Careers & Education

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IBM is on a mission to transform the nature of work. Upcoming demographic shifts in the composition of the workforce are the catalyst for change in developed countries. By 2025, about 20 per cent of the populations of the U.S. and U.K. will consist of people over the age of 60. In older societies such as Japan and Germany, the comparable figures will be over 30 per cent.

So you have decided on a career in IT instead of, say, being a dancer on Broadway or becoming a fugu chef in Japan. Given that you consider IT more interesting than appearing in 50,000 performances of

Senior executives at the Tokyo Stock Exchange will get between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their pay cut for up to six months following a systems failure that shut down stock and convertible bond trading on the bourse for several hours on Nov. 1, the exchange said in a statement.

Women have been entering traditionally male-dominated fields such as law and medicine in significant numbers in recent years, but they continue to be under-represented in technology-oriented fields such as computer science and engineering.

He has only been in the job six months but Greg Davis, the new president of Dell Canada, is exhilarated about the future. Davis, who relocated from Austin, Tex. to Toronto, said there were great opportunities for the company around Toronto. But he emphasized that Dell Canada's business had grown across the country. He said "enterprise services" would be a key future growth area for Dell Canada, as would be the server and storage space.

The new man in the number-two spot at Novell Inc. has a major task on his hands: how to get the troubled company's business back into alignment. Part of the company's restructuring will be reflected in Novell's upcoming layoffs, due to be announced at the same time as the software vendor's fourth-quarter financial results, he said.

One particular hiring conundrum is hardly a new one for those in human resource management: Is a company better off developing and training specialized workers in-house or hiring skilled workers from outside the company? The question is especially important in fast-paced, technology-based industries where investment in human capital is critical.