Archives for Employment

It’s no joke: there really are too many lawyers. And there are too few nurses and accountants. At least, that’s the employment outlook this year.

What if you could glimpse the future and foresee low demand for your skills in 2012? Would you change careers based on that data or would you continue to chase your dream?

Most of us would pursue our passion - after all, we only get one shot at life. Still, amid an oversupply of lawyers (was it ever otherwise?), many of whom are struggling to pay off six figure law school debts, you have to wonder shouldn’t they have seen this coming?

Archives for Coaching

Ask anyone who has sourced or managed a globally distributed project. Collaborating with a customer, supplier, or co-worker located in another country typically brings more than you bargained for - a multicultural learning experience.

You can muddle through on your own or get help. Specialized trainers can heighten your cultural awareness and teach you about the tendencies and work styles of one culture compared to another. But there’s a catch: Fostering multicultural awareness usually involves perpetuating generalizations.

Let’s face it, cultural stereotypes often have more than grain of truth to them, but they also tend to rub people the wrong way. Is it possible to educate globally-collaborative workers about different cultures without making generalizations?

“People don’t like to be generalized about,” concedes Craig Storti, one of the leading cultural consultants. “And they especially don’t like somebody from another culture doing it. What I say in my book and in my workshops is I’m describing how Indians come across to westerners - it’s not how Indians see themselves.”

Archives for Branding You

In this post-Enron era of mandated transparency, corporate annual reports offer greater insights to a broader range of stakeholders, not just investors.

Though annual reports suffer from an excess of glossy prose and disclosures, savvy corporations realize that it’s not just financial analysts and investors reading between the lines. Increasingly, job candidates are mining annual reports to better equip themselves for interviews and to gauge the corporate culture.

“The strongest candidates are the ones that dig into annual reports,” says Lori Blackman, president of DNL Global, a Dallas-based recruiting firm. “The job candidates’ objective should be to help grow the company.”

Here are some questions job seekers should keep in mind when reading an annual statement:

• Is the company profitable? Which lines of business turn a profit and which underdeliver?
• What are the company’s biggest business or market-driven challenges?
• Does the company focus solely on executive compensation or does it tout an equity distribution plan for rank and file workers, too?
• Does the company discuss its commitment to talent management?
• Does the company express a preference for home-grown rather than acquired talent?
• Does the company have a commitment to global diversity? Is this commitment reflected in their choices of directors and executives?
• Does the company have a viable global growth strategy?
• Is the company committed to building greener, more energy efficient operations?
• Does the company support volunteerism and creative philanthropy?

Profitability. The good news is you don’t have to be an MBA or financial analyst to make sense of the numbers. There are a wide range of articles on the web and various books available about how to read financial statements and annual reports.

Archives for Branding You

They don’t teach this in management school, but learning how to build and maintain friendships in the workplace is a skill that can take you a long way in your career.

Just ask the founders of Google and Yahoo! But then again, when friends ‘break-up’ at work, whether it’s a legal partnership, two chefs at a bistro, or heads of a public company such as Disney, it can cause a permanent rift in the relationship. The truth is it’s risky to work with friends.

Yet it turns out that working with friends - or befriending co-workers - can enhance your job performance. Nearly two-thirds of employees believe that office productivity improves when co-workers are friendly outside of the office, according to a recent study by Accountemps, a staffing company for financial services professionals.

For many of us, friends are magnets that lure us to a new job and the ties that bind us when we might otherwise break away. Yet balancing the chemistry of friendships on and off the job is often a bit of an ordeal.

Archives for Branding You

How much do you know about the corporate culture of a prospective employer? Until you work there, you’re in the dark, right? By reputation, a manufacturing company might be known as a meat grinder or a large law firm as a cold and unfriendly place. Yet how much of this reputation is true and how much of it is sour grapes?

It’s imperative to discover the true nature of corporate culture before you accept a job offer. If the company likes go-getters, but you’re a slow-starter, look elsewhere. If the company likes consensus builders, but you shoot from the hip, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.

Unless you’re equipped with science-fiction powers of precognition, your options for evaluating the culture as a job candidate or job seeker appear limited to talking to people and power-reading on the web. The obvious place to start, the careers section of the corporate site, is usually a dead end. There you can read the type of gloss that belongs on a Hallmark greeting card. If reading about the CEO’s family values melts your heart, so be it, but I’d rather know if the company nurtures or chews up its young. And to get that kind of information you have to dig - deep.

Archives for Research

Corporate interviews have become endurance tests, a common way of simulating how candidates will respond if hired. Job candidates sitting on the hot seat can expect to hear the same questions posed four to seven times in a single afternoon. While job seekers are judged on every little detail, feeling pressure not to make mistakes, paradoxically, interviewers often believe they have latitude to come across as aloof, disorganized or rude.

But in a tightened labor market, candidates may experience a role reversal. Savvy employers may drop the fortress mentality - lowering a drawbridge across the moat of fire. For example, some firms may devote more of the interview process to “sell” candidates on the company. And some firms hit by the labor crunch are lowering skill-level or experience requirements for new hires, especially when it’s possible to shape raw talent in a matter of weeks or months.

Archives for Research

Forbes released a careers package called  Worst Jobs for the 21^st Century.  Although it’s neither uplifting nor funny, the report uses federal data to identify careers to avoid (assuming you still have a choice).

Forbes reports that apart from manufacturing jobs, in decline because of productivity gains and offshoring, technology is undermining classic office jobs such as filing and data entry.  

The worst jobs projected through 2014?