The poll, conducted by search firm TopGrading Solutions found that 38% of employees found their last job through word-of-mouth or referrals, 20% found their jobs online and 24% via recruiting firms. 7% found their last position by walking in and applying, and 2% found their job through a newspaper or print advertisement. TopGrading Solutions is part of MRINetwork, which recruits for retail and other industries,

TopGrading Solutions surveyed unemployed and employed adults over four months for the poll.

Skipping work without good reason? You have lots of company.

Unscheduled absenteeism at U.S. companies and organizations has climbed to its highest level since 1999, according to results of a recent nationwide survey of human resource executives in U.S. companies and organizations.

The survey, conducted for CCH by the Harris Interactive consulting firm, put the U.S. absenteeism rate at 2.5 percent in 2006, up from 2.3 percent a year ago and the highest since seven years ago when it was 2.7 percent.

It found that personal illness accounts for only 35 percent of unscheduled absences, with the rest due to family issues (24 percent), personal needs (18 percent), stress (12 percent) and entitlement mentality (11 percent).

Nor should they. Those skills are big assets when it comes to multi-tasking and productivity. But they're also a nightmare for many of their bosses, those over 35 who understand that while technology is a useful tool, it doesn't replace relationship building as a primary means for doing business. Today's bosses can't understand why their young recruits, for all their brains and technical acumen, hardly ever come over and actually talk to them.

"I hear from clients that [young professionals'] first instinct is to IM rather than walk over to their boss's office. That can be OK for a quick question, but when you're planning something, you need to talk face-to-face," says Steven Rothberg, founder of Collegerecruiter.com, who places recent graduates into corporate jobs.

The tech disparity between 20-somethings and 40-somethings is far greater today than it was 20 years ago, when today's 40-somethings were the young turks. Over 17 percent of today's workforce is between the ages of 25 and 34, while another 28 percent is made up of employees 55 and over, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show.

That breakdown is not much different than in many past years. But what is different is the speed of technological progress since the mid-1990s, from the Internet and e-mail to cell phones and instant messaging. A recent survey by outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison shows that 60 percent of U.S. corporations acknowledge having workplace tensions among generations.

Ruth Sherman, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based communications consultant whose client roster includes Deloitte, Pfizer and Bank of America, says common complaints about younger workers range from lame handshakes and poor conversational skills to super-casual attire and personal use of company e-mail. Some show up at job interviews in tee shirts. What the Gen Yers don't see, she says, is the meaning and value of gestures and other non-verbal skills that don't come through in a text message.

"My clients are frustrated; a lot of them are throwing up their hands because they can't persuade young people to get it," Sherman says.

Carl Tyler, a veteran of Lotus and IBM who now runs Instant Technologies, an enterprise IM software group, thinks one of the biggest etiquette breaches by Gen Y recruits involves newbies typing paragraph upon paragraph of chat.

"It's a new medium, don't treat it like e-mail," Tyler says.”

A bad boss can drive you nuts! Long hours, low pay. Hard work, no health insurance. The boss gets a golden parachute, you get no pension, no respect. You need a break.

Do not include the name of the company or any personal names or other personal identifiers with the story. For legal reasons, stories including this information will not be posted.

While stress is one cause of high blood pressure, there are a number of other things that can contribute, such as a poor diet, drinking too much alcohol, being overweight or obese, eating too much salt and not doing enough exercise.

Dr Chantal Guimont and colleagues who carried out the latest study acknowledge that other factors may have contributed to the high blood pressure found in the white-collar workers that they studied.

However, they believe job stress is important and may chronically activate the nervous and cardiovascular system.

Dr Guimont said: "Our study supports the hypothesis that job strain, particularly in workers with low social support at work, may contribute to increased blood pressure."

Is your life all work and no play? You may be a workaholic, or in danger of becoming one.

And you're not only not alone, it appears you're being joined by a growing number of others.

On The Early Show Friday, Thalia Assuras reported that more than a-third of Americans will opt to not take all the vacation days they're entitled to this year, and Americans are averaging more than three hours a week more today than their parents did. That's the equivalent of three-and-a-half more workweeks a year.

Mailing Unsolicited Resumes
Unsolicited Resumes are garbage, scrap paper, wasted effort and job-search (junk), according to Jack Chapman, author of "Negotiating your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute." Frank Traditi, Career Strategist and author of "Get Hired NOW!?" feels the same way. He says that people "treat their job search like a direct mail advertising campaign. They expect great response from blindly sending out hundreds of Resumes. They wait by the phone and it never rings. They sit at their computer and never get a response."

2. Looking for "Vacancies"
Many jobs are not advertised. Harvard's Mark Granovetter found that 43.4 percent of jobs are created for the applicant, often at the time of the interview. Traditi agrees. "It's no wonder that job seekers spend many months on their job search, or become so frustrated that they give up looking for work. They are looking in all the wrong places," he says.

7. Not Preparing for Interviews
Prospective job seekers always tell me that as long as I get them in front of the decision-maker they will take it from there. Most people think the purpose of an interview is to "interview." Wrong. The purpose is to eliminate your competition. If you don't know how to do this, then you will not be successful in securing the position or money that you want. You can never be over-practiced or over-prepared for an interview.

A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released on Wednesday.

A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.

To reach the projected pay figures, the survey calculated the earning power of the 10 jobs respondents said most closely comprise a mother's role -- housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.

"You can't put a dollar value on it. It's worth a lot more," said Kristen Krauss, 35, as she hurriedly packed her four children, all aged under 8, into a minivan in New York while searching frantically for her keys. "Just look at me."

One factor may be scarcity. In fields like engineering, a company may get one woman and seven men applying for a job, Farrell said. If the company wants to hire the woman, they may have to pay a premium to get her.

That's because she may have more competing offers than her male counterparts. The reason: not only is she a top performer who can boost a company's profitability but employing her helps a company improve its equal-opportunity standing, which in turn can help it secure government contracts.

Also, where women can combine technical expertise with people skills – such as those required in sales and other arenas where customers may prefer dealing with a woman - that's likely to contribute to a premium in pay.

"She gives people the best of both worlds," Farrell said.

"For some, being honored in front of one’s peers is a great award. For others, the thought of being put on display in front of their peers embarrasses them," he said in a press release. "It depends on the culture and preference of your particular employee base."

70 percent receive verbal praise, but only 49 percent want it. Then there's the 21 percent of workers who want verbal praise but aren’t hearing it.

40 percent who want written praise receive it.

30 percent who want to be singled out through a special event are recognized that way.

29 percent who want a cash bonus as recognition for their work receive it.

27 percent who want incentives such as award merchandise, gift cards or trips receive them.

27 percent who want an award such as a trophy or plaque receive it.

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Whether you're just starting your career or have reached middle management, anyone can benefit from having mentors. Even CEOs have people they can bounce ideas off, and with whom they can discuss their next career move or how to handle that disgruntled shareholder who wants their heads.

If your employer doesn't have a formal mentoring program, you'll have to go it alone and find one for yourself. It could be your boss, a coworker, a person in another department or even someone outside the workplace.

Mentoring should be a two-way street. It's not all about you, your problems and your career. Think about why you need a mentor and how the mentor would benefit from spending time with you. Then approach the person, but don't come across as needy.

Realize that as you work your way up the corporate ladder, your mentors will change.

"It may be someone you outgrow. The dark side of mentorship is that they may begin to see you as a competitor. You must be able to change mentors as you grow," says Larraine Segil, a partner at consultancy Vantage Partners.

Photocopier manufacturers are anticipating a 25% rise in call outs over the festive period because of workers abusing the machines.

Manufacturer Canon said a third of its technicians called out over the Christmas period have to deal with the consequences of staff sitting on photocopiers to make pictures of their bottoms.

In response, the company has increased the thickness of the glass on the machines from 3mm to 4mm to take the strain.

David Smith, marketing director at Canon UK, said: "People obviously let their hair down at Christmas time and the photocopier tends to get a bit of extra-curricular activity."

Office holiday parties are like blind dates: Wear the wrong shirt, tell the wrong joke or drink one too many martinis and your potentially happy future is over before it began. Each year amid the jovial flow of cocktail franks, gin-and-tonics and choruses of Fill Me Up, Buttercup, someone becomes a footnote in their company's holiday folklore, forever labeled as the guy who thought it would be funny to teach the boss's wife to dance the Macarena.

The delicate task of navigating this half-social, half-professional occasion leaves many employees wishing they could simply stay home.

But according to executive coach Marjorie Brody, the office holiday party is an ideal opportunity to raise your profile at work in a positive way and make connections that can help your career.

"Most people think it's a party, and either they don't want to go or they'll go and just eat and drink with their friends. Both of those are mistakes," Brody says. "It's a chance to be talking to people you don't normally speak to and a good opportunity to create an impression."

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.