Merger Survival Guide - Six Tips for Keeping Your Career Intact When Your Company Merges

The news can make even the most confident worker uneasy: Your company is merging with another. Whether your company is being bought or is buying another, a merger can mean job cuts, reorganizations, and new bosses.

You may not know for months exactly how the merger will affect your career. But you can do more than just wait. Here are six tips from the experts on how to get through a merger with your career intact:

# Assess your chances. To plan your next move, you need as much information as possible about the acquisition and your place in the new company. Sometimes a company will simply acquire the technology of another and let most of the workers go. Other times, the acquiring company wants to keep most of the workers.

Your specific job influences the likelihood that you'll be let go, as well, says Barb Kinnune, a longtime recruiter in Silicon Valley and currently career center manager at NASA Ames Research Center. "If you're in a revenue-producing role, the chances are much greater that you're going to stick around." Cost centers such as human resources, finance, and legal departments are often targets for consolida