Career Blog

Several hundred graduates rushed to the first job fair for low-carbon professionals on Sunday in Beijing, but despite “low carbon” being a popular industry catchphrase, that was not the event’s main attraction.

The job fair was instigated by the Beijing Instrument Industry Group Co Ltd with companies from the automotive and mechatronics industries attending. A total of 383 job opportunities were offered at the fair.

“We make many instruments to detect carbon emissions and our business is very much involved with low carbon,” said Jia Shaowei, assistant general manager with Beijing Beifen-Ruili Analytical Instrument Company, which is affiliated with the Beijing Instrument Industry Group Co Ltd.

Jia said they planned to offer about 50 jobs and had received more than 100 resumes by 11 am.

Most of the job seekers were graduating students, he added.

According to Jia, the company wanted to use the job fair to publicize the importance of low carbon for business and society.

However, many job seekers at the fair were not interested in the low carbon issue.

“I only came here because they are recruiting graduates in my major. I don’t mind whether the jobs are low carbon or not,” said Lei Shuai, who is a mechanical senior student from China Forestry University.

Lei said he arrived at the job fair at 10 am when it was busiest and had given his resume to nine companies.

“I only know low carbon is an environmental protection concept,” said Wu Jian, a classmate of Lei Shuai.

Wu said he just wanted to find a job.

Staff from companies attending the job fair also admitted they didn’t see any difference between this job fair and other job fairs.

“The job opportunities which we are offering don’t relate to low carbon directly, and I can’t see the difference between this job fair and others we have attended before,” said Wang Yunhui, an official with the human resources department of the Beijing Automotive Technology Center of the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co Ltd.

She said they were offering more than 60 job opportunities at the job fair and that none of them were directly related to low carbon, although she did point out that the whole automotive industry was focusing on carbon emissions and the environment.

“We also want to pass on the message that we take the environment very seriously and that companies like us must take responsibility for low carbon,” said Wang.

Before you say ”I do” to a business partnership with your spouse, consider the pros and cons of this working relationship.

Given the slow rate of new job creation, an increasing number of Americans are jumping on the entrepreneur bandwagon, and many of them are forming partnerships with their spouse or significant other. And while every “copreneur” situation is unique, there are some common threads among couples that make it work.

First, it’s important that the husband and wife have complementary skill sets. “I am more visionary, creative and future-thinking and my husband is more pragmatic, so we have different strengths,” says Jane Wurwand, who owns Dermalogica, a Los Angeles-based skin care company with her husband, Raymond. When they started the company in 1984, Jane wanted to be able to talk directly to their network of licensed skin therapists. Raymond acted on the idea by starting their bi-annual “Congress,” which now draws over 2,000 salon owners and employees together for three days of education, sharing ideas and bonding.

Dr. Irwin and Lucia Smigel have been working as a husband-and-wife business team for nearly 45 years. “We enjoy being together, so we do everything together,” Lucia says. But Dr. Smigel is quick to point out that they have different strengths. He’s a dentist and inventor–he created a line of teeth whitening products called Supersmile–and Lucia’s business savvy complemented his innovative product development skills.

While different skill sets can be an asset to the business, it’s important to be in sync on core business values. “Raymond and I have similar qualities in our approach to business, our views on business ethics and customer service,” Wurwand says. “Whenever we got a customer complaint in the early days, we made it a point to call the customer personally and resolve the issue–not hide behind someone else or some policy or clause.”

Another key factor in successful husband-and-wife working relationships is having clearly delineated roles and responsibilities at work and at home. “My husband loves the business side of things while my strength is in branding,” says Kaira Rouda of Real Living, Inc., a Columbus, Ohio-based real estate franchisor. “So I don’t feel stepped on if he doesn’t include me in a financial meeting.” Kaira entered the business with her husband, Harley, at a time when her expertise was needed to re-brand the company. Within just a few years, their company grew into the fifth largest privately held real estate company in the country. “Working together as a team has greatly benefited the business,” she says. “When we are in sync, we are unstoppable.”

For some couples, the responsibilities get divided at home as well. Just as Kara and Theo Goldin of San Francisco-based Hint Essence Water were about to launch their new product, Kara discovered she was pregnant with their fourth child. “We understand that we also have responsibilities for the kids,” she says. “We divide up based on our skill sets.” For example, Kara spends more time teaching their children how to handle social situations and how to understand other people’s needs, while Theo helps them with their school work.

Family should be high on the list of considerations,” says Kathryn Stafford, Ph.D., an associate professor at Ohio State University who teaches a class on family business owners. “Couples might be tempted to think that this is a solution to the difficulty of balancing work and family, when, in fact, it may be quite the opposite.”

Another important element to a successful working partnership is having clear lines of communication. Wurwand says that she and her husband have “fierce conversations” when they disagree, but they ultimately come to an agreement. “You have to state your opinion and win the other one over,” she says. “But we never pull our personal stuff in, and we have never come home not speaking to each other. It usually just ends up in a compromise.”

“Copreneurs need to have a conflict management protocol,” advises Jane Hilburt-David, president of Key Resources, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. “Each person needs to have a job description with responsibilities and a title, and they need to create healthy boundaries.” She also believes that individuals need to plan time for themselves, time as a couple and time for their jobs.

Finally, couples who share a business need to outwardly support each other. “The most powerful way to demonstrate that support is when you acknowledge each other in front of your team,” Rouda says. She admits that in the early days of their working relationship, her husband hesitated to defend her or her points because he was afraid it would show favoritism. “But that doesn’t work,” she says. “Instead, always present a unified front when talking to your team.”

Stafford agrees: “You need to be recognized as competent at your job and appreciated for it–especially by your spouse.”

 

The shifting of a 40-year-old system of setting annual iron ore prices to a short-term pricing mechanism may shake up the Chinese steel industry by creating an even playing field for all steel mills – large and small – in terms of raw material costs.

BHP Billiton said on Tuesday that it had concluded agreements with a significant number of Asian customers to shift pricing for the majority of its iron ore to short-term contracts, which are based on market prices.

Vale wants a new pricing system every quarter, said Pedro Gutemberg, director of marketing and research at Vale in Beijing on Tuesday, speaking at an industry conference

“A more time-adjusted pricing mechanism is needed in order to better reflect real market prices,” he said. “Benchmark prices are over. This is a market-oriented industry.”

That shift may be of some value to smaller steel mills.

“Vale has offered quarterly priced iron ore to us, which means we could buy iron ore at the same prices that large steel mills pay,” said a sales manager at a small, private steel mill that doesn’t have an iron ore import license.

There are 1,200 steel mills in China, but only 112 have licenses to import iron ore at long-term prices. Others need to buy iron ore from the spot market.

“You cannot say it’s a good thing for small steel mills considering surging iron ore prices, but you can say large steel mills and small steel mills will now be at the same competitive level in terms of raw material costs,” said the salesperson, who requested anonymity.

“And as far as I know, BHP and Rio will only retain the quarterly pricing offer with existing customers that hold import licenses.”

Sumitomo Metal Industries Co, Japan’s third-biggest steelmaker, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying it agreed to pay Vale between $100 and $110 a metric ton for the quarter starting on April 1, spokesman Toshifumi Matsui said on Tuesday.

The quarterly pricing agreement with the Japanese steelmaker is nearly double the $60 per ton paid in last year’s contract.

Spot prices rose higher on Tuesday, landing at around $150 per ton after stripping out freight costs.

However, Chinese officials and some Chinese steel mills with long-term pricing agreements reiterated their opposition to a change in the pricing mechanism.

Jia Yinsong, an official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at a conference on Tuesday that China opposes the three global miners shift to spot prices because that pricing system will create financial risks for some Chinese steel mills.

“We of course prefer benchmark prices because an annual pricing system means we will have stable raw material costs for the whole year, and according to historical records, long-term prices are usually lower than spot levels, except during the financial crisis,” said Wang Yongsheng, CEO of Shandong Taishan Steel Corp.

Beijing is home to the largest number of the country’s wealthiest lot, with 151,000 people owning more than 10 million yuan ($1.46 million) and about 94,000 people with more than 100 million yuan in personal assets, according to a recent report.

The 2010 Hurun Wealth Report, which specializes in tracking the wealthy, said there are 875,000 multimillionaires and 55,000 billionaires in China today, 6.1 percent and 7.8 percent more than last year.

In Guangdong, there are 145,000 multimillionaires and 82,000 billionaires, while Shanghai has 122,000 multimillionaires and 73,000 billionaires, the report said.

The group in Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai account for 48 percent of the total number of China’s richest, who seem relatively unscathed by the recent global downturn, it said.

Rupert Hoogewerf, the founder of the Hurun Report, told China Daily that the rise in the number of China’s wealthiest is dependant on the soaring property prices, better performance of the stock market and the booming Chinese economy.

According to official statistics, Chinese GDP grew by 8.7 percent in 2009 to 33.5 trillion yuan, and the Shanghai Composite Index rose over the same period from 2300 points to 3000, an increase of 30 percent.

China’s house prices in February this year also rose by 10.7 percent year on year.

Hoogewerf admitted that most of China’s wealthiest citizens were making money from the property sector.

The report also said that China has 1,900 people with 1 billion yuan and 140 people with 10 billion yuan in personal assets, nearly doubling the figure in 2009.

Hoogewerf said there seems to be a hidden class of low-key rich, who keep their heads below the parapet.

The average age of China’s wealthy is 39, 15 years younger than their counterparts outside of China. The male to female ratio of the country’s richest is 7:3, it said.

They made their money primarily from the property and manufacturing sectors, and they are super confident about China’s economic outlook, the report said.

They enjoy collecting watches, jewelry, Chinese calligraphy and paintings and, on average, they own three cars and 4.4 luxury watches, it said.

Travel, golf and swimming are their leisure activities of choice and they take an average of 16 days holiday a year.

Only 3 percent of China’s super rich never do any charity work, as it has become a way of life for most of them.

For their children’s education, the United Kingdom is the first choice for secondary school and the United States for university.

“China’s rich are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way they spend their money and at a remarkable pace,” Hoogewerf said.

Get ready to sum up your accomplishments and aspirations in 30 seconds or less.

When Anita Attridge worked in human resources at Merck and Xerox, she frequently kicked off job interviews with a standard request: Tell me about yourself. A striking number of applicants couldn’t answer her coherently. “You’d get everything from, ‘Where do you want me to start?’ to their whole life story,” she says. She’s now a coach with The Five O’Clock Club, a career counseling firm.

“People screw it up all the time,” agrees Connie Thanasoulis, a career services consultant at the job search Web site Vault.com. “They think they should walk you through their entire résumé.” Instead, Thanasoulis, Attridge and other career and communications pros agree, job seekers should be prepared with a 15- to 30-second “elevator pitch,” so-called because it should be so vivid and concise it could be delivered in the space of an elevator ride.

How do you sum up your life’s experience and job ambitions in 30 seconds or less? First of all, think about the benefit you can confer on the employer, advises Jane Praeger, a media coach who heads Ovid Inc., in New York City. “People are too apt to go in with a laundry list of skills–I can do this, I can do that,” she says. “Instead, say, for example, ‘I can make sure your employees are well supervised and motivated.’” Praeger’s own elevator pitch? “I help people figure out what to say and how to say it, to get the results they want.”

Thanasoulis’ strategy: Start by filling a whole page with what you would want to say to a hiring manager. Cut that down to half a page. Keep cutting until you get to a quarter page. Then pull out three bullet points that give a snapshot of your career. Thanasoulis’s pitch: “I spent 25 years on Wall Street heading up a staffing organization for Fortune 500 companies. Now I take those insider secrets and teach people how to run an efficient, effective job search.”

Thanasoulis, Praeger and Attridge agree that practice is essential. “Practice until it’s as easy as saying your name,” says Attridge. Always rehearse out loud, in front of a mirror, or to a friend or into a tape or video recorder. Force yourself to sound enthusiastic. Too often job candidates recite their pitches in a monotone or rush through them without passion. “Often the content is very good, but the delivery is so bad you don’t hear it,” Attridge notes.

Career coaches suggest preparing more than one pitch, for different audiences. Win Sheffield recommends tailoring a specific one for each interview. “Develop your pitch with a specific person in mind,” he says, and make sure it includes where you’ve been, where you are and where you’re going.

It’s helpful to have a pitch designed to work in a social setting that doubles as a networking opportunity, such as a college reunion. In that kind of situation, Thanasoulis advises, mix in personal details along with the professional ones. For her that would mean something like, “I worked in corporate America for 25 years. I created my own business, and I absolutely love it. My husband and I built a home on Staten Island, and we just adopted a 180-pound mastiff.” Then see what your conversational partner picks up on.

As much when you’re selling yourself as at any other time, it’s important to pay attention to your audience. “The pitch is no substitute for developing a relationship with a person,” Sheffield notes.

Sometimes less self-promotion is more.

The other day I felt I needed something from one of my superiors and had to blow my own horn to get it. I hesitated at first. Would I come off as a braggart if I argued that I was more deserving than colleagues? I plunged ahead, first in an in-person meeting and then in a follow-up e-mail that I tried to keep short but specific and ultimately persuasive. I argued that because of my 30 years’ experience as a journalist, my 15 years at Forbes and my recent performance with X,Y and Z articles, I deserved recognition. But before sending the note I showed it to my immediate editor, and he made an extremely helpful suggestion: After ticking off my accomplishments, I should conclude with a note of humility. If the boss could possibly find a way to accommodate my request, I would be most grateful, I wrote.

Amid all the career advice exhorting workers and job seekers to engage in relentless self-promotion, is there any room for that most traditional and modest of virtues, humility? Absolutely, career experts say. “Somebody who comes in and says, look how great I am–that can be a serious turn-off,” says Jeff Hunter, vice president of human resources at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco and a career and workplace consultant for Glassdoor.com, a job review and ratings site. “It’s best to approach a hiring manager or supervisor from the perspective of what the manager needs and what best fits those needs.”

Don’t ever describe your attributes with a string of extravagant adjectives; instead tell short, concise stories about yourself that communicate your accomplishments in challenging situations, advises Orville Pierson, senior vice president at the outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison and author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search. “Your stories should illustrate you at your best, at work,” Pierson says. Stick to facts and be succinct. Lay out the situation, the work you did and the results you achieved.

Pierson’s advice reminds me of that great writing maxim, “Show, don’t tell.” Vivid details are always more meaningful than vague descriptions. In reviewing the memo I banged out the other day, I see I did a good job of ticking off four specific stories I’d recently written, but I was too vague when I referred to “all kinds of projects” I’d done. Also I failed to describe specific problems for which I had found solutions.

Jeff Hunter points out that you can take humility too far, though. Example: Last week he interviewed a Dolby job candidate who he thought would be a good fit for a position. But when he asked the interviewee about what he could do for Dolby, the candidate underplayed his capabilities, emphasizing how other people had helped him succeed. “I stopped the interview,” Hunter says. “I said, ‘I love the way you’re letting me know that you’re a team player, but you’re not letting me know what you’ve done and how you could add value.”

Janice Howroyd, the head of Act-1 Group, a staffing firm in Torrance, Calif., advises workers to demonstrate passion and humility at the same time. Show excitement when you describe your accomplishments and ambitions. “Passion is always attractive,” she says, “and humility becomes the thread between passion and skill.”

August Turak, an entrepreneur and consultant who wrote a four-part Forbes.com series called “Business Secrets of the Trappists” about his experiences at a financially successful monastery, agrees that humility can be a powerful tool in the workplace. “It’s in our self-interest to forget our self-interest,” he says. “The most shameless act of self promotion that we can engage in is being humble.” Because others find humility so attractive, the virtue serves many purposes. Turak remembers when he won an award as a 22-year-old photocopier salesman. At the party celebrating his achievement, he got up and said, “I couldn’t have done this without the help of my managers and vice president.” He recalls, “I looked out over that crowd and realized, these guys love me.”

Neeti Nundy didn’t expect her training to lead to this. When she graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nundy, 29, followed the path of other young, ambitious workers onto Wall Street. Now she doesn’t even watch the S&P 500. Her days are spent leveraging her financial skills to help small startups deliver cutting-edge needleless vaccine injections to the developing world.

Nundy isn’t alone. The financial sector has shed close to half a million jobs since its peak, leaving many at a crossroads, confronting choices that seemed unthinkable two-and-a-half years ago, when the market was at its all-time high. Whether by circumstances or by choice, many have said goodbye to Wall Street and are reinventing themselves in other parts of the economy.

The flow of talented people out of careers spent in front of spreadsheets may help revitalize other parts of the economy that couldn’t compete with the lavish life finance once offered. New York City has spent millions of dollars to retrain investment bankers for other lines of work. New Jersey created a program to help former traders earn their teaching credentials. Here are the stories of seven who left Wall Street behind and reinvented their lives.

The Entrepreneurs

When Shu Kim and Khanh Pham met working at Lehman Brothers seven years ago, they became fast friends. Kim, now 41, had come to Wall Street in a roundabout way. After earning her law degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, she worked in real estate law in Hawaii for three years. From there a colleague called and asked if she would be interested in working for Lehman’s office in South Korea. She jumped at the opportunity and found herself in New York a few years later as part of the global real estate group.

Pham, too, had taken an unlikely route, one of thousands of smart people with no initial intention of working in finance who got sucked in by Wall Street. After graduating with a masters in public policy from Berkeley, she worked for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation, underwriting its programs for affordable housing. A friend who worked as an analyst at Lehman convinced her to take a job at the firm, and Pham soon began working on so-called mezzanine debt, often used in acquisitions and buyouts, as part of the real estate group.

During their weekly lunches, the friends talked about how they wanted to form their own business some day. Fate soon forced their hand in the form of layoffs. Both received generous severance packages and had offers from other firms waiting for them.

Instead they each contributed six figures from their savings to start a new Web site they hope will make it easier for customers to buy from local businesses across the country. Small businesses–coffee shops, art stores, graphic designers–sign up to get a storefront on the site, shustir.com, which the founders hope will drive customers to the type of places that depend on foot traffic.

“We want to support local businesses that are really the fabric of our communities,” Kim says. She believes the talents she cultivated at Lehman–developing relationships, determining value, ensuring an investment makes sense–are now helping her build her own business. “We know we have the basic skill set that we developed at Lehman, but now we’re using it to learn a whole new language,” Pham says.

The transition has been difficult at times. Many of their former Lehman co-workers, virtually all of whom transitioned into jobs that are carbon copies of what they did before, now regard the pair as a curiosity. There have been highlights too. The company now employs eight people, and the site is undergoing its first redesign.

Both women feel they are doing something that matters. “At the end of the day, this is the legacy I want to give my children when I’m gone,” Pham says. “I don’t want to be known as ‘Khanh, she’s a really good underwriter.’”

The Umpire

“I was a floor broker for 22 years,” says Edward Gelormino, talking into his cellphone on a high school baseball field in central New Jersey. “That was all I knew.”

Gelormino started working as a clerk on Wall Street making about $12,000 a year. Over the years, he rose to a role as a floor broker. Eventually he was a vice president at Midwood Securities, executing trades for clients on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange and making six figures.

Then technology caught up to him. Computerized trading, he says now, put him out of business about two years ago. Suddenly there wasn’t a need for him. “I had to start my life all over again,” he says.

Gelormino looked for other jobs on Wall Street but couldn’t find one. As time passed, he started applying to any job, no matter how little prestige or pay it offered. He sold his houses. He took a number of odd jobs, even driving a bread truck on overnight deliveries. It was tough not making the kind of salary he was used to, but he now says he’s happier than he’s ever been, adding, “I don’t have the bills that I once had; I don’t have the pressure that I once had.”

He took classes to become an umpire for high school baseball games in New Jersey, restarting a passion he had to abandon 20 years ago when the demands of Wall Street took up too much of his time. During the day, Gelormino now manages a caféin Freehold, N.J. “There’s a whole different world out there that you don’t even realize,” he says. “A nice world.”

The Teacher

As a finance major at the University of Florida in the late 1990s, Sean McMahon felt like he was part of a digital vanguard that would help rid Wall Street of longstanding inefficiencies. Above all, he prized innovation. After graduating he worked at a regional bank in Atlanta, underwriting loans, like one to a company that developed a way to use a Kevlar strap in construction, eliminating the need for five men to do the dangerous and awkward job of wrapping giant chains around pieces of steel.

With a friend from college, McMahon cofounded a small consulting firm, called Jaywalk, in 1999. The idea, he says, was to point out that Wall Street analysts had an inherent conflict of interest when issuing buy or sell ratings on the very companies that were also investment banking clients. At its height, his firm consolidated the ratings of more than 150 independent research firms and covered over 7,000 stocks. Of all the 3,000 stocks recommended by major Wall Street firms, they discovered, only seven had “sell” ratings.

McMahon’s analysis made a splash. Bank of New York Mellon quickly became interested. At the time, it had a significant brokerage operation but did not have the research or investment-banking conflicts of interest that saddled full-service firms. It bought Jaywalk in 2002, and McMahon, now 34, moved to New York.

Things quickly soured. The portfolio managers with whom McMahon met, instead of jumping at the chance to have unbiased, unfiltered research that might conflict with what they had previously read, turned him down cold. He recalls one manager standing up in the middle of his presentation and closing the door before turning to him and saying, “You realize I can’t have independent investment research here. For my fiduciary responsibility, I need to show positive evidence for the stocks I decided to purchase on behalf of my clients. If I have a report in my file cabinet saying the stock I owned was a ’sell’, then I have a liability.”

Analysts turned a cold shoulder as well, McMahon says, resistant to acknowledging anything that contradicted their earlier work. He came to see Wall Street as a ridiculous world in which institutions cared more about what certain hedge funds were holding than about objective information that could show whether those investments were any good in the first place.

Eventually McMahon’s firm played a large part in the landmark Global Research Analyst Settlement brokered by the SEC, which helped separate the investment side of a firm from the side that issued buy and sell ratings. Jayhawk earned the business of seven of the 12 firms involved in the settlement; McMahon became a managing director before the age of 30.

Still, the rampant conflicts he saw didn’t change. He thought about doing other things. He had been wildly successful, but not so successful that he didn’t have to worry about money for the rest of his life. At the end of 2006 he moved to Rio de Janeiro for a year while consulting for the bank. He finished that job in 2007, and then quit.

When he returned to the U.S. he met with several startups in San Francisco, but realized he wasn’t interested in becoming a serial entrepreneur. “I could have just found another desk job, but that was the point–I wanted to do something different, ” he says. Instead, he realized, he was fascinated by the dynamics of change and innovation in the market. “A bomb goes off somewhere, and it has an effect. There’s a report of swine flu, and it has an effect,” he says. He began applying to Ph.D. programs, intending to research business at a process level.

McMahon moved back to Florida and began taking classes at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The management department at the university had a focus on ethics and innovation that appealed to him. He now teaches strategy to students in their final semester of college while conducting research.

He enjoys it and feels that, unlike on Wall Street, he can have an impact. His first academic research paper, on supervisor leadership and workplace creativity, will be presented at a conference in Montreal this summer. “I am very happy with my decision,” he says. “I have yet to second-guess my choice, and don’t believe I ever will.”

The MBA

Thomas Campbell was one of the countless Columbia Business School grads who had a chance to find his fortune down on Wall Street.

Campbell, however, had already had that life. Before coming to Columbia, he worked as an investment portfolio manager at Merrill Lynch, then as an institutional advisor at Morgan Stanley.

While at Morgan Stanley, Campbell, now 31, worked on a community real estate development project in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla. There he helped the first full-service grocery store open in Midtown, a crime-ridden five-square-mile neighborhood that badly lagged the rest of the city in basic services. Not long after the store opened, the neighborhood showed the first signs of growth in years. The project was honored as the top redevelopment project in the state. Campbell began to see how he could use his financial skills to change his community.

He started his MBA in 2007 and planned to eventually set up his own real estate firm. He reasoned, however, that he would probably need to spend at least two years in investment banking before moving to private equity. From there, he hoped, he would make the transition to becoming an entrepreneur. This roundabout path no longer made as much sense as he watched the market meltdown while in the middle of graduate school.

“I realized that it’s just as risky to work for someone else as it is to start your own business,” he says now. He had that option, though. He was fortunate among his classmates to get an offer from a major Wall Street firm. He declined it.

Instead he’s building a business he started soon after graduating: Thorobird, which will build and rehabilitate low-income housing. His portfolio is now up to seven properties. Says Campbell, “There’s been a tremendous learning curve the past nine months.”

The (Nonprofit) Executive

An interest in the academic side of market theory led Neeti Nundy to Wall Street after she graduated from MIT in 2002. Landing her first job at Goldman Sachs, Nundy worked on the trading floor selling derivatives to large pension funds. The glamour of being a part of a white-shoe firm faded as she realized the deals that she was working on all followed the same structure. Even in a place that was supposed to be the leading edge of Wall Street, she found herself getting bored.

Thoughts of doing something that would have a greater social impact gnawed at her. She compared herself to her brother, a doctor. “I was up for promotion, and had to think about whether I really wanted this,” she says. After four years at Goldman, she decided she wanted to go to a program that focused on social initiatives at the Wharton School, part of the University of Pennsylvania. She began classes in 2006, at the height of the market.

While in school, she learned of Path, a nonprofit that focuses on public- and private-sector partnerships to improve global health. She interned in Path’s Seattle office during the summer, working with startups developing new vaccines to get versions of their medicines to developing countries.

Nundy realized that her understanding of supply chains could be as useful in eradicating persistent global diseases as her brother’s work as a doctor. “I thought the only way to make an impact was to be in the field saving lives. I didn’t realize that there’s this whole field where business skills are needed to solve these problems. I thought it was a basic science problem,” she says.

She took a full-time position at Path after graduating from Wharton in 2008. Since then, she’s traveled to Brazil and India, helping establish programs in each country. She still talks with her friends from Goldman, and says, “Everyone jokes that I made the right timing in terms of my decision to leave.”

The Pizza-Box Maker

When the global economy was brought down by a flurry of bad mortgages, Jennifer Wright wasn’t surprised. She had worked at Citigroup in London for seven years, selling corporate bonds, before she joined the Royal Bank of Canada to work on the investment management side. After that she spent a few years at a firm she won’t name that specialized in collateralized loan obligations, pools of debt that are now blamed for helping to bring down the housing market. In mid-2007, she says, she realized CLOs were going to cause huge problems in the economy. “If the economy was going to get really bad,” she says, “I didn’t want to be in the situation where I was pigeon-holed into CLOs.”

Instead, she went to Columbia Business School in an attempt to wait out the coming meltdown, figuring that if she couldn’t find a job, she should at least spend time broadening her skills. That’s where the pizza box came in.

Wright had a friend, William Walsh, who developed a pizza box in 2003 with a clever series of perforations that allow it to easily tear apart into four serving trays and a sturdy storage container. He received a patent for the technology in 2006, and soon asked Wright, 38, to help him launch a company to bring his design to market.

The opportunity was intriguing, but scary. “I’ve always been a finance person. That’s my identity,” she says. But, she realized it was as good a time as any to start a company. “The golden handcuffs in finance are that if you start your own business, you start to look at the salary you’re leaving. But salaries are coming down. There’s fewer exciting opportunities out there,” she says.

Wright and her partners formed a company called Eco Incorporated and dubbed their signature product the Green Box. The company began attracting interest online after actor Ashton Kutcher mentioned the product on his Twitter feed. A video Wright posted on YouTube in mid-February is now up to more than 400,000 hits.

A few national chains, which Wright won’t name, are now testing the Green Box, and the company is fielding calls from individual pizzerias. Wright is now trying to tap Columbia alums for additional funding. “I’m lucky in a sense,” she says. “If the economy hadn’t turned this way, I might not have pursued this.”

The Volunteer

Two years ago Wendy Franklin had every reason to think that her life would continue as it had before, which at least from a financial standpoint was very, very well. An executive at Bear Stearns, Franklin, 58, stood near the top of the financial world after a 25-year career on Wall Street. Then in the opening act of the financial meltdown of 2008, her firm collapsed beneath her.

Franklin appeared to be among the fortunate few: She worked in Bear’s municipal bond division, a unit that was blameless in the firm’s collapse, and when JPMorgan Chase took over the company, she was one of the handful of people it offered a chance to stay on. Yet to her own surprise, Franklin saw the offer as disturbing and not reassuring. If she stayed, she realized, “I’m going to do this career until someone has to carry me out in a box.”

One of the unexpected benefits Franklin discovered upon leaving her job on Wall Street was the freedom to speak her mind. “I would have hung up on you so fast if you called me a few months ago,” she said on a bright afternoon in late April 2009. “Talking with a journalist? That was an easy way to get fired. But I’m working as a volunteer now, so no one can fire me.”

Franklin had a sterling Wall Street pedigree: a master’s from the Yale School of Management, a 15-year stint at Lehman Brothers, two years at Merrill Lynch and four at Goldman Sachs. Eventually she rose to senior managing director at Bear Stearns, working in municipal finance and helping the Denver International Airport, the New York State Thruway Authority and other public entities to sell tax-exempt bonds.

She was highly paid, but always felt she was doing good by using her banking skills to help the public sector. She was not a risk-taker. Proving that she could leave Wall Street and survive felt like the biggest bet of her life.

Franklin’s retirement lasted all of one day. She received a call from a friend who knew that Surgeons of Hope, an offshoot of Doctors Without Borders, needed help. The nonprofit, which helps build first-rate facilities in impoverished nations and sends surgeons to train local health providers, consisted of only one paid employee.

The transition was rough. The Web site and e-mail system crashed the second that she was there. “If I was at JPMorgan, I could have called so-and-so and they would have fixed it immediately,” Franklin says. “Then I realized, I am so-and-so.” But she began to realize that all of the things she thought she needed–a large, bustling office; a dedicated support staff; a constant update of what was happening in the market–are things she can do without: “I’m not sitting around twitching because I can’t check spreads to Treasuries anymore.”

Moving on from Wall Street, and her former salary, required sacrifices. She carries around a notebook and writes down every purchase, including a $3 coffee, to see how much she needs to live a life she’s comfortable with in New York. While she’s done well for herself in her career, she still needs an income. She’s taken a side job, working as a consultant on transportation projects for 20 hours a week, but her main focus is fundraising for the foundation.

When asked if she’s happy, in a sense, that the financial world fell apart so that she could find a job that she finds so rewarding, she pauses. “It’s just a tragedy that happened. The world was going to collapse anyway. In a tiny, tiny way it presented me the opportunity to see something very clear that I just didn’t have time to think about when I was running around being an investment banker. Somehow it just threw everything in great relief. I was able to pause and say, ‘I have a choice here.’”

The job market for recent college graduates continues to be brutal, but aspiring interns have reason to be hopeful. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, employers anticipate hiring 5.8% more interns this year than they did last.

If you’re vying for one of those coveted summer positions, there are ways to get ahead of the pack. Most important: When hunting for opportunities, make the most of your school’s career services office and job boards–but don’t rely entirely on them.

Make a list of the companies where you’d like to intern, and find a contact at each one. Reach out to your professors, family and friends to see if they can recommend contacts. When you identify a contact, have your mutual acquaintance make an introduction and ask if the contact knows the name of the hiring manager in your department of choice. Also ask if that department has employed interns in the past and, if so, what kind of work the interns did.

Résumés recommended by in-house employees often get first consideration. “Recommendations for students go a long way,” says Shawn Vanderziel, vice president for human resources at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Any referrals receive immediate attention.”

If you don’t know anyone in-house, use resources such as LinkedIn, or just call the company to get the name of the relevant manager. Direct your résuméto that manager–in addition to sending it to the human resources department.

Learn as much about every company as possible, and tailor your résuméand cover letter to each one. Tell how your past experience has prepared you to help the firm achieve its goals. Hiring managers will understand that as a student you may not have professional experience, so discuss your time spent in part-time jobs or in leadership positions in campus organizations.

Once you’ve landed an interview, prepare by doing more research on the company, its products and its clients. Also, run through practice questions with a friend or someone in career services. “You should understand what an employer is looking for and be ready to share examples of your leadership ability,” says Marie Artim, assistant vice president of recruiting at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

In many cases the interview will be conducted over the phone, since companies don’t usually pay to bring intern candidates into their offices. One way to convey enthusiasm during a phone interview is to smile as you talk–as silly as that may sound.

At the end of the interview, ask about the next step in the process. That question will show that you’re enthusiastic, and it will also give you a sense of when to follow up in case you don’t hear anything for a long time. Send a handwritten or e-mailed thank-you note that points out things you liked about the interview. Also use the note to smooth over any rough patches or weak spots in the interview.

Salary is a touchy subject. If your first-choice internship is in the nonprofit sector and getting that experience is more important than getting paid, then say up front that you’re willing to work for free.

“It goes back to what is your goal,” says Shawn Vanderziel. “That determines whether and when to say you’re willing to work unpaid.”

 A new survey shows that about 42 percent of private enterprise employees looking to change jobs would rather work for foreign-funded businesses.

Workers in the private sector seem to be the most active job-hoppers, with 64.5 percent of them saying they are considering changing jobs, according to the survey by Zhaopin.com, one of the largest human resources service providers in China.

The findings coincide with publication of the best-selling novel “Du Lala’s Promotion”, which features a simple girl who started employment at a small private company and worked her way up to a job with one of the world’s top 500 businesses. The young woman has become a shining example for many Chinese employees at relatively unknown private enterprises.

Chen Xu, vice-president of Zhaopin.com, said that changing jobs played a very significant role in career development and people should not only focus on promotion within the same company.

“There are considerable differences between private and foreign-funded companies, including ideology, the way of thinking and communicating as well as different ways of management,” said Zhang Yong, director of human resources at Zhaopin.com.

It would be very difficult for employees of private firms to adapt to the culture in foreign companies, he added.

He said that with the development of the Chinese economy, many Chinese enterprises have been gradually globalizing their outlook. As such, job-seekers should not choose a company just because it is State-owned, private or foreign-funded.

He said the potential for career development should be their top consideration.

Meanwhile, a recent survey conducted by the Shanghai World Expo Group on the job market for fresh graduates revealed that foreign-funded firms are more willing to fire fresh graduates compared with a year ago.

Newly graduated students, for the first time, want to work for State-owned companies because stability has become the main factor in choosing a job in the wake of the financial crisis.

Foreign-funded firms are now second choice, with the number of graduates looking for such jobs decreasing as much as 36 percent from a year ago, the survey found.

Employment in the private sector is still least popular but the number increased to 7.67 percent from 1.73 percent last year. However, private firms are still the most significant employers in the country, hiring 75 percent of China’s workers.

A new office trend has sprung up this year among Chinese white-collar workers involving the posting of photos of former Miss Hong Kong Li Jiaxin in their offices and making her picture their computer desktop image.

It is not that they are necessarily infatuated with her beauty. Rather, it is a humorous way of reminding their bosses about salary increases because the pronunciation of Jiaxin is the same as the Chinese phrase for pay rise.

There are also millions of teacups on sale imprinted with the slogan “I need a salary increase” at Taobao.com, Chinese largest e-shopping site. Many white-collar workers have placed them prominently on their desks or take them to meetings with their bosses.

Song Xi, a 27-year-old analyst working in Shanghai, said: “Of course, it is just a way that young Chinese – including me – are entertaining themselves. Most bosses still retain a distant look.

“I have been working at this consultancy for four years. In 2009, for the first time, I didn’t get any salary increase. It used to be a 10 to 15 percent rise every year.”

According to a recent survey by Zhaopin.com, a human resource service firm based in Beijing, around 66.3 percent of 6,000 respondents didn’t get any increase in their salary in 2009.

The financial crisis placed a big burden on Chinese white-collar workers. About 41.1 percent of the survey respondents felt very unsatisfied with their salary in 2009 and 21.7 percent of them said that a pay rise was their top expectation this year.

Wang Haoshu is a 26-year-old magazine editor based in Xiamen, Fujian province. He said: “A 7,000 yuan monthly salary seems to be fair for people with only three years of working experience. But I feel compelled to complain about my salary, which hasn’t risen over the past year, because of the rocketing house prices. I hope my salary catches up with the growth of house prices. I’m willing to work overtime or burn the midnight oil for a better salary.”

The results of an investigation by All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) showed that based on analysis of the annual reports of listed companies, at 208 State-owned enterprises, incomes of front-line employees are 18 times lower than top executives. More than 23 percent of employees didn’t get any increase in their salary in the past five years.

Wang Wei, 29, has been working for a State-owned manufacturing enterprise in Beijing for five years. “Fortunately, we routinely get salary increases that basically depend on length of service,” he said. “Every year I get hundreds of yuan more, but it is really little better than nothing.”

According to official statistics, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of 10.13 percent from 2002 to 2009. However, the inflation-adjusted income of Chinese employees only grew 8.18 percent annually over the same period.

Zhang Shiping, an ACFTU official and a member of the National Comm

ittee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said during the CPPCC annual meeting in Beijing last month that rises in property and commodity prices have led to a decline in quality of life for some Chinese employees.

More than half of the Zhaopin.com survey respondents said they would look for another job if their salary remained unchanged in 2010.

Li Chunjiang, a 29-year-old trip planner at a State-owned travel agency, said: “I will quit my job if I don’t get any rise in my salary because it is unfair to a hard-working employee like me who hasn’t had any cash bonus in two years.”

He said his 52-year-old mother, who works at a kindergarten, earned 200 yuan more a month compared with last year.

“I can understand that my company encountered many difficulties during the financial tsunami, but to receive no salary increase actually affected my work performance and has made me very depressed,” Li said.

Senior human resource consultants of Zhaopin.com said Chinese people always take the time after the Spring Festival holiday to start thinking seriously about their career.

They said the potential for career development should be a key factor when people are deciding whether to work for a company or not, rather than salary.

Feng Huichao at Horizon Group said frequent small-scale bonuses or increases in salary based on performance was much more effective in encouraging employees and retaining talent.

In addition to the money, Wang Shuili of Horizon Group wrote in a report that corporate managers should try to encourage staff in many other simple but considerate ways, such as offering praise in public or a note of thanks. Such gestures are deemed to boost work efficiency and performance, he said.

A survey by international human resource firm Hudson, found that because of the global economic recovery, about 64 percent of companies it polled were willing to pay a 10 percent higher salary than the previous post afforded to lure talented managers and 24 percent were willing to pay 20 percent more.

More than 1,500 key human resources personnel, mostly at international businesses, were polled in the survey.

Thanks to China’s stimulus plans for domestic consumption, more than 82 percent of polled companies in the consumer goods sector will increase salaries by more than 10 percent. Only 1 percent of polled enterprises in banking and financing said they wouldn’t raise salaries.