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Best Places to Launch A Career AND Raise A Family

Posted by: Lauren Young on September 05

BusinessWeek just came out with its annual list of the Best Places to Launch A Career, ranking 119 employers on areas such as pay, benefits, and training programs.

To find out whether these companies are also family friendly, I compared BusinessWeek’s list to Working Mother Magazine’s annual list of the best 100 companies for working moms. I realize that the focus is on mothers, but aside from lactation rooms and women’s networks, the majority of perks available to working moms, such as back-up daycare and flexible schedules, are available to working dads, too. As for parental leave, many companies offer paid time off to moms as well as dads. Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG are the best companies to start your career and stick around once you have a family. These three companies, which hail from the accounting realm, rank in the top 10 of both lists.

Overall, 35 companies overlap on the two lists, which I spent about an hour combing through so I may have missed one or two companies. To be fair, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison: BusinessWeek’s ranking incorporates government agencies such as the IRS, while the Working Mother list does not. BusinessWeek’s survey also includes service-oriented jobs for those young idealists who want to make the world a better place such as AmeriCorps and Teach for America.

The other companies that overlap:
Deloitte
Goldman Sachs
Marriott International
IBM
J.P. Morgan
Microsoft
Abbott Labs
Merrill Lynch
Verizon Communications
General Mills
Lehman Brothers
Cisco Systems
Intel
Wachovia
Citigroup
Accenture
Kraft Foods
Met Life
Prudential
Blue Cross Blue Shield
Eli Lilly
Grant Thornton
Merck
Booz Allen
Allstate
Hewlett Packard
UBS
Credit Suisse
PNC
McGladery & Pullen

Considering that the average American will have had 10 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38, it’s unlikely that most of today’s college graduates will stay with the same employer from cradle (of their first child) to grave. But aside from a gold watch and a lovely retirement package, there are some good reasons to look beyond employers as mere launching pads. To paraphrase Richard Dawson, the host of “Family Feud,” our survey says these are 35 companies worth staying at for your entire career.

If there are any readers out there who have worked at these companies while raising a family, please share your thoughts on whether or not they are good places to start as well as stick around.

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Reader Comments

Garry Barton

September 11, 2008 04:00 AM

This article is very interesting. A statement that especially caught my attention was that an average American professional is “expected” to change 10 jobs between the age of 18 and 38 (which is around one job every 2 years). Things look quite similar here in the Middle East region. A recent research report by Bayt.com (titled 2008 Human Resource Review) shows that the average professional has changed at least one job in the last five years with most professionals changing jobs once every 2.25 years. According to the same leading jobsite’s ‘Workplace Loyalty’ research report, loyalty levels are quite high with 64% of employees in the Middle East declaring themselves ‘loyal’ to their companies. Employers all over the world it seems are struggling to retain their best talents in these high mobility times!

Gary

September 11, 2008 09:39 AM

Interesting article. It would be nice to have one place where you could have it all in your career lifecycle.

I don't know much about the best places to start a career survey, but I know through some of my colleagues and my wife that the "Working Mothers Best Places to Work" list is often just a PR exercise for these companies, and that the actual culture or practices of many of these organizations is not universally favorable to working mothers.

Having worked at consulting companies, I find it hard to believe that those jobs, by their nature, are very family friendly. If you are talented and successful enough, you can get a family friendly arrangement for yourself no matter where you work. Of course, that doesn't do much for the average worker.

Good job at providing an interesting perspective on something we all strive for: great career in a family-friendly environment.

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About

In this blog, BusinessWeek’s Lauren Young, Cathy Arnst, Diane Brady, Karyn McCormack, Anne Newman, Mauro Vaisman, Lourdes L. Valeriano, and Joy Katz, Mark Hyman, along with freelance writer Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, lead a broad discussion of the issues and day-to-day concerns of working parents, offering up interviews with work/life experts, examinations of relevant research, and their personal accounts of bouncing between separate, sometimes conflicting worlds.

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