I have been working in stereotypical big business for more than 6 years.  I even have my own little cubicle and receive the sort of memos you see in “Office Space”.  I have welcomed new employees and said farewell to the same ones a couple of years later.  I have watched employees that started around the same time as me advance in the company or move on to something else.  Although there may not be any hard and fast rules that would guarantee career success, there do seem to be a few key attributes that truly help.

(Click to continue reading…)

When I got my first job out of college, I found out that they required their employees to dress business casual or professional every day. I knew that might happen, but I didn’t have to be happy about it. At the time, I owned one pair of black slacks, two solid-colored blouses, and one nice suit jacket. I needed some more outfits but buying business clothing can be incredibly expensive if you are not sure of the right places to shop. I panicked just a bit, but I learned very quickly where to find the best deals and how to maintain my new wardrobe.

(Click to continue reading…)

Blogging started off as my hobby job.  Before I knew that I wanted to do this full time, I had been skipping around to different money-making part-time activities in an effort to find a hobby that I’d like and that would give me some extra cash to boot.  I personally worked in a local bookstore on the weekends for a few months, then tried petsitting for about half a year, and even babysat for a few weekends.  Here is a closer look at these hobby job ideas.

(Click to continue reading…)

This post about “a little white lie in salary negotiation” sparked a bit of a heated debate in the Daily Worth community (I discovered it through a post on the New York Times Bucks blog). The original post said:

I’d found a position I liked and applied for it. The recruiter asked for my current salary. Let’s just say I inflated the figure—and told her I was earning $5,000 more than I was. (“Everyone does that,” a successful colleague had told me. “Just don’t puff it up too much, so that figure seems realistic.”)

Some people didn’t take kindly to her advice about inflating your previous salary.

I don’t think it’s lying. I think it’s acceptable to lie about your previous salary if you are pushed to give a hard number. I also don’t think it’s appropriate for a recruiter or a prospective employer to ask what you earned at your last job. They have assigned a dollar value to you and they should base their compensation on that value, not on what your previous employer paid you. When you reveal what you earned at your last job, they make take that into consideration when they shouldn’t.
(Click to continue reading…)

Now that summer has unofficially started (officially it won’t be for another few weeks), I thought it would be fun if everyone shared their first summer job and what they learned from it.

My first summer job was as an intern at Periphonics, an interactive voice response company that was acquired by Nortel Networks shortly after I left. It was the summer of 1999 and I had just come home from a year at Carnegie Mellon, surviving the second “weeding out” semester, and thought I could put my awesome collection of computer science skills to work. If memory serves me, I was developing a web interface for a playback tool they were developing.
(Click to continue reading…)

The Huffington Post shared the thoughts of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) on unemployment this week:

Unemployment insurance “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,”

The title of the article is a little misleading. In quotes, Kyl said that benefits dissuade people from job hunting, not that they “make people not want to get a job,” as the title states. While I didn’t hear or read about the debate, it seems like a stretch to take the quotes and twist them to match the title.

(Click to continue reading…)

Career Comeback by Lisa Johnson Mandell is a career book designed to help the older job seeker freshen up their resume and avoid age discrimination. If the same sounds a little familiar, it’s because Mandell was the subject of a very popular WSJ article on Botoxing Your Resume back in mid 2008. The book isn’t a longer version of the article but it does take advantage of the same idea – after a certain point, your resume would be fifty pages if you included everything you ever did. While the breadth of experience may seem like an asset, it could be a liability as employers see your wealth of experience and expertise as a liability. An expensive liability.

(Click to continue reading…)

This post is part of the one day blog event “The Spectrum of Personal Finance.” In this event, comic book nerd Brian of My Next Buck, will discuss 8 different emotions (taken from the Green Lantern comic series) and relate them to personal finance. Here at Bargaineering we will be looking at Fear. To view the rest of the event look at the bottom of the page to see the other blogs hosting articles.

When I started looking through the personal finance blogosphere a year ago I was frightened of all the information I was gathering. There was so much out there and I didn’t necessarily understand what I was reading. I didn’t want to make a misstep with my hard earned cash, so I didn’t do anything at first.

(Click to continue reading…)

I hope you got as much out of reading and commenting about the posts in Career Week as I did writing them. While the posts themselves were written to speak to those who are currently unemployed, I think the ideas and tips I shared are applicable to anyone looking for a job. If you have employed and are looking for a better job, you can use the tips from Career Week to get to the next level. If you are employed and looking to change your career path, you can use the ideas from some of these posts to help you make that change.

For this week’s Your Take, I wanted to ask you to share your best career tip. It can be anything related to career advice from looking for a job to preparing your resume, from interviewing preparation tips to salary negotiation. There are many many topics I didn’t cover in the series, so feel free to cover them here in your best career tips.

I’m eager to hear the great ideas you have! (feel free to leave two or three or five, don’t feel like you need to limit it to just one)

(Photo: krishnade)

An MSNBC article this week discussed how women are increasingly earning more than their husbands. Twenty years ago, 17.8% of women outearned their husbands. In 2007, 25.9% outearned their husbands if they both worked and 33.5% of married women outearned their husbands period. It’s estimated that the percentage bas probably jumped because of all the jobs lost in the recession, it’s estimated that nearly 75% were held by men.

The Shriver Report conducted a survey and found that 65.3% of women and 61.2% of men were comfortable with women earning more than men. I want to know, what do you think?

(Click to continue reading…)