Recruiting creative professionals is a bit of a rough and tumble affair. The industry leaders scale up by establishing teams in dozens of countries, moving themselves closer to their customers while tapping local talent supplies. Yet, when it comes to recruiting “creatives,” that is, problem-solvers and innovative thinkers, size alone is not enough of a…    Continue reading

A BusinessWeek cover story The Best Places to Launch a Career proclaimed that this was the “year accountants became sexy.” Does that add up for you? In a study promoting the best places for college grads to work, accounting firms nab the top three spots: Deloitte & Touche; PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young.  In a…    Continue reading

The Wall Street Journal says being a motivational speaker is a high-paying gig. Actually what they say is it one of the five most overpaid jobs in the country. Apparently that’s a bad thing. For some of us, overpaid is ample motivation. But you really can’t make a name for yourself on the lecture circuit…    Continue reading

When Groucho Marx famously told the Friars that he “didn’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” he notified them via telegram. If Groucho were on e-mail today he would be spammed by invitations from friends, acquaintances and total strangers to join dozens of social networking sites. I picture…    Continue reading

Back in the day, enterprising housewives earned “lipstick money” peddling beauty products to their neighbors. Men were relegated to lugging around brushes, Bibles and vacuum cleaners. Flash forward to 2007. That knock on the door is your Avon man. One of Avon’s more successful male sales reps is Bobby McKinney, a 58-year-old fire code inspector…    Continue reading

Welcome to the job world, class of 2008!  This promises to be one of the toughest summers for new job hunters in the past decade. If Friday had been a Groundhog’s Day for new grads, there would have been no mistaking the message. On Friday we learned that: oil struck record highs – at a…    Continue reading

10. You can stay busy on a 17-hour plane ride without watching an in-flight movie. 9. For four weeks of vacation in year one you would learn enough Flemish to say Het spijt me, ik spreek geen Vlaams. 8. Six years of German – what else is it good for? 7. Your friends know it’s…    Continue reading

It’s not often that we see an international enterprise that is entrepreneurial, eco-friendly and earning money too. That’s why we were so inspired to read about Mark Bent’s SunNight Solar company in a New York Times article last year. Bent, a 49-year-old Houston oilman, has developed and is distributing a solar-power flashlight for poor villagers in…    Continue reading

I don’t consider myself a nomadic professional, but I have lived, worked and/or studied in Cairo, Berlin, Bangkok, and Seoul – where I am now. In a matter of weeks I will move to Singapore, where I am exploring my next career opportunity. Professionally, my background is in high technology having been mentored in Silicon…    Continue reading

Worried about what to give a college graduate who has everything but a job? Have you considered pummeling them with career guides? Just a hunch, but I think they would prefer your money. Still, I generally take the passive road and give them a book store gift certificate and let them choose a nifty career…    Continue reading

One of Silicon Valley’s cleverest blogs, Valleywag, features a special report called Tech’s 10 Worst Entry-Level Jobs.  How bad are the jobs? Not that bad, really, and at about $50,000 – $80,000 a year they pay way above the national average for 2008 college grads. “Soon America’s most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and…    Continue reading

A site called Job Profiles recently published a list of 100 specialty job boards apparently to help recruiters hunt for qualified job seekers in a dozen different fields. True, that doesn’t cause my pulse to race either. Yet, for job seekers, specialty boards may be an essential place to promote your resume. Think about it:…    Continue reading

You can’t fault popularity contests – they’re so democratic. But are they a useful way to help job seekers find a job? Universum, a Swedish research firm, fields an annual study of MBA students on behalf of Fortune that ranks the 25 most popular potential employers. The MBA graduates who participated were asked to list…    Continue reading

Today’s papers tout that April’s job losses aren’t quite as bad as feared. One possible exception to that would be if you’re the one affected. U.S. employers cut only 20,000 jobs in April – some economists had predicted four times that number. That gap’s not surprising considering all the announced corporate layoffs, particularly in the…    Continue reading

If I belonged to a football team, a fraternity, or an office of 20-somethings, I’d use Twitter to “tweetup” with my friends. It’s not the place to find a job – is it? Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, an Internet entrepreneur based in Amsterdam, recently posted a job listing on Twitter that caught my eye: Wanted:…    Continue reading

If you work in high-tech or pharma and collaborate with co-workers, customers, suppliers or partners located in other countries, there’s an increasing likelihood that your company will offer you some form of training to help you master cross-cultural or virtual work challenges. Beyond those two fields, however, it’s hit-and-miss, according to top cultural trainers. Without the…    Continue reading

Sometimes, your career can go global quite by accident. And how you deal with it can make a huge difference in the outcome. About two years ago, I was on a ski vacation with my family when my cell phone rang on the chair lift. It was my boss, telling me that he really needed…    Continue reading

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. But in fact the Kansas Jayhawks were both lucky and good last night, winning the NCAA Men’s Basketball Title in overtime. Before the season began, I posted about the surprisingly global nature of one Jayhawk program. Ever since my post about studying abroad in which I suggested that it…    Continue reading

Upon learning that the US economy suffered a net loss of 80,000 jobs in March, the Democrats snapped to action and proposed a stimulus package to help relieve impacted workers. After three consecutive months of job losses, the unemployment rate has shot up to 5.1%. “These job numbers strengthen the case materially that we are…    Continue reading

Your dream to live abroad is about to come true. You have checked immigration laws, obtained permits, estimated the cost of living and developed a plan to export your life and work abroad. But there are aspects of a global relocation that you might have overlooked. So before you sublet your place, loan out your…    Continue reading