GSETA

Platform to Employment: New Hope for "99-ers"

Joe Carbone, President of The Workplace, one of Connecticut's 5 Workforce Development Boards, has developed an innovative program called Platform to Employment (P2E) that serves his region's long-term unemployed.

Featured recently on 60 Minutes (see video above), P2E is a public/private partnership that lasts for 8 weeks, combining work experience with a 5-week preparatory "boot camp." Upon program completion, they match their participants with open positions at local companies.  Placements are made on a trial basis, paid for by The Workplace. The expectation is that if the company is satisfied with the performance of the candidate, a full-time job will ensue.

As a 501C3, they are collecting donations to help fund the program, to date raising more than half a million dollars. 

For WIB areas that may be interested in learning about how to replicate the program in their areas, The Workplace is sponsoring a free webinar on March 8 from 1-3 p.m. Details and the registration form are here. 

Friday Link Round-Up

Social Media for jobseekers

View more presentations from James Mayes

As everyone returns to work after the 2011 GSETA Conference, here's your round-up of links for the week:

• Fact Sheet on the American Jobs Act--from the White House, this fact sheet lays out the major provisions in President Obama's proposed legislation.

• American Jobs Act Promotes Promising Models to Help Low-Skilled Adults Earn Post-Secondary Credentials--In a related link, this article from CLASP explores one of the American Jobs Act provisions. 

• What Hiring Managers Really Look For--some of the areas job seekers should be sure to emphasize in all their contacs with employers. 

• The Full Scope of America's Job Crisis in 17 Charts--some pretty sobering statistics here. 

• 5 Quick Ways to Organize a Presentation--ways to organize your slides based on the purpose of your presentation. 

• Can America's Jobless Fill America's Jobs?--Is widespread joblessness the result of a weak economy or does it signal a broader shift toward higher-skill work that may leave many Americans behind even as the economy recovers? 

• 4 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation--some good advice on setting up a "clean name" and then promoting your professional persona for job search. 

Friday Link Round-Up

Social Media for jobseekers

View more presentations from James Mayes

As everyone returns to work after the 2011 GSETA Conference, here's your round-up of links for the week:

• Fact Sheet on the American Jobs Act--from the White House, this fact sheet lays out the major provisions in President Obama's proposed legislation.

• American Jobs Act Promotes Promising Models to Help Low-Skilled Adults Earn Post-Secondary Credentials--In a related link, this article from CLASP explores one of the American Jobs Act provisions. 

• What Hiring Managers Really Look For--some of the areas job seekers should be sure to emphasize in all their contacs with employers. 

• The Full Scope of America's Job Crisis in 17 Charts--some pretty sobering statistics here. 

• 5 Quick Ways to Organize a Presentation--ways to organize your slides based on the purpose of your presentation. 

• Can America's Jobless Fill America's Jobs?--Is widespread joblessness the result of a weak economy or does it signal a broader shift toward higher-skill work that may leave many Americans behind even as the economy recovers? 

• 4 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation--some good advice on setting up a "clean name" and then promoting your professional persona for job search. 

Friday Link Round-Up

LinkedIn Demographics & Statistics - July 2011

View more presentations from Amodiovalerio Verde

There are some great links in this week's round-up, especially around the economy, job creation and how work is changing. 

• Growing Structural Evidence: Skills Mismatch Between Idle Workers and Vacant Jobs-"Technological advances have automated many low and middle-skill jobs. The principal tools for tackling structural unemployment are equipping more current workers and students with the education and skills for higher-skilled jobs that currently are vacant or for which growing numbers of workers are projected to be needed. More opportunities and incentives to pursue lifelong learning to keep skills current are also needed."

• An Economy that Works: Job Creation and America's Future--This report from McKinsey and Company is a MUST-READ. Some compelling and disturbing statistics on what's needed to create the right kinds of new jobs to get the economy back on track. Also critical info on the changing nature of work (58% of employers are turning to PT, temp and contingent workers) and how this impacts workers and job creation. 

• Workforce Strategies and the Changing Employer/Employee Relationship--Employment and career journalist John Rossheim sat down with The Seamless Workforce to discuss the current status of the ever-evolving relationship between employers and employees, especially with the rising number of contingent workers joining the workforce. The key take-away? Employers are shifting employment risks to workers. 

• The US Has Waged a War on Jobs--from Fortune Magazine. Key quote: :If VC's evaluate business plans by how quickly entrepreneurs propose to get work out of the U.S., if Wall Street looks to see how quickly jobs are being cut at the first sign of financial distress, if government leaders consider how many public sector jobs they can eliminate a measure of their acumen, and if a presumably enlightened captain of finance measures an industry's progress by how much outsourcing is taking place and how low wages have fallen, it is little wonder that jobs are an afterthought in most economic discussions."

• Use Blogging to Protect Against Unemployment--finding an industry or occupational niche and becoming a valued expert in it can provide the best protection against unemployment. 

• The Job Change Notifier--this handy tool will let you know when anyone in your LinkedIn network changes jobs. This can lead you to the hidden job market. 

• 32 Free Nonprofit Webinars for August 2011--Some great topics in here, from fundraising to marketing to using social media. 

• Disability Disclosure in the Job Search--an archived webinar and resources from DiscoverAbility NJ. Includes a panel discussion with two people with disabilities discussing their experiences with disclosure. 

The Youth Unemployment Bomb

A new Business Week article looks at the global youth unemployment crisis, noting that large swaths of unemployed 16-24 year olds is causing social unrest and resulting in a potential "lost generation" of young people who fail to launch properly into the work world.

This dire picture of the youth unemployment crisis is echoed in a March 2010 article  in the Atlantic, which describes research indicating that those who graduate into a recession experience earnings gaps for the rest of their lives, earning far less than their counterparts who gradudate into an economy with more jobs. These young people are also less likely to work in professional occupations and more likely to cling more tightly to the work they do find and to develop depression and heavy drinking habits. Not a pretty picture.

Some additional key findings from the BW article:

• The key to employment is the right match between education and jobs. Too often young people are seeking education for its  own sake, without connecting it to the real job market, resulting in frustration over being more educated than job skills demand. At the same time, there are large numbers of youth who are under-educated and unable to meet the entry-level requirements of most employers. Educational programs need to be more tightly linked to employers and employer demands. In those countries with strong apprenticeship programs, youth unemployment is lower.  Internships are another strategy. And young people need access to better occupational information when making educational decisions so that they connect their post-secondary plans with the real demands of the job market.

• Encouraging entrepreneurship may be "one of the most underexploited means for reducing youth unemployment." The BW article describes a University of Miami program, Launch Pad, that has launched 45 companies since 2008 and has attracted a great deal of interest and venture capital. Supporting young people as entrepreneurs has the dual outcome of both employing individual youth as well as potentially creating more jobs for others--an economic and workforce development win/win.

What is your area doing to address the youth unemployment issue? What issues do you see in terms of how youth unemployment may be impacting your work?

The Declining Demand for Men

Economist Nancy Folbre looks at how the recession has had a disproportionate impact on men, in part because traditionally male occupations, such as manufacturing, have been particularly hard hit:

The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women. Because men tend to work in more cyclical industries than women, they have historically lost more jobs on the downturn and gained more on the upturn.

The current upturn, however, is doing little to restore jobs, with November unemployment rates at 10.6 percent for men and 8.9 percent for women.

A long-term trend also lurks behind the cyclical pattern — a decline in the demand for the kinds of jobs that men typically fill.

For example, men constitute more than 71 percent of the work force in manufacturing but less than 25 percent of the workers in health and education services. These two employment categories were similar in size in 2000, but manufacturing employment has failed to rise, even in non-recession years. Employment in health and education, in contrast, has risen slowly, but steadily.

Why does this happen?

Partly because employers, men and consumers are all strongly influenced by conventional gender roles.

As Maria Charles and David B. Grusky of Stanford document in their book “Occupational Ghettos,” gender segregation is a remarkably persistent and complex phenomenon shaped by deep cultural beliefs.

But surely economic factors play some role. Men seem to be more reluctant to enter women’s jobs – which typically pay less for the same credentials – than women to enter men’s jobs. Will prolonged high unemployment among men overcome their reluctance?

Maybe, but not overnight. We should address the mismatch between the supply of and demand for men from both sides.

Increased public investments in job training and education could help workers diversify their skills, and a green jobs program could increase the demand for both men and women who need jobs but can’t find them.

Is your local area doing things to address the "Mancession"? If so, what are you doing? How are these strategies working?

The Case for Early Unemployment Intervention

The first thing many dislocated workers do upon being laid off is take a few weeks (or months) off before they dive into the job search. According to research, however, this may be the best way to become one of the long-term unemployed, which could lead to becoming unemployable.

From a 2008 paper by University of Chicago economics professor, Robert Shimer:

Professor Shimer averaged job-finding data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from January 1976 to October 2007, looking at only people who either lost or left jobs before becoming unemployed (that is, excluding people who were new entrants or re-entrants to the labor force).

 Professor Shimer found that 51 percent of workers who had been unemployed for one week obtained work in the following month, but the share declined sharply after that.

“For workers with duration less than six months, the job finding probability averages 31 percent,” he writes. “It falls to 19 percent during the next six months and just 14 percent for workers who have been unemployed for over a year.”

In other words, in recent decades, a person out of work for a week was nearly four times as likely to find a job the next month as a counterpart who’d been out of work for a year.

This trend holds true using more recent data from 2009, suggesting that the sooner a job seeker begins looking for a new position, the better. In fact, all-out efforts should be made in the first four weeks following a lay-off and, if possible, as soon as a worker is notifed that he/she will be let go.

What is your One-Stop Career Center doing to inform job seekers of these statistics and get them started on their job search within the first few weeks of being laid off? Unemployed workers need to understand that the longer they wait to begin the search, the greater the likelihood they will be unemployed for the long-haul.

Employers Pickier About Job Applicants' Skills

A recent NPR story highlights one of the major problems facing job seekers--employers are becoming much pickier about applicant skills:

Many of the chairs that are now being filled are in highly technical and specialized fields. And it's not that easy to transition from being an architect to a software engineer, or from an escrow officer to an airplane mechanic.

Boeing, for example, hired more than 5,000 people this year. Glenn Cook, director of staffing for the aerospace company, says it will hire about twice that many next year. With an increase in the production rate of the 787 and a new facility in South Carolina, he says Boeing needs more engineers and more mechanics.

"What we really want to do is hire people with experience so they can hit the ground running and help us out immediately," Cook says.

It's a refrain you often hear from employers.

Peter Cappelli, a management expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says it didn't used to be this way. "A generation ago you would never expect that somebody could come into a reasonably skilled, sophisticated position in your organization and immediately make a contribution," Cappelli says. "That's a brand new demand."

In addition to wanting people with work experience who can hit the ground running, there's also increasing evidence that many businesses are only interested in workers who are already employed. For workers who are laid off from shrinking occupations, this is certainly a double whammy.

The Recession Has Hit Minorities Especially Hard

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the recession has hit African-American and Hispanic workers especially hard:

• As of September, white unemployment was at 8.7 percent, the Hispanic unemployment rate was at 12.4 percent and the black unemployment rate was at 16.1 percent.

• The Black unemployment rate has steadily risen every year since 2008. Since Sept 2008, the black unemployment rate has jumped from 11.2 percent to 15.9 percent this year.
  
  Along that same period, however, the white unemployment rate has actually gone down. In September of 2008, the white unemployment rate was 8.6 percent, but had fallen to 8.3 percent by September of 2010.
  
  In September 2008 Hispanic unemployment stood at 7.6 percent, but jumped to 12.2 percent one year later. By September 2010 the rate fell to 11.9 percent.

• 49.1 percent of black teens are unemployed, a rate that's 26 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate for white teens and 10 percentage points higher than the rate for Hispanic teens.

Friday Link Round-Up

Hard to believe it's Friday already. And here's some Friday trivia for you. In October 2010, we have 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays--an event that apparently occurs only every 820 years or so.

But you're here for the links. So here they are:

• Job Openings Per Unemployed Worker Unchanged in August--The chart above is from this article. Note that in every industry, there are many more workers than jobs.

• Youth Employment Transporation Resources--Best practices, issues briefs, etc. from the Community Transporation Association. There's also a version for Older Workers. 

• 10 Things Recruiters Won't Tell You--Includes a webinar and resources for dealing with these. 

• Pre-Crime Comes to the HR Department--A new software package trolls your online identity--Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. and provides an evaluation of you in several categories, including "Poor Judgment," "Drugs and Drug Lingo," and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." It can be used for applicants and current employees and claims to help companies predict a person's character, not their behavior. This could be the trend of the future, folks, so one to watch for.

• College Fish.org--A compilation of tools and resources to help people transfer from community colleges into 4-year degree programs.

• How Do I Develop and Deliver an Elevator Speech--The title says it all. 

• 4 Digital Alternatives to the Traditional Resume--Especially good for job seekers who need to stand out in a crowded field and have digital artifacts they can share.

• How to Find Good Hourly Employees--Some good advice for employers in here.

• Teach on the Road by Broadcasting Yourself Live--Did you know that with a Droid or iPhone, a Ustream account and the Ustream broadcast app you could be running live streaming video of any event? It's easy and free!

• 37 Productivity Tips for Working from Anywhere--Surely there's something on this list that can help.