Facing The Challenge of Leaving a Long-Term Job to Start Something New

 Leaving a company that’s been your professional home for years, or decades, is a major shift that can feel both thrilling and perilous. In this article, the authors outline six challenges that often come up when making this transition: 1) Ruminating and second-guessing; 2) Feeling guilty; 3) Being afraid of losing status; 4) Needing to adapt; 5) Managing the perceptions of your new colleagues; and 6) Balancing opposing emotions. They offer advice for how to overcome these six challenges and share strategies to ensure that your new job or career is just...Read more...

How to boost your motivation on the job

 Feeling Unmotivated? Here's How to Plug Back In.

It’s common to go through periods at work where you’re just not feeling it. No matter what’s sapping your motivation, these strategies can help you interrupt the cycle of numbness and paralysis—and restore your sense of agency.

Detach. Being unhappy at work can...Read more...

Should you quit that unchallenging jobs?

 Some days, you hate, hate, hate your job. Other days, you wonder if you’re truly unhappy or just coming to terms with the reality that workdays can often feel like a long, tedious slog. It’s even harder to tell the difference if your friends and colleagues constantly complain about their jobs. Once a group vent session begins, a creeping sense of self-doubt takes root. “You think, ‘Am I being entitled by wanting more or is it really this bad?’” says Jenny Blake, a former career development program manager at Google and author of three books, including Pivot and Free Time. “You can write it off as a first-world problem, but work is where you spend the vast majority of your waking hours, so it matters.” Read more...

Pay Transparency Is Sweeping Across the US

 Applying for a new job is always a venture into the unknown, but when it comes to the pay on offer, that uncertainty is lessening. Salary disclosure in US job ads appears to now be the norm. New data from job marketplace Indeed shows that as of August more than half of US job postings on the site included a salary range. Pay transparency laws have recently spread across the US, taking effect in Colorado in 2021, New York City in 2022, and California and Washington states this year. New York state enacted its own law yesterday. But the trend to more openness about pay may also reflect a growing awareness that pay transparency is good for business. Indeed surveyed US job seekers earlier this year and found that 75 percent of them would be more likely to apply for a job if it included salary data. Postings that included pay rates attracted 30 percent more applicants on the site. “With the tight labor market, pay transparency seems to be one of the new tactics employers can use to attract workers,” says Corey Stahle, an economist at Indeed who conducted the study. Read more...

X, formerly known as Twitter, will collect user biometric data, job and education history

 X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin collecting biometric data and information on users’ employment and education history starting next month, according to the site’s updated privacy policy. “Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” X said in the new privacy policy, set to go into effect on Sept. 29. The social media platform told Bloomberg Law that the biometric data collection is for X Premium users, or those who pay for the platform’s subscription service, to allow for an additional layer of verification. X did not specify what biometric data it plans to collect. However, such data can include facial images, fingerprints and iris patterns.  The new addition to X’s privacy policy comes as the company faces a proposed class action lawsuit in Illinois over allegations that it collected biometric information on users without providing advance notice or obtaining their consent. Read more...

The Best U.S. States for Jobs by Worker Availability

 According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the main driver of the current labor shortage was the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing more than 100,000 businesses to close temporarily and resulting in millions losing their jobs. Subsequent government support for those who lost work and other subsidies made it easier for people to stay home and out of the workforce. A Chamber of Commerce survey found that 1-in-5 people have changed their work style since the pandemic, with 17% having retired, 19% having transitioned to a homemaker role, and another 14% working only part time. The industries with the highest unemployment rates are also those that have added the most jobs, with leisure and hospitality experiencing the highest rates (5.1%) just ahead of wholesale and retail trade (4.4%). Overall, though the job marker has started to cool somewhat, hiring is still outpacing quit rates. The national quit rate in July 2023 was 3.8%, compared to a hiring rate of 4%. And with 9.8 million job openings in the U.S., there should be ample opportunities for job seekers. Read more...

Preparing New Employees

Source: Wikipedia

Induction Programme

An induction programme is the process used within many businesses to welcome new employees to the company and prepare them for their new role. It helps in the integration of employees into the organization. Induction training should, according to TPI-theory, include development of theoretical and practical skills, but also meet interaction needs that exist among the new employees. An Induction Programme can also include the safety training delivered to contractors before they are permitted to enter a site or begin their work. It is usually focused on the particular safety issues of an organisation but will often include much of the general company information delivered to employees.

Benefits

An induction programme is an important process for bringing staff into an organisation. It provides an introduction to the working environment and the set-up of the employee within the organisation. The process will cover the employer and employee rights and the terms requirements for working at the company and pay attention to the health and safety of the new employee. An induction programme is part of an organisations knowledge management process and is intended to enable the new starter to become a useful, integrated member of the team, rather than being "thrown in at the deep end" without understanding how to do their job, or how their role fits in with the rest of the company. Good induction programmes can increase productivity and reduce short-term turnover of staff. These programs can also play a critical role under the socialization to the organization in terms of performance, attitudes and organizational commitment. In addition, well designed induction programmes can significantly increase the speed to competency of new employees, thus meaning they are more productive in a shorter period of time.

NYC law will force businesses to reveal salary ranges on job postings

 A New York City law that will go into effect this spring will require companies to reveal the salary ranges on job postings.

Supporters say it’s a measure that could help close the gender wage gap. The law, which will be enforced beginning on May 15, applies to companies with more than four employees. Companies that post job openings will be required to note the minimum and maximum salaries based on a “good faith” determination at the time of the posting. It’s unclear how or if the law will be applied to companies that hire remote workers. Firms that refuse to comply could be hit with fines of up to $125,000 or other civil penalties. Supporters of the measure say that the law is needed to shrink the pay inequality gap, but pro-business advocates have argued that it is another example of government. Read more...

Some gender disparities widened in the U.S. workforce during the pandemic

 The COVID-19 recession resulted in a steep but transitory contraction in employment, with greater job losses among women than men. The recovery began in April 2020 and is not complete. As of the third quarter of 2021, the labor force ages 25 and older remains nearly 2 million below its level in the same quarter of 2019.

The pandemic is associated with an increase in some gender disparities in the labor market. Among adults 25 and older who have no education beyond high school, more women have left the labor force than men. Other disparities have stayed the same or even narrowed: The gender pay gap has remained steady, for example, and the difference in the average hours worked by men and women has slightly diminished. Overall, the number of women ages 25 and older in the labor force has fallen 1.3% since the third quarter of 2019, similar to the 1.1% decline of men in the labor force. But this modest overall change obscures divergent outcomes for labor force members with different levels of education. Women who have no education beyond high school exited the labor force in greater numbers than similarly educated men. However, the pandemic has not interrupted the long-running gains of women among the college-educated labor force. From the third quarter of 2019 to the same quarter of 2021, the number of women in the labor force who are not high school graduates decreased 12.8%, dwarfing the 4.9% contraction among comparably educated men. The pandemic also disproportionately affected women with a high school diploma. The ranks of women in the high-school-educated labor force have declined 6.0% since the third quarter of 2019. The labor force of similarly educated men has fallen only 1.8%. Read more...

Featherbedding in Labor Relations

Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. The term "make-work" is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding. The term "featherbedding" is usually used by management to describe behaviors and rules sought by workers. The term may equally apply to mid- and upper-level management, particularly in regard to top-heavy and "bloated" levels of middle- and upper-level management. Featherbedding has also been occasionally used to describe rent-seeking behavior by corporations in response to economic regulation. The term "featherbedding" originally referred to any person who is pampered, coddled, or excessively rewarded. The term originated in the use of feathers to fill mattresses in beds, providing for more comfort. The modern use of the term in the labor relations setting began in the United States railroad industry, which used feathered mattresses in sleeping cars. Railway labor unions, confronted with changing technology which led to widespread unemployment, sought to preserve jobs by negotiating contracts which required employers to compensate workers to do little or no work or which required complex and time-consuming work rules so as to generate a full day's work for an employee who otherwise would not remain employed. Read more...

Business rule mining

Keywords: business rule mining;System integrators;Legacy software applications

Definition

Business rule mining is the process of extracting essential intellectual business logic in the form of Business Rules from packaged or Legacy software applications, recasting them in natural or formal language, and storing them in a source rule repository for further analysis or forward engineering. The goal is to capture these legacy business rules in a way that the business can validate, control and change them over time.

Overview

Business rule mining supports a Business rules approach, which is defined as a formal way of managing and automating an organization's business rules so that the business behaves and evolves as its leaders intend.

Business rule mining example

It is also commonly conducted as part of an application modernization project evolving legacy software applications to service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, transitioning to packaged software, redeveloping new in-house applications, or to facilitate knowledge retention and communication between business and IT professionals in a maintenance environment.

Alternative Approaches

Alternative approaches to rule mining are manual and automated.

A manual approach involves the hand-writing of rules on the basis of subject matter expert interviews and the inspection of source code, job flows, data structures and observed behavior.

Manually extracting rules is complicated by the difficulty of locating and understanding highly interdependent logic that has been interwoven into millions of lines of software code.

An automated approach utilizes repository-based software to locate logical connections inherent within applications and extract them into a predetermined business rules format.

With automation, an effective approach is to apply semantic structures to existing applications. By overlaying business contexts onto legacy applications, rules miners can focus effort on discovering rules from systems that are valuable to the business. Effort is redirected away from mining commoditized or irrelevant applications.

Further, best practices coupled with various tool-assisted techniques of capturing programs’ semantics speeds the transformation of technical rules to true business rules. Adding business semantics to the analysis process allows users to abstract technical concepts and descriptors that are normal in an application to a business level that is consumable by a rules analyst.

System integrators, software vendors, rules mining practitioners, and in-house development teams have developed technologies, proprietary methodologies and industry-specific templates for application modernization and business rule mining.

Source: Wikipedia

Characteristics of an Entrepreneur

Keywords: Characteristics of an Entrepreneur, Definition of an entrepreneur, Entrepreneurial Development, Self-employed mindset

12 Essential Characteristics of an Entrepreneur

By ActionCoach

Definition of an entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is a businessperson who not only conceives and organizes ventures but also frequently takes risks in doing so. Not all independent business people are true entrepreneurs, and not all entrepreneurs are created equal. Different degrees or levels of entrepreneurial intensity and drive depend upon how much independence one exhibits, the level of leadership and innovation they demonstrate, how much responsibility they shoulder, and how creative they become in envisioning and executing their business plans.

The Five Levels of Entrepreneurial Development

Brad Sugars, a world-renowned business author and founder of his own international franchise with nearly 1,000 offices worldwide, identifies five different types or levels of entrepreneurial mindsets, patterns of thinking, and belief

systems.

They begin with the basic level of the employee – and an understanding that good employees often evolve into great entrepreneurs but that to become an entrepreneur one has to first adopt a perspective and seek out a role above and beyond that of an employee.

• The employee sets goals mainly to impress others, to avoid confronting fears – including the fear of personal

freedom and success – and to conform to a comfort zone rather than pushing to learn more and gain new

experiences.

• Because of self-imposed limitations, employees prefer to follow someone else’s game plan, and they lack the

desire to become a self-motivated and self-reliant entrepreneur.

• They focus primarily on personal security and their emotional motivation derives from a fear of insecurity and a desire to be within the comfort zone of a secure situation.

Those who want a greater sense of responsibility and control over their lives and have the confidence to experiment with that possibility often rise up from the ground level of employee status to the first level of entrepreneurship. They do this by becoming self-employed.

Level One: The Self-Employed Mindset

The emotional driving force behind the self-employed person is not security but a desire for greater control over his or her life, career, and destiny. Relinquishing that control to a boss every day from nine to five is not their idea of happiness, and they believe that they could do their job just as well without an employer – and perhaps without the need for other employees. They want more autonomy. They want to do things their own way. And they usually begin by creating a situation where they do the same type of work they did while an employee, but they figure out how to do it by themselves and for themselves. Read more

Why American jobs have a higher risk of automation than jobs in Germany, the UK, and Japan

Keywords: technological advancement, automation

You’ve been warned before—robots are coming for your job. The speed of technological advancement, particularly in smart automation, has sprung countless economic studies and political warnings about how many people are likely to lose their jobs to this rise of the machines. But it’s not an easy number to peg down; estimates range from 5% to 50%.

The latest predictions from PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) survey the damage for specific countries. Analysts at the consulting firm said that by the early 2030s, 38% of US jobs are at a high risk of automation, more than in Germany, the UK, and Japan.

PwC revisited two notable studies on the topic. The first was from 2013, in which Oxford University researchers said that 47% of US jobs would be lost to computerization in the next few decades. Those results were based on whole occupations that could be at risk from automation. The other study was from 2016, in which OECD staff said the figure was actually closer to 10% when analyzing the specific tasks within jobs that were likely to be automated.

The PwC analysts took the task-based approach a step further. In addition to breaking down occupations into manual tasks, routine tasks, computation, socials skills, and literacy skills, they included some details about the workers doing the jobs, particularly the education and training required.

Then, focusing on the UK, PwC looked at the industries with the highest risk of automation, taking into account the proportion of jobs at risk within each sector and its employment share in the overall UK labor market. They found that the wholesale and retail trade sector was most at risk. It’s an industry that employs 15% of the workforce. If PwC is right that 44% of retail jobs are at risk, then 2.3 million jobs just in the UK are on the .... Read more

Is Economic Despair What's Killing Middle-Aged White Americans?

Keywords: Middle-aged white Americans without college degree, Alana Semuels, Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Two Princeton economists elaborate on their work exploring rising mortality rates among certain demographics.

ALANA SEMUELS 

Two years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an alarming revelation: Middle-aged white Americans without a college degree were dying in greater numbers, even as people in other developed countries were living longer. The husband-and-wife team argued, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that these white Americans are facing“deaths of despair”—suicide, overdoses from alcohol and drug, and alcohol-related liver disease.

The paper caused a stir in academic circles and in the media, and has remained in the public discourse following Donald Trump’s win partly on the strength of his support from these same middle-aged white Americans (the alive ones, to be clear). The paper, however, couldn’t answer the question everyone had: Why was this demographic in particular struggling? It couldn’t be purely the economic pain they faced in the wake of globalization; after all, European countries are also affected by globalization, and their residents are getting healthier and living longer. And non-whites in the U.S. are living longer than they used to as well, and they are subject to the same economic forces as middle-age whites and are struggling, at least in economic terms, even more.

As I wrote yesterday, the poor health of middle-aged white Americans is having an impact on the labor force. Men aren’t working or looking for jobs because they’re sick, on pain pills, or abusing alcohol or drugs, research suggests. Just why they’re so sick was not something that Case and Deaton elaborated on in their 2015 paper.

Now, in a new paper, the economists explore why this demographic is so unhealthy. They conclude it has something to do with a lifetime of eroding economic opportunities. This may seem like a circular argument, when put together with previous work: Middle-aged Americans aren’t working because they’re sick, and middle-aged Americans are sick because they’re not working. But Case and Deaton argue that it’s not just poor job opportunities that are affecting this demographic, but rather, that these economic misfortunes build up and bleed into other segments of people’s lives, like marriage and mental health. This drives them to alcoholism, drug abuse, and even suicide, they say, in a new paper released Thursday in advance of a conference, the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.

“As the labor market turns against them, and the kinds of jobs they find get worse and worse for people without a college degree, that affects them in other ways too,” Deaton told me.

What differentiates Case and Deaton’s paper is this idea that as people get older and their fates deviate more and more from those of their parents, they struggle to keep their lives together.  The very act of doing worse than their parents’ generation—what Case and Deaton call “cumulative disadvantage”—is ... Read more

Unemployment takes tough mental toll

Keywords: unemployment, hopelessness, jobless,unemployment rate, Michael Dixon, Robert L. Leahy, Elizabeth Landau

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Living at a friend's house without paying rent, he spends all day searching online for job opportunities and more short-term ways to make money, fearing that if he stops to watch TV, he'll miss something.

"It's kind of like a feeling of 'I can't believe this is happening to me,' and a sense of hopelessness," said Dixon, a 38-year-old Seattle resident. "You really, really, truly start to question who you are."

Michael Dixon hasn't had a job since September,
but he's definitely not relaxing at home.

"It's a really nasty cycle that plays on you psychologically,"  Michael Dixon says of unemployment.

Dixon, an experienced software test engineer, knows he's not alone in his jobless turmoil. The unemployment rate in the United States is at 8.1%, but that doesn't include people who haven't been looking for a job recently.

Deceptively, the unemployment rate will likely drop this summer, but that's because federal extended unemployment benefits are running out for an additional 115,000 people. That statistic doesn't capture just how many Americans have been desperately wishing for a job for a long time.

Psychologists point out serious mental health consequences of being in Dixon's situation for a long time.

It's common for people who have been unemployed for six months or longer to show signs of depression, says Diane Lang, psychotherapist based in Livingston, New Jersey. Eating habits focus on comfort foods, leading to binging. Stress, anxiety and negative thoughts make it hard to get a good night's sleep, resulting in fatigue and lethargy.

"Being unemployed is actually one of the most difficult, most devastating experiences that people go through," said Robert L. Leahy, director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy and author of "The Worry Cure."

Research suggests that being unemployed doubles a person's chance of a......Read more 

Business term of the day - Term for September 23, 2013: "Creeping normality"

Antique bronze ring with ruby for women

Source: Wikipedia
Creeping normality refers to the way a major change can be accepted as the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments, when it would be regarded as objectionable if it took place in a single step or short period. Examples would be a change in job responsibilities or a change in a medical condition.
Jared Diamond has invoked the concept (as well as that of landscape amnesia) in attempting to explain why in the course of long-term environmental degradation, Easter Island natives would, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree:

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

Jobs That Pay 100k a Year Without a Degree

Keywords: Jobs That Pay 100k a Year Without a Degree

Jobs That Pay 100k a Year Without a Degree

With the already high costs of college tuition continuing to rise and job prospects looking more and more slim for recent grads, many are considering the merits of going to college versus finding a job that does not require a bachelor’s degree.

Contrary to the idea that you cannot find a high-paying job without a college degree, there are actually many jobs that are attainable without a degree and have salaries that will rise above $100,000 after you gain experience in the field.

1. Real Estate Broker

While you do need a license to become a real estate broker, you can apply for that license with just a high school diploma. The average salary ranges from $30,144 to $180,434 per year, meaning that while you won’t start out at 100k, you have a strong chance of making it there with experience.

This field is currently highly competitive due to the increase in licensed real estate brokers during the recent housing boom. Read more...

Consumer Confidence Index in U.S. Increases to 81.5

Keywords: Confidence U.S. consumers, index of sentiment

Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly increased in August as Americans grew more optimistic about the prospects for the world’s largest economy.

The Conference Board’s index of sentiment advanced to 81.5 from a revised 81 the prior month that was stronger than initially estimated, the New York-based private research group reported today. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists was 79.

Sustained job growth and increased wealth tied to higher home values and stock portfolios are helping to sustain the household spending, boosting automakers and home-improvement retailers such as Lowe’s Cos. Today’s report showed more Americans expected a pickup in employment opportunities and income gains in the next six months.

“The household sector is still improving and a lot of that improvement comes from home prices,” said Sam Coffin, an economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. UBS Securities is the top forecaster of the Conference Board’s index in the last two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Estimates for consumer confidence ranged from 74.3 to 82 in the Bloomberg survey of 71 economists after an initial July reading of 80.3. The measure averaged 53.7 during the recession that ended in June 2009. The cutoff date for the Conference Board’s survey was Aug. 15.Read more...

Career Development

Fine jewelry set for under $100

In organizational development (or OD), the study of career development looks at:

    how individuals manage their careers within and between organizations and,
    how organizations structure the career progress of their members, it can also be tied into succession planning within most of the organizations.

In personal development, career development is:

    " ... the total constellation of psychological, sociological, educational, physical, economic, and chance factors that combine to influence the nature and significance of work in the total lifespan of any given individual."

    The evolution or development of a career - informed by  Experience within a specific field of interest (with career, job, or task specific skills as by-product)  Success at each stage of development,  educational attainment commensurate with each incremental stage, Communications, and  understanding of career development as a navigable process.

    "... the lifelong psychological and behavioral processes as well as contextual influences shaping one’s career over the life span. As such, career development involves the person’s creation of a career pattern, decision-making style, integration of life roles, values expression, and life-role self concepts."

Figures in career development

    Jesse B. Davis[3]
    John L. Holland
    Frank Parsons
    Edgar Schein
    Rino Schreuder

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.

This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound employment sickness has overtaken us. And from there, it’s only a short leap to ask whether that illness isn’t productivity itself. Have we mechanized and computerized ourselves into obsolescence? Read more...