Brian Fellows had seen it all before. When media conglomerate Thomson Corp. acquired NewsEdge five years ago, it was the second time his company had been swallowed by a larger competitor. The anxiety that swept through the 20-person IT department was palpable, but Fellows, then the distributor of electronic news and information's network and security manager, kept his head.

"The second acquisition -- for me, at least -- was a little more known," Fellows recalls. "I'd been through the fires before. I knew it was coming. On the other hand, I was now a manager, and I knew that the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more likely it is to get peeled off."

Fellows not only survived his company's second acquisition, he prospered. His team grew from two people at NewsEdge to six at Thomson, which folded NewsEdge into its Dialog division. Even as four data centers, including his, in Burlington, Mass., were being eliminated and their functions absorbed by Dialog facilities in Minnesota, his IT group became a primary network-support operation for the 900-employee division.

"My group had grown. My budget had grown. My responsibilities had grown," Fellows says about Thomson Dialog, which he left after a few years to work for a smaller firm. "If I'd stayed there I would have probably ended up with 10 people, managing the networking for one of the [company's] major divisions."

Fellows learned through experience what recruitment and human resources experts agree are the keys to prospering through an acquisition or merger: Have patience; plan for the contingencies; maintain a cooperative attitude and practice problem-solving that can demonstrate your value to the combined company.

Mergers and acquisitions typically create high anxiety for employees uncertain about their role in a newly combined company, but keeping cool and taking certain precautionary steps can go a long way toward ensuring a smooth landing, experts and mergers-and-acquisitions veterans say.

"Be patient," advises Mitchell Marks, a professor at San Francisco State University's College of Business and a consultant specializing in managing corporate transitions. Employees whose companies have acquired or merged with another company typically have more time than they realize to assess the situation and explore their options, he says. Decisions about workforce restructuring and potential job cuts usually are several months away.