A less flexible FSA

Posted on December 13, 2010
Filed Under Corporate Policy, Employment, Health | Leave a Comment

With open enrollment season soundly underway, and the New Year quickly approaching, you might be wondering how the new healthcare law should affect your healthcare choices. Although I briefly reviewed that new healthcare law in a recent post, one element of the law which virtually escaped my eye revolves around the issue of flexible spending accounts. While in the past you may have had a reliable formula—which you derived by scrupulously pouring over your or your family’s healthcare history—to calculate how much to put into FSA each year, calculating how much you should take out this year will be no easy task. Read more

The “career-ending move”

Posted on December 9, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Keeping your Job | Leave a Comment

Do you remember Steven Slater? Though we may have forgotten his name, it is unlikely his actions have been completely forgotten by the public consciousness. Steven Slater, for a week or two, became a folk hero, of sorts. A beacon for employees suffering the dangerous effects of a high-stress career, Slater, as you will recall, was a JetBlue flight attendant whose dissatisfaction lead him to curse at a customer and then swiftly depart a plane via its emergency exit with libations in hand. Though different from most career-ending moves (which typically involve theft or fraud—for an example par excellence, think Bernie Madoff), Slater’s was, without a doubt, a career-ending move. Never again will he be able to tend to the luggage of airline customers, or escort an unreasonably sized trolley up and down a plane’s aisle serving customers soft drinks and tea. Read more

Finding federal employment

Posted on December 6, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Federal Employment, Finding a Job | 4 Comments

Finding a federal job can be a lot like gaining membership into a secret society. The application process can be painstaking if not grueling, though, once you have made it past the preliminary rounds and are accepted, you’re in for life—or, such is the mythology of federal employment. The truth is the Office of Personnel Management is making numerous changes that will allow federal job seekers to apply to federal jobs with greater ease, and which will help job seekers—whose application would have otherwise gone unnoticed—garner the attention of federal recruiters. There are also things federal job seekers can do, however, to become more competitive applicants. Read more

How not to build a professional network with social networking sites

Posted on December 2, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Networking | 3 Comments

After returning home from graduate school, I paid a visit to my friend’s dad. The reason? My resume. In addition to retooling my resume (which, at the time, was in horrible disrepair) he advised me to become active on a new social networking site called LinkedIn. Though I heeded his advice, it wasn’t until this past spring—prior to which time I had a shell of a LinkedIn account—that I became a truly active LinkedIn user. Since its creation, LinkedIn has become an accepted component of the contemporary professional networking paradigm, leading one to wondering about the utility of other social networking sites (such as Facebook or Twitter) in professional networking. Should Facebook and Twitter (and similar social networking sites) be used as professional networking platforms? Read more

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