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10 sexy jobs

By Candace Corner
CareerBuilder.com

(CareerBuilder.com) — Money, power, fame and glamour are just some of the elements that take a career choice from tedious to tantalizing, but there’s a little more to it than that.

In the same way that physical beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the definition of what qualifies as a “sexy” is a matter of what you find most attractive about a job’s responsibilities.

Firefighters are sexy because their role requires bravery, and doctors have sexy jobs because they have commitment and credentials. Danger and intrigue can also factor in to what we find alluring.

If there’s one other thing sexy jobs share with the perceptions of physical beauty, it’s that society, for the most part, creates a general guideline for what makes a job hot. We find interest in the rich and famous and the jobs that seem to have the best perks.

Here are some examples of jobs that sizzle:

1. Showgirl

Why it’s sexy: Their job involves performing dances in elaborate, revealing costumes onstage.

Where you’ll find them: For the most part, it’s Vegas, baby. They’re onstage, in the dressing room or working out.

The pros: They’re in the spotlight, in peak shape, and always look amazing.

The cons: It’s harder than it looks, and involves constant exercise and a lot of practicing. Costume headpieces are heavy and people often confuse showgirls with being part of the sex industry.

2. Couture salespeople

Why it’s sexy: The rich and famous often shop high-end. The right store and location means there is a likely chance of working with A-list celebrities and other beautiful people.

Where you’ll find them: Mostly in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Milan, but basically anywhere where wearing the latest trend is more important than the price tag.

The pros: It opens up opportunities for meeting the right people to launch a future position in fashion or as a personal assistant. And you can’t beat the employee discount.

The cons: Retail is still retail, so expect to continue folding sweaters, re-organizing racks and assisting crabby customers.

3. Fashion journalist

Why it’s sexy: These people know the industry inside and out, attend all of the fashion shows and schmooze with designers and other influential people.

Where you’ll find them: In the press seats by the runway and on location for interviews. While it’s not mandatory, there are more people working in the major fashion capitals.

The pros: Amazing samples and the opportunity to meet some of the biggest names in the business.

The cons: Finding work can be difficult. Writing reviews in this industry means a lot of working hours and dealing with city expenses and difficult people.

4. Runway model

Why it’s sexy: They showcase the latest fashion and their job is to be beautiful.

Where you’ll find them: On the runway and at fashion shoots, largely at the fashion capitals, but also anywhere there are designers looking to show the public their newest creations.

The pros: They have a reputation for being hot and they get paid for it.

The cons: Competition is fierce. The model look that’s in-demand at the moment may not be what designers are looking for next season.

5. Hotel concierge

Why it’s sexy: They’re smooth operators and know all the right people and places in the area.

Where you’ll find them: At upscale hotel locations and around the grounds making sure everyone’s happy.

The pros: Area businesses are more likely to treat you right, since you recommend new business.

The cons: Long hours and the not-so-glamorous duty of dealing regularly with difficult personalities.

6. Makeup artist

Why it’s sexy: They transform and enhance people’s looks to be their best or most interesting.

Where you’ll find them: At counters, on film sets, in dressing rooms and anyplace else where someone is going to be televised, photographed or doing a big appearance.

The pros: There is an amazing chance for advancement from counter rep to launching a signature beauty line or garnering celeb clientele once a reputation is established.

The cons: A client with a good experience will say a lot, but so will those with bad experiences. Word-of-mouth creates the biggest buzz, so this could work against a makeup artist.

7. Stunt double

Why it’s sexy: Stunt men and women defeat the odds while they leaping off buildings, cruising through fires and conquering car crashes. The thrill and the danger create a high.

Where you’ll find them: Somewhere dangerous or somewhere relatively safe and doing something dangerous.

The pros: They get the reputation of surviving some of the most death-defying acts humanly possible.

The cons: Stunts don’t always get the recognition they deserve in the public eye.

8. Magazine photographer

Why it’s sexy: They are paid to capture images of beautiful and interesting people and locations.

Where you’ll find them: At photo shoots and in dark rooms. The majority of the work is in New York and Los Angeles.

The pros: Their creative vision pays off, literally.

The cons: Expensive and heavy equipment, finding the right frame and needing to talk your subjects into your ideas.

9.Club owner

Why it’s sexy: They are their own bosses and they create the atmosphere where people go to party.

Where you’ll find them: Working the room and overseeing the scene.

The pros: As the owners of the area hotspots, everyone wants to know them. Reputation makes the business.

The cons: Trends come and go, and if club owners can’t keep it interesting, patrons will party elsewhere.

10.Professional investigator

Why it’s sexy: Their job is all about uncovering confidential information, whether it’s insurance fraud or cheating spouses.

Where you’ll find them: Doing research, testifying in court or on location for surveillance.

The pros: Uncovering infidelities and getting justice for the romantically wronged is their bread and butter.

The cons: Serving subpoenas and other court-related work is the unglamorous side of their business. The work can also be sometimes perceived as seedy by the general public.

The Talent Behind ‘China Inc.’

By Thomas Hout and John Wong

From The Wall Street Journal Online

A stereotype is forming around China’s acquisitions in the U.S. — buy fast rather than build slow. Lenovo’s buyout of IBM’s PC unit, TCL’s buyout of France’s Thomson and with it RCA, and now Haier’s bid for Maytag all suggest that China is in a hurry to go global and will freely spend low-cost money to acquire our brands and distribution access, plus secure an outlet for their low-cost products made in China.

The problem with this view is that China’s most successful acquisitions to date in the U.S. have little to do with China’s low-cost money and workers or buying our brands. They are instead all about Chinese management skill and U.S. workers. These no-name Chinese acquisitions are turn-arounds founded on hard-nosed Chinese business practices, and they import less product from China than most U.S. manufacturers do.

Haier in fact doesn’t fit the mold either. It has spent 10 years building its own brand in the U.S. and now has its name on 10% of new U.S. refrigerator sales. Large units, too expensive to ship from China, are made in the U.S. Haier succeeded by partnering with a young, market-savvy U.S. entrepreneur, Michael Jemal, who created down-market, niche refrigerator products that the big U.S. brands ignored and won its own distribution access by customizing products for the big box retailers. Haier’s bid for Maytag is a turn-around play premised on Haier’s proven management practices. Otherwise, sophisticated co-investors like Blackstone and Bain Capital would not be aboard.

Chinese companies that are successfully building slow in the U.S. include Wanxiang and China International Marine Container (CIMC). Wanxiang Group, China’s leading auto-parts maker, tried to export auto parts from China to the U.S. but found itself under-priced by Polish and Romanian imports. So it adopted a private equity role in building a U.S. business: it joint ventures or acquires stakes in struggling U.S. manufacturers, then restructures their management and operations based on what Wanxiang learned in China. The Group now has equity positions in over 30 auto-parts companies world-wide, and its U.S. sales of nearly $400 million are more profitable than its business back home.

CIMC may be the world’s least visible globally dominant company, making 40% of all shipping containers. In the 1990s it consolidated South China’s big container business — much like GM rolled-up U.S. autos in the 1930s — by buying up smaller local producers with non-voting stock, then rationalized production among these subsidiaries. Only then did CIMC acquire a U.S. truck-trailer maker from a bankrupt parent and turn it around, using Chinese-made container components and factory floor technology.

Chinese management is an under-rated asset in American discussions of China’s global strategy. Almost all large successful companies in China are turn-arounds of formerly politically managed state-owned enterprises. The managers who took them over during the 1980s and 1990s reforms had to learn what any turn-around specialist does — flatten layers, fire the pretenders, prune losing businesses, and hammer operating costs down. The CEOs of Haier, Wanxiang, and CIMC all started and spent their careers on the factory floor. China’s low-cost mentality is just as much about cheap management as about cheap labor.

So it makes sense that China’s first and surest global companies will be in mid-tech or modest brand businesses built on ground-level operating skills, opportunism, and local partnerships — not high-profile consumer brands or high tech. These proven Chinese strengths also play perfectly to deep changes going on in the U.S. economy — revitalization of distressed small manufacturers through new partnerships, private equity’s growing role, and even lower income consumers’ trading-down to lower-priced household durables.

Not all Chinese companies, however, think they have the time to build slow. Lenovo and TCL are in fast-moving businesses where strong global competitors are breathing down their neck in China — especially, Dell, Samsung, Nokia and Motorola. Computers, flat-screen televisions, cell phones, and mobile consumer electronics devices of all kinds may be made in China but controlled by multinationals there who are pulling away from Chinese competitors.

This issue of pace is a problem for China. Product and marketing innovation is rooted in close contact with customers and close collaboration with adjacent, complementary technologies. Chinese state-owned companies have typically been separated from end customers by government-controlled distribution intermediaries. The result is China doesn’t have what Silicon Valley and other innovation clusters have — diffusion of knowledge horizontally and movement of technologists between firms.

Too much can be expected of China’s high-profile companies now. The early rounds of Chinese globalizing favor less glamorous, hard-nosed Chinese companies who have a lot to offer to industrial America right now.

Expat Life: A One-Way Ticket To a New Life in China

By Alan Paul

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Please don’t call me a trailing spouse. It’s a horrible term — sexist and demeaning when applied to a woman and downright emasculating when slapped on a man. But lingo is lingo and facts are facts. And the fact is, in expat land, I am a trailing spouse. I became one the moment I put my career on ice, packed up the house and three kids in suburban New Jersey and moved to Beijing in support of my wife and her new job.

This isn’t all new to me. I haven’t set foot in an office for nearly 10 years, working from home as a magazine writer and editor. As our three children’s primary caregiver I am used to being the only adult male in a room, having chaperoned field trips, assisted in kindergarten classes and shown up for countless midday assemblies. Still, the dividing line is much sharper here. After all, we have uprooted our family and moved to the other side of the world for someone’s job. And it’s not mine.

While my wife, Rebecca, has long had the job that parents like to brag about, as a rising editor at The Wall Street Journal, I’m the one who has managed to live out the widespread male fantasy of getting paid for a state of perpetual adolescence. As a senior writer for Guitar World and the basketball magazine Slam, I was paid to write the kinds of things that most men call procrastination: Who are the five greatest power forwards of all time? Name rock guitar’s 10 greatest riffs. Why isn’t Lynyrd Skynyrd in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? When it was time to leave home and go to work, my destinations were press-row seats at NBA games or New York rock shows. It’s not a life I could easily abandon.

Yet when Rebecca casually mentioned to a friend last December that the Journal’s China Bureau Chief job was posted, I urged her to go for it. She was shocked. I had, after all, nipped in the bud talk of moving to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, hesitant to give up my gigs and support system to head off into the great unknown. “But this is different,” I explained. “It’s China!”

Six months later, worn out and frazzled from preparing to pull up stakes, I found myself asking my doctor for a sleeping-pill prescription to help me get some rest. A simple thought ran through my head: “Me and my big mouth.”

For months, I had wondered what it would feel like to board a plane with a one-way ticket to Beijing. When the moment came last August it felt like a huge exhale. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me, knowing that our 15 suitcases were secure in the cargo bin, life as I knew it was fading in the rearview mirror and adventures were looming ahead. Whatever difficulties the transition posed had to be a piece of cake compared to the painstaking, numbing process of erasing our existence in Maplewood, N.J., and emptying the house we had lived in for seven years.

Moving to China with three kids — Jacob, 7, Eli, 5 and Anna, 2 — seemed so wild and ambitious back in Maplewood. Then we arrived here — to the Western style “villa” my wife’s company owns in a tree-lined, European style gated housing compound called Beijing Riviera — and felt anything but exotic. Standing on the playground watching my kids run around, I was surrounded by dozens of moms from around the world. One of the first questions people ask upon meeting one another is, “Where was your last posting?” We were not only fresh off the boat, but fresh on the scene in a larger sense. Our most exotic traits were the reversal of gender rules and our straight-out-of-the-burbs background.

I met an 8-year-old girl whose mother was Indian and father Dutch but who had never lived anywhere but Beijing. Eli became good friends with a 5-year-old British girl with a perfect English accent who was born and raised in Hong Kong. At a school assembly, the principal asked how many kids spoke four languages and about 20% raised their hands.

Fellow expats were not the only ones not quite sure what to make of me. The company driver had to get used to not only having a lady boss, but figuring out how to deal with a male tai tai (lady of the house). Like most people in his position, Mr. D is a bit of a heavy. He is also indisputably loyal, officious and efficient. He has driven us around town to perform the many bureaucratic errands required to live here — processing visas, getting press credentials, applying for driver’s licenses. He also provides invaluable assistance in many of these tasks.

On one such errand, Mr. D’s view of me was stood on its head. I am credentialed and sanctioned as the Beijing Bureau Chief for Slam magazine. We waited in line at the massive, bustling government office where visas are issued for Chinese and foreigners alike. When it was my turn, the policeman processing my paperwork looked up from his stamping to say, “I very like Slam.”

Next came a fairly intense, in-depth basketball discussion. He wanted to know who I thought was the best Chinese basketball player, “after Yao Ming.” Mr. D watched and listened in amazement, then turned to the officer and asked him something in Chinese. The two had an animated chat, and Mr. D looked at me and smiled and laughed. Afterward, something seemed to change in the way he regarded me.

While my wife went off to work, burying herself in a demanding new position, the kids were adapting to life halfway around the world with remarkable ease, nonchalantly starting at a British-run school complete with uniforms. Frankly, they inspired me to keep moving forward and never look back, as I walked to Starbucks everyday, laptop bag slung across my shoulder, grateful for the free wireless service as I waited for my DSL hookup to be activated. It didn’t take long to sell a story on bike riding through crowded, downtown Beijing and start interviewing the stars of the Chinese national basketball team, in search of the next Yao. You know — getting paid for the kind of stuff most people call procrastination.

Executives in China Need Autonomy and Access to Boss

By Carol Hymowitz

From The Wall Street Journal Online

SHANGHAI — On a recent evening stroll, James Rice, a vice president at Tyson Foods and the head of its China operations, wandered into a narrow alley, drawn by the pungent scent of spices coming from a food vendor’s stall. The vendor was selling skewers of barbecued lamb coated with cumin, a popular evening snack here.

That detour gave Mr. Rice the idea for a new food product: cumin-flavored chicken strips. “I found just what I was looking for — an exotic flavor that is authentically Chinese,” he says. Within a few weeks, his research-and-development manager had created a new recipe, and members of his marketing staff had begun testing it with consumers. When they got a 90% approval rating, they knew they had a hit. Mr. Rice began selling the new product in just two months.

That quick launch was the result of strong teamwork by his staff. It also reflects the freedom Mr. Rice has been given by superiors at Tyson’s headquarters in Springdale, Ark., to build the company’s business in China as he thinks best. “When I see a way to modify or create a new product I think we can make money on, I don’t have to go through layers of management or wait months to get a decision,” he says.

Some of the executives who oversee operations for multinational companies in China have this kind of autonomy. Others must seek approval from bosses located elsewhere for even small decisions, such as making a change in packaging or pricing. Many spend considerable time weighing when to act independently and when to take marching orders from corporate headquarters.

It is the yin-yang management challenge for overseas executives everywhere. But the stakes are higher in China, the world’s fastest growing economy, where every multinational company wants to do business. “If you don’t have flexibility to respond quickly to new markets or situations — to make a pricing or flavor change — it’s very hard to compete against Chinese companies, which do react quickly and also have the advantage of much lower fixed costs,” Mr. Rice says.

It also can be an operational nightmare when corporate bosses insist on centralized systems. An executive at an industrial-products concern spent months last year arguing with his bosses in the U.S. about an information-technology system they wanted to use globally that wasn’t compatible with Chinese characters. They purchased the system, and he had to buy a separate IT system that his employees could actually use.

A manager at a consumer-products company wanted to reduce the package size of a product in order to lower the cost and attract more lower-income Chinese customers. He sent the request to his boss, the vice president of Asia operations, who sent it to the vice president of international, who in turn sent it to senior executives in the U.S. The request was approved, but by then five months had passed and a competitor already had launched a similar product in a small package.

Country managers who focus on what their superiors back home want may not pay close enough attention to local preferences and practices. That can be a fatal error, says Desmond Wong, Americas Coordinating Partner-China at Ernst & Young Americas. “Anyone who manages Chinese employees has to understand that they expect an extra month’s pay at Chinese New Year, and if they don’t get it, they’ll try to find work elsewhere,” he says.

Local hires also want assurance that their boss has the ear and respect of his or her boss. “So it’s important to persuade top executives to visit China at least once a year,” Mr. Wong says. “And if you tell employees before the visit that you want them to look good to the bosses, they’ll go extra miles for you.”

The most successful executives in China have autonomy, as well as access to corporate chiefs when they need it. Jack Q. Gao, vice president and regional director of Autodesk’s operations in China, believes that “to grow in this market, which is so dynamic and unique, I need to be directly supported by top executives who can present one strategy to the government.” China’s government, he notes, not only sets economic policy but is the largest customer of Autodesk and many other multinational companies.

Since he took his current job two years ago, Mr. Gao, who oversees about 1,600 employees, has opened research-and-development centers in China to create software products tailored for Chinese customers. He also is partnering with local businesses to create new applications for AutoCAD, Autodesk’s software design tool. “It’s a new business model,” he says, and it may help to offset software piracy.

Mr. Gao meets several times each year with Autodesk Chief Executive Carol Bartz, along with the company’s chief operating officer, head of global sales and vice president of the Asia-Pacific region. The group, which is known as the China Initiative Steering Committee, is also available to confer about “anything unique or experimental I may want to try,” he says, ” and gives me a direct channel [to the top] for decision making.” Unlike some of his counterparts at other multinational companies, he adds, “I don’t have to spend all my time educating corporate executives about China.”

Executives Trained Abroad Are Sought After in China

By Andrew Browne

From The Wall Street Journal Online

When Dominic Leung moved to China this year as chairman of the country’s second-largest life insurer, the Hong Kong executive startled his senior managers with a blunt message: Skip the formalities.

On his first outing to a branch office, the staff formed a welcoming line that snaked from the elevator lobby down a long corridor to the reception counter — the kind of over-the-top gesture that strokes the egos of many Chinese corporate VIPs. But Mr. Leung was embarrassed, and annoyed. “I said to the general manager: ‘You never do that again,’ ” he recalls. ” ‘I don’t need that.’ ”

Mr. Leung, who worked previously for American International Group and the United Kingdom’s Prudential PLC, says he is now trying to persuade managers at Ping An Life Insurance not to greet him personally at the airport. “To me it’s wasting time — they should be working in the office,” he says.

Mr. Leung, a 56-year-old insurance-industry veteran, is part of a new wave of “overseas Chinese” being recruited to fill top slots in Chinese companies. These executives — from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other locales where Chinese have settled — have long been wooed by multinationals to run their China operations. Now, some of the brightest are jumping to Chinese companies instead.

In some ways, the trend points to the relative fortunes of Chinese companies in China’s vast domestic economy, where local businesses have proved to be at least the equal of multinationals in the battle for market share. Increasingly, Chinese companies are seen as a springboard for the ambitions of overseas Chinese with U.S. and European graduate degrees in business. Some who have made the leap say they were prompted by a glass ceiling at multinationals for ethnic Chinese employees.

Once the new recruits get over initial culture shock, they report few regrets. Middle-ranking managers who once reported up a chain of command to New York or Frankfurt suddenly find themselves controlling companies that are emerging as national leaders in the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

In a multinational company, “headquarters calls all the shots. But if you work for a Chinese company, you call the shots,” says Zheng Xue-cheng, a corporate search executive with Egon Zehnder International, which recruits high-level talent for Ping An and other Chinese companies.

Corporate perks may be meager in Chinese firms, but pay is competitive and stock options can be generous — in rare cases, sensational. After quitting his job running Microsoft China, Tang Jun, a naturalized U.S. citizen, joined Chinese online gaming company Shanda Interactive Entertainment and picked up 2.6 million stock options now valued at more than $90 million. (The company was listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market this year.)

Tan Wee-Seng, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, gave up housing, education and car allowances when he left a senior business role at Reuters news service last year to join Li-Ning Sports, a sportswear company run by a former Chinese Olympic gymnast. “But the options are better,” says Mr. Tan, Li-Ning’s chief financial officer who steered the company through a Hong Kong listing this year.

Another lure: the chance to “help and transform this country,” says Mr. Tan. Ping An’s Mr. Leung says moving to the company gives him a feeling of belonging in China. Working for a multinational “I was an outsider, maybe even a foreigner,” he says. “Now I’m one of them.”

Chinese companies are more open-minded about international recruitment than their counterparts elsewhere in Asia. In part, the openness is driven by necessity: Chinese companies planning to raise capital overseas often lack financial managers with the skills to navigate complex international regulatory and compliance issues.

In some industries, like banking and insurance, Chinese companies face an onslaught of foreign competition as domestic markets open, and they need managers who can implement smart sales and marketing strategies and internal restructuring.

China Construction Bank, one of the country’s Big Four lenders, planning to issue shares next year, has invited a leading Japanese banker to sit on its board of directors — a first for the bank. The Bank of China, also in line to list, is searching overseas to fill positions up to the level of vice president.

Ping An Group, parent of Ping An Life Insurance, has gone further than perhaps any major Chinese company in opening its staff ranks: Half of its top 50 managers come from outside the Chinese mainland, says Sun Jian Yi, the group’s deputy chief executive officer. As a start-up in 1988, Ping An was up against an established state monopoly, the People’s Insurance Co. of China. To compete, it had to look as different from PICC as possible. “We said we wanted to follow the international market,” says Mr. Sun. “We needed overseas money, overseas systems, overseas talent.”

Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley came in as early private-equity investors. The Shenzhen-based company, which listed just across the border in Hong Kong this year, hired the McKinsey & Co. consultant who drew up the company’s long-term strategy, Louis Cheung.

Mr. Cheung, a 40-year-old Cambridge-educated Hong Kong native, joined Ping An after turning down offers from an international investment bank and a dot-com. Mr. Cheung, 36 when he joined Ping An, says he wanted a company offering super-charged growth, and “China is the only country where you can get that kind of growth.” Now Ping An’s chief operating officer, he shuttles between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, where his wife, a Singaporean investment banker, lives.

For Ping An and other Chinese companies, overseas Chinese are an easier fit than other outsiders. For a start, they can speed-read office memos in Chinese handwriting. But the high-paid recruits can also spark resentments. Ping An runs a two-track pay system. “At first people asked: ‘Why are you paying so much?’ ” says Mr. Sun, who happily admits he earns less than some of the overseas Chinese who work under him. “We had to educate our work force.”

And imported management methods don’t always go down well. Staff at Ping An headquarters are fuming over a new electronic card system at the main door. Employees who leave the building for longer than 30 minutes must explain their absence to a supervisor. “Not even a mosquito can get out of this place without permission,” grumbles a junior manager.

Alan Ku, Ping An’s Taiwan human-resources manager formerly with Unilever, says the system is now being reviewed.