DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709120531

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JOANN S. LUBLIN AND JOSEPH B. WHITE, THE WALL STREET

        JOURNAL 

                                            LENGTH:  124 lines

IT'S A GOOD TIME TO BE A DILBERT WITH UNEMPLOYMENT AT NEARLY A QUARTER-CENTURY LOW, THE SEESAW OF POWER IS SHIFTING FROM EMPLOYER TO EMPLOYEE.

The downtrodden Dilberts of America are finally riding high again.

People no longer hide under their desks, cowering in fear of layoffs. With unemployment at nearly a quarter-century low, the seesaw of power is tilting from employer to employee. Many feel in control of their careers to a degree not seen during this decade.

Job hopping prevails amid a cornucopia of vacancies. Those with the scarcest skills or willing to take risks by jumping into new and fast-growing businesses are dictating their employment terms and leveraging prospective employers against each other to sweeten compensation packages. Meanwhile, to attract and retain the best and brightest, bosses are pursuing, cajoling, flattering and paying professionals and middle managers more than ever before, with everything from signing bonuses to mentoring programs.

Chicago pollster International Survey Research Corp.'s latest data, based on 200 businesses with more than 450,000 workers, find that layoff fears are at their lowest level in three years. ``In the right professions, Dilbert should come out from under his desk and look for other jobs,'' asserts Michael Adams, a 42-year-old executive who gets headhunter calls three times a week - a record volume for him. ``There is a ton of activity out there. I feel like I can decide where to go at any time.''

In late July, Adams used a lucrative offer from another company to enhance his pay and status in his current job as vice president of regulatory affairs and quality assurance for Cytyc Corp., a maker of medical-diagnostic applications in Boxborough, Mass. A small manufacturer of medical equipment wanted him so badly that officials called him daily until he agreed to a job interview. The next morning, the small company offered him its regulatory-affairs vice presidency, along with a 35 percent salary increase and options to acquire 1.8 percent of the newly public company's shares outstanding.

Adams demanded a 4 percent stake instead. The company responded with a second offer that provided a private-country-club membership and a restricted stock grant representing just under 4 percent of the firm's shares outstanding. He accepted.

When colleagues at Cytyc learned Adams was resigning, they begged him to stay. Cytyc sweetened the pot with additional stock options tied to certain performance measures, a revamped bonus plan and a 12.5 percent pay raise. In addition, Cytyc expanded his duties to involve him in new-product development, acquisitions and European clinical research. Adams decided to stay at Cytyc.

Still, he isn't making any promises about staying put and speculates that he could switch jobs within a year. Adams thinks small employers like Cytyc increasingly ``are going to have to offer cars, country-club memberships and some creative ways to get bonus money'' to retain hotly demanded managers like him.

``In my industry now, pay raises are coming fast and furious,'' he observes. But ``it's hard to gauge yourself unless you go through something like this. The experience made me feel very marketable.''

That is vastly different from the trapped and anxious feeling he had about his career six years ago. At the time, he was the regulatory-affairs manager for a division of Millipore Corp., a Bedford, Mass., purification-technology concern. He ``felt very much like Dilbert'' because neither he nor the division was very important, Mr. Adams recalls. ``And my job security was very much in question.''

Mr. Adams is hardly an anomaly anymore. At Fidelity Investment's big customer-service facility in Covington, Ky., where about 2,800 people are employed, up from just 300 five years ago, Paul Smith, site general manager, is seeing a new profile among prospective hires. ``If you look at the resumes of 28- to 30-year-olds today, they've got three jobs'' listed already. ``Ten years ago someone with three jobs was a `job hopper.' Today, someone who is 30 and has had 10 years with one company, you ask if they are too conservative.''

To fill its expanding staff needs, Fidelity has raided local banks and small businesses. Smith also has commissioned a video to showcase the region (Covington is across the Ohio river from Cincinnati) and Fidelity's main office here, which is designed in the style of a Japanese palace.

But there is stiff competition from other Cincinnati employers. Star Banc Corp., after fighting off a hostile takeover bid by archrival Fifth Third Bancorp five years ago and slashing staff, is hiring again. So is Cinergy Corp., a utility that must compete for both customers and raw materials. Suddenly ``signing bonuses are more the norm than the exception,'' says Jeffrey Duell, manager of strategic recruiting for Cinergy, and salary charts the company used five years ago are useless.

And wherever they land, employees aren't willing to stand still. In January, Craig Mathison, 33, took a job with Cincinnati Bell Information Systems, a unit of Cincinnati Bell Corp. that manages billing for a number of phone and cable companies. Formerly an aide to the administrator of a California hospital, he was lured by a friend who worked at CBIS and touted the company's program for training mainframe-computer-systems programmers. CBIS is looking to hire 650 people to add to its staff of about 2,800. The company recently sweetened its formula for determining annual bonuses to a target of 4 percent of annual pay, from 3 percent.

Already, Mathison is itching to make his next move. He doesn't want to stay on a technical career path and regularly cruises a company database of job postings, looking for opportunities at CBIS in sales and marketing. His motto, he says, is ``don't be shy about letting the right people know about your hopes and plans.'' In today's job market, there's no ``scare mentality. I don't feel downtrodden.''

Neither does Denise Messemer, 30, an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand in New York who until recently had been feeling stagnant in her career. Then four months ago, she received an offer from a client that would have sent her overseas for a year and moved her into management.

Messemer quickly told her bosses, who were considering her for a promotion. They urged her to stay - and a few weeks later, named her a manager, her first upward move in six years. She also got a nearly 15 percent raise.

Others, instead of weighing one offer against another or waiting to see if their position with an employer improves, job hop among a number of industries, advancing with each move.

Consider Jodi Strassberg, 26, an international-transportation supervisor who has held three jobs since earning a masters' degree in Chinese studies in late 1993. Back then, the job market was so tight that she applied to more than 200 banks and shipping concerns - and landed only one job interview. She became a sales associate for the ocean-shipping unit of CSX Corp. and stayed 2 1/2 years.

But she lasted only eight months in her next job at a U.S. shipping unit of Tokyo-based Mitsui & Co. She says she disliked its ``elitist'' corporate culture and never fit in well. In late June, she was wooed away by Iselin, N.J., diversified manufacturer Engelhard Corp.

At Engelhard, Strassberg has been paired with a ``buddy,'' distribution manager Stuart Gottlieb, to teach her about the company's culture. (Engelhard's Pigments and Additives group, where Strassberg works, recently launched a ``New Buddy'' program that links each recruit and transferee with a peer from a different area.) Rapid integration into a new job is important because ``you spend most of your time working,'' Strassberg says. ``You don't want to be miserable.''

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