Highest-Paid Public Employee Earns More Than $5 Million A Year

In recent years, there’s been a simmering debate over whether public employees are overpaid. Periodically, there are stories about principals, bureaucrats or janitors who somehow managed to work the system and get obscene pay. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has produced research that shows federal workers are paid 30 to 40 percent more than they would be in the private sector. But other studies have come to the opposite conclusion. But it took an online sports website, Deadspin.com, to crunch the data to identify which state employee is the highest paid. And surprisingly, in 41 of the 50 states and Washington D.C., the highest paid employee is a college sports coach. At the top end, a handful of coaches at state universities earn more than $5 million a year, according to newspaper reports. . Thirteen are basketball coaches; and there is just one hockey coach. Only one of the 41 coaches works with a women’s sports team. The lone exception? Full Article…

A Boss’s Open Letter To Workers Who Want To Quit

Two people quit my company this month. That’s OK; it happens. Before these unfortunate events, I liked these employees a lot. Afterward, I only liked one of ‘em. The woman who quit “the right way” will discover that she lost a boss but found a long-term champion of her success. The other employee may as well be dead to me. Quitting a job sounds like it should be straightforward, right? Yet as in all things career-related, there’s a right and wrong way, and how you approach these delicate situations could have longer-term impacts than you might consider in the heat of the moment. From my perspective, the graceful exit is a lost art, especially among the millennial set. To be fair, they don’t have a lot of experience with quitting an employer. The oodles of time that a typical millennial spends thinking about the workplace tends to focus on perfecting the resume, the cover letter, the thank-you note, and later, mastering the rocky apprenticeship period, and looking for opportunities to advance. Full Article…

After 20 years, American cars are hot again

Automotive  While Detroit has changed much for the better in terms of start-up activity and economic diversification, its renaissance is also circling back to the four-wheeled heritage the city was built on. Excerpt: “Detroits boom-and-bust history was built on a dependence on big, fuel-thirsty vehicles. Now, with freshly stocked showrooms of new cars and more-efficient trucks, U.S. automakers are gaining ground on their Asian competitors with the best lineup in a generation. “No matter what the economy does, no matter what fuel prices are, Ive got a car for all seasons,” said Chuck Eddy, a Chrysler dealer in Youngstown,  Ohio, who is seeing sales boom for Dodge Dart compact cars and Ram 1500 pickups. “I didn’t have that in ’09.” “Detroit is arguably much more competitive than they have been, from the broad spectrum of their lineup, in a decade or more,” said  Jeff Schuster, an analyst with researcher LMC Automotive. “Right now, Detroit has the momentum.” More here. Give Full Article…

Keeping your professional development continuous

Keeping up-to-date with professional development can support you in an unstable jobs market. Photograph: Jack Sullivan/Alamy

Do you remember leaving school or university and thinking that exams and assessments would be a thing of the past? It doesn’t take long to realise that the workplace can be an equally intense and competitive learning environment.

Whether we like it or not, employees are constantly being judged on their capabilities and benchmarked against their peers. And, unlike studying for a qualification, the goalposts in the workplace keep moving. This might be because of new technology, customer demand, legislation or simply because there is a new chief executive with a different vision. All these changes invariably have implications for the staff.

Some organisations are good at providing learning opportunities when they can see a direct benefit to the organisation.

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