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"What is the best way to give notice at a job you haven't even started? I am an M.B.A. student who was offered a marketing position in December. I accepted the job, telling the company that I would start in September since I was still in school. Now I have a much better job opportunity in high tech, which I would much rather take. I would have a much bigger impact and turn in a better performance at this second job. How can I tell the first employers that I now want to decline their offer?"

"The pair lives very comfortably, without wants or financial worries. They've had no trouble making friends in their new community because the folks in Belize speak English. They eat out three or four times a week. They barbecue lobster and filet mignon at home. They have reliable Internet to keep them connected to the outside world. By choice, they do not have a television. "I used to think that the news was important," Jason explains. "But not anymore." The retired couple has a maid and a gardener, each of whom visit once a week."

"Early in Ian Graham's new book 'Unbillable Hours,' a John Grisham-like true story of his work as a corporate lawyer and how he helped get a murder conviction overturned, he quickly comes to the realization that working at a big Los Angeles law firm wasn't the best career move. The money is great -- $120,000 as a first-year associate -- but as one of his colleagues points out, working 260,000 billable hours per year comes out to $40 an hour, or what he pays his cleaning lady."

"Big, complex problems require the work of multidisciplinary teams. Consider prostate cancer. Decades of research and billions of dollars have led to the understanding that neither doctors, chemists, biolo­gists, nor engineers can arrive at a cure on their own. That multifaceted approach is gaining acceptance among the vari­ous individuals and organizations concerned with solving great problems. When giving research money to colleges, founda­tions and government agencies often require that investigators come from multiple academic disciplines as a condition of financial support."

"Excerpts from an interview by Wall Street Journal Capital columnist David Wessel with Gail Mellow, who has been president of LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, N.Y. for 10 years. The college, part of the City University of New York, has 13,500 credit and 30,000 non-credit students. (Read the related column.)"

"If "Jackass 3D" is anything like prior triumphs in the franchise, its band of raunchy, anarchic daredevils will make high art of low humor and leave no mishap private - especially if it involves someone's privates. But just try to get Johnny Knoxville and his gang to talk about how much each is paid. In America, money is the last conversational taboo."

"In the writing process, there is perhaps nothing harder than reading one's own work with a critical eye."

""Yes, you really do need to target your resume and cover letter every time." I find myself uttering this over and over again to my students. Whether itis in a class of design students or meeting one-on-one with a business student, they all doubt whether this is truly the case. They cannot believe that they need to go through the trouble of reading through a job description, interpreting what an employer is really asking for, and then demonstrating their interest and skill in these areas. They ask, "Do employers really care?" and some of them raise objections, feeling that targeting their resume is dishonest or "being fake." After several years of struggling with this, I have realized I can relate this issue to something students are more familiar with, something they think about all the time - dating. When placed in the context of an everyday situation where they "target" their communication, they begin to see how important it is to enter into a relevant conversation with a potential employer from the outset. "

"High school graduation rates are one of education's perennial bad-news stories. How bad? In 2008, there were 1,746 "dropout factories," high schools that graduate fewer than 60% of their students. "

"When I do a seminar for prospective career changers, I always ask the audience how many people are using LinkedIn to communicate directly with contacts in their new industries. Typically, only a handful of people raise their hands. But given the fact that tapping the social-media groundswell is one of the best ways to launch a new career, active participation in sites like LinkedIn should be 100%."

"The unemployment rate dropped sharply last month, but employers continued cutting jobs in January as businesses remained insecure about the economic outlook. The jobless rate fell to 9.7% from 10% in December, the Labor Department said Friday, because its survey of households found more people landed jobs than entered or returned to the labor market. But a separate survey of employers, which counts how many workers are added or cut from payrolls, found that 20,000 jobs were eliminated last month. And revisions to last year's data found far more jobs were lost over the 12 months than previously predicted."

Twitter's recently-launched Lists feature is an outstanding new tool that not only improves the overall Twitter experience by allowing you to organize and group the people you follow on Twitter, but that can also help you optimize your job search and personal branding efforts.

"Last year, Jackie Siddall described in a blog post how a message she received on Twitter prompted her to buy a folding kayak for around $1,900."

In a time of increasing competition and economic pressures, employers are faced with difficult recruitment and retention challenges. Learning Plans are a tool used by many organizations to link business needs with individual career development interests, thus potentially engaging and retaining employees for longer periods. Learning plans benefit both employers and employees, as they build a sense of ownership and motivation through communication and negotiation. Self-directed learning allows employees to take responsibility for their own learning and career development, as it involves a level of personal investment. Employers reap the benefits through supporting and investing in their employees, which leads to an increase in skill development, motivation, and productivity. How did Learning Plans come about?

"If you're like most entrepreneurs, you have a lengthy to-do list that never seems doable-no matter how many hours you work. But there's a reason you're not ticking off items, or maximizing results when you do. You've likely organized your task list by deadlines, and you're cranking away on the most pressing items first. A better, smarter approach is to prioritize your list by what matters most."

"Giving kids' allowances raises lots of questions for parents: How much to pay? Should the money be tied to chores - and if so, which ones? Can the kids spend the money freely, or must they save part of it?"

"Interruptions at work, from email and phone calls to co-workers dropping by your office to talk, can complicate the juggle, extending your workday and draining personal time. But how far would you go to eliminate them? Would you book a conference room? Turn off your e-mail? Put up police tape outside your cubicle, to keep your co-workers away?"

"Taking time off work when your kid gets the flu or chicken pox is usually a routine matter. But how do you explain your time-off needs if your teen - or spouse or partner -becomes too depressed to get out of bed, or your child becomes too anxious to go to school? Helping out a troubled loved one in such cases poses a dilemma, because the stigma placed on mental illness forces most people to keep it a secret. Yet a new survey shows people are taking off a surprisingly large amount of work time for this purpose. Some 41% of working adults took from four to nine days off work in the past year to deal with a mental-health issue of their own, or of a friend, family member or co-worker, says a recent survey of 669 working adults by Workplace Options."

"On just about every reality TV show, from "The Bachelor" to "Jersey Shore" to "The Real Housewives" (pick a city -- any city), we hear the same thing: "I don't like drama." But disdain for drama isn't limited to our favorite reality stars. It's also apparent in the workplace. Bing: Don't get burned by office politics"

"I answered my phone recently to hear a friend shrieking in my ear. "Check your inbox for the email I just sent you," he wailed. "And please, please tell me I didn't hit Reply All." What happens when we hit "reply all" by mistake? The result can be very embarrassing to say the least. Elizabeth Bernstein offers some tips on how to avoid making such a potentially costly mistake. You know that feeling: You hit Send-and your heart nearly stops. This shouldn't still be happening. After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness. "