Tips on staying happy and motivated in your job

Newswise
Tags: talent management

If you have a job during this recession, be thankful you do. It could be tough finding another.

Unemployment is hovering near 10 percent – the highest in more than 26 years. That figure doesn’t include those involuntarily working part-time (one to 34 hours a week) or those who gave up looking for jobs for one reason or another and fell off the unemployment rolls.

As a result, a huge pool of talent is competing for a limited number of jobs – at a time when businesses remain cautious about hiring. In a Huntington Bancshares Inc. survey of 200 small business owners in the Midwest, for example, only about a fifth said they expected to fill positions in 2010. Sixteen percent said they didn’t expect to ever reach their pre-recession levels of staffing.

So even if you’d like the challenge of a new job, you may have to wait out this economic slump, says Butler University executive-in-residence Marv Recht. How do you stay happy and motivated at work? Recht suggests the following:

Marv Recht has more than 35 years of career counseling and human resources experience, working for General Motors Corporation and human resources consulting firm DBM. Now retired from corporate life, he works at Butler University as an executive-in-residence for the College of Business, where he teaches courses on career planning and development, and serves as an academic advisor.