Human Resources

Daily Dose: What About Our Children?

Do you receive a child care subsidy as a Federal employee? Joe Davidson at the Washington Post thinks it’s not enough: Child-care subsidy is spotty for government employees Here’s why: One benefit [the Federal government] provides, at least on paper and to some workers, is child-care subsidies. It’s certainly a good investment to support dayRead… Read more »

Is Your Job Market Competitive? 6 Ways to Find Out

In one of my recent posts, I came up with a silly scheme to determine how long someone’s job search would last. One of the factors in this four-factor formula relates to how competitive your job market is. This data would pretty useful to have before launching a career transition or new graduate study program,Read… Read more »

Take the “Difficult” Quiz

Does your employer think of you as “difficult” … and before you answer that, let me add that difficult employees aren’t necessarily bad employees. Some employees are viewed as “difficult” because they’re effective catalysts for organizational change. They’re engaged in their work and confident in their contributions to the workplace. They clearly communicate their desireRead… Read more »

Counting down the Top 10 GovCon stories of 2010 (Number 10)

Logjam at the Defense Contract Audit Agency – Number 10 SummaryDCAA came into the spotlight in 2008 when the GAO revealed there were inappropriate relationships between DCAA employees and government contractors. According to the GAO, contractors had influenced reports and DCAA supervisors pressured subordinates. To help address the challenges at DCAA, Patrick Fitzgerald took chargeRead… Read more »

Daily Dose: Do New Sick Leave Changes Make You Sick?

The pay freeze has been everywhere ever since it was announced, and rightly so! In fact, some GovLoopers have been talking about ways to make life better for Feds without pay bumps. Well, it looks like OPM is already on it… kind of. According to Ed O’Keefe’s latest Federal Eye piece, OPM is reshuffling theirRead… Read more »

Four reasons not to stop your job search during the holidays

A lot of job seekers assume that the holidays stretching from Thanksgiving until after the New Year are a time to put their job search on hold. If you tell yourself no employers hire over the holidays, no employers interview during December, everyone is physically (or mentally) on vacation…stop! Sure the festive nature of theRead… Read more »

What do 100 MPAs Think about Government

I was honored to spend the last 2 days at Syracuse University with MPA and PhD students in Public Administration, IT, and Public Diplomacy. I had two lunches, 1 dinner, 2 coffee breaks with specific small groups of students, a career talk to 30 students, and a presentation to 100 students about Gov 2.0. IRead… Read more »

Military transition: Career choices

A post by Patra Frame, ClearedJobs.Net’s career strategist So there you are, trying to figure out what jobs in the civilian world will be worthwhile. And here I am, regularly talking success stories and research…. With all the potential careers available, how do you start to choose? First steps are to think about what yourRead… Read more »

Care and Feeding of Your Network: 4 Strategies that Work

I always emphasize the importance of networking for job search, especially in fields that tend to be tight-knit or don’t have the resources to do lots of recruiting at big events or on big job boards, like small and mid-size nonprofit or governmental organizations. The idea is to develop relationships with people in your fieldRead… Read more »

How to Make Lemonade From Prunes: A Career Guide

Have you ever worked for someone who lived by the mantra “We’ve never done it that way and we’re not going to start now.”? If you work for the Federal government, it’s likely that you have. Oddly enough, there still remain many civil service employees across the Nation with more than 30 years of service.Read… Read more »