GSETA

2010 GSETA Conference Workshops

The 2010 GSETA Conference workshop schedule is now available. You can download the PDF file by clicking here.

Friday Link Round-Up

Here's your round-up of links for the week:

• Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen: Good article using a framework from Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. In your career, it helps to both to know which type you are as well as to have the other types in your network. Each of them serves a purpose.

• Motivating without Money: Short answer--remove uncertainty about work; communicate a lot; ask people what they want; and say "thank you."

• Social Media as Mentoring Platforms: From Learning Solutions Magazine, how to use social media to support corporate mentoring. 

• Employment Gap Resume Samples: How to deal with a variety of gaps in your employment.

• 100 Best Blogs for Your Job Search: Lots of great resources here. 

• Directory of Corporate and Organizational Alumni--for job search networking

• How to Market Yourself to Employers in a Recession--title says it all.

Creating a Personal Learning Plan

The most valuable professional development plans are those we create for ourselves. We are more likely to implement the learning and to develop in the ways that most enhance our career paths.

Here are some tips and resources on creating a personal learning plan.

Tips for Creating a Personal Learning Plan

1. Reflect on successes, challenges, etc., from the previous year. Also reflect on trends in your industry and/or occupation.

• What strengths do you want to further develop?
• What weaknesses do you want to mitigate?
• What specific skills do you want to work on?

2. Brainstorm some learning goals for the next 6 months. Try using the BHAG approach to goal-setting.

3.  Ask yourself if these goals make you feel excited and energized. If they don't, keep working on them until they do.

4. Look at your list and ask yourself, "If I could only accomplish two things on this list, what would they be?" Put the rest on a "some day" list.

5. What mini goals do you want to set for yourself? Where do you want to be a week from now, a month from now, two months from now, at the end of your learning experience?

6. How do you want to learn? What resources are available to you? Can you connect with other people who are want to learn the same thing? Come up with a preliminary plan for pursuing your learning. Also give yourself permission to change that plan as you go through your project.

7. Set specific concrete tasks for yourself to accomplish every day.

8. Be sure to set aside time to accomplish those tasks. Consider your energy levels and use times of day where you're more alert and engaged. Learning shouldn't be relegated to when you're exhausted.

9. At least once a week review and reflect upon both what you've been learning and your learning plan. Document your reflections somehow--written in a blog post, record audio or video.

10. Use your reflections on your learning plan to change course if necessary. Have you found another topic you want to pursue? Are you finding that you're interest in your topic is waning? Do you need to change tactics? Refine your plan as you go.

Additional Resources

• Complete Guidelines to Design Your Training Plan
• 100 Amazing How To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything
• 7 LinkedIn Tactics for Lifelong Learning
• Professional Development Practice: The One Sentence Journal
• 15 Steps to Cultivate Lifelong Learning
• What Is Reflective Practice? (PDF).
• Becoming a More Reflective Individual Practitioner

Friday Link Round-Up

30 Recruiting Strategies in a Down Economy in 30 Minutes

View more presentations from Geoff Peterson.

Here's this week's round-up of links:

• 3 Ways to Demonstrate Your Value in a Job Search--Demonstrating value is definitely the key to a successful job hunt.

• Use Social Media to Target Hiring Managers--Social networks can help you get around gatekeepers and directly to the hiring manager.

• A Directory of Networking and Job Search Support Groups for NJ

• 30 Recruiting Strategies in a Down Economy--something to share with employers. 

• 5 Tips to Stay Focused in Your Job Search--these are good.

• Where to Get the Best Free Education Online--there are a surprising number of great online learning resources available for absolutely nothing. 

• SME Business Toolkit--free forms, training, how-tos, etc. for would-be entrepreneurs.

• Workforce Solutions Website--The Austin, TX area WIB/One-Stop is using a variety of social media tools to communicate with their community, including a blog, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and LinkedIn. 

• Exploring Careers from the Comfort of Home--online resources for exploring career options.

Texting for Teen Services

The Mt. Sinai Adolescent Health Center is running a 3-month pilot, Text in the City,  to explore how texting can be used to provide services to teens. In keeping with the program's mission, participant's can ask confidential health questions, sign up for birth control reminders and receive weekly health tips, all via cell phone. You can read more about the program here and here.

Cell phones and text messaging are the predominant form of technology communication for most teens--even the poorest will have a cell, which makes texting a great option for providing workforce development/job search services to teens. You can:

• Text job search and career tips
• Provide reminders about appointments and activities
• Send words of encouragement and inspirational quotes
• Respond to teen questions
• Do "mobile polling" to get feedback from teens

Learn More

• How to Set Up an SMS Campaign--tons of info and resources in this article. 

• Setting up an SMS Campaign from Your Desktop

• BabaJob: Bringing Jobs to People at the Bottom of the Pyramid--case study of how they are using text message in India to serve the poorest job seekers.

• How to Launch a Group Text Messaging Campaign for Your Nonprofit for Free--includes links to service providers. 

• 10 Nonprofit Group Text Messaging Campaigns--many of these ideas can be adapted for workforce development. 

• Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study--free report for download that includes more examples. 

• Mobile Marketing Best Practices for Nonprofits--tons of examples and tips, all with links.

• Poll Everywhere allows you to create and manage cell phone polling campaigns. For 30 or fewer poll participants, the service is free, which means you could use it in workshops and training sessions to get student feedback. Here's more on pricing and options.

Friday Link Round-Up

It's Friday the 13th, but hopefully these links will bring you some luck.

• How to Prospect Using LinkedIn and Twitter--a very nice article on how to use these two powerful social media tools to get into the right networks without cold calling. Good for job seekers AND for job development.

• SHRM Disability Employment Resource Page--A fabulous collection of webinars, guides, videos, etc. from the Society for Human Resource Management. Great to share with your employers. 

• Middle Skill Jobs: Going Strong or Fading Away?--New labor market analysis from David Autor of MIT suggests that middle-skill employment has bottomed out — at a rapid rate — and the workforce has split predominantly into high- and low-skill/wage jobs.

• Employment Transportation Encore--"Use this site as your portal into a virtual learning experience on how to improve people’s access to jobs and job training through improved transportation options. We’ve organized Web-based presentations from recent conferences, webinars, and other interactive resources that showcase useful practices from communities just like yours. The best part is that you can design your own conference based on topics that interest you most and then “attend” this customized conference from the comfort of your own desk at a time of your choosing."

• Hidden LinkedIn Tips and Tricks--Again, good for job development and for job seekers.

• Can Community Colleges Save the US Economy? --An interesting Time Magazine article on the value of CCs and the challenges they are currently facing.

• Including Presentations in Your Nonprofit's Strategy--Slideshare is a free online presentation sharing site that offers a lot of potential for WIBs and One-Stops. This article includes some excellent ideas and links for how you can use online presentations to market, fundraise, educate, etc.

10 Tech-Enabled Business Trends: Is Your WIB/One-Stop Keeping Up?

McKinsey Quarterly has published Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch. They are: 

• Trend 1: Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstream
• Trend 2: Making the network the organization
• Trend 3: Collaboration at scale
• Trend 4: The growing ‘Internet of Things’
• Trend 5: Experimentation and big data
• Trend 6: Wiring for a sustainable world
• Trend 7: Imagining anything as a service
• Trend 8: The age of the multisided business model
• Trend 9: Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid
• Trend 10: Producing public good on the grid

You have to register (it's free) to read the entire article, but it's well worth it. Then have a discussion with your WIB members and One-Stop staff to see how well you're keeping up with these trends.

You might also want to check out this McKinsey article on e-government 2.0. Key quote:

In the face of unprecedented fiscal constraints, as well as users’ heightened expectations based on the integration of the Internet into their daily life and work, it is imperative that the public sector refine its approach to e-government to ensure that these initiatives achieve maximum impact.

Forget "Transferable Skills"--Long-Term Unemployment Leads to Perishable Skills

We spend a lot of time talking with job seekers about transferable skills. But according to this article from Bloomberg, we need to be concerned about impact of long-term unemployment on "perishable skills":

Industries with highly perishable skill sets include health-care technology, telecommunications, and finance, where regulations have changed dramatically in the past year. The toughest, though, may be information technology. Companies in that sector have cut payrolls for 32 of the last 33 months, through June, for a cumulative loss of some 312,000 jobs, or about 10 percent.

In technology, “if you’ve been out of work for a year or two, you’re probably somewhat outdated,” says Shami Khorana, president of HCL America, the U.S. arm of New Delhi-based HCL Technologies Ltd., which employs about 5,000 workers in the U.S. He plans to hire at least an additional 600 people as the economy improves and anticipates retraining some candidates with obsolete skills.

Unemployed workers in construction, retail, low-level health-care jobs, and teaching are more likely to be attractive to employers once hiring picks up because such jobs don’t change as quickly, experts say.

As we serve more people who have been unemployed for longer periods of time, we need to be sure that we're talking to people in industries where skills get old quickly about ways that they can keep skills up-to-date, including:

• Internships--these work even for experienced people.

• Volunteer projects--many nonprofits would LOVE to have experienced people help them with their websites or finances.

• Contract work--Freelancing is a great way to keep skills up to date. 

• Participating in workshops and other training opportunities.

Friday Link Round-Up

Here are this Friday's links:

• DiscoverAbility NJ Learning at Work Symposium--Save the Date! On November 3, DiscoverAbility NJ will be hosting a work-based learning symposium for One-Stop Career Center staff and others who work with people with disabilities to address their education and employment needs. The Symposium will explore the use of job shadowing, internships, apprenticeship, and other work-based learning experiences to help youth and adults with disabilities.

• USDOL OJT Toolkit--Speaking of work-based learning, DOL has published an online OJT toolkit. Tons of resources, including outreach and monitoring tools.

• GSETA Conference Scholarships Available for Disability Employment Service Providers--Also from DiscoverAbility NJ, $350 scholarships to the GSETA conference are available to staff who work with people with disabilities. Preference will be given to staff with a disability.

• 55 Quotes to Inspire Creativity, Innovation and Action--You're sure to find something here to post over your desk or in your office.

• 21 Resources to Become a Better Listener--Communication starts with listening, so here are some resources to get you started.

• WorkSC--This is how the South Carolina Library system is supporting online job search and career development activities. Some good ideas for you to check out, especially if you're working with your local library system.

• 9 Tips for Preparing for the Jobs of the Future--Some decent tips here. The rest of the site is worth a look as well. It focuses on "encore careers" for experienced workers. Their "Get Started" Guide "offers expert advice, tips and success stories about how to pursue encore careers in education, health care, government and the environment."

• Cooking Fries? Cleaning Hospitals? Executives Reflect On Their First Jobs--From CNN, these reflections by famous CEOs on their first work experiences could be great for youth programs.

Webinar Resources

As WIBs and One-Stops try to do more with less, webinar technology becomes increasingly attractive. It minimizes the costs and logistics of face-to-face events, allowing you to provide services to hundreds of people using computers and a phone line. With webinars you are also able to record and archive events for posting on your website and ongoing use with customers. Both employers and job seekers are increasingly looking for online options for learning and information sharing and webinars can be a perfect strategy for accomplishing this.

Here are some webinar resources to get you started.

Webinar Platforms

Your webinar starts with a decent platform. There are a variety of options on the market, each with different pricing plans based on the number of webinar hosts, number of attendees and the features you want to select. It's a good idea to look for platforms that integrate audio and web conferencing so that people can listen to audio through their computers or through the phone. You also want to find platforms that allow you to record your webinars so that you can upload and share through your website.

• Go-To-Webinar--for $100/month or less than $1,000/year you can host and record unlimited webinars with up to 100 people.

• DimDim--DimDim offers webinars that can be hosted through your browser and don't require attendees to download any software to their computers. With DimDim Pro, you can offer unlimited webinars to up to 50 participants for $25/month. They also offer an Enterprise version with pricing based on number of users.

• WebEx--For $49/month, you get unlimited meetings with up to 25 participants with free mobile access, voice conferencing and online recording. Additional options will increase your costs.

• Adobe Acrobat Connect and ConnectNow--Pricing starts at $40/month for up to 20 participants with ConnectNow. After that, you need Connect which is priced based on the number of participants. 

For more on platforms, check out this article on 17 Online Meeting Tools that Facilitate Collaboration.

Planning and Running Webinars

Webinars are not the same as doing in-person meetings or trainings. Not only do you need to deal with technology issues, you are also missing the in-person opportunities for audience feedback that can trip up even the most seasoned presenters. If you're going to go into the webinar business, it's a good idea to be prepared. Here are some articles to get you started.

• 10 Steps for Planning a Successful Webinar
• 7 Tips on How to Run a Webinar
• 28 Web Conference Training Tips
• Tips for Remote Presenters
• 10 Best Practices for Webinars or Webcasts
• Tips to Pulling off a Successful Webinar
• Tips for Delivering Webinars/Training Online
• Running Effective Online Trainings

What experiences have you had with webinars? Are you using them at your WIB or One-Stop Career Center? Leave us a note in comments!