Careers: The Workplace

When the Paycheck Cannot Wait A lot of career advice sounds good when you have enough money in the bank to wait several weeks for the right opportunity to come along. Real life does not always give people that kind of breathing room. Sometimes a person loses a job on Friday and by Monday morning

The Advice That Should Still Matter at Twenty-One Imagine writing advice for two newborn children, sealing it away, and knowing they will not read a word of it until their twenty-first birthday. That changes the way you think because advice built around today’s technology, hottest career, newest investment, or latest social trend may not mean

Change the Conversation When people want more money at work, the natural approach is usually to walk into the boss’s office and ask for a raise. There is nothing wrong with making that request, especially when your responsibilities, performance, or market value clearly support higher pay. The problem is that a direct request can quickly

More Than a Statistic Approximately 22.7 million Black men and boys live in the United States, representing nearly half of the roughly 46.2 million Americans identified as Black alone in recent Census estimates. But those numbers represent real people living at every stage of life. They are boys preparing for school, young men wondering what

The Labor Market Is Not One Labor Market When people talk about the job market, they sometimes make it sound like everybody is standing in the same line waiting for the same opportunity. That has never been how the real world works. One job may have hundreds of people applying, while another employer cannot find

The Difference Between Earning Well and Owning Well Many of us spend a good part of our working lives trying to figure out how to earn more money. We chase promotions, larger salaries, bonuses, impressive titles, and opportunities to work for companies whose names carry a little weight when we tell somebody where we work.