photo credit: Marshall Astor via flickr

This guest post is by Peter Weddle of WEDDLE’s, “your guide to resources for employment, personal development and career success.”

Changing Perspectives on Careers

A recent survey by eFinancialCareers found a surprising shift in the career outlook of financial professionals. A whopping two-thirds of the respondents said they would be willing to abandon the go-go, money-is-everything environment of Wall Street for a career in the now emerging field of regulatory oversight.

In other words, they put their finger in the air and found their career prospects in overseeing the financial services industry to be equal to or better than those they had while working in the industry.

How about that for a change in perspective?

This development is part of a trend that is far larger than the financial services industry. In career field after career field, both working professionals and those in transition are being forced to take a squinty-eyed look at the future prospects of their current occupation.

Today’s lingering recession and the “less jobs” recovery it will precipitate is forcing many of us to reexamine workplace assumptions we once cherished as sacrosanct and employment goals we once thought were a lock.

The world of work we knew and counted on has suddenly and irrevocably become an unfamiliar and unpredictable place.

How Do You Survive in Such a Seemingly Unstable Environment?

Emulate your peers in the financial services sector. Give yourself permission to look around. Think beyond the boundaries of what’s always been and what you thought would always be.

Sure, such independence can be intimidating, especially at first. The feeling is not unlike your inaugural time alone behind the wheel of a car.

It was liberating to be in charge of setting your own direction and more than a little nerve wracking getting yourself and the car to wherever you were going, all in one piece. But you did. And you can—indeed, you must—for your career, as well.

In Today’s Constantly Roiling Workplace, You Must Be the Driver

Here’s what you should do, just as if embarking on a trip:

• Climb behind the wheel of your career and set it into motion
• Determine the best route to take and set off in that direction

You can decide that your prospects warrant staying on the same path you’ve always followed or, as is apparently the case with many financial professionals, you can chose to take an entirely different route. Either way, the choice is yours and only you should make it.

Those two acts — taking the controls and taking off — enable you to motor with your career.

Think of it as hitting the open highway in the workplace. It’s a quintessentially American act—full of independence and self determination. You’re Jack Kerouac on the road in today’s world of work. You’re in the driver’s seat in your career and you’re setting off in search of the American Dream.

As the word implies, however, motoring is not a one-off event. It’s a passage. On the road, you hit detours, roadblocks, heavy traffic and more, so you must continuously adjust your course to find the best way forward.

In your careers, you will also take a wrong turn or come to a dead end from time to time — after all, the 21st Century workplace is an unfamiliar neighborhood — so you’ll have to reassess your position regularly and make whatever changes are necessary to keep you moving forward.

Your drive is often cited as a key component of career success. It denotes the all important attributes of ambition and determination. Important as those characteristics are, however, they are insufficient to preserve your well being in today’s world of work.

What’s needed, as well, is action or what might be described as motoring with your career — setting out on the road to meaningful and rewarding work.

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including WEDDLE’s 2009/10 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet and Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

Does Your Job Search Need a Jump-Start?

If so, it pays to sit down and analyze your situation. You should carefully question everything you’re doing. Careful, though — the wrong questions can be harmful to your career health.

Example: Never ask yourself questions like, Why can’t I find a job? Or, Why won’t anyone hire me?

Such “Why” questions will prompt your brain to give you excuses instead of answers — you’re too old/too young/too experienced/too stupid, etc. There’s not much you can do about being young or stupid, is there? Which just leads to more frustration.

Instead, when analyzing your job search, ask yourself empowering “How” questions like, How can I generate just one networking lead today? Or, How can I meet someone who works at General Mills?

Such “How” questions lead to actionable ideas like these: You could call an old buddy from high school, someone you worked with two years ago, a neighbor who works for General Mills, etc.

See the difference?

Let’s follow this logic and replace two common “Why” questions with more-effective “How” questions that can get you hired faster …

1) Why is my job search taking so long?

This is exactly the sort of “why” question many unemployed folks ask themselves every day. Unfortunately, it will produce more frustration than answers.

Instead, examine every aspect of what you’re doing to find a job and ask yourself this “How” question: How could I improve this?

Analyze the following:

* Where you look for job leads each day (online and offline)
* The resume and cover letters you send out — have they been proofread by someone else?)
* Your networking activities — how many people have you added to your network this week? This month?
* Your job interview skills — when is the last time you practiced by videotaping yourself or talking to yourself in a mirror?

If you could improve each of those areas by just 10%, you would gain an overall 40% increase in the effectiveness of your job search. Do that and you can’t help but get hired faster.

2) Why aren’t employers calling me?

This is another question that generates a long list of frustrating possibilities, none of which is fun or useful to contemplate.

Instead, ask yourself, How could I get in front of more decision makers who can hire me? Answering this “How” question will encourage you take positive action. For example, you could:

* Write down the names of the 105 companies you most want to work for. (You do have a list of target employers, right?) Research them at ZoomInfo.com. Then, email the people in your network asking for an introduction. (This is made easier if you have a profile at LinkedIn.com.)

* Call 5 of the most successful people you know and ask them, “How did you get your last 3 jobs?” This gives you a double benefit:

1. You will learn 15 ways to meet hiring managers and recruiters. That’s the obvious benefit.

2. Your calling for advice will flatter those people, making them more likely to remember and recommend you to potential employers. This is the not-so-obvious benefit.

* Start a blog about your industry that gets you noticed by recruiters and hiring managers. This is not a quick fix, but it’s a great way to improve your visibility and employability for the long term. (You’ll find excellent articles on blogging for employment at www.CareerJounal.com/jobhunting.)

* Finally, if employers aren’t calling in response to your emailed resume, it may be because they never got your resume. Spam filters are set on “Kill” these days, making email less reliable than ever. If there’s a job you really, really want, consider sending your resume by FedEx. Yes, it costs a few bucks. But a FedEx envelope, addressed by name to the hiring authority, has a 100% chance of being opened. That means your resume will get read. And that’s what you want, right? Besides, if you’re applying to a carefully targeted list of employers, you won’t be FedExing hundreds of resumes — it will be more like 5 or 10. So this can be money well spent.

Now go out and make your own luck!

Kevin Donlin is co-author of Guerrilla Resumes. Since 1996, he has provided job-search help to more than 20,000 people. Author of 3 books, Kevin has been interviewed by The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, CBS Radio and others.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

There’s no way I can get the “scoop” on what has been perhaps the most eagerly awaited Supreme Court decision of the term: Ricci v. DeStefano, No. 07-1428 (June 29, 2009).

Since the Court’s 5-4 decision was announced last week, it’s been the subject of a torrent of reporting and analysis, focused as much on its significance for the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor — who was on the Court of Appeals panel the Supreme Court reversed — as for the difficult employment law issues with which it dealt.

So what can I possibly add?

My aim with this series of posts is to:

1. Present the complex and controversial facts, issues, and holding of Ricci in a digestible and comprehensible fashion, including key points made in the two concurring and one dissenting opinions — no mean feat given the 93-page length of the decision, including a 34-page majority opinion.
2. Point to some interesting commentary on the case.
3. Offer my own perspective, including practical implications for employers and their attorneys.

The series will be divided as follows:

• Part I: The basics: the facts and holding of the Ricci case
• Part II: The Ricci case majority opinion’s reasoning explained — what was and was not decided
• Part III: Interesting issues raised by the concurring and dissenting opinions in Ricci
• Part IV: Thoughts on the Ricci decision’s significance — my own and those of others

Ricci Case in a Nutshell

Ricci involved a race discrimination claim brought by white and Hispanic firefighters challenging the City of New Haven’s decision not to use certain test results for purposes of promoting firefighters to Captain and Lieutenant positions.

At the time of this decision by the City, many firefighters competing for the promotions, including the white and Hispanic plaintiffs, had studied for and taken the tests.

The City claimed it made this decision because using the tests would have exposed it to race discrimination liability due to the tests’ racially disproportionate impact on black applicants.

The Supreme Court crafted a new legal standard for this type of Catch-22 situation, in which either decision could arguably have exposed the City to discrimination liability.

Under this standard, the employer can use concerns about possible disparate-impact liability to defend a race-based decision only if it can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that it would have been liable based on the disparate impact, rather than just a good faith concern about the risk of litigation over this issue or about the possibility of such liability.

Applying this standard, the Supreme Court reversed the summary judgment the district court had granted for the City, which the Court of Appeals had affirmed.

The Supreme Court held that the City had discriminated against the white and Hispanic firefighters and that the concern the City expressed about the disparate impact of the test did not justify the City’s decision.

Genesis of the Disputed New Haven Firefighters’ Exam

The City’s firefighter promotion process was restricted by two elements with which most private employers need not contend:

1. A civil service merit system requiring promotion of the most qualified individuals, as determined by job-related examinations, with each vacancy filled by one of the top three scoring applicants.
2. A firefighters’ union collective-bargaining agreement specifying further qualifications for promotion and requiring that 60% of the examination score be based on a written test and 40% on an oral test.

Given these requirements, the City contracted with a company that specializes in designing such nominations for fire and police departments — at a cost of $100,000.

This company took the following steps to customize-design an appropriate written and oral examination:

1. It conducted job analyses to identify the tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities essential for the lieutenant and captain positions, using interviews, on-the-job observations, and questionnaires.
   • In this process, it deliberately oversampled minority lieutenants and captains in order to avoid any possible bias against minorities.
2. It compiled a list of training manuals, department procedures, and other materials to use as sources for test questions.
3. It used the source materials to draft a multiple-choice written test for each position.
4. It prepared oral examinations, concentrating on job skills and abilities identified by the job analyses and consisting of “hypothetical situations to test incident-command skills, firefighting tactics, interpersonal skills, leadership, and management ability, among other things.”
5. It assembled a pool of oral examiners:
   • These were “battalion chiefs, assistant chiefs, and chiefs from departments of similar sizes … throughout the country.”
   • 66% were minorities.
   • Each three-member oral examination panel contained two minority members.
   • Each oral examiner was trained for several hours to ensure consistent scoring.

Racially Disparate Impact of the Exam Results

In 2003, 118 New Haven firefighters took the examinations for promotion to lieutenant or captain.

The test results had a racially adverse impact. It was undisputed that this impact was significant and that it established a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability. The extent of the adverse impact was indicated by the pass rates:

On the captain exam:

• White: 64%
• Both black and Hispanic: 37.5%

On the lieutenant exam:

• White: 58.1%
• Black: 31.6%
• Hispanic: 20%

The minority pass rates fell well below the 80% standard set by the EEOC to implement the disparate-impact provision of Title VII, as they ranged from 34% to 59% of the white pass rates.

The City’s Conumdrum and Its Ill-Fated Decision

Based on the test scores and the “rule of three,” the City could not consider black candidates for any then-vacant lieutenant or captain position.

This led the mayor and other local politicians to “open a public debate that turned rancorous.” Some firefighters argued the tests should be discarded because the results showed them to be discriminatory. They threatened a discrimination lawsuit if the City used the tests.

Other firefighters said the exams were neutral and fair. They threatened a discrimination lawsuit if the City did not use the test.

Finding itself in this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” conundrum, the City ultimately took the side of those who protested the test results, deciding not to use them. In making this decision, the City took the following steps:

1. Under the City’s contract with the company that prepared the tests, the company was to provide a technical report describing the testing process and analyzing its results. Instead of requesting this report, City officials met with the leader of the team that developed and administered the tests, who orally defended their validity.
2. Several days later, the City’s attorney stated in a letter to the Civil Service Board (”CSB”) that “a statistical demonstration of disparate impact,” standing alone, “constitutes a sufficiently serious claim of racial discrimination to serve as a predicate for employer-initiated, voluntar[y] remedies–even … race-conscious remedies.” This assertion, of dubious accuracy at best under then-existing federal law, became the issue ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.
3. A few weeks later, the CSB met and heard testimony from a number of witnesses, including a Department of Homeland Security fire programs specialist, an industrial/organizational (”I/O”) psychologist, the president of the New Haven firefighters’ union, and some firefighters. The City’s HR Director asked the CSB to discard the test results, citing the I/O psychologist’s statements about the possibility of alternative testing methods with less disparate impact. With one member recused, the CSB deadlocked, so there were insufficient votes to certify the test results.

Allegations of the White and Hispanic New Haven Firefighters’ Lawsuit

Some of the white and Hispanic firefighters who likely would have been promoted based on their test scores sued the City and some of its officials, alleging that by discarding the test results they discriminated against the plaintiffs based on race, in violation of both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The City and its officials asserted the defense that use of the test results could have resulted in liability for adopting a practice with a racially disparate impact.

The Rulings Below Went Against the White and Hispanic New Haven Firefighters

The District Court granted summary judgment for the City and its officials, and a Court of Appeals panel affirmed without writing a detailed opinion.

This panel included Judge Sonia Sotomayor, now the President’s nominee to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, adding further interest to the Ricci case.

In support of its conclusion that the City’s decision not to use the test results was not unlawful under either Title VII or the Equal Protection Clause, the District Court reasoned as follows:

• The argument against the City’s decision was that absent proof that the test-result disparities were caused by a particular flaw inherent in the exams, the City should have used the tests because there was no other alternative in place.
• However, the City was not obliged to use the test results simply because it had not yet formulated a better selection method.
• The “motivation to avoid making promotions based on a test with a racially disparate impact … does not, as a matter of law, constitute discriminatory intent” under Title VII.
• The Equal Protection claim lacked merit because there was no evidence of “discriminatory animus” toward the higher-scoring white and Hispanic firefighters.

The District Court’s bottom line was that the decision not to use the test scores was not “based on race” because “all applicants took the same test, and the result was the same for all because the test results were discarded and nobody was promoted.”

The Supreme Court’s Holding: The City Discriminated Against the Higher-Scoring White and Hispanic Candidates

The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the District Court, finding that the City had discriminated against higher scoring candidates. It said:

We conclude that race-based action like the City’s in this case is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.

The [City] … cannot meet that threshold standard. As a result, the City’s action in discarding the tests was a violation of Title VII. In light of our ruling under the statutes, we need not reach the question whether respondents’ actions may have violated the Equal Protection Clause.

More specifically, the Court stated:

[T]here is no evidence–let alone the required strong basis in evidence–that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City.

Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions.

The City’s discarding the test results was impermissible under Title VII, and summary judgment is appropriate for petitioners on their disparate-treatment claim.

Next, in Part II: The Ricci case majority opinion’s reasoning explained — what was and was not decided.

The summer project of my daughter Emily, who will be a senior in college this fall, it is funded by a grant from The Miller Center Vocations Initiative at Hendrix College, which “designs, funds and oversees a variety of programs created for the purpose of helping participants explore the content and nature of their life’s true calling.”

Wow! True calling? That’s a tall order. But Emily’s up for the challenge.

Swapping her past summers’ “vocation” of lifeguarding for modern e-journalism/blogging, she’s making the rounds with her digital recorder, interviewing what will surely be an interesting variety of people. She’s starting with people we know in our community, but hopes to extend outward from there.

Her blog posts based on these interviews will incorporate audio clips from the interviews, and perhaps also photos, which can provide a lively addition to the written content.

In addition to helping Emily explore the adult workworld, this project may be useful and of interest to her fellow college students and to career changers and counselors. I’d like to encourage my readers who have their own employment-related blogs to give the Vocations blog a mention and link.

photo credit: Tanel via flickr

Continuing my sixth-blog-anniversary observations about the changes I’ve seen in blogging and Internet content, and my own meandering personal journey as a blogger. Part I of this personal history of blogging is here.

Blogs, Web 2.0, and Information Overload — Making the Problem Better or Worse?

I originally saw bloggers as “web sherpas,” guiding a growing, loyal audience to the latest and coolest stuff on the web in a particular subject-matter niche, and doing so with a personal touch.

This sort of knowledge management and sharing purpose drove many of the earliest bloggers, whose style has been described as follows:

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. … These were web enthusiasts.

Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary.

An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked.

As an online legal researcher ever since the dial-up DOS days of the early 80s, I thought that through my passion for digging and reading online I’d do the heavy lifting for others who would regularly read my blog and marvel at the great web content I uncovered.

For a while, I actually thought I could stay on top of all the blogs in areas related to employment law and HR. As I saw more and more of them sprout up around me, I figured I could perhaps avoid getting lost in the shuffle, maintain a central position, and serve a useful function by serving up links, excerpts, and comments each Monday to the previous week’s best material by other bloggers.

I found myself spending significant weekend time preparing HR/Employment Blogosphere Update. But quickly the growth became so rapid I had to give up.

Today, you can still conveniently peruse the “HR/Employment Blogosphere” by yourself on my “Interactive Blogroll” (it may take a minute to load, it’s so full of relevant blogs).

The explosive growth of blogging leads me to wonder whether we all aren’t just making information overload much, much worse.

The flood of online content has become a tsunami.

I know I can’t possibly keep up with all the blogs in my blogroll — just one relatively narrow corner of the blogosphere!

But there’s another way to look at the problem. As user-created content has grown exponentially during the years I’ve been blogging, tools for searching, finding, organizing, following, and distributing it have also undergone drastic change and improvement.

The ultimate balance seems to be a much greater diversity of online content than during the pre-blog era, with an ever-increasing ability to obtain the specialized content one wants — when and where one wants it.

Search Engines, SEO, and RSS

Blogs Trump Conventional SEO

As I said in Part I of this series, shortly after I began blogging I discovered that search engines just love blogs.

That fact did not remain a secret for long, and it quickly became conventional wisdom that one of the best ways to create a website that would rank well in search, bringing free traffic, was to set it up as a blog or connect it to a blog.

Meanwhile, experts in search engine optimization (SEO) were charging thousands of bucks to engage in all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate manipulation of conventional websites that would increase search traffic. But plain-Jane blogs with lots of good content, frequently updated, often beat out costly SEO efforts.

Blogs Have to Use SEO Techniques to Keep Up

Then the field started to become so crowded that this was no longer enough. It wasn’t as simple as beating out static websites simply by having a blog — not when hundreds of blogs started showing up in search results.

Now it wasn’t just static website owners vs. bloggers; it was bloggers vs. bloggers. Smart SEO practices became essential in order for a blog to pull down the most search traffic. And the name of the game became “how to get free traffic to your blog.”

RSS Solves Information Overload — Kind Of

Meanwhile, RSS exploded onto the scene, seeming to promise the next great great solution to information overload.

Blogs had initially seemed a solution to this problem — relative to simply searching the web, as I mentioned above — but now their incredible proliferation had simply made matters worse. We went from “too much web content, too little time” to “a few great blogs point me to all the best web content” to “too many blogs, too little time” — all in the space of a year or two.

RSS and aggregators like bloglines promised to allow review of “hundreds of stories and blog entries in less than half the time it would take using a browser and a favorites list.”

Well, I started using Bloglines and pretty soon clogged it up with so many feeds I had — you guessed it — information overload! “Too many RSS feeds, too little time!”

Nonetheless, RSS is a great thing. Used with a bit of moderation, it can create great at-a-glance customized personal news pages, for example, and blogs and websites can use it to create newsfeed widgets.

Social Bookmarking — The Next Big Thing

As I fell further and further behind in my efforts to stay on top of and blog about all kinds of interesting online reading connected with the subjects of this blog — despite RSS — along came the social bookmarking sites.

I found these exciting because they allowed me to at least preserve and “tag” (assign keywords to) items of interest — and access these bookmarks from any computer (in contrast to regular bookmarks stored on an individual computer’s browser).

I chose to use delicious. Lo and behold, delicious creates RSS feeds for every tag, so I could create topical feeds for display on my blog just by using topical tags.

They now appear under “George’s Micro-Blogs” at right. And you can subscribe to them here.

Many other ways for busy websurfers to organize their information and combat information overload (or at least information clutter) come online frequently.

Just the other day, I discovered another one to try: iLighter, which uses a highlighter and “sticky note” approach, combined with a flexible foldering system for storing not just links, but also excerpts from web pages.

In Part III: Different visions of blogs and blogging, trying to monetize the blog, shifting subject matter over time, and more….

Additional Resources

• Roundtable by four long-time St. Louis blogging lawyers (including me): A Blogging Guide for St. Louis (and Other) Lawyers (and Others)
• Internet Resources on Information Overload and Productivity
• Beating Information Overload with News Aggregators
• Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload
• Social Bookmarking Apps Provide a New Knowledge Management Platform