In recent years, serving on a board of directors has gone a long way from being the cushy sinecure it had been in days past. Thanks to added responsibilities brought on by the Enron debacle and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, directors' duties have increased exponentially, with frequent committee meetings, conference calls, and reading assignments. Worse, there's the possibility of permanently damaging one's hard-earned reputation when the company endures a corporate scandal or shows poor performance.  

Just last month, new Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain felt it necessary to defend the brokerage firm's directors from angry shareholders who blamed the board for the company’s losses. And there was the blistering criticism of New York Stock Exchange directors over their role in approving former chairman Dick Grasso's $140 million pay package.
 
It's enough to make many top-level executives think twice before signing on to new board membership. M. Keith Weikel, for example, the retired C.O.O. of health-care provider Manor Care, serves on two boards now and has been approached about joining several others. But he's turned them all down. "In today's world, you have to be very sure that this is a company and a group you want to get involved with," he says.

There is a silver lining, however: increased opportunity for newcomers. As more companies discourage their C.E.O.'s from sitting on outside boards and require other top executives to limit the number of directorships they hold, it's becoming easier for newbies to make their way into the boardroom. Dennis Carey of recruiting giant Korn Ferry International says that about a quarter of the 100 directors he's placed during the last two years have been newcomers, compared with perhaps "a handful" six years ago. According to Julie Hembrock Daum, the North American board-services practice leader for Spencer Stuart, 21 percent of directors of Standard & Poor's 500 companies in 2007 came from the ranks of division heads and below, while that figure was only 7 percent in 2002.

"If there was ever a good time to try to get on a board, it's now," says Mason Carpenter, a professor of strategic management and a corporate-governance specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.

Kathy Herbert can attest to that. The former executive vice president of human resources at supermarket chain Albertsons, Herbert was unsure what her next step would be after a big corporate merger in 2006. While still working at Albertsons to help with the transition, she began thinking about joining a public board, having already served on the boards of several major nonprofits. Around that time, she began speaking with recruiters for Covidien, a medical-device and pharmaceutical company, who had contacted her because of her H.R. expertise, as well as her experience in merchandising and operations. After interviews with the five-member search committee, Herbert was offered a seat and became a board member last June. "It seemed like the perfect board for me," says Herbert, citing the chance to broaden her industry experience.

Similarly, Helena Wisniewski, a vice president of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, was asked to join the board of medical-device manufacturer Greatbatch this past March—her first board seat. Wisniewski says that Greatbatch's recruiters told her that they found her using Google to try to identify someone with the right mix of scientific and entrepreneurial experience.

As both Wisniewski and Herbert learned, board recruitment has become more open since Sarbanes-Oxley and other rules mandated that the governance and compensation committees of boards run a much more formal recruiting-and-selection process. Gone are the days when boards would consider only a handful of candidates—typically ones already known by the C.E.O. or other directors. The average public company board now considers about 25 candidates for each open position, according to Spencer Stuart.

For executives interested in serving on a board for the first time, relationships are still key. Recruiters and other experts say that networking with board members who have a reputation for recommending executives to search firms helps—the world of corporate boards still holds echoes of the previous era and can be rather small.

"On any given board, there's probably a couple of people I know," says Debra Perry, a former senior managing director at Moody's who was recruited to become a director of credit-protection firm MBIA in 2004 (she stepped down from the board earlier this year to help develop MBIA's global-credit-risk strategy). On many occasions, Perry has referred interested candidates to a search firm or a governance committee of another company.

"It's all about making yourself visible and finding people to recommend you," says Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst, a New York-based research and advocacy group focusing on women in business. Covidien's Herbert attributes part of her attraction to the firm to the fact that she was well-known in the industry and had recently been named one of the top H.R. executives in the country in a trade magazine.

One other tried-and-true strategy is to start on smaller, sometimes private, boards, and work your way up. Irwin Kishner, chair of the corporate practice group at the New York-based law firm Herrick Feinstein, says many of his firm's private equity clients do a broad search to fill board positions at companies in their portfolio. Another stepping-stone is to join a nonprofit board, especially one that includes members who are also directors of big public enterprises.

Ultimately, for those up-and-coming executives who find that the networking and professional development potential of board membership outweigh the cons, there's never been a better time to step up to the plate.