Reaching the end of your Pay Band

I have recently read this article on dealing with people that have reached and surpassed their upper limit of their Pay Band. I believe that at the root of this article is the frustration of the employees that have mastered their jobs and disconnect between what they feel like they are contributing to the company and what they are being rewarded for it. While, the most common motivation for people is money and it is frequently stated that said boss is “not paying me enough”. I do feel that tenure often reflects value to the company and should be rewarded appropriately. The fact that there’s a cap on wage increases after a certain figure, should signal to the economist in us of the company’s strategy. It was considered when compiling this pay plan, and people should strive to elevate to the higher pay band every few years with their respective career moves.
Stagnating in one position appears to be even dangerous to the career. It seems like career has momentum, but it’s deceptive because the moves may be years apart. So you have to think about the overall trajectory long term and set goals for yourself. Perhaps even make a project plan for the next five years. Once you do that then you shouldn’t really have a problem with the reaching the top pay band at your company.
Also, elaborating on this topic calls into question loyalty to a company vs. loyalty to a profession. It may seem lucrative and common for people to establish relationship with their workplaces, but that should be resisted. Relationships tend to bring out expectations and their eventual escalation that both parties have from each other. The problem with loyalty/relationship with the workplace is that the workplace is not human (contrary to what the legal system may identify some corporations). You cannot allow yourself to become discouraged in the workplace because of your increasing expectations.
Career can stay within an industry, but should not be limited to the company.

HR Job Search Week 1

My exams have finally came to an end, which means that I have to find a place of employment. During the first week of the job search I applied to 10 jobs online, which were posted on various sites. They were all entry level HR jobs. I understand that the success rate for this kind of job searching method is pretty low, and that there must be plenty of jobs open that are not posted on the mediums that I have checked.
Next week my plan is to start working smarter, I will still sites like indeed.ca and simplyhired.ca, but will also target some companies that I am interested in. I feel like there's a lot of competition out there right now and I can not let them outwork me.
Target for applications next week 20.

Daily Wave, April 6th

The Human Resource Manager Movie
So there have been a few movie out there that have HR manager or someone doing HR related task as the protagonist, but this movie is titled the HR manager, which is pretty new to me. It's also a foreign film, which usually means that people likely put in effort to make this movie. Since there are more hurdles for foreign movies to show up here (Canada/US), we really get just the best from the best. I found this movie here http://hrauthority.ca/human-resource-management/the-human-resources-manager-trailer

For quick access:

Daily Wave, April 4th

Rant
There is an abundance of useful information online, but the fascination with Search Engine Optimization may be viewed as a short cut to creating traffic for your website. For example, you may search for Human Resource blog posts and come across this incoherent exploitation of the SEO system. http://articlesmax.com/why-you-need-human-resource-training.html. That article is not meant to inform, it's meant to show up on the top of the search results because they used Human Resources and related terms around 20 times in 500 word article (if you can call that an article). This is the evolution of those annoying pop-ups that have been really popular a few years back. This is actually related to the post I made about outsourcing and ODesk.The jobs posted on that site mentioned the requirement to write 1 article per day for 1 dollar per article (obviously outsourced to the developing economy country). To avoid this we should learn the Boolean search language (http://www.internettutorials.net/boolean.asp) and use that to really narrow down what you want. 

Private outsourcing

So recently I have bumped into the website called oDesk.com. This site has a neat purpose, which is to bring people that have work and people that want to work together, which essentially is outsourcing work. Now this being the internet, the nature of work is really mechanical, there are plenty of IT assignments offshoring, data entry and blog writing. The best function of this outsourcing site is that it lets you see how many people bid for that job and what the average rate is for those bidders. This approach is perfect for economists, because it’s a transparent competition based on wage (price). This would allow for the most economical results for the employer, who decides that outsourcing is appropriate for their function.

I am just curious to see where else can this approach be applied. I understand that KSAs will have to be measured and monetized. This may prove to be difficult to do for most knowledge based jobs, as well as retail environment because the retailers that want to keep costs down usually pay minimum wage already, and hence cannot benefit from this cost cutting approach, and the retailers that pay above the market do so because of the need to be selective and get the best candidates. Similar approach may be already used for contract positions, especially in the business to business setting, but I doubt that it is transparent, which should be beneficial for the sake of perceived justice.

Beyond the employer this may be useful for someone outsourcing their own work. I’ve first read about that concept in the book called 4-hour workweek. It’s an interesting approach to work and it tries to leverage the technology to essentially become an agent that delegates rather than an employee who contributes to the company. I believe that this approach is in the grey area ethics wise for a number of reasons. First of all you are leading your employer to believe that you are working for them when in fact you can be doing other things with  your time, especially since you have more time after offshoring all of your work to someone across the internet.  Other things can include: distracting co-workers, exposing your company’s confidential information to other parties and so on. Moreover, if the company found out about the arrangement, they would likely cut the agent out and in fact outsource this function, which would reduce the number of jobs available to the society overall.

Daily Wave, April 1st

On-boarding and beyond
This article has some tips on creating a good environment for the new hires. This is useful as I have witnessed numerous times how people can decide to leave after being hired. That's company's money wasted. This helps to mitigate that. http://www.hr-esources.com/03/01/8-keys-to-retaining-the-perfect-employee/