The Homa Files

Jen Folsom, MSB MBA ‘02, got some nice press in Newsweek … she’s become one of our rockstar alums ! 

Way to go, Jen.

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Newsweek, The Vanishing 9-to-5 Job, June 25,2010

On a typical weekday, Jennifer Folsom works from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to about 8 p.m. Her hours may sound like they belong to a college student cobbling together a hodgepodge of part-time jobs, but Folsom is the director of a successful D.C. headhunting firm where she oversees a handful of employees with equally irregular schedules.

“We get the job done and I work 50 or 60 hours a week,” says Folsom, who adapts her work schedule to give herself time with her three sons. “I just don’t necessarily do it from 9 to 5.”

As the traditional U.S. workday continues to fade, Folsom’s experience may soon become the rule rather than the exception. Two generations ago, America’s workforce — from Ford’s assembly-line workers to IBM’s “company men” — would show up to work at 9 a.m. on the dot and leave the second the whistle blew at 5 o’clock. Now, one in five Americans works mostly nonstandard hours — nights, weekends, or rotating shifts.

Experts believe that statistic will balloon in coming years as the Great Recession accelerates a cultural shift in the corporate world, allowing more employees to tailor their work schedules to preference, position, and personal life.

Folsom has seen this firsthand. Her company, Momentum Resources, is designed to place professionals in senior-level positions with flexible hours.

When she helped start the firm in 2007, her biggest challenge was convincing CEOs that their stringent loyalty to the 9-to-5 workday was impeding them from acquiring top talent, specifically working mothers with impressive résumés.

“They just weren’t set up to do it,” she says. But the model has proven remarkably successful at companies like Best Buy and employers seem more willing to adapt these days: since 2007, Momentum has placed flex employees with more than 250 clients in the D.C. metro area, and Folsom says demand is growing.

Full article:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/25/the-vanishing-9-to-5-job.html

This entry was posted on June 29, 2010 at 6:15 am and is filed under Careers & Interviewing, MSB - School & Alums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.