Career Change

Used by 93 percent of companies to recruit, LinkedIn is the most popular professional network in the world. But one profession is categorically excluded from it: sex workers. In its updated user agreement, LinkedIn explicitly bars all sex workers, even legal ones, from its site. One prostitute in Nevada calls...

I recently received this question from a reader. Q: I was hired for a specific job with a specific job title. Months later, my employer changed my title without asking me and made me work in a role that I neither wanted nor was qualified for. I wouldn't have left my prior job for the newly changed job title....

SAN FRANCISCO -- Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science. Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write...

By the time that he was 24, Thomas Mickens had at least 20 luxury cars, 20 properties, a 38-foot yacht, a series of businesses, and 50 employees. By the time he was 26, he was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Mickens was released five years ago, with an entrepreneurial spark just as bright. No longer the...

Donna Read never planned to spend the rest of her life working at a grocery store. But the decent wages and great benefits kept her there for 12 years, until she was fired last summer. At age 58, Read fell into poverty, and into a depression that kept her in bed for three months. But now Read is going back to...

Warrior Spirit Band band members Paul Delacerda, King Burton, Sean Foster and Levon Ingram at Rock 4 Recovery. Paul Delacerda has had a long road to his current job as the drummer for a touring rock band composed entirely of wounded military veterans. When he left the Army in 2009, he faced a difficult...

I know a few people in their 40s and 50s who reinvented themselves the old-fashioned way: They went back to school. One became a high school teacher. Another became a psychologist. And a third went through an extensive wine certification program and became the marketing director for a wine retailer. School is...

Something happened last week that has made me call off the hunt for right now: I am flooded with freelance work. I'm up to my eyeballs, which is great -- not only from an income standpoint, but also because it's given me some perspective. After the sobering barrage of comments to my last post about contingency...

The idea of paying someone to help you get a job may strike you as absurd. Yet the practice of using a job coach is growing as workers seek any advantage in a tight labor market. But what would a career coach tell you, if you had the bucks to hire one? Interviews with career coaches uncovered several key...