Job-Hoppers, Better Polish Those Negotiation Skills By SARA MURRAY Women expect to do more job-hopping over the course of their career than men, a new survey shows, and that means their salary-negotiation skills are more important than previously thought. The average woman believes she’ll hold eight jobs over the course of her lifetime compared to seven jobs for the average man, according to a new Citigroup Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. survey of more than 1,000 professional male and female LinkedIn members. “Women tend to think about their skills as being very versatile and adaptive,” which helps explain the job switching, said Linda Descano, chief executive for Women & Co., Citi’s personal finance arm for women. But “if we’re going to make all these twists and turns we need to be really strong in negotiation.” A Citi/LinkedIn survey earlier this year showed just one in four professional women has asked for a raise in the past year, a sign that women must build their negotiation skills, Descano said. Still, the latest survey showed that nearly half of women, 47%, said they felt they had achieved their personal goals and considered themselves successful. But in one key attribute – confidence – women still lagged. When asked about the most important factors for success, confidence was second on the women’s list, trailing only behind quality of work. When they were asked to describe themselves, though, women used words like good listeners, collaborative and detail-oriented. Men, on the other hand, called themselves confident and ambitious. “There are perceptions that when you are acting confident or being decisive it can be perceived negatively,” Descano said. When it comes to juggling work and family, roughly the same amount of men and women said striking balance between a career and their home life was a major concern. But women were more likely to say flexible schedules and maternity leave were important to their career happiness. Some 90% of women surveyed said a flexible schedule and the ability to work from home were key drivers of career satisfaction (hear that, Marissa Mayer?), compared to 72% of men who said the same. Women were also more inclined to value time off after childbirth: 56% of women said good maternity leave was important to them, compared to 36% of men who said the paternity leave policy was important. On one point, pretty much every professional was on the same page: They all thought they were hard working. It was the most common word people used to describe themselves.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 14:14:59 +0000