These demographic shifts mean all of us are likely to need flexibility at different points in our working lives depending on our individual circumstances. Simply put people need and want to have time outside of work to so they can enjoy their families and the fruits of their labor.

Fortunately it would appear employers are willing to make the changes necessary to accommodate their employee’s life situations. With technology facilitating different ways of working and the reduced cost to employers by having employee’s office virtually this looks to be the way more and more of us work in the future.

That being said it will also afford us all the requisite 75 days we need to spend shreddin in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, you know “working virtually”.

p. smurf

If you’ve impressed them enough to make them select you from among the other candidates you’re in a position of power which is always a nice place to be.

p. j. o’ smurf

• When you don’t believe in what you’re doing or the product you represent.
• When your boss hasn’t said anything that actually makes sense in…..
• When you have no respect for management.
• When you can’t remember the last thing you were able to accomplish.
• When you feel like you’ve lost your Mojo.
• When Monday starts to suck on Sunday afternoon.
• When you’re trapped in Middle Management hell.
• When you haven’t got your 75 days of skiing and boarding in due to work.
• When you’re having stress induced heart attacks.
• When you’re reading Gun’s & Ammo on the way to work.
• When you hope and pray everyday that you will suffer serious injury in the workplace and can collect Workers’ comp.
• When you take up smoking just to have a reason to leave the office for 10 minutes every hour.
• When co-workers post your nameplate on a bathroom stall due to the inordinate amount of time you’ve spent there.
• When you call in sick to work because of “woman problems” and you’re a dude.
• When you have to scroll down at least 30 websites on your recently visited URLs on your work computer before coming across anything related to what you are being paid to do.
• When your daily “Lunch hour” has morphed into a “Lunch Afternoon”.
• When the only raise you’ve received in the last five years is in your blood pressure.
• When your boss tells you the company is in great shape while repo men take off with all three of the grey felt-lined walls that signify the 2′x 2′ boundaries of your workspace.
• When your boss is smiling at you and the only thought that crosses your mind at that moment is, “Something bad is about to happen.”
• When your colleagues notice that you’ve missed work to attend five separate funerals for your father in a one year period.
• When your appointment book contains exactly zero appointments and over 100 doodles of different scenarios in which your boss can be brutally murdered.

In all seriousness when you’re demoralized and burned out from the incessant restructuring and changes in senior management it’s time to quit. When the stress and frustration is slowly driving you insane it’s time to quit. When you are constantly asking yourself “why do I put up this shit day after day” it’s time to quit.

A job is like anything else, it changes over time and not always for the better. Take a hard look at your day to day and what the future holds and if it sucks quit. Balance is the key and you can’t be in balance if you spend 10 hours a day doing something you hate with people you don’t like. Life’s short so if you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns with your current job make a change and keep your health and your sanity.

p. smurf

What differentiates one from the other is that the search firm delivers not only candidates but business intelligence as a product. As a search firm we look for more than an individual, we build a complete candidate pipeline and provide all of that information to our clients.

Search capability and job fulfillment are the hallmarks of a true search firm; the staffing piece is operationally driven by the client’s preference as to whether they are looking to hire their people directly or under the contract to hire or purely straight contract models.

We all know the Colorado employment and staffing market is extremely competitive, so what you need to do is find a way to differentiate yourself from your peers in the workplace. The simplest way for you to raise your profile is to look for a problem at work, identify a solution and propose that you implement this solution. Research some ideas and look for a niche that needs to be filled and take the time to create a truly viable solution.

Take your time, organize your thoughts and pitch your ideas to whomever you deem appropriate. Typically when a person not only presents a solution but offers to manage and drive the process its well received. That being said, if for whatever reason management isn’t ready to implement the change it still shows your ambition and enthusiasm for the job as well as willingness to go above and beyond.

Colorado and California are two of the most competitive employment markets in the U.S. so when an opportunity presents itself think twice before you say no.

p. smurf

The Denver metro area has one of the highest per capita college educated populations in the US so prepare thoroughly and here are some things to take into consideration and avoid when you are ready to ask for a raise or promotion.

Don’t be emotional.

Come to this meeting from a position of power; have no expectations, hopes or fears and be prepared for any and all eventualities.

Don’t go into the meeting unprepared.

Research what people in your position are being paid and look at what their productivity as been and where you stand relative to them. Understand the dynamics of your organization what obstacles may stand in your way. Consider the fiscal health of the organization and try and know all of the issues that might keep your boss from giving you a raise.

Don’t ask yes or no questions.

Try to begin all of your questions with an interrogative such as who, what, when, where, how or why. This will elicit a response other than the yes or no you are trying to avoid, and will allow you to engage in a meaningful conversation and collect additional information.

Don’t present your current salary or position as a problem.

Remember to come to the meeting and present yourself as the solution not an issue. Do not complain and stay away from office politics; remain focused and speak to what you can do for the company and why you feel a raise is appropriate at this time.

No ultimatums.

Remember this is a negotiation, remain calm and focused and look to what if any hurdles may stand in your way and look to ways those problems can best be solved. Understand your audience and prepare completely so you can speak to any challenges you’re facing clearly and concisely. This is an opportunity to present solutions as well so don’t be afraid to ask for what you need to solve those problems.

Whatever your perfect job may be there are dream jobs out there and people do figure out ways to get them; that being said there are also a lot of jobs that are simply an upgrade,-well-paying, stimulating work that may not be your perfect job but will get you to a better place while you continue the search for workplace nirvana. And for a host of little-understood reasons, we’re approaching a rather good time for trading up in the job market.

Happy hunting; when the labor market tightens hiring criteria relax and doors open, another strategy is to move from a depressed sector to a livelier one which can also grow a paycheck by as much as 25% overnight.

Cheers!!

p. smurf

Even posing such queries in these anxious times might seem ludicrous. Surveys report that up to 80 percent of American workers aren’t satisfied with their jobs. Yet there’s a strong inertial pull holding people in place. The economic recovery seems fitful at best, and when it comes to jobs, it’s been the most impotent rebound in history. For the 8 million out-of-work Americans, any job right now would be a dream job. Between outsourcing, Iraq, predictions of a looming real estate collapse-if you have a job, even one that stinks, there can be an understandable urge to hold your nose and hang on.

Which is a shame, really. Because there are indeed dream jobs out there these days, and people do figure out ways to land them. Within easier reach are a growing number of jobs that are simply upgrades-well-paying, stimulating work that may not be your labor of love but can get you on higher ground while you continue the search for workplace bliss. And for a host of little-understood reasons, we’re approaching a rather good time for trading up in the job market.

Despite all the gloomy news, corporate profits at U.S. companies are more than 20 percent higher than they were at this point in 2003. That’s one of the strongest rates of profit growth since the 1980s. Up to now, managers have been squeezing more hours out of existing employees rather than hiring new ones-another reason for hating your job. But statistics suggest that tactic has reached its blood-from-a-stone end point, and many economists predict a building wave of new job creation that will start in 2005 and roll on for many years.

There are many factors behind that belief, but a fundamental one lies in the distinction between an expansion driven by corporate investment, which cratered in 2001, and one driven by consumer spending, which has propped up the economy since then. The dollars that companies spend on buildings, machinery, computers, software-the things that put people to work-add up to only about 10 percent of the gross domestic product but generate as much as two-thirds of each point of total economic growth. Consumer spending creates jobs at Wal-Mart. Corporate spending creates them at IBM.

And now corporate spending is going gangbusters again throughout many industries, rising 10.5 percent to a projected $1.2 trillion for 2004. The CEO Confidence Survey, a leading indicator of business investment and quality job growth compiled by the Conference Board, is registering scores above 70-the highest level since 1992, which marked the beginning of the longest and strongest economic expansion in the post-World War II era. A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has itself hired 5,500 new workers over the past year, found that more than three-quarters of the CEOs at the nation’s 364 fastest-growing companies plan to add workers during the next 12 months.

At the same time, productivity growth is fading, falling from 9 percent a year ago to about 2 percent today. That means bosses aren’t able to wring as much new output from their current workers. They’ll need more to grow sales. They’ll be looking for people with skills, education, and entrepreneurial zeal-and will have no choice but to pay well for them. “Wages for those kinds of people will rise at rates we’ve never seen before over the next couple of years,” says Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and author of The Rise of the Creative Class. “These will be jobs with a view.”

The effect is already coming into focus. Even with sputtering job growth, the unemployment rate has fallen almost a point over the past year and is expected to flirt with 5 percent next year. The last time that happened was in 1997, a moment when the dynamics of the labor market utterly and violently reversed to the disadvantage of employers. That tight labor market was presaged by so-called spot shortages-a spike in demand for a specific occupation in a specific place. From 1995 to 1996, for instance, wages for software architects rose 20 percent in places like Silicon Valley and Boston.

Similar spot shortages are popping up again now. In Atlanta, salaries for network systems analysts have risen 15 percent this year. In Washington, D.C., and Seattle, defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have thousands of high-salary IT positions they can’t fill despite offering significant wage premiums. In New Jersey and Southern California, accountants are almost as hot as tech workers were in the dotcom days; companies are paying headhunters just to set up interviews, on top of the usual payment when a prospect is actually hired.

The shortages, says economist Phil Hopkins of forecasting firm Global Insight, will spread to other cities and occupations, generating wider and wider circles of opportunity for better work-and, for some, dream jobs. What follows is a guide to slipping the bonds of bad work, illustrated with real-life stories of people who have landed enviable jobs. Take heart from their tales. Chase the dream. Just think how good it would feel to tell your boss that, actually, you don’t love your job. And you’ve just accepted a far better one.

DEFINE THE DREAM

To begin the quest, ponder this: What in the world is my dream job? Obvious though the question is, it can be tough to answer. For one thing, after a certain point, as life’s compromises pile up, a lot of people simply stop believing in the perfect job. John Krumboltz, a professor of education and psychology at Stanford University, estimates that only 2 percent of workers older than 30 have the jobs they dreamed of having when they were teenagers. Krumboltz believes that career idealism gets pounded out of people partly because, early on, we fixate on jobs that are less a dream than a hallucination. “Most of us are not going to become rock stars or play shortstop for the Yankees,” Krumboltz argues. “To put all your stock in getting this one dream job is an exercise in futility for most people.”

Krumboltz suggests a better approach: Experiment with different dreams. Richard Hagberg, a psychologist and Silicon Valley management consultant, offers similar advice. “Think of the things you like to do, not necessarily things you’re good at,” he says. “Then see if anyone is getting paid to do them.” For instance, are you a home video nut? Maybe you should start a company that makes corporate training and marketing videos. One of Hagberg’s clients did just that. Hagberg had urged the man to hang out with people in the videography industry, and he clicked. The acid test for whether you’ve found a potential dream job, Hagberg says, is, “Do you get along with the people in this field? Are you like these people?”

MAKE YOUR BOSS’S RESUME YOUR OWN

Some of the most frustrated people in America are workers in the so-called creative class, the term that Florida uses to describe executives, technologists, marketers, and others who make up the top 30 percent of the workforce. Many dream of running their own shop but, at least at some point in their careers, find themselves blocked by a heavy hitter higher up the ladder who isn’t going anywhere.

Beth Axelrod, chief strategist for the 70,000-member workforce at WPP Group, the advertising conglomerate that owns the likes of J. Walter Thompson, wants to make the dreams of those stymied creative types come true. Axelrod is among a growing group of headhunters who are trying to raid high-ranking talent whose career paths are cut off at rival companies. In Axelrod’s case, she targets the No. 2 or No. 3 person responsible for hit ad campaigns and offers them a chance to run a piece of business on their own at WPP. In human resources circles, that’s known as the “pull-up hire,” and it can be an express elevator to better work. In May, for instance, J. Walter Thompson recruited Mike Mazza to be its chief creative director for West Coast operations. He’d been a No. 2 creative officer at San Francisco’s Publicis & Hal Riney, the agency that created Sprint’s ads. “He had done great work, but he was clearly blocked,” says Seth Wolk, head of HR at Thompson. He keeps files on the bench strength at all his competitors, looking for frustrated stars to cherry-pick.

So how do you get in the file? One useful maneuver is to get some of the reflected glory from the very boss whose success has stalled your advance. If your boss has been celebrated for a tough turnaround, make clear to people in your field what your contributions to that feat were-which projects were your ideas, which programs you managed, how you cleaned up your own part of the business. It helps to be able to document it with e-mail trails, memos, and testimonials from clients and customers. Another trick: Seek out headhunters who specialize in your field and get on their radar screens. Industry gossip is the currency of their trade, and the people who do the actual hiring rely heavily on their informal intelligence network.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

If you spend any time in Silicon Valley, you still hear a lot of carping about the ravaged work environment. There are an estimated 10,000 IT workers in the San Francisco Bay Area who are still pounding the pavement for full-time work. But here’s a little secret: One reason they can’t find good jobs is that they won’t move to where the jobs are.

Hey, it’s the Bay Area; it’s a nice place to be. But there are gaping job openings for them if they’d just move on. Jeffrey Shuman, head of hiring for Northrop Grumman’s 22,000-strong IT division, is filling 4,300 openings this year. He has found it almost impossible to recruit in the Bay Area-even for a 350-mile shift to Southern California, where Northrop is based. “We’ve had candidates turn down jobs that pay six figures and a full relocation package with moving expenses,” Shuman laments. “They have self-imposed boundaries. They don’t want to leave. They don’t want to commute.”

At the moment, Silicon Valley is an exception to another rule for job upgrading. The Valley is the ultimate “industry cluster”-economists’ term for an area where companies in the same general business congregate. Clusters typically have higher productivity and higher profits, and therefore higher wages. When times are good, a concentration of employers bids up wages. The Valley is still digging out from the bust, and thus isn’t generating all the upside of a cluster in an improving economy. But it will again someday, and clusters in other areas are booming now-Los Angeles’s aerospace and defense cluster being a prime example. In this economic expansion, the gap between the have-not cities and those that are bases for fast-growth industries will widen. So if you’re a coder in Topeka, move to Raleigh-Durham. If you’re a biochemist in St. Louis, move to Boston or San Diego. Says Tom Long of executive search firm Egon Zehnder, “You can stay within the industry where your skills are already in demand, but increase your labor mobility and future pay overnight.”

TRADE INDUSTRIES

Sometimes the best move is to find similar work in an entirely different industry. Stuck in a feast-or-famine sector like financial services? Go get a similar job in an industry that’s booming.

That’s precisely what Aslam Chaudhry did. After years as an IT specialist at a number of large financial houses, including institutions like Cleveland’s Key Bank, Chaudhry hopped to a Detroit-based ad firm during the boom. When business started to slow there, he considered taking a high-paying job at a utility, but instead chose to slide over to yet another sector. Recently he joined SAS, a $1.3 billion privately held power in the rebounding business software market.

Today Chaudhry, 45, leads a staff of 12 at SAS headquarters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. His team is developing software products for the banking industry. He says he expects to be making much more money than the utility offered him-more than he’s ever made, in fact-within a year. He won’t say how much, but we’re talking serious six figures. “I’m a happy guy,” he says. He may stay that way. SAS is in the sector that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will post the highest wage and employment growth over the next eight years. Utilities? Didn’t even make the Top 20, lagging behind industries such as public transit and child-care services.

Now is a particularly good time for moving across industries the way Chaudhry did. As the labor market tightens, hiring criteria relax and doors open. Moving from a stagnant sector to a livelier one can pump up a paycheck 10 to 20 percent overnight, say BLS economists.

THINK BIG

During the bubble we all dreamed of being a top player at the next Microsoft. We would retire at 30 to sip piña coladas in the shade of coconut trees. That fantasy will still come true for some. But for those whose dream job includes a measure of certainty and security, it’s useful to remember that startups and other small companies have an 80 percent failure rate. That’s a powerful argument for chasing your dream at a larger company that offers growth opportunities internally.

As an exclusive Business 2.0 survey shows, Fortune 500 companies in a number of different industries have been on a hiring binge of late. (See “Who’s Hiring Now,” page 114.) Big companies typically provide better benefits and wider geographical opportunities. And this happens to be a great time to get on the management track in a giant corporation. That’s where the baby boomers’ impending retirement will be felt first, creating skills shortages in management, where workers are typically older. For that reason, forward-looking companies like WPP are aggressively adding younger workers to beef up their feeder pools of potential managers. Kelly Hopkins, a 27-year-old fine arts grad and self-taught tech support worker, sees herself rising to her firm’s middle ranks in the next few years. She just took a job as an editorial assistant at Boston-based Pearson Education, a branch of the British publishing giant, after bouncing from one startup to another during the past four years. She turned down a better-paying offer from a small firm that was closer to her home. “You need to have a 401(k), and you need to have vertical mobility,” she says. “They want you to go after promotions here.”

Falling in love or lust at work isn’t without its risks and is almost always a BAD idea. Whoever said “don’t mix business with pleasure” was right, you’re really just looking for trouble. If you have to do it, save it for after hours, keep it outside the office and remember those kinky emails you’re trading back and forth will look great in your personnel file. You should also take a look at the longevity of your typical relationship and see if that coincides with when you want to start looking for a new job because in the majority of cases when the #^)*&^%& hits the fan one of the employees leaves.

We spend so much time at work that the office is an easy place to fall in lust or love, and if you’re lucky (or not so lucky) you could end up as one of the people that actually meets their significant other. On the other hand with Colorado Springs, Englewood, Denver, Boulder and Ft. Collins nearby there are plenty of places to move and start over!