Hopefully, this is a topic that will become even more popular as the economy rebounds and more unemployed people start finding work. Naturally, this is important for anyone switching jobs or moving to a new career. The advice is simple – you need to figure out how to work with your new manager and adjust to what inevitably will be an environment that is different from your old work environment. Be flexible and helpful!
Category: Your Career (Page 55 of 62)
If you’re looking for a new job or career, one thing that you will most definitely want to have is a great set of business cards. Being able to hand these out to prospective employers is important. Not only do these have your contact information, but it also looks extremely professional to have business cards. Whether you give them out like candy at parties or you save them for only extremely potential employers, being able to show that you are a professional person can be extremely advantageous for most people.
The news isn’t very good on the job front, and even the tech sector is struggling to add jobs.
Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.
Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.
While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.
The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.
That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
Technology firms are sitting on a mountain of cash, so hopefully this will be temporary. President Obama is now proposing huge tax breaks for investments in equipment, along with making the research tax credit permanent. If the GOP can put aside politics and pass these proposals that they have supported in the past, perhaps we can jump start this sector and other sectors.
There’s an interesting battle brewing between HP and Oracle regarding Mark Hurd, who was recently hired by Oracle after he was recently ousted as CEO by HP’s board following an expense and sexual harassment scandal. Now, HP is suing Hurd regarding Hurd’s new position at Oracle.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is suing Mark Hurd, the chief executive it ousted last month, to stop him from taking a top job at rival Oracle Corp.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a California state court, came a day after Oracle hired Hurd as co-president to help lead the database software maker’s efforts to lure business away from HP. HP claims that Hurd won’t be able to perform his job at Oracle without spilling HP’s trade secrets and violating a confidentiality agreement.
This type of complaint isn’t unusual in the technology world, nor is the confidentiality agreement that Hurd had signed as part of a severance package from HP that could top $40 million.
Technology companies often require such agreements because workers walk out the door with valuable technical information.
But the stakes are higher with Hurd than a rank-and-file employee, and the lawsuit may delay when Hurd could start his new job.
HP may have a valid claim, but you have to wonder why they wouldn’t have an even more explicit non-competition agreement. It sounds like they might have a case surrounding trade secrets and confidentiality, but for $40 million you would think they would have something more concrete.
This should be a lesson to any company who provides VERY lucrative severance packages – get something in return!
Here’s one disturbing trend that should have you focus on education and training:
Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay – or none at all.
Job creation will likely remain weak for months or even years. But once employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly into two categories of roughly equal numbers:
_ Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and software engineers.
_ Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, like home health care aides and store clerks.
And those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.
This has been going on for years, and it’s only going to get worse. You can’t rely on walking into a factory and getting a well-paying job. Those days are gone.
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