The companies said 19 of the Times' newspaper sites -- which include the Boston Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the Times itself -- will co-brand their online recruitment advertising Web sites with Monster, with the sites beginning to appear next month.

For Monster, the deal offers a local reach that otherwise might not be possible, enabling companies and recruiters to drill down into local employment markets via the newspaper sites.

"The alliance significantly advances Monster's strategy Barracuda Spam Filter – Free Evaluation Unit to provide highly localized online recruitment and career services, allowing Monster to leverage its expertise and full range of solutions" with local news outlets, said Monster CEO William Pastore.

Getting local could help Monster attract a greater variety of job listings to its site, including positions that would, because of salary or other factors, only appeal to potential employees in specific locations.

Over the past year, Monster has actively signed deals with more than 60 daily newspapers.

On Wednesday, Monster and The New York Times Co. said the local job sites will feature geographically focused content from newspaper partners, as well as job-hunting advice from Monster.

Cardiovascular health is, without a doubt, the place to be. Openings in almost every category in the field are expected to grow faster than other careers through 2010 -- some jumping 26 percent a year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Not only are jobs that keep the heart healthy in high demand now, but they are expected to continue to explode for decades as the population ages and more people need heart care.

We know what you're thinking: years of schooling, right? Not quite. You don't have to be a heart surgeon to work in the cardiovascular field.

"There are so many people behind the scenes," says Lori Shannon, director of invasive cardiac care with Clarian Health.

You may be surprised to learn that most executives say those who work from home for an employer are less likely to get promoted than their desk-tethered counterparts.

But Julie Kampf isn't. Kampf, the president of Englewood-based executive search firm JBK Associates Inc., knows first-hand how tough on a career telecommuting can be. She tried it and suffered, and she has seen qualified job candidates get overlooked because they dared to inquire about working from home – even for one day a week.

"For me, working at home was detrimental,'' says Kampf, who declined to name the employer. She says that when she worked from home in 1993, she put in about 15 hours each workday, and still couldn't please the boss. "Even though I was extremely productive, I was pretty much told 'I need to see your face here' by my boss at the time,'' she said. "It was miserable.''

The study's results fly in the face though of a growing movement. Since 1990, the number of teleworkers has grown to more than 45 million from about 4 million says the Telework Coalition. Even President Bush and other top administrators have championed telework as a vital part of business-continuity plans. Gas prices, traffic congestion and housing costs are also factors driving telecommuting.

Biotechnology has been around for centuries. From farming to food production and storage, biotechnology has touched our lives in numerous helpful ways.

As baby boomers age, there has been an increased demand for new medical procedures and equipment. As a result, biomedical engineering, a field that combines medicine with engineering and biology, is expected to grow in the next decade and beyond.

With an insight into both medical and engineering fields, biomedical engineers work effectively in hospitals, research facilities, academia, government regulatory agencies or as consultants.

Biomechanics, which applies biomechanical engineering to biological or medical problems, utilizes scientific principles to produce new ways of keeping the body functional and healthy. These include the creation of synthetic organs and joints, as well as machines that control body functions, imaging systems like X-ray and ultrasound, and the laser systems used in corrective eye surgery.

Dr. Anna Fels, a New York-based psychiatrist and author of "Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives," published in 2004, said that while women's access to education at all levels has improved, their second-class citizenship often kicks in when they hit work.

Alfia Muzio, 23, who graduated from Columbia University in New York last spring, said that entering the work force can be "exciting and full of promise."

But she also said it can be lonely and intimidating. "The men at my office are totally inappropriate," she said. "They say things of a sexual nature, commenting on appearance in an unwelcome way using 'honey' or 'sweetie' instead of names. It gets very uncomfortable. One guy actually just got fired for sexual harassment. That kind of stuff would have never happened in college."

According to Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions statistics, women filed 85 percent of all sexual harassment charges in 2004.

Maybe you should. But please base your decision on something other than their relative "hotness" at the moment. I mean, Jake Gyllenhaal is pretty hot at the moment, too, but that doesn't make him the boy for me. Same goes for you and these oh-so-fabulous careers that everyone is talking about.

Every time one of those lists of the hottest careers or industries comes out, usually based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I receive a steady stream of questions from readers asking me whether they should pursue one or more of these fields.

Perhaps the most disturbing came from a young man who wanted to know if he should study to be a nurse or an electrical engineer. I told him I didn't know what unnerved me more: the thought of being cared for by a nurse who should have been an electrical engineer or vice versa.

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.

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.

Similarly, you are likely to be more satisfied if you take a job where your work schedule is flexible, you don't have a long commute, you work fewer hours or you have a more senior position.

"The most important thing, if you can pull it off, is to get job security," says Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at England's Warwick University. "In international data and U.S. data, it is the single strongest correlate with overall job satisfaction."

Yet none of these changes is a cure-all. While a promotion or a more secure job is desirable, it's unlikely to bring a large, permanent increase in your level of happiness. As with a big pay raise, you will quickly adapt to your improved circumstances -- and you may end up only marginally happier than you were before.

The number of jobs advertised these days demanding the knowledge of a second language is also a good indication of just how pervasive the need for language education has become. Companies with global aspirations are beginning to realize the significance of having employees who are multilingual and able to communicate with international clients. Simply put, while multilingualism may not yet be considered an essential job skill, in the business community, it is fast becoming an additional skill employers are seeking for. "If you're in competition with somebody else for a job, and you have only the essential skills, the person who has capability and experience in another language gets the edge," claims Zekulin.