How to Transition From Employee to Employer?
Having been both I see the pros and cons Employers: I personally hated all the paperwork.  Government forms, legal protection, insurance, taxes, payroll, accounting, year ends, bank accounts, inventory tracking, expenses. The best bosses don't worry about the product, they worry about maintaining an environment that is good for the product.  Good employees who are happy will make good products that you can sell to customers who are happy with your company. I personally went back to employee because I wanted to go home at night and forget about work.  Employers cannot do that.
It depends on your employer. They may not care to pursue matters if you don't give enough notice. They might be happy to see you go. Or they might be really sad to see you go, but not feel like they need to punish you. Or they might be really angry to see you go, and decide that they want to punish you to the full extent of the law just out of spite. Essentially, we can't tell you that, because different employers will behave differently. My advice? Be a mensch. Give the old employer as much notice as humanly possible so that they can find, hire, and train your replacement. Leave on as good terms as possible. Don't burn bridges. Chances are your new job can wait for another week or two. Learn how to do the job and don't be afraid to step in and help out. If you never do this people will assume you think you're too good to do the work they do and they won't respect you or your authority.   Being good at something gives you natural authority and people will seek you out for advice/direction.  Trust your employees to do their jobs until they prove otherwise. Management is a relationship and relationships are based on trust. If you want to be untrusted the very best way to go about it is to show you don't trust the other person. If you're not trusted then no one is going to follow your untrustworthy advice/direction.  Stay calm even when things are going terribly. Even if you're freaking out on the inside it's best to show a calm front. If you're constantly on edge it will amplify through your employees and a chaotic workplace is obviously less efficient overtime. If you lose your cool apologize sincerely.  Be positive. Always have something good to say about something and employees will more likely be able to stay positive. If you're negative all the time then again this is going to amplify through employees and if everyone is gossiping and complaining all day efficiency is going to go down.   Be assertive and explain why. Sometimes you can take input from employees and negotiate, but sometimes you just have to tell them what to do and it's important to include why because if you include the why people are much more likely to comply as well as to remember what you said.  All these things may not make you liked. If your goal is to be liked then quit because all bosses aren't liked by many employees. You will be more likely to be effective and at least respected. This is excellent advice. I would make sure that you arm yourself with some solid questions about the company including reformatting some of the questions that they ask you. Interviews should be a two way conversation, the more you get them talking, the more comfortable they'll be to recommend you. Some questions to ask: 1. Tell me a bit about your (interviewer) background? This gets them talking a bit and allows you to relate with them 2. Where do you see the company moving in the next 5 years? 3. Why is this job opening available? 4. Can you tell me a bit about the corporate culture? 5. How can the company invest in me? 6. What are the qualities that will make me successful in this job? 7. Tell me a bit about our competitors (you should know some of them) and what sets this company apart? Make sure you're armed with as much information about the company as possible. One of the things that set me apart when I interviewed at the company I'm working at now was I came into the interview with the company's financial report and started asking specific questions about details on that report. Also, MAKE SURE TO GET A BUSINESS CARD OR CONTACT INFORMATION BEFORE YOU LEAVE. Thank you letters are an annoying formality, but it is necessary, don't rely on the recruiter to give you that information. I started out in compliance at a software company, despite having little interest in compliance. I did that for ~2.5 years, then worked with my manager to arrange to work 10 hours/week in the Marketing department, then after ~6 months of that, I moved to Marketing full time. If you kick ass in whatever job you have and work on extra skills (learning to code/improving at Excel will give you lots of options, such as software engineer or data analyst positions), you ought to be able to parlay the experience you've gained plus the other skills you have into something you're more interested in. Most companies would rather keep a good employee in the building than risk losing him/her. so you'd rather work with someone who doesn't set boundaries and is willing to sacrifice family relationships and personal obligations?  This provides short-term profitability at a substantial cost in employee morale, long-term productivity, and turnover.  Yes, there are some industries that thrive on the latter (e.g, Wall Street), but most of those people have a short horizon of employability in those areas (make your fortune and scram).  Startups may have the same attitude.  But if you are planning to have a stable career (as an employee), or if you are an employer who wants loyal employees and long-term stability (and yes, profitability), this is just a recipe for disaster. Try and bring with you a folder full of evidence about your skills and accomplishments, many of the top blue chip companies do what's called evidence-based interviewing and it means you provide evidence to back up your assertions about how great you are. So for example, the interviewer asks how you get on with your colleagues and you provide an email thanking you for being a great team player, or they ask you about research and you show them a piece of research you did. Of course this is harder when you go for your first job, but bring what you can. As an alternative and/or alongside this you can use stories (as someone else said) as a kind of evidence if you don't have any physical evidence. Your story should show systematically how you handled a situation to get a good outcome.  If they are a very conservative company they will want you to show that although you can kind of think outside the box, you are not prone to emotional reactions or knee-jerk responses and everything you do is carefully thought out and wouldn't bring them into disrepute if it got covered on the front page of a newspaper.  Good luck. 10 years into my career.  Here are my notes:  1. Don't work overtime as a salaried employee.  If there's more work than people then management needs to hire more people.  Sure, there are times when shit hits the fan and there's no other option, but that should be a 'once every two years' event, not a 'once every week' event.  2. Be a rockstar.  If you're spending time 'looking busy' because you finished a 3 hour job in 1 hour ship the results to your manager and ask for more.  Those results will be noticed and will move you from entry-level to mid-level to senior.  3. Skills pay the bills.  Always work on learning new things to bring value to your employer.  This is also required to move up the chain in your career, and leads into my #4.  4. Get paid what you're worth.  Maintain an understanding of what similar skillsets are paying in your area and either maintain or exceed that.  Your employer has an incentive to pay you as little as possible.  Show them comparable salaries for the same position paying more and make them match it.  If they won't match it find someone who will.  5. Don't correct your boss/salesperson when they are presenting to management/customers.  Instead, let them know after the meeting.   Your #2 points (both of them) are something that I struggled with when I was new in my career.  It was incredibly frustrating to *know* something, but not have anyone listen due to the fact that I was a 'kid'.  Unfortunately it's a part of life.  If you can do #2 and #3 on my list for a couple of years people will start listening.  It's a great feeling being a 24 year old kid in a room full of my boss's bosses, and my boss's boss's bosses and having them listen and consider my opinion, but it's not something that's given to everyone. You need to earn it. Obviously, her new employer won't know how much was contributed from   the old job, so this won't work this year. Obviously the new employer would. They will not deposit anything, unless you tell them how much you have deposited already. Somehow tell the new employer how much was contributed by her last   employeer, so they can stop deducting at the right time. I'm not sure   if this is even possible. Why isn't it possible? I've been in a similar situation, the employer had a form to fill on this matter as part of the paperwork for the payroll, right between the direct deposit forms and the 401K contributions form. By the way, another thing to take a look at when switching jobs is the Social Security tax. I wrote about it here. Nice. Well it looks like you are pretty setup. Get that LinkedIn profile setup. Start trying to connect with executives in your industry (hard) and then grind it out. It's very unlikely you will get a C level at your current employer so get ready to make a transition and make it . Most of the C levels I have spoken with either grew with a small company over 10 years or more. OR they jumped from one company to another to get the title Tell your employer during your initial contract Terms of Service discussions.  Ordinarily, this is boilerplate but you should ask for a rider in your contract which says - in some form - I already have IP, I will continue to work on this IP in my own time, and any benefit or opportunity derived from this IP will continue to be entirely mine. I requested exactly such a rider when I took up a new job just over a year ago and my employer was extremely accommodating.  That I already had a company in which that IP could reside actually made the process easier. As @JohnFX has already mentioned, not telling your employer is both unethical as well as storing up potential legal hassles for you in the futre. "&gt; How did you make the transition up the ""ladder"" thus far?  I applied online for jobs that were above and beyond what I was currently doing and did well enough in the interviews to get hired. For my current position, I found the hiring manager online and emailed him directly to tell him I was the person he was looking for. But I don't think that approach will get me any further.    &gt;How is your LinkedIn connection with executive recruiters?  I don't have one. I know that's an important next step but I'm not sure how to do it. Do I just email a bunch and introduce myself? I expect to be in my current position for at least 2 more years (realistically 4) and I would like to start cultivating the relationships but I'm not sure what to do.   I think that getting on some boards would be a similar step but again I'm not sure how.   &gt;Would you be willing to take a salary cut for a title change?  Within reason. Maybe 10%.   &gt;Does your college have a program for networking with alumni?  Probably. I have a pair of Masters' Degrees in my field from a top-25 program. The issue is that the alumni I network with would need to be executives and they're harder to engage." Express yourself as being disloyal and see what happens next.  I have been loyal to every company I have ever worked for since I started working at fourteen. I am now sixty.  Some things have not worked out for me, but I own a home. I have a good job that I love. I work hard and I earn a good living.  Be disloyal to your company and put *that* on your resume and see what your future holds for you.  All you have to do to be loyal to your company is do your job and not betray them. Some companies I have worked for have, in fact, gone out of business while I was working for them and I lost my last paycheck, but I moved on.  In my opinion if you hire me and you pay me for my work, if I understand my obligations to my employer and my employer understands its obligations to me then I am loyal and if I am not happy two weeks notice is my prerogative if there is some reason I can't negotiate a solution.  I will never betray an employer. If I do not want to work somewhere I will leave. Ask someone in Human Resources. I seriously doubt you are the first person to ask this question for their company and they should be more than happy to help. Don’t do anything that causes taxes or penalties, beyond that it’s entirely personal choice and other posters have already done a great job enumerating then.  I recently switched jobs in June and rolled over a 401k from my old company to new company and the third party managing the account at the new company was much more professional and walked me through all the required steps and paperwork. The other commenters have a point.  You're going to have a hard time succeeding without the right structure at work.  That said, you can look into sales methodologies like MEDDIC.  These methods are commonly deployed at B2B companies which it sounds like you are.