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Career-Propelling Money Advice for Creatives

By Matt McCue The most important thing someone working in a creative business needs to remember is that it’s still a business. Just because it’s characterized as “creative” doesn’t mean that it should be fundamentally organized or run any differently than those in “serious” fields like financial services and accounting. And yet, all too often creatives,

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Human Resources: Transgender Employees Rights and Employer Obligations

by Cheryl Chong KEEP UP WITH THE RULES Recently, California’s DFEH (Department of Fair Employment and Housing) issued a new brochure titled “Transgender Rights in the Workplace.” A few key points for employers to be aware of, include the following: There are two kinds of gender transitions: physical and social. The former involves medical treatments. The other involves name

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Know What Your Design Skills Are Worth In 2017

By Diane Domeyer, Executive Director, The Creative Group, specialized staffing service placing interactive, design, marketing, advertising and public relations professionals with a variety of firms. To remain a cutting-edge creative professional, you recognize the value of keeping your skills sharp. But when you’re job hunting or looking to advance in your organization, it’s just as important

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These Meetings Will Make Everyone a Design Leader

by Marcus Castenfors Leadership could be something you fear. You fear that it will cause problems. You fear that you have to do things you don’t enjoy. You have to micromanage. You have to do a lot of admin work. The boring stuff. Leadership doesn’t have to be this way. Leadership can be rewarding, inspiring,

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Human Resources – Pay and Train When You Should; Avoid Fines

  By Cheryl Chong Holidays Hours worked on holidays, Saturdays and Sundays by non-exempt employees are treated like hours worked on any other day of the week. California law does not require that an employer provide its employees with paid holidays, that it close its business on any holiday, or that employees be given the

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2016 ACA Compliance Checklist

This is the year that the rubber really hits the road for employers with 50 or more full-time workers. The Affordable Care Act employer mandate for organizations with 50 to 99 employees takes effect this year, meaning that if you haven’t been offering your staff coverage before, you are now required to do so. There

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Human Resources: Relationships Shape Workplaces on Many Levels

By Cheryl Chong Time for a “Love Contract”? Considering the litigious world we live in today and the CA employer’s obligation to protect its employees from sexual harassment, it would be a wise idea to look at your workplace policies and draft one that discourages romantic relationships. However, this is not within anyone’s control. An

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The Art of Thought: Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926

by Maria Popova How to master the beautiful osmosis of conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, deliberate and serendipitous. In 1926, thirteen years before James Webb Young’s Technique for Producing Ideas and more than three decades before Arthur Koestler’s seminal “bisociation” theory of how creativity works, English social psychologist and London School of Economics co-founder

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California Beefs up Data Breach Notification Law

California’s data breach notification law has been beefed up with the enactment of legislation. The new law requires businesses to provide free identity-theft prevention services to subjects of a breach if their personally identifiable information has been compromised. The law, which is the result of AB 1710, covers both customers as well as employees of

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