By PHYLLIS KORKKI
Published: December 31, 2009

NYTIMES-With companies sometimes receiving hundreds of applications for a single job, it is becoming more common for hiring managers to conduct initial screening interviews over the phone. This saves them considerable time and money — especially if a candidate lives out of town.

Don’t take these interviews lightly. “It is important to prepare for a telephone interview just as you would for a regular interview,” said Alison Doyle, a job search specialist for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

The employer will normally call or e-mail you in advance to set up an interview time. If possible, arrange for the interview to be over a landline phone, as it tends to be more reliable than a cellphone. Make sure that children, pets and other sources of interruption will be out of the room. Keep a glass of water nearby.

Phone interviews can often last a half-hour to an hour, Ms. Doyle said; be sure to have your résumé in front of you, along with a list of your accomplishments. Long pauses or halting responses caused by a lack of preparation could keep you from making it to the next stage. Do your best to be personable, but don’t overdo it by, say, trying to tell a joke and guffawing.

One advantage of a phone interview is that you don’t need to worry about what to wear (although dressing up might make you feel more confident). But some companies have started to conduct video interviews, Ms. Doyle said, sending Webcams to be used temporarily by applicants who don’t have them at home.

New York Times - For all the hand-wringing about the weaknesses of health care, one aspect of it has remained strong: its ability to provide jobs. In fact, health care employment has increased during the recession, while employment as a whole has declined, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Within the private sector, more than 11 percent of the American work force is engaged in health care work, compared with just 3 percent before 1960, the bureau says.

Regardless of how health care reform shakes out, the industry jobs picture is likely to remain robust, given the aging population and technological advances in medicine.

High school and college students take note: the positions expected to post some of the largest increases include registered nurses; personal and home care aides; home health aides; nursing aides, orderlies and attendants; medical assistants; licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses; pharmacy technicians; and physicians and surgeons.

By MATT VILLANO
Published: May 2, 2009

ON a recent Monday evening in the basement of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Brooklyn Heights, a group of seven local residents gathered to discuss their faith — in the job market.

One woman, who had been laid off from a high-powered job at a local hedge fund, sought advice about the benefits of accepting part-time work. Another participant, a man who had worked more than a decade in the technology industry, wondered aloud whether switching fields would be wise.

At the front of the room, Conrad Cardinale beamed like a proud father. That’s because the group was his idea. Mr. Cardinale was a managing director at Bear Stearns until its collapse in 2008 and, after he was laid off, he set out to expand his professional networks.

One strategy included asking his pastor for permission to lead networking sessions at the church. The pastor agreed, and a self-help group was born.

“I didn’t know what to expect at first,” Mr. Cardinale said. Noting that “it helps to talk with other people who find themselves in the same situation,” he says the meetings help since “you never know when you’re going to meet someone who knows someone that might be able to help you land your next job.”

Mr. Cardinale, who is still looking for work, is not the only jobless or underemployed professional who is starting a networking group. While people have flocked to social networking Web sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, growing numbers of job seekers are building grass-roots offline communities, too, and sometimes use the Internet to arrange to meet people face-to-face.

In many cases, these meetings are regular gatherings that attract no more than a dozen people at a time. In other cases, the get-togethers are much larger, and travel to different cities.

Whatever the approach, participants say the goals are simple: to talk, trade stories, voice concerns and share contacts that could lead to new work.

“The benefit of getting together in person is that you feel like you really get to know what someone’s all about,” said Rodney Jordan, who has a job with a local printing company but started the Community Matters Networking Group in Hockessin, Del., to help neighbors in need. “Those face-to-face connections can go a long way.”

Mr. Jordan found group members through advertising online and offline. His group, like Mr. Cardinale’s, meets in a local church. Other grass-roots networking organizations convene in places like neighborhood coffee shops.

Consider the five-member “D.C. Burner Opportunity Seekers” group in Washington. Every Monday at 10 a.m., it gathers at the Busboys & Poets restaurant in the Mount Vernon Square neighborhood to share information about professional contacts, strategies and plans.

Caryn Sykes, a self-employed accountant and business planner, said she assembled the free-form group from friends she met at the annual Burning Man cultural festival in Nevada to help get over the shock of losing two of her biggest clients.

“Dealing with the loss of work as a self-employed person, I was feeling pretty isolated there at home,” Ms. Sykes said. “Talking with other people about their experiences and committing to being proactive about getting through the situation made me feel like I was taking matters into my own hands.” Group members share contacts to help one another find job leads.

In Seattle, a different coffee klatch, “Pink Slips Unite,” is more structured.

This 12-person group meets on Thursdays at C & P Coffee Company in West Seattle. The group was founded by Keri Robinson, a recently laid-off Microsoft marketing specialist, who first advertised the gathering on a neighborhood blog. She starts each meeting by asking participants to share professional highs and lows of the week. Members also detail efforts to obtain job interviews.

“If I want to work someplace and someone else in the group has a contact there, I should know about it but I might not know to ask,” explained Ms. Robinson, who has not yet found a new job. “We’re trying to focus on making those connections because that’s what will help our people find their next jobs.”

When the group draws a crowd of 15, it’s a big day. At some other grass-roots networking gatherings, attendance in the thousands can be the norm.

Such is the case with LaidOffCamp, a networking program developed by the entrepreneur Christopher Hutchins, after his layoff from a technology company, to help others tap into their entrepreneurial energy.

The first daylong series of seminars was on March 3 in San Francisco, attended by job seekers, freelancers and other self-employed workers. Since then, this traveling endeavor has morphed into more of a Lollapalooza-style networking event that advertises online and through word-of-mouth. In June, for example, stops will include Miami, Chicago and San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Rajiv Doshi, recently laid off as a software developer, attended the inaugural event and said networking face-to-face was a worthwhile complement to networking communities online. “In-person networking events allow you to build upon the types of relationships you’ve formed online,” he wrote by e-mail. “It’s important to have face time to build a stronger connection.”

DESPITE the benefits of face-to-face networking, career specialists warn that not all grass-roots groups are created equal.

Some can focus on the wrong things. Duncan Mathison, a management consultant in San Diego, said it was easy for gatherings to devolve into negativism and amount to nothing more than “a group gripe session” about heartless employers and persistent creditors.

Rachelle J. Center, president of RJC Associates, a management consulting firm in San Francisco, said job seekers should also beware of organizations where fellow participants are more interested in receiving help than giving it.

“It has to be a quid pro quo,” she said. “You help them, they help you. Successful networking is as much about what you can do for others as it is about what you can get from them.”

New York Times

By GREGORY SPIERKEL
Published: May 2, 2009


MY late father was from Belgium and my mother is from Luxembourg. They emigrated to Canada from Europe on a freighter a year before I was born. We lived in a small iron-ore shipping town 370 miles north of Quebec City with other immigrants. Our street was like a little United Nations, and everyone was chasing work.

My mother was an interpreter for an iron ore company and my father was a jack of all trades. He started a newspaper and a TV station that both failed, and he worked for the government and in finance. My parents separated when I was 5, and when I was 10 my father returned to Belgium to run an airport. I visited him in the summers until he returned to Canada six years later.


I went to an English high school in a French community. Several teachers pulled me along, persuading me to accomplish things I otherwise wouldn’t have done. I became assistant captain of the ice hockey team and captain of the curling team, and was class president my senior year. These were small leadership opportunities that were linchpins for me to become more comfortable with myself and take on responsibility, but I didn’t see it that way at the time.

While attending Carleton University in Ottawa, I started doing some statistical analysis for Bell Canada. After I graduated, I went to work for it to develop one of the first e-mail systems for Canada. This was in the early 1980s, however, and the system was ahead of its time. One of my first bosses there said that as long as I made the right decisions 51 percent of the time, he could live with the wrong ones. I was in my late 20’s. He was telling me not to be risk-averse, and he gave me a lot of runway.

I’ve learned that you have to be willing to take an assignment that is less glamorous than you would like, and to make something out of it. You need to surprise your boss or the people around you. Either turn a project around faster or leave it in better shape than it was. People will trust you and give you more responsibility and more interesting work.

Many people feel disenfranchised when they get a small project. But if you shine on a small one, you’ll look even better than on a bigger project where there are more people.

I’ve lived and worked in seven countries. In 1989, while working for the telecommunications vendor Mitel, I was in Hong Kong setting up a factory in mainland China at the time of the uprising in Tiananmen Square. I was 32. We had five Chinese nationals working in China, and I was determined to get them out. Headquarters back in Canada thought I was crazy. I chased down paperwork for the men, found a driver, paid him to cross the border into China and negotiated with the government for two days. I didn’t rest until we were back in Hong Kong.

When I was 40, I thought I was moving along well at Mitel when a more seasoned executive was given the C.E.O. spot. I did some soul-searching about what I wanted to do and decided I wanted to work overseas again.

I moved to Ingram Micro in 1997 and started our operations in Asia. After working there and in Europe, I was promoted to president in 2004 and to C.E.O. in 2005. We’re a distributor that sells technology products to small and medium-sized businesses through a network of system integrators. We’re like a Wal-Mart where these businesses shop for all the elements of an information technology system.

Working abroad was enriching beyond my imagination. I had one guiding light after obtaining my undergraduate degree: to see the world through work. In my early 20’s, I was focused on what I could do to work for a company that would send me abroad. After getting my first such assignment, I was on my way (and I never looked back).

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

www.nytimes.com

By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 11, 2009

In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.

Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.

Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.

But choosing a career is a guess about the future in which economics is only part of the calculation. Prestige, peer expectations and the climate of public opinion also matter. And early indications suggest new career directions that are tethered less to the dream of an immediate six-figure paycheck on Wall Street than to the demands of a new public agenda to solve the nation’s problems.

The deep recession has clearly battered industries — and professions — whose economics were at risk before the downturn. Law firms are laying off lawyers as never before and questioning the industry’s traditional unit of payment, the billable hour. Journalism is reeling from the falloff in advertising and the inability of newspapers and magazines to make a living on the Web.

Still, the industry whose troubles are having the greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation’s elite universities, is the one at the center of the country’s economic downturn — finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved irresistible to many of America’s brightest young people, but the jobs, money and social respect there are much diminished today.

“In choosing careers, young people look for signals from society, and Wall Street will no longer pull the talent that it did for so many years,” said Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “We have a great experiment before us.”

What will the new map of talent flow look like? It’s early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on careers in finance and business consulting.

For the highest-paid business fields, the outlook is for a tempering correction instead of an all-out exodus. At Harvard, for example, about 40 percent of undergraduates in recent years went into the most lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting, based on surveys at the school year’s end. “That certainly won’t be the case this year,” observed Lawrence Katz, a professor and labor economist who has studied undergraduate career choices at Harvard going back to the 1960s. “We’re seeing students who would have been part of the Ivy League pipeline to Wall Street in the past considering very different career paths.”

Kedamai Fisseha, a 21-year-old senior, is one of them. An economics major, Mr. Fisseha says he always assumed he would go into finance, and his summer internship last year was at the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Yet after Wall Street’s meltdown, job prospects there have withered. Instead, he is interviewing with Teach for America, a nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach in hard-to-staff schools for two-year stints. (After that, only one-third stay in the classrooms, though two-thirds remain in education.)

Mr. Fisseha regards the turn of events as an opportunity to broaden his horizons. “It’s been liberating, and lucky for me,” he said. “But your situation does dictate your preferences.”

Graduate schools of government and public policy are seeing a surge of applications. In a survey of its members released last week, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration found that 82 percent reported an increase in applications this year, and many saw the largest percentage jumps in several years, or ever. The most-cited reason was the expectation by students that government will be hiring.

Still, the appeal of public sector careers extends beyond job openings, say school officials. The laissez-faire presumption that government is not the solution but the problem, dating back to the Reagan era, has been cast aside, they say.

The government’s need to step in with financial bailouts and recovery programs to steady the economy is seen as the immediate proof, they say, but not the only one. The environment, energy and health care also pose huge, complex challenges. “Young people today understand that government has a powerful role to play in solving these problems,” said Sandra Archibald, dean of the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, where applications this year are up 26 percent.

Government school officials also point to an Obama effect: his election as an endorsement of government activism.

The economy, other long-range policy issues and the new administration, according to David Ellwood, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, add up to a “benevolent perfect storm,” which could lure talented people to public service in a way not seen in decades.

Yet even before the economic crisis, Mr. Ellwood said, there were signs of a drift among young people toward trying to work on public problems, influenced by everything from the 9/11 attacks to climate change.

Matthew McKnight attended Phillips Exeter Academy and was a freshman at Dartmouth College during the 9/11 attacks. The event and its aftermath, he recalled, left him with a conviction that he should serve his country “because of the opportunities I’d been given.” After graduating from college, Mr. McKnight joined the Marines. His four years in the military included a stint at the State Department in a counterterrorism unit, and he recently returned from 13 months in the field in Iraq.

Article Published in New York Times