Average Annual Leave in Colorado (Estes Park: how much, home, school)

[RVT South Africa]

My husband and I are looking to move with our child to Colorado from South Africa. How much annual leave is the average given in the work place so that we can negotiate annual leave with his prospective employer.

[brightdoglover]

Completely depends on the employer and the job but my guess is it will be a shocker compared to European (and South African?) leave. There is nothing unique to Colorado in comparison to other states, it depends on the company. There aren't any federal rulings, either.

[Bideshi]

I'd say average for new hires is one week vacation. Two weeks is pretty much tops.

[Dogmama50]

Depending on the company and how high his position is, one to three weeks is the average in the US.

[CosmicWizard]

I had 5 weeks in Virginia, but just 2 weeks in Colorado for the same job. The company in Virginia wrapped sick days and vacation days together. They called it personal leave time. Employees were treated like adults. If you took care of yourself and stayed healthy, you got 5 weeks of vaction time. My company is Colorado separates vacation days and sick days, essentially rewarding sick employees with more time off than healthy employees. This is a common trick in the USA to get more work days out of the employees for the same pay.

[RVT South Africa]

wow! Thank you for the replies. Back home we get anything from 18-21 days, EU is even better than us. How do Americans travel?

[SCentralNEGuy]

Originally Posted by RVT South Africa

wow! Thank you for the replies. Back home we get anything from 18-21 days, EU is even better than us. How do Americans travel?

Try to take weekend trips where you add one or two days on to the beginning and end of each week. There are a lot of things you can do in a weekend. I usually take a week long summer trip, a several day trip around holidays in the winter, and then a couple days here and there. Overall I may end up taking a little over two weeks taking advantage of the holidays but am self-employed so it is not quite as strict. I agree I think its a terrible system and that we as Americans don't take enough vacation! The worst part is that some of the destinations like Estes Park are a lot busier on the weekend during the week, so you are going to be spending it with people who are trying to take as little time off as well!

[delta07]

The fact of the matter is most average Americans don't travel, at least not in the sense that most Europeans, Australians, and other first world countries do. We don't get the vacation time. The people I know who travel for longer than a week or so have either saved up their vacation time for years (if their company allows this), work alternative schedules, work for the federal government, work for themselves, are teachers, or quit their job.

When I worked for the federal government, I started out earning about 2.5 weeks of vacation a year and moved up to about 4 weeks. Then when I left and went into teaching, I got a total of 10 days leave during the school year. I ended up using that when I was sick (as a new teacher, I was sick a lot). Of course, I did get about 6 weeks of free time during the summer, but I was broke so I couldn't travel. My husband is a nurse and he earns almost 8 weeks of leave a year. On top of that, he works an alternative schedule and it's very flexible. We can stack his work days together so we can stretch our vacation time out even further. We are very lucky!

[brightdoglover]

Americans working for the normal times off don't travel, they take a vacation for a week or two. Some people don't want their job to think it can get by without them. When I worked in a software company, the standard was two weeks off for the first five years. I did the math and almost had a heart attack about the rest of my life.
My current job in healthcare gives RNs three weeks the first year, four weeks after that, and five weeks after 15 years. Of course, we are working weekends, nights and holidays, so it doesn't feel like that much, but it's not bad for the U.S. My job also only allows two weeks per person during summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day) so no "travel" then. I can get a few days more than two weeks in the summer because, as I cheerfully point out, I work every holiday every year.
If we went to "paid time off" instead of vacation/sick, there'd be a lot fewer casual sick calls and you could get a total of six weeks time off if not calling in sick. I don't know why they won't go to that. I did have a job that had paid time off if you didn't call in and worked holidays, you had six weeks off. I used that to take a major trip to Nepal and was gone for over a month.

[MountainK]

Try to negotiate a bank of vacation time when you begin a new job, otherwise if you only accrue a couple of weeks a year, you don't end up with very much time off. Some businesses are more willing to negotiate vacation time than salary, but if you don't do negotiate for more vacation time when you are initially hired, you may be out of luck. But if you don't have strong skills/knowledge/expertise to contribute, you may have no leverage when negotiating, but if you don't ask, you won't receive it. You definitely need to ask.