Each year, U.S. News compiles a list of the Best Careers based on the Labor Department’s employment projections. And this year, we continue to base our picks for the Best Jobs of 2012 on professions that should hire abundantly over the next several years. To better help you make a smart career choice, we’ve also started ranking our selections.
Phones and tablets are also showing up in meetings. It’s easy enough to pretend you’re taking notes, but many use the technology to drown out the sound of the meeting coordinator. The meeting time is wasted when workers aren’t paying attention.
And then there’s tech envy. Do your coworkers spend more time envying your technology than getting their work done?
Most employers are not familiar with military service, positions, jargon, or acronyms, so it can be even more challenging for veterans to make a strong case. What can job-seeking veterans do to help transition into civilian positions?
"If you want to become an entrepreneur because you don’t want to work for “the man” anymore, consider that working for yourself might mean working for a meaner boss."
— 10 Things to Consider Before Becoming a Full-Time Entrepreneur
“There’s no bright-line test on sexual harassment since the courts—including the U.S. Supreme Court—have made it clear that it will depend on the frequency and severity of the conduct, whether the conduct is physically threatening or humiliating and whether the conduct interferes with the employee’s job performance,” says Paul O. Lopez, director and chair of the litigation department at law firm Tripp Scott.
Some economists began to refer to the depths of the recession as a “mancession,” since the bulk of the jobs lost were among men in male-dominated industries such as construction and manufacturing. During the recession (defined as December 2007 to June 2009), the economy shed more than 7 million jobs. Men fared worse in the recession, suffering more than 70 percent of the job losses. But strikingly, in the midst of a slow recovery, women have lost 117,000 jobs while men gained 1,140,000—a staggering difference of about a million jobs.
"Find out how people in the position you’re applying for dress at that company. Then dress one—and only one—level better. If, as is the case with many startup software firms, people are wearing jeans and a t-shirt, then come to the interview in business casual pants and a collared shirt. Showing up at a startup firm like this in a suit may cause a negative first impression."
Most English majors don’t go on to become novelists, and history majors don’t always become history teachers. Edwin Koc, who wrote the NACE report cited above, states in it that “the objective of a liberal education…is to prepare you broadly for the professional world so that you are prepared to undertake many jobs rather than to be trained to do a specific task.”
Traditional pension plans, paid family leave, and even the company picnic are all on the decline. Employers have significantly cut many of the benefits they offer to workers over the past five years. Some 77 percent of companies report that benefits offerings have been negatively affected by the slow pace of recovery, according to a Society for Human Resource Management survey of 600 human resources professionals.
“When confronted by one or more job demands, a flexible schedule provides working moms with alternatives for meeting those demands while caring for their newborns. When working moms are better able to control their work environment and adapt, work-related stress is less likely to become a family issue,” study author Dawn S. Carlson, a professor of management at Baylor University, said in a university news release.
“It’s really just a matter of jumping in and starting to develop something,” says CompTIA’s Thibodeaux. “Once you create your first program, you get the bug … It’s definitely a learning-by-doing kind of thing because it’s changing so quickly all the time that you have to be in the business of doing it to really stay on top of it.”
