2 . The following jobs are expected to be in high demand in 2023. Clicking on the “Find jobs” link will take you to the list of current job postings and help you make career choices.

Nurse Practitioner

Average hourly wage: $56. 00

Nurse practitioners can perform many of the tasks that doctors do, such as creating treatment plans for patients and managing medical records. The big difference is that nurse practitioners cannot prescribe medications in most states. To become a nurse practitioner, you will need a graduate degree in nursing along with the appropriate licenses for the states in which you work.

Data Scientist

Average hourly wage: $52. 00

From car rental companies to telecommunication businesses, data scientists analyze the information to figure out the best ways for their businesses to be more successful. The job duties include identifying what types of business and customer data are worth gathering, then checking whether the information is accurate. It’s a big job that generally requires eight working hours a day and professional skills in mathematics.

Web Developer

Average hourly wage: $38. 00

Most people rely on the Internet to stay informed and connected with our communities. Web developers make sure those sites function properly while also updating them to include new functions that make them easier to use. Most of the work can be done remotely, which is favored by young people.

Choreographer(编舞师)

Average hourly wage: $20. 00

Maybe it’s the popularity of viral dance videos on TikTok that brings about the increasing demand in recent years. In addition to instructing trainees and performing on the stage and in the film, they work on smaller events such as weddings and other family gatherings. No degree is necessary to work in this field, but you will need some training and rhythm.

Top work-life balance benefits for 2023

“Flexibility is the gold standard of work-life balance benefits,” says Jonathan Pas, health care leader at consulting firm Mercer.

It’s no surprise then that two years after the pandemic forced most office workers to perform their jobs remotely. 78% of employers say they’ll allow employees to continue doing so regularly in 2023, according to a Mercer survey. But there’s still some     1    : only 9% say they will allow employees to work remotely daily.

    2    , flexibility around when employees work is just as important as where. In the survey, 66% of employers said they would offer flexible work schedules over the course of a typical work day, such as specific times during the week to     3     to personal matters and four-day work weeks. Employees no longer want to organize their personal life around a(n)     4     work schedule but instead want the two interwoven, so they can decide what to prioritize and when.

Pas     5     against making hollow promises about a company’s commitment to work-life balance. “If employees feel a disconnection between programs that are rolled out and what senior leaders really expect, credibility is questioned, and the goodwill created through the program is denied.” He cites paid time off to volunteer, which almost half (45%) of companies say they will add to their benefits     6     next year.

Other benefits requiring a broader organizational buy-in are sabbaticals(公休假) and unlimited vacation days. Both benefits encourage employees to pursue interests outside of work with     7     periods off. Still, if they feel a dishonour associated with taking advantage of them, they’ll be hesitant to do so. The relatively low     8     rates for 2023, though—only 12% for sabbaticals and 15% for unlimited vacation—indicate that employers are still against paying employees not to work.

Instead, they prefer to find new ways to give employees more money, with the rise of employer-funded lifestyle accounts, which are often reserved for big-ticket items that might otherwise require some     9    . Nevertheless, only 12% of employers said they would add lifestyle accounts in 2023, and 70% said they are considering them, which could indicate a trend on the horizon.

But perhaps the most telling statistic about the importance of     10     work-life balance is the number of companies that said they don’t plan to offer any additional benefits to support work-life balance: a mere 5%.

4 . Your colleague is the first one in and the last one to leave. They volunteer to take on every additional task that comes your team’s way and they respond to emails within minutes. They’re working all the time, whether from the office or from home.     1    

Dealing with a workaholic colleague can be challenging, but there are steps you can take to ease the negative effects of their behavior on yourself and your team.

Depersonalize their actions.

While it’s tempting to assume that your colleague is overworking in an attempt to outshine you, this is a classic example of a cognitive bias (偏差). In social psychology, this refers to the tendency humans have to owe another person’s actions to their character or personality, while crediting our own behavior to external or situational factors that are outside our control.     2     Debias (消除偏见) your thinking by considering other reasons for their behavior.

Resist peer pressure.

    3     You may start comparing your capacity and output to theirs and wonder, “Am I really working hard enough?” Before you begin overextending yourself in an effort to “catch up”, mind your mindset and be aware of extremist thinking. Taking time off for self-care isn’t indulgent (纵容的), rather it’s a precondition for your performance.

    4    

Workaholics tend to have few boundaries. You’ll need to play defense by managing their expectations around your response times and availability. Let’s say your colleague asks you to turn around a project brief in less than 24 hours. You can push back and explain, “That’s not possible. If you have this sort of task in the future, I’ll need at least a three day’s notice to work it into my schedule.” You might also advocate for better systems and processes that remove the need for excess effort.

Finally, remember to adjust your perspective on productivity. While it may be tempting to evaluate your daily success based on the number of hours you work, it’s the quality of work you deliver that matters most.     5    

Chinese netizens are passionately discussing the “Kong Yiji mindset,”     1     term inspired by an influential figure in modern Chinese literature and used to refer to college     2     (graduate) who consider themselves above manual labor.

    3    (set) a few years after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the story starts with Kong Yiji being ridiculed by the working-class customers in the tavern he frequents for continuing to wear his long scholar’s gown, even though he never passed the imperial exam     4     could have landed him a decent job back in the past.

As The Paper, a Chinese media company based in Shanghai, writes, “Kong Yiji would rather steal than do     5     he considers a menial job(粗活)just to make money. This is relatable in the eyes of some, who think their academic qualifications didn’t lead to the job they wanted or deserved.”

The related term, “Kong Yiji mindset,” refers to those who see Kong in     6     (they) as they face the pressures of a job market that can’t keep up with the record-breaking number of college graduates. Kong is a     7     (sympathy) figure to some recent college graduates whose reality is not living up to expectations.

Some netizens are concerned that education itself may one day be seen as superfluous (多余的). “When we were young, we     8     (tell) to study hard, and when we grew up, we would become astronauts and scientists,” a Weibo user commented. “Now it has become study hard to screw screws, to be a cleaner, to collect junk. It’s not that I look down on those professions—every profession is respectable—     9     it is strange that the wind is blowing in this direction.”

In recent years, China has been pushing to expand vocational education as a means to solve the surplus of college graduates. However, the transition remains challenging as the prejudices     10    blue-collar jobs lingers.

6 . “I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.

Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their labour was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling (辛苦工作) in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. According to America’s historical statistics, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.

The standard pattern of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.

Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of toil. Goldin argued that stigma (污名) reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy and neglectful of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the office clerk job of the 20th century was easier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse. With the arrival of tight labour markets in the 1950s, discriminatory policies against hiring married women were virtually abandoned.

Today, women still work and earn less than men. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, Goldin says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are conflicting with being on call for children. Perhaps men should also share the family burden and allow their partners to be more professionally involved instead.

If you have not heard of Yangshi Lei, the     1    (honour) name of the Lei family responsible for imperial architecture during the Qing Dynasty, then you have missed an important detail about the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and Yuanmingyuan Garden.

All the above great cultural relics and popular tourist attractions have been included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List,     2     surprisingly enough, they are all designed by the Lei family.     3     (represent) the great achievements of science and technology in ancient China, their architectural practice covered a wide range of city planning, imperial palaces, gardens, temples, princes’ residences and schools.

Yangshi    4     (refer) to architect or architecture in Chinese. Yangshifang, the then government authority similar to the National Architecture Design Institute today, was in charge of site     5     (select), design and construction of imperial architectures.

    6     (amaze), eight generations of the Lei family were appointed director of Yangshifang consecutively from 1662 to 1911.

With so many architectural    7     (work) on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List, the Lei Family is    8     unique phenomenon in the architectural history throughout the world. Apart from the grand architectures, China has another treasure left by the Lei family - design drafts. In the National Library of China alone, there     9     (be) up to 20,000 architectural design drafts, each of     10     plays an important role in the research of the history of the Qing Dynasty and how architecture developed at the time.

9 . The pandemic has given a big push to all forms of digital communication. A workplace dominated by time on screens may seem bound to favor newer, faster and more visual ways of transmitting information. But an old form of communication — writing — is also flourishing (蓬勃).

The value of writing is highly valued in management thinking. “The discipline of writing something down is the first step towards making it happen, ” said Lee Iacocca, a giant of the American car industry. Jeff Bezos banned slides from meetings of senior Amazon executives (主管) back in 2004, in favor of well-structured memos (备忘录).

The move to remote working has strengthened the value of writing. When tasks are being handed off to colleagues in other locations, comprehensive documentation is crucial. When new employees start work on something, they want the back story. When old hands depart an organization, they should leave knowledge behind.

Software developers have already worked out the value of the written words. A research programme from Google into the ingredients of successful technology projects found that teams with high quality documentation deliver software faster and more reliably. Gitlab, a code hosting platform whose workforce is wholly remote, describes its secret of success as “textual communication”.

The deep thought and the discipline required by writing are helpful in other contexts, too. “Brain writing“ is a brain storming technique, used by Slack among others, in which participants are given time to put down their ideas before discussion begins.

Writing is not always the best way to communicate in the workplace. Video is more memorable; a phone call is quicker; even PowerPoint has its place. But for the structured thought it demands, and the ease with which it can be shared and edited, the written words are made for remote work and will flourish in the post-pandemic workplace.

10 . Gail Rodgers, a grandma of three, has become a lifeguard at her local pool. Seeing her local pool couldn’t ________ due to a lifeguard shortage, the 66 year old woman decided that her ________ wouldn’t get in the way while helping her community. “I did this lifeguard thing back in the late ‘60s’.________ , I thought I can do this again,’’ she said.

Rodgers, ________ in the late 1960s, said she had to learn new skills. Jeff Blume, president of Cincinnati Pool Management and Rodgers’ boss, also admitted that the physical examination is ________. “Lifeguard candidates have to swim a 300 yard length, and then submerge (潜入水中) and grab a 10-pound brick off the bottom of the pool,” Blume explained.

Through great ________, Rodgers became a part time lifeguard.   “It’s been fun ________ people enjoying the nice weather in the pool. It’s been more ________ than I expected to be,” Rodgers said. Her boss said it has also been a joy to have her on their team.

Blume noted that fear can ________ a lot of people and he’s glad that Rodgers is such a(n) ________ for being courageous. “I think there’s a ________ of ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘That’s not for me. That’s for the young’ or something like that. So, there’s a lot to ________, but if people want to do it, we could help them with the skills and give them a little bit more of a________ before they actually take the class. If people ________ that is an option, I think they might not look at the skills test as a tall mountain to get over.”   They hope more people are inspired to ________ life-guarding as the country continues to face lifeguard shortages.