Career Planning/Management

Resume Subscription We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. You will be charged $ + tax (if applicable) for The Wall Street Journal. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Please click confirm to resume now.…

Being young and ambitious right now often means proving that you can be both of those things at the same time.That applies even to 25-year-old Charu Thomas, who earned an engineering degree in 3½ years after completing high school in three years. She founded supply-chain software firm Ox at age 18, raised $3.5 million in funding and, in 2020, made it onto Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.  Yet in a breakfast with investors in the fall, she said they wanted to discuss “quiet quitting” and the motivation of younger…

At the dinner party and the church group, on the sidelines of the soccer game, it is always the second question, if not the first. “It’s like talking about the weather,” says Zac Boller, a 45-year-old Seattleite.  In countless moments far from the office, many of us are still our jobs first. A marketing professional in Texas told me she was asked what she did while high above the trees on a ziplining course, strapped into a harness.  Some of us grasp onto our titles like a life raft, convinced they’re the…

Kip Conforti is hiring for a part-time position at one of two package-shipping stations that he owns in Pennsylvania. He’s filled such roles with high school and college students during two decades in business, but this time his top candidate is a man in his 70s.Mr. Conforti has grown weary of younger employees who, he says, arrive late for shifts, call out of work often and spend more time scrolling social media feeds than chatting with customers. About a year ago, he tried something different—recruiting people who are…

It’s a feeling many bosses can relate to right now: Your team is looking for assurance that jobs are safe. If only you had a clue.Inspiring confidence is a key part of managing people and—many business leaders say—a tricky feat at the moment. A growing drumbeat of layoff announcements have made many employees fearful of a contagion effect. In a recent survey of 35,000 workers, more than a quarter of those in the U.S. said they feared they would be laid off. Worldwide, more than one in three did, according to staffing firm…

A mystery permeates the job market: You apply for a job and hear nothing, but the ad stays online for months. If you inquire, the company tells you it isn’t really hiring.Not all job ads are attached to actual jobs, it turns out. The labor market remains robust, with 10.8 million job openings in January, according to the Labor Department. At the same time, companies are feeling budgetary strains and some are pulling back on hiring. Though businesses are keeping job postings up, many roles aren’t being filled, recruiters…

A new breed of commuter is going to great lengths—and doing a lot of number crunching—to pull off living and working in far-apart places.A super commuter used to mean someone who trekked at least 90 minutes to work each way, often five days a week. But with more companies embracing hybrid work, the new super commuter is one of the many people who now live hundreds of miles or multiple states away from where they work. They commute fewer days but even longer distances.  Making it work often means predawn…

When John Winner (yes, that’s his real name) needs a winning idea, he breaks some of his 45 employees into teams and challenges each group to outdo the others. The co-founder and chief executive of Kizen, a data automation startup in Austin, Texas, believes that friendly rivalries produce better results than having everyone work together. “Competition can be really fun and useful,” says Mr. Winner, 34, who considers himself a math whiz but admits he can’t match the perfect score his business partner achieved on the SAT’s…

Many people with long Covid are legally entitled to accommodations at work to help them do their jobs. Still, some are finding it hard to ask for help.Disability can encompass any number of physical or mental impairments. Often, managers can more easily comprehend the limitations imposed by static conditions, such as the loss of a limb or hearing. Symptoms can ebb and flow over time with chronic illness, such as long Covid, Crohn’s disease or lupus, making the experience more difficult to grasp, say disabled people and…

A familiar host greeted viewers tuning into the Winter X Games on ESPN last month, but many of them may not have known—or known how to pronounce—the name that appeared under his face: Selema Masekela.After going by Sal for more than two decades as a sports commentator, Mr. Masekela, 51 years old, wants to be known by his full name.  Sal was catchy but always felt like a painful compromise, he says, adding that using his given name (pronounced seh-LEM-ah) is about reclaiming part of his identity. He began…