by Pamela Weinsaft (New York)
“A career isn’t just climbing straight up a ladder – it is more like a garden lattice. There are many steps along the way and at each juncture, a chance to learn a lot about yourself and your profession,” said Kathleen Weslock, the head of Human Resources at leading software and IT services company, SunGard Data Systems.
The Crooked Career Path
A Spanish and psychology double major at Hood College in Maryland, Weslock started her career as a switchboard operator at the Pan American Health Organization. Because she was fluent in Spanish, less than six months later, she was “promoted” to secretary in the human resources department. The head of employee relations needed someone who could keep information confidential and who could translate for her. “While this job may seem menial to many, I learned a lot from this position and from Mariko; she taught me the importance of having a solid work ethic at an early stage in my career. I learned so much, from basic level employee relations to discretion to the proper code of conduct. She was a marvelous woman,” explained Weslock.
She then went to work as a secretary in the HR and training department of the US Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to the assistant director, where she ran training programs that taught business executives how to lobby in Washington, DC. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.
She then went to work as a secretary in the training department of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to teaching business executives how to lobby in Washington, D.C. She was also rubbing elbows with business leaders, top columnists, and powerful business executives. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.
At one of the labor relation sessions she organized, some of the influential executives encouraged her to go to grad school or law school and pursue labor relations as a career. “At that point I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with my career. I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer, but I did find the thought of a career in labor relations interesting. So it was really a chance meeting with individuals who really cared about helping young people with their careers that gave me the impetus to decide to go back to graduate school.”
Read more
Voice of Experience: Kathleen Weslock, Head of Human Resources, SunGard
Voices of Experience“A career isn’t just climbing straight up a ladder – it is more like a garden lattice. There are many steps along the way and at each juncture, a chance to learn a lot about yourself and your profession,” said Kathleen Weslock, the head of Human Resources at leading software and IT services company, SunGard Data Systems.
The Crooked Career Path
A Spanish and psychology double major at Hood College in Maryland, Weslock started her career as a switchboard operator at the Pan American Health Organization. Because she was fluent in Spanish, less than six months later, she was “promoted” to secretary in the human resources department. The head of employee relations needed someone who could keep information confidential and who could translate for her. “While this job may seem menial to many, I learned a lot from this position and from Mariko; she taught me the importance of having a solid work ethic at an early stage in my career. I learned so much, from basic level employee relations to discretion to the proper code of conduct. She was a marvelous woman,” explained Weslock.
She then went to work as a secretary in the HR and training department of the US Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to the assistant director, where she ran training programs that taught business executives how to lobby in Washington, DC. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.
She then went to work as a secretary in the training department of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and worked her way up to teaching business executives how to lobby in Washington, D.C. She was also rubbing elbows with business leaders, top columnists, and powerful business executives. “But I was still typing,” laughed Weslock.
At one of the labor relation sessions she organized, some of the influential executives encouraged her to go to grad school or law school and pursue labor relations as a career. “At that point I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with my career. I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer, but I did find the thought of a career in labor relations interesting. So it was really a chance meeting with individuals who really cared about helping young people with their careers that gave me the impetus to decide to go back to graduate school.”
Read more
Transition Services Helping Asset Management Firms Make Advances
Featured, NewsBy Elizabeth Harrin (London)
It’s been a long time coming, but asset management firms are finally winning back market share in the transition services arena. As banks and brokers drop out of the marketplace, asset management firms are moving back in.
The Move Away from Transition Managers
Transition services is a business area which helps institutional investors transition from one fund manager to another, switch global pension deals, rebalance their portfolios or shift into a new asset class. It always involves a lot of funds, and it’s always complicated. A year on since Lehman Brothers Holdings – a major player in transition services – collapsed, other global banks have also cut out or scaled back their transition divisions, including Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS.
It’s not always the banks that are pushing investors away as they reduce their involvement in this area. There are signs that investors are also losing confidence in the bigger names, and turning to specialist or smaller firms – firms that can provide the certainty that their transition services business is a key market distinguisher. The shift in market share has also been helped by the fact that technology and trading venues that were once only available to broker/dealers are now much more widely accessible and firms choosing to put transition services at the heart of their business have the technology skills and budgets to put them on a level playing field.
That said, transition managers themselves are expensive people to have around: they have a highly skilled role, often with a broad background in finance and excellent risk management ability. They also have to be great at managing the relationships with clients and keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time. No investor wants to start a massive portfolio shift and build a relationship with someone in a firm where transitions are an ancillary part of the business and could get cut in the next round of cost-saving measures. Read more
Women Leading the Way in Sustainable Investments
Green is GoodGreen mutual funds might seem like the hottest new trends on Wall Street but women in this industry are adamant that green investing is not a passing fad. According to the Social Investment Forum, an association of socially responsible investing firms and professionals, socially responsible investing represents an estimated $2.71 trillion. From 2005 to 2007, this segment of the market grew at a rate of 18 percent.
“Green business is not a trend,” says Vicki Radden, Managing Director of the Capital Markets Partnership. “It’s a new way of approaching business that is not an option. It is a requirement.” The Capital Markets Partnership (“CMP”) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition of investors, investment banks, insurers, city, state and federal government, countries, and NGOs creating a market shift toward sustainable investment. Says Radden, “The Capital Market Partnership provides advocacy for various financial products and pushes forward the agenda within the capital markets to drive financial entities to develop, support, invest and promote.”
Radden likens the so-called trend in sustainable investing to the dot com era in the early nineties. Back then, companies viewed adding a dot com to their names and creating an Internet presence as a “hot” idea and key differentiator. However, a few years later, it was standard operating procedure; a requirement for doing business.
Read more
Ask-A-Career Coach: What Do You Do When Your Contacts Don’t Respond?
Ask A Career CoachContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
I have left several messages for people who know me well, but they haven’t called me back. What else can I do? I’d like to talk to them about my job search.
I’m not sure from the question how many times you have tried to reach your contacts, but I always advise a minimum of three times, including different medium (i.e., phone and email, not just one or the other). With email, you are never sure if the person even received it. Perhaps it went to his/her “spam” folder. Perhaps the person thought s/he responded but accidentally deleted it instead. The same goes for a phone message. So, at a minimum, you should try to contact someone three times by at least two different methods.
Read more
Voice of Experience: Christi Pedra, CEO, Siemens Hearing Instruments
Voices of Experience“My [25 years] at Siemens hasn’t always been a vertical rise to the top,” she said. “I’ve taken many lateral moves and they’ve provided me with some excellent, much-needed experience. You’ve got your feet firmly planted, but sometimes you need to move to the left or right before you can make it to the top.”
Pedra has a knack for seeing opportunities others might miss if they only look upward. After graduating from a state college, she started her climb with non-profits such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the March of Dimes and spent a great deal of time managing community outreach.
In 1980, Pedra entered the business world via the telecommunications industry, first with Nortel, then with ROLM. While working on an MBA from Rutgers University, she continued her career climb, this time at Siemens. There, she volunteered for projects offering significant growth potential, but these also required her to venture into unfamiliar territory.
“You can’t be afraid to go out on a limb,” Pedra said. “That’s where the fruit is.”
Read more
Happy Labor Day!
NewsExecutive Women in East Asia: Still Few and Far Between, But Growing in Number
Office PoliticsWomen make up only 10% of all the executives in South Korea and most corporations have only one or two female executives. And it is worse in the financial industry: Hye-Ryun Kang and Chris Rowley note in their case study, “Women in Management in South Korea: Advancement or Retrenchment?,” in Women in Asian Management that out of 710 executives in 140 companies only 1.1% in that East Asian country’s finance firms are female.
“Contrasting with worldwide trends, this time of feminization in financial areas,” observe Kang and Rowley, pointing to data that show South Korea’s ranking behind Canada (35%), the United Kingdom (33%), Mexico (22%), Hong Kong (21%), China (19%) and Egypt (11%) in terms of the percentage of female managers.
So why the disparity? To begin, culture. “Confucianism is often characterized as a system of social and ethical philosophy rather than a religion,” explains Judith A. Berling, a professor of Chinese and comparative religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. “[It] built on an ancient religious foundation to establish the social values, institutions, and transcendent ideals of traditional Chinese society.” And Confucian values support male superiority and female subordination, according to Vimolwan Yukongdi and Rowley in their book The Changing Face of Women Managers in Asia.
Read more
Voice of Experience: Alison Sanger, Chief Operating Officer, Ironwood Capital Management
Voices of ExperienceThe last nine months have been the toughest of Alison Sanger’s career. As COO of Ironwood Capital Management, she has worked incredibly hard to help the firm navigate the choppy waters of the financial crisis. But Sanger had an additional challenge as she had her third child right in the middle of the chaos. “It was a kind of a crazy intersection of all things. I’m a ‘put one foot in front of the other’ kind of girl, so I think that, right now, I’m most proud of having survived and come out the other side.”
Sanger hails from a small town in Michigan, and majored in accounting at Miami University (Ohio). But when she first entered university, accounting seemed the least likely path she would take. “I tested out of all the English classes but into remedial math going into college. So how does someone like that end up in accounting? I’m really competitive and considered it a challenge. So I got to work and took a lot of math classes. And, as I took the classes, I realized I was good at them and enjoyed them. That, combined with the idea that I would be employable in a very slow job market, is what got me into accounting.”
Read more
10 Tips for Managing Gen Y
Expert AnswersGeneration Y (also known as ‘The Millennial Generation’) are people born between the late 1970’s and early 1990’s, and represent the demographic cohort following Generation X. Chances are you have some in your department. They don’t have the same approach to work to that of their older colleagues. We offer up our top 10 tips for managing that population:
Read more
Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do I Talk About Being Laid Off In The Job Interview?
Ask A Career CoachWhile layoffs are more common and carry less stigma, it is still true that employers generally prefer employed candidates to unemployed. So you need to be truthful and acknowledge the layoff, but you don’t need to dwell on it. In fact, you want to move away from the topic quickly and refocus back on the positive aspects of your career. A good way to structure what you should talk about is to take your cues from the employed candidates:
Read more