Found out about this employee blog network hosted by Honeywell HR that was aimed to promote and entice people to join their company. A recruiting blog, if you will. Some of the blogs are pretty well-written too.

In another era, the task of caring for elderly parents often fell to the unmarried daughter who never left home and never worked for a living. But now, in a 21st-century twist on the 19th-century spinster, career women like Ms. Geist who have made their mark in the world are returning home to care for parents in old age.

They are embracing a filial role that few could have imagined in their futures and are doing so by choice. In fact, sociologists are beginning to give the phenomenon a name: the Daughter Track, a late-in-life version of the Mommy Track, a career downsizing popular with younger women.

Women, now as always, bear a disproportionate burden for elder care and often leave jobs, either temporarily or permanently, when the double duty becomes overwhelming , according to recent studies of family care-giving, women in the workplace and retirement patterns. Although there is no precise count of how many women have walked away from careers to care for their parents, more of them than ever are financially independent, unmarried or childless, which makes it more feasible than it might be for women with families at home. And never have more parents needed adult children to care for them, what with long life expectancy and disabling conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

"Smart corporations are paying attention" to the challenges that caring for elderly parents presents, said Meryle Mahrer-Kaplan, vice president of advisory services at Catalyst, which has more than 300 corporate members interested in the issues of women in the workplace. "It's so pressing because you can't plan for it, you can't put it off, and it's not a good-news activity. It weighs people down."

"What pharmacists do and what they will do is shifting," said Kenneth M. Hale, assistant dean of OSU’s College of Pharmacy. "When I was a young lad, the American Pharmacists Association had a code of ethics that said pharmacists couldn’t counsel patients. Now, it’s unethical not to. The clear line between doctors and pharmacists has changed." The need to fill prescriptions has been partially addressed by technology improvements and the use of pharmacy technicians. But that hasn’t helped with increasing pressure on pharmacies to become more involved in helping patients manage their drugs, especially elderly patients who might take several medicines, said Dr. David Knapp, dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland. "Every hour of every day, dozens if not hundreds of prescriptions are coming across the counter," Knapp said. "They are trying to do that while at the same time counseling patients, calling physicans, helping diabetic patients manage eight or 10 medicines, teaching parents how to help their child use his new asthma inhaler." To train more students to become pharmacists, 20 pharmacy schools have opened in the past five years, including one at the University of Findlay. The Northeast Ohio College of Medicine Board of Regents approved a program at that school this month. Classes will begin in 2007.

His goal, he said, was to land a face-to-face interview the next time a job opened up in the department. That's was the only way, he felt, that he could overcome his lack of experience and training in communications.

"I even made up a mantra for myself: Passion trumps pedigree," he said.

Had that not worked, McCormick says he would have started looking elsewhere. "In my mind I was fully prepared to leave the company to do what I wanted to do."

In January 2003, communications positions opened up, and it wasn't until the end of the summer that McCormick got the job, nine months after he had started his career introspection.

Global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas points out that last year, retailers added nearly 700,000 workers in October, November and December to handle the onslaught of shoppers. More than half the workers were added in November.

CEO John Challenger says there are several things you can do to raise your chances of landing a job. Among them, start now. He also says consider becoming a fill-in. You can get a foot in the door by offering to start working now as an on-call fill-in for vacationing staffers.

As always, early applicants will have the most options, but it also pays to stay in the game into peak season.

"We start as early as possible and stagger our hiring," says Sheliah Gilliland, a spokeswoman for Blairs, Virginia-based online retailer eToys Direct. "We begin the big hiring push in early September, then continue into November, according to our forecast and week-to-week sales." According to Gilliland, eToys projects it will hire more than 1,300 seasonal associates in 2005, in roles ranging from "fulfillment, pick-and-pack and quality control to smaller numbers of recruiters, IT and loss-prevention specialists as well as maintenance people."

The report, based on a survey of those who gave birth for the first time between 1961 and 2000, shows more mothers-to-be working during pregnancy, often into the final month.

About 57% of new mothers in 1996-2000 had worked full time while pregnant compared with about 40% in 1961-65. And of those employed between 1996 and 2000, more than half worked into the last month of pregnancy. After giving birth, 65% returned to work within a year.

Women with a higher education level are likely to be in higher-paying jobs and tend to stay on the job longer while pregnant and return sooner, the report suggests.

Fifty-nine percent of companies say they won't be giving out holiday bonuses in any form this year. And of those that will, only 13 percent said they will be giving out bonuses in cash.

The rest will opt to give food gifts, gift certificates or retailer gift cards, according to a survey released Monday by Hewitt Associates.

Among the companies that said they would be giving cash, the average holiday bonus planned is $683, but the cash bonuses slated range between $25 and $2,500.

Employers said they would spend between $10 and $150 on gift certificates; $10 to $50 for food gifts; and $10 to $100 on retailer gift cards, according to Hewitt's survey.

Good technical skills won't be enough for workers who want to hold onto their jobs in IT, as staff need to show off new business skills to attract employers.

Scepticism about the effectiveness of IT, increasing automation and offshoring will lead to the emergence of a new breed of IT professionals who combine technical aptitude, local knowledge, knowledge of industry processes and leadership ability, according to analyst Gartner.

Workers will have to prove they understand the realities of the business, such as industry and customer issues and regulation, as three out of five will have business-facing roles within five years.

Diane Morello, vice president of research at Gartner, said in a statement: "Some will be bolstered, some will be carved up, some will be redistributed and some will be displaced."

Technology infrastructure and services. Opportunities in technology infrastructure and services, the foundation of the IT profession, will grow in service, hardware and software vendors-many in developing economies-and wane in user companies. Network design will remain strong everywhere.

Information design and management. Business intelligence, online consumer services, work enhancement initiatives, search-and-retrieval practices and collaboration all will grow in user companies, systems integrators and consulting companies. Linguistics, language skills, business and cultural knowledge, and knowledge management will be fertile ground.

Process design and management. IT professionals can look at process opportunities from three angles: competitive business processes, design of process automation and operational processes. The first will be the "sweet spot" for companies; the second, for software vendors; the third, for outsourcing vendors.

Relationship and sourcing management. Far removed from the traditional skills that IT professionals pursue, relationship and sourcing management will gain ground, demanding strengths in managing intangibles and managing geographically distributed parties with different work outcomes and cultures.

Take Yazuya, a highly profitable mail-order firm selling health supplements in the city of Fukuoka. A visit to one of its offices surprises, and not just because of the plastic cartoon cats climbing up the outside wall. On the ground floor, a large space is given over to flower-arranging and dances at the weekend. A canteen upstairs serves wholesome food at low tables over tatami mats. The offices are bright, airy and dotted with flowers, in contrast to the usual workplace oppression. And the staff are overwhelmingly women, even at management level.

Yazuya is an exception in Japan. Female participation in the labour force, at 55%, has risen in recent decades, but lags well behind Britain (61%) and America (62%), with many women, says Kathy Matsui, an analyst at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, dropping out completely to raise children. Less than 10% of managers are women in Japan, compared with 46% in America.

A lot of hair-pulling has gone on over youngsters unwilling to commit themselves to a full-time career. Ms Yazu maintains that the solution is to give younger employees a participatory style of management and "a sense of ownership" in what they do. In the year between a university student's recruitment and her start at work, she is sent newsletters, her uniform (designed by staff and voted on at a company fashion show) and assorted company philosophies set down by Ms Yazu's late husband that the new recruit has to memorise. A letter to her parents is a solemn undertaking that the company will "nurture" its new charge. To a western ear, this all sounds a bit freaky, but it seems to work. Departures from the company are almost unheard of.

Conflict can also flare up over management style. Unlike previous generations who've in large part grown accustomed to the annual review, Gen Yers have grown up getting constant feedback and recognition from teachers, parents and coaches and can resent it or feel lost if communication from bosses isn't more regular.

"The millennium generation has been brought up in the most child-centered generation ever. They've been programmed and nurtured," says Cathy O'Neill, senior vice president at career management firm Lee Hecht Harrison in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. "Their expectations are different. The millennial expects to be told how they're doing."

Matt Berkley, 24, a writer at St. Louis Small Business Monthly, says many of his generation have traveled and had enriching experiences, so they may clash with older generations they see as competition or not as skilled. "We're surprised we have to work for our money. We want the corner office right away," Berkley says. "It seems like our parents just groomed us. Anything is possible. We had karate class, soccer practice, everything. But they deprived us of social skills. They don't treat older employees as well as they should."

60% of workers rate time and flexibility as a very important factor in retention, but only 35% of employers feel the same.

Only 49% of employers rate financial compensation as a very important driver of retention, but 69% of workers believe it is.

On average, employers only expect 14% of their workforce to leave in the next year, but Spherion data shows that nearly 40% of U.S. workers intend to find a new job in the next 12 months.

Less than half (44%) of U.S. workers believe their companies are taking steps to retain them and nearly a third (31%) believe there is a turnover problem at their company already.

Only 34% of HR managers mention turnover/retention as a key HR concern.

One of the biggest disconnects between employers and employees is the importance workers place on their ability to maintain a balance between their professional and private lives. In its previous Study, conducted in 2003, Spherion found that 86% of U.S. workers agreed that work/life balance and fulfillment was a top career priority and 96% agreed that an employer was more attractive when it helped them meet family obligations through options like flextime, telecommuting or job sharing. However, it appears that U.S. employers have not significantly responded to that need.

According to the 2005 Study, one-third of workers between the ages of 25 and 39 feel burned out by their job and 28% of all workers say their employers expect them to stay connected to the office outside normal office hours. At the same time, only 24% of employers offer a formal flex-time program, only 12% offer telecommuting and 11% offer job sharing.

Even more concerning, many companies don't plan to implement work/life balance programs at all. In fact, 61% of all companies stated they don’t plan to offer job sharing, 56% don’t plan to offer telecommuting and 33% don’t plan to offer flextime.

According to The Economist magazine, for example, the U.S. government's Glass Ceiling Commission reported in 1995 that women held 45.7 percent of all jobs in the nation but only 5 percent of senior manager positions.

Ten years later, in 2005, women made up 46.5 percent of the work force, but the number in top management positions -- despite the increased publicity given to the issue and recommendations of the Glass Ceiling Commission -- had only grown to less than 8 percent.

Today's work structure was constructed by and to suit men in the days when the husband went to work and the wife stayed home and looked after the home and family. The perceived wisdom was that the husband, after a stressful 9-5 day at the office, returned to the bosom of his family to be soothed and fortified for the next day. Today, it is still widely accepted -- by women as well as men -- that the nurturing role remains the province of women.