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If you're not familiar with CA firms, you may be a little surprised to know that there's such a thing as "recruiting season." Employers will come around university and college campuses during set times of the year - both in Canada and the US - to interview potential employees en masse . The phenomenon of ‘campus visits’ is especially pronounced in the US where there’s a plethora of colleges to visit - smaller campuses often miss out on visits from the Big Four and students who want to get noticed with an in-person interview end up having to travel to a campus visit taking place at another larger school. A reader asks what to do if you had the misfortune to miss out on recruiting season - or were simply unsuccessful in the hunt for a position . Above: Non-big-four recruiting poster in Buffalo's airport. Photo credit: Krupo (as usual) I'm grouping both scenarios together because the methods of dealing with either scenario are ultimately the same. Figure out what...
One reader asked a clever question to one of my recent posts about the market's job situation: Just out of curiosity, how much lay offs are there in the accounting firms? What is causing all these lay offs? I thought the CA firms had a shortage of workers and they were hiring like crazy? I’m not really in the accounting field, so I guess I’m behind on the new… Layoffs are caused by an excess supply of employees, and an insufficient demand for their work - same as in any company. How many layoffs are there and what's causing them? The short answer to both is, "it depends." If you live in a region where there's lots of work, layoffs aren't happening. If you're in a region where some or all audit firms lost business, you'll be looking at 2 to 20 people in a given city's office. Yes, I can't give you a hard number, just some ballpark estimates, and that's because it's all spread around. So much so that when someone hazards a firm number, hecklers...
The TTC's workers are threatening to go on strike again next month, the CBC reports . The rather angry comments left in response jive with me to some extent, though my reaction is muted by the fact I've seen how much idiocy the drivers have to put up with. Part of the TTC union's campaign is to divide the public transit service's economic value by the number of employees and to settle on the result as the employee's value added. Before the economists in the audience bust a gut laughing or just have an aneurysm explode all over their monitors, this quote from the above page's comment list nails the fault in that logic: Do the TTC employees honestly beleive that they are each worth a million dollars? Who are they kidding? I work for a company that has revenues of 346 Billion. With 40,000 employees, does that make me worth $8,650,000.00? Well put. Having said that, some of the TTC's employees do a hard job while still showing customers a polite and friendly face...
Some young man - for all I know, he could even work in the same building as me - writes about his personal finances, and considers the Toronto real estate situation . He identifies two groups of buyers, young urban professional types, and older boomers who want a maintenance-free lifestyle. Well, there's another group - foreign (and domestic) investors who then rent out the pads. And I glare angrily at them for keeping up demand on the market, which keeps prices from slumping in the face of the construction boom gripping the city. Like me, he doesn't like the prices much, nor the condo fees - bleh. And apparently taxes on units are going up super-high, which is only good if you're not living there - at least all those rich young folks and investors give the city something back. You'd think all this construction would slacken off prices, but no. That ECO100 lesson I'll always remember is the one where our professor point out that although condos may appreciate in value...
Francine is continuing her probing look into how the profession operates by taking a look at starting pay . Before we dive headlong into that issue, some personal observations. If you study long and hard, you certainly want to be fairly compensated. Having said that, is studying business really hard? Not really. Lots of the clever people I know burdened themselves with extra course loads or extracurriculars to add some real challenge to their university program. I mean, we're not studying quantum mechanics, or trying to score high marks in chemistry or biology. We're learning about inventory cycles, double entry bookkeeping and how to both fix and break these sorts of things - yay audit. But, there's a high demand for people with a schooling in basic business acumen, which inflates salaries - both of the Commerce grads, and of their instructors. High pay for instructors in Management Faculties translates into higher tuition. If your friends are paying yearly tuition of, say...
Over at one of the discussion forums I visit there was a heated debate about the reason for the higher prices of goods in Canada, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar has hit parity with that of the Americans. The debate spilled over into other various fun topics, including taxes and healthcare. One person commented that taxes have little to do with price differences, "The fact that anyone thinks that stuff like health care and taxes have anything to do with price difference, they deff need to go back to school. You don't add taxes to the price of a car until after you buy it. So this argument about health care and taxes is totally irrelevant to this thread." I decided to respond to that comment, and to then turn my response into a full-blown post. If this was only about the exchange rate difference, that comment would be correct. If you take this debate to be more all-encompassing, the cost of doing business has to be considered as well. Remember that you're not...