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195,000 new jobs in June

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Employers added a better-than-expected 195,000 jobs in June, as the labor market advanced despite huge federal spending cuts and tax increases, and a eurozone recession.
The unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.6%, the Labor Department said Friday.

Economists had estimated that 165,000 jobs were added last month, according to a consensus forecast.
Also encouraging: job gains for April and May were revised up by a total 70,000. April's increase was revised to 199,000 from 149,000, and May to 195,000 from 175,000.

In June businesses added 202,000 jobs, while federal state and local governments cut 7,000. The growth was broad-based, with leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, retail, health care and finance all showing solid gains.

Other barometers of the labor market were mixed. The number of temporary workers rose by 9,500. The addition of contingent workers typically signals more hiring of permanent staffers.
But the underemployment rate — a broader gauge of joblessness that includes people who stopped looking for work and part-time workers who prefer full-time jobs, as well as the unemployed — jumped to 14.3% from 13.8%. The number of so-called involuntary part-time workers increased by 322,000 to 8.2 million.

The average workweek was unchanged at 34.5 hours. Employers typically increase the hours of existing workers before adding new ones. Average hourly earnings rose 10 cents to $24.01.
Leisure and hospitality led job gains with 75,000. Professional and business services added 53,000 and retailers, 37,000. The construction industry added 7,000 jobs while manufacturers cut 8,000.
The construction industry added 13,000 jobs. But manufacturers, still feeling the effects of a eurozone recession and the federal spending cuts, chopped 6,000.

Monthly payroll increases have averaged 202,000 this year, vs. 183,000 in 2012. "Employment growth continues to look more than strong enough to keep unemployment trending down," Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist of High Frequency Economics, said in a research note.
Last month's solid gains increase the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will begin dialing back its stimulus at its September meeting, RDQ Economics said in a research note. The Fed rattled stock and bond markets recently by saying it could rein in its monthly bond-buying later this year and end it by mid-2014, assuming the unemployment rate falls to 7% by then.

Expectations for strong employment gains were fueled by a payroll processor ADP's report this week that the private sector added 188,000 jobs in June.

Yet the economy has been mixed lately. Home sales have hit pre-recession levels and consumer confidence has surged for three straight months. But reports have shown consumer spending and manufacturing weakening. And last week, the government revised down its estimate for first-quarter economic growth to an annual rate of 1.8% from 2.4%.

Some analysts worry that $85 billion in across-the-board federal budget cuts and a January increase in payroll taxes may still inflict their most severe damage to the economy this summer.

Highest Paying Cities For Tech Jobs

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It’s not surprising that California’s Silicon Valley lands in the top spot on a new ranking of metropolitan areas that offer the best-paying jobs for information technology professionals. But there are some other unexpected results in a new survey from Dice, a 22-year-old career site that specializes in tech jobs. One is that while Silicon Valley still boasts the highest tech salaries in the nation, at an average of $101,000, that number is down by 2.8% from a high of $104,000 the previous year. Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings, says the dip in Silicon Valley salaries is probably a result of companies there hiring more people straight out of college, which skews the average salary downward. “Silicon Valley is plucking new grads from around the country and moving them into the Bay Area,” he says.

Can you guess which city comes in second? Baltimore/Washington, D.C. with a salary of $98,000, up 3.8% from the previous year. The area is home to giant defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman, both of which have a huge need for technology talent, and to large defense-oriented technology companies like AIC and CACI. In third place: San Diego, at $97,000, an impressive 13.4% hike from 2011. San Diego is the base for companies like Qualcomm that make the underlying technology for wireless communications, and to a number of smaller companies with demand for tech talent.

Overall, tech professionals had a 5% pay increase over the previous year, up from an average of $81,000 in 2011 to $86,000, according to Dice. The previous year salaries had only risen 2%. Average bonuses fell a bit in 2012, from $8,800 to $8,600, but a slightly greater number of employees collected bonuses, 33% versus 32%, in 2012. More good news for tech workers: a majority of tech professionals (64%) say they feel confident they could find a good new job in 2013.

In some areas, tech pay showed strong gains. Pittsburgh had the greatest salary increase, growing $18% from a year earlier, to $76,000. Melland says Pittsburgh has had to work to keep graduates from top schools like Carnegie Mellon from decamping to other cities, so companies there have hiked pay. In St. Louis tech salaries have risen 13.3% to $81,000 and in Phoenix, tech pay is up 11.5% to $84,000.

According to numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment in the technology sector, at 3.8%, is less than half the national rate of 7.8%. “There is more demand for technology skills than other areas and it’s growing,” says Melland. “Especially if you’re willing to relocate and go where the jobs are, there is terrific opportunity in this market.”

Dice gathered its salary data in late September and early November of last year, running online surveys of 15,000 tech professionals. Respondents also participated in discussions led by Dice staff.
I.T. pros know that their talents and skills are in hot demand. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they changed jobs within the last year and earned a greater salary as a result.
For newcomers to the tech profession, those with two years of experience or less, salaries have risen 8% over the last year to $46,000. For techies with at least 15 years of experience, the average salary is $103,000, a 4% hike from the previous year.

One city that just barely missed the top ten highest-paying metro areas for tech jobs is New York, where we’ve had a boom of I.T. activity over the past several years. But at $90,000, New York lags just behind Austin, Tex., in 11^th place, and New York tech salaries are essentially flat, down 0.4% in the last year. Melland explains that while the tech startup market is still healthy, the financial services sector has continued to cut back, depressing salaries.

One other interesting statistic from the Dice report: some I.T. skills are more prized than others. Workers fluent in programming languages like Hadoop, NoSQL and MongoDB, that can help companies analyze large databases, earn at the upper end of the pay scale, usually more than $100,000 a year, as opposed to $80,000 earned by those working with mobile technology or $90,000 for those who do cloud computing.

Overall, the picture keeps getting brighter for workers with technology skills. “Demand has been steadily increasing,“ says Melland. “There are technologies like mobile applications, cloud computing and data and network security that didn’t even exist five years ago, that are critical to almost every company today.” That means plenty of jobs and high salaries for people who know how to work with those technologies.

High-Paying Flexible Jobs

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Looking for a career that offers flexibility or a fat paycheck? It turns out there are plenty of jobs that offer both.

With help from Payscale.com, which lets users compare their salaries with those of other people in similar jobs by culling real-time salary data from its 35 million profiles, we’ve compiled a list of 10 high-paying flexible jobs.

Payscale found the 22 most flexible jobs in terms of schedule flexibility, and the percentage that can telecommute (work from home)–and provided the average pay for workers in these jobs with at least a bachelor’s degree and 5 to 8 years of experience.

Forbes culled through the data to find the 10 best-paying gigs, and at the top of the heap we have senior project managers, IT, who bring in about $99,700 a year, on average. Twenty-six percent of these professionals (those with at least a bachelor’s and 5 to 8 years experience) say they’re able to do their job from home. The average across all jobs and industries for workers with at least a bachelor’s is 7%.

A senior project manager in IT is responsible for developing a detailed project plan for IT services and products, and identifying critical paths, says Katie Bardaro, Payscale’s lead economist. “They must match detailed customer requirements with constraints and assumptions of the IT team in order to establish project deliverables,” she says. And they can easily do the job remotely.

“The IT industry pays well and typically grants the ability to work from home to its seasoned workers,” she says. “Many of the tasks completed by these jobs can be done via technology (phone, computer, e-mail, web chats, etc.) and require a sharp focus and sometimes odd hours, all three of which sum up to a perfect job for telecommuting.”

Actuaries hold the No. 2 spot on our list of high-paying flexible jobs. These professionals use mathematics, statistics, and financial theory to assess the risk that an event will occur and to help businesses and clients develop policies that minimize the cost of that risk, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Payscale data shows they make $94,600 a year, on average; and 93% say they have a flexible schedule. (The average across all jobs and industries for workers with at least a bachelor’s is 72%.)

“Schedule flexibility is important to employees as they are comforted by the knowledge that they can easily change their schedule and time-off,” Bardaro says. “This knowledge will incent workers to be productive as they know they have some level of control in their schedule. This is especially key for families who might need to take time off to align with school breaks or stay home with a sick child.”
Third we have attorneys and lawyers. Ninety-one percent of them, who rake in about $92,400 a year, on average, say they have flexible schedules.

Rounding out the top five are management consultants and tax managers, who make $89,500 a year and $89,300 a year, respectively. Both of these jobs are considered highly flexible by Payscale, because of the percentage of workers who said they can do their job from home.

“Flexible jobs don’t only offer the ability to have a better work-life balance, but also often make workers more productive,” Bardaro says. An office environment can be distracting–and working from home shuts out all office chatter, drama and distractions, and provides workers with the ability to hunker down and focus solely on their work tasks.

“One key thing to mention, however, is that the ability to work from home is a privilege and often only granted to experienced or seasoned workers,” she adds. “This is driven by the fact that a worker will need to prove themselves trustworthy in a work environment before they are trusted to work well with no supervision. Often times, the best way to convince employers that you can work from home is to be an all-star at the office and show you have the ability to succeed with limited supervision.”

The Happiest Jobs In America

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When you think of a cheerful job, you probably don’t think of loan officer, warehouse manager, or accountant. But it turns out these are some of the happiest careers in America, according to online jobs site Careerbliss.com.

CareerBliss compiled a list of the 20 happiest jobs based on analysis from more than 100,400 employee-generated reviews between February 2011 and January 2012. Employees were asked to rate 10 factors that affect workplace happiness, including one’s relationship with the boss and co-workers, work environment, job resources, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture, company reputation, daily tasks, and control over the work one does on a daily basis.

The employees valued each factor on a five-point scale, and also indicated how important it was to their overall happiness at work. The numbers were combined to find an average rating of overall employee happiness for each respondent, and then sorted by job title to find which occupations had the happiest workers. A minimum of 50 employee reviews was required to be considered for CareerBliss’ 20 Happiest Jobs in America, and executive level jobs, like chief executive, were excluded from the study.

“Since we tend to spend more waking hours working than doing anything else, our work happiness is a huge factor in our overall happiness,” says CareerBliss’ chief executive, Heidi Golledge. “Nearly every person has a desire to feel valued and content, and a workplace or a career that provides that for its employees is key to not only happiness for the employees but the long-term success of the business.”

The happiest job of all isn’t kindergarten teacher or dentist. It’s software quality assurance engineer. Professionals with this job title are typically involved in the entire software development process to ensure the quality of the final product. This can include processes such as requirements gathering and documentation, source code control, code review, change management, configuration management, release management, and the actual testing of the software, explains Matt Miller, chief technology officer at CareerBliss.

With an index score of 4.24, software quality assurance engineers said they are more than satisfied with the people they work with and the company they work for. They’re also fairly content with their daily tasks and bosses.

These professionals “typically make between $85,000 and $100,000 a year in salary and are the gatekeepers for releasing high quality software products,” Miller says. Organizations generally will not allow software to be released until it has been fully tested and approved by their software quality assurance group, he adds.

Golledge says, “In past studies, we have noted that the long hours and intense demands on software engineers’ time caused them to rank as less than happy. However, we are happy to report that software quality assurance engineers feel rewarded at work, as they are typically the last stop before software goes live and correctly feel that they are an integral part of the job being done at the company.”

Tied for the second most blissful job is executive chef and property manager; both earned an index score of 4.15. Executive chefs, also known as chefs de cuisine or head cooks, do everything from menu creation and staff training to ordering and purchasing inventory. They cite the work that they do and the people they work with as the main drivers of their happiness.

Property managers plan, direct, or coordinate the selling, buying, leasing, or governance activities of real estate properties, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers in this profession are most satisfied with the people they work with and the work that they do.

“Many of the happiest jobs have some component with working with people,” Golledge says. “Folks who work with others tend to rate their happiness higher on our site.”

Bank teller and warehouse manager round out the top five happiest jobs in America, with index scores of 4.14 and 4.13, respectively.

“The roles that we did not expect to see were teller, accountant and financial analyst,” she says. “Even though all three of these positions ranked low on compensation, they all ranked very high on ‘the company you work for’ and ‘the people you work with.’ Clearly, working with likeminded folks who share a love for calculators and numbers drive their happiness.”

A few support roles, like customer service reps and administrative assistants, also made the list. Why? “Through our research we have seen that many people who take on these roles are typically happy supporting or servicing other people, and are therefore fulfilled in their jobs.”
Golledge adds, “We have also noticed that happiness definitely does not align with pay, and once someone’s basic needs are met, the additional money on the job is a nice perk but is not what drives employee happiness.”

CareerBliss also found that many people appreciate their jobs more in a down economy. “As the job market is improving every day, we see that employees are looking to evaluate if they are happy in their current position and if their company is providing the type of culture they identify with,” Golledge says. “This year will be a very important year for employers as employees look at a possible career or job change to improve their satisfaction at work.”Click here for the complete list of the 20 happiest jobs in America.

Source Page : http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/03/23/the-happiest-jobs-in-america

Why You Should Take The Blame

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I was at a party in Greenwich Village in New York City. It was crowded, with about twice as many people as the space comfortably fit. There was a dog in the mix too. But it was a casual event and we all spent a lot of time in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning.
I was at the sink washing dishes when I heard the dog yelp behind me. I turned just in time to see a woman curse at the dog as it dashed out of the kitchen. She had obviously just stepped on his foot or tail.
“Watch out!” she shouted after the dog, then saw me looking at her and added, “He’s always in the way.”
Really? You step on a dog and then you blame the dog? Who does that?
Actually, a lot of us do.
We start blaming others at an early age, usually to escape parental anger and punishment, but also to preserve our own self-esteem and self-image. Then the behavior sticks, often well into our adulthood. I — and I am sure you — see people in organizations point fingers all the time.
Sometimes it’s at a departmental level: A struggling sales group blames a poor product, while the product people blame an ineffectual sales team or maybe lax manufacturing. Blaming a department or a product feels safer than blaming a person since it appears less personal, can pass as an attempt at organizational improvement, and might seem less defensive. But it’s counter-productive as the transparency of culpability betrays its disguises.
A few years ago I sat at a table with the leaders of a major stock exchange. They were struggling with setting goals for the year. The CEO, to whom they all reported, was not in the room.
I asked them what was getting in the way. “We need direction from senior leadership,” they answered in agreement.
“Seriously?” I was stunned. “Look around,” I said, raising my voice a little, “Everyone in the organization is looking for direction from you! You are senior leadership.”
“No,” the head of something answered with the others nodding, “The CEO isn’t here.”
I retorted: “You’re blaming the CEO? You’re waiting for him to tell you what to do? At your level? Really?”
An awkward silence followed. Then we got to work turning the company around.
Blaming others is a poor strategy. Not simply because everyone can see through it. Or because it’s dishonest. Or because it destroys relationships. Or even because, while trying to preserve our self-esteem, it actually weakens it. There’s a more essential reason why blame is a bad idea: Blame prevents learning.
If something isn’t your fault, then there’s no reason for you to do anything differently. Which means, in all probability, you’ll make the same mistake in the future. That will lead to more blame. It’s a cycle that almost always ends badly.
Recently, a CEO I work with fired Bill*, one of his portfolio managers. He didn’t fire him for poor results. He fired him for blaming his poor investment results on everything except himself. The CEO was only looking for one thing from Bill: Awareness of the mistakes he was making. But Bill continued to deny his role in his poorly performing portfolio.
The CEO was right to fire him. If Bill couldn’t admit to the mistakes he was making, why wouldn’t he make the same mistake tomorrow? Would you trust Bill with your money?
Thankfully there’s a simple solution: Take the blame for anything you’re even remotely responsible for.
This solution transforms all the negative consequences of blaming others into positive ones. It solidifies relationships, improves your credibility, makes you and others happy, reinforces transparency, improves self-esteem, increases learning, and solves problems. It’s as close as I’ve ever seen to a panacea.
Contrary to what you may feel in the moment, taking the blame is the power move, strengthening your position, not weakening it. First of all, because once you’ve taken responsibility for something, you can do something about it, which gives you strength.

But also because it takes courage to own your blame, and that shows strength. It immediately silences anyone who might try to blame you — what’s the point if you’ve already taken the blame? The “blame you” conversation is over. Now you can focus on solving problems.
Being defensive makes you slippery. Taking responsibility makes you trustworthy. You might think it puts you at risk because others may see an opening and jump on you. But that’s not what usually happens.
I was running a strategy offsite at a high technology company with a CEO and his direct reports. We were looking at some problematic numbers from the previous quarter. One by one each leader was trying to argue that he or she was not, ultimately, responsible for the issues, pointing to the other areas that contributed.
Then Dave, the head of sales spoke up. He proceeded to list the mistakes he felt he personally made and what he wanted to do differently in the future.
His colleagues didn’t pile on. In fact, they did the opposite. They began to say things to dilute his blame. One by one, they started taking responsibility for their role in the challenges the company was facing.
Taking the blame serves as an example. When you take the blame, others get embarrassed about not taking the blame themselves. When they see you don’t get shot, they feel emboldened to take the risk.
And even if they don’t, you will now be able to avoid making the mistakes you’ve made in the past, which, ultimately, is the key to your success.
By taking the blame, Dave changed the course of that meeting and, as it turns out, the course of the company. He also got promoted.
There is one tricky part of this. To take the blame, you need to have confidence in yourself and your capability. You need the personal strength to accept failure. You need enough self-esteem to believe you can learn from your mistakes and succeed another day. You need to accept failure as part of life and not a final sentence on who you are as a person.
In other words, it’s OK to step on a dog. It happens. Just don’t blame the dog.