THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WHERE THE JOBS ARE : BEARINGS : Thrive on Stress? Telecommunications
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Think your job is stressful? If you’re in the telecommunications or financial services industries, you’re probably right.
Those businesses, along with nonprofit organizations, were ranked the most stressful for employees in a study of 12 industries by the publishing and consulting firm Human Synergistics International.
All of those areas of the economy lately have undergone massive changes, explained J. Clayton Lafferty, the clinical psychologist who is the firm’s chairman. He pointed to cutthroat competition among long-distance telephone companies, retrenchments by banks and investment firms and the intensified fund-raising pressures on nonprofit enterprises such as museums because of the weak national economy.
“There’s been a lot of change, and most people don’t handle change well,” Lafferty said.
The events that produced the most stress were layoffs, receiving no recognition for personal achievements and being passed over for promotions. The conclusions were drawn from the replies of 1,739 employees with 35 organizations in the 12 sectors surveyed.
The complete ranking among the 12 sectors, from most to least stressful, was as follows: telecommunications; financial services; nonprofit organizations; consumer products; automobile manufacturing; gas and electric utilities; health care administration; agricultural processing; management consultants and trainers; chemical processing; educational administration, and state and federal government agencies.
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