Workforce Developments

What's up with WorkforceDevelopments?

You might have noticed, I haven't posted in a while. 

I've been blogging here at WorkforceDevelopments since 2006. Can you remember what social media was like in 2006? Heck, we were still calling it "web 2.0" way back then. Facebook was barely around, and Twitter was launched that same year. 

We hadn't even had the global economic meltdown yet. 

So the world turns, and life goes on. These days I spend my writing and web time on other projects like my new collection of short stories, The Streetwise Cycle and an online video literary magazine called GuerrillaReads. 

For now, I'm putting this blog into hibernation. I'll keep the content posted online - it's good stuff. Who knows, I may return to it one day. I enjoyed every bit of writing and analysis I did here. Please do continue to add comments and stay in touch. 

See you on the web and in the real world again soon. 

--Bronwyn 

 

 

All I want for Christmas is a job

Is it so much to ask for?

 

 

Courtesy of Spencer Green, Gary Stockdale and found on HuffPost

Changing interest in unemployment

A couple of weeks ago I took a look at the question of when do Americans care about the homeless? Turns out there's a remarkably predictable pattern to it, and we're currently in the midst of the annual burst in concern. I used a fun little tool called Google Insights to learn this.

Today, a look at a completely different pattern. How has our interest in unemployment changed over time? Like my question about the homeless, the answer tells us a lot about Americans and our economy. Check out this graph:

 

This chart tells us two very important things. First, as the impact of the 2007 financial crisis began to be felt, there was a sudden surge in people who wanted to learn more about unemployment, and that surge has not yet declined. The US unemployment rate shot up from 5.2 percent in May 2008 to 8.9 percent by February 2009; the Google search surge actually preceeded that slightly. Second, the terms people search for on Google is a pretty good indicator of what's going on in the real world.

What were the top five unemployment-related searches? You won't be surprised:

1. Unemployment benefits
2. Unemployment office
3. Unemployment rate
4. NYS unemployment
5. Unemployment extension

That last one is interesting in light of yesterday's news that House Republicans have blocked another unemployment extension. Based on the comments on this blog, I can tell you anecdotally that Americans have been deeply interested in every unemployment extension that has or has not been passed by Congress during the downturn. Google Insights data gives the statistical evidence to support it. 

 

Vote!

I wasn't the first to my local polling place this morning, but it was close.

There are some tight elections out there, and the stakes are high this year, so get out and...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To find your local polling place, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When do Americans care about the homeless?

Americans are a kind, caring people, right? If internet searches are a good measure of what people care about, then check out this chart from Google Insights:

 

There are four things you can learn from this one simple graphic:

• Every year when Thanksgiving rolls around, Americans experience a sudden upsurge of interest in the homeless
• There's a secondary bump in interest every April - tax season!
• Interest in the homeless is at its lowest during summer - until 2010 its lowest level has consistently been in August
• Overall interest in the homeless appears to have increased since the economic collapse

Where is the greatest interest in the homeless? Top five states by Google search:

1. Hawai'i
2. District of Columbia
3. Maryland
4. Massachusetts
5. Washington 

What else do you see in the statistics? What can we learn from these stats?

You can go much deeper into this data by place, time and search terms by going directly to Google Insights.

Workforce Development Summit 2010: Nov 4 in San Francisco

The following announcement comes to WorkforceDevelopments courtesy of the Bay Area Coalition for Employment Development (BACED). If you'd like to see your upcoming event here, just drop me a line.

*  *  *  *  * 

The Workforce Development Summit 2010  is an all-day conference featuring a variety of speakers on topics ranging from disabilities in the workplace to green careers.  There will also be multiple breakout sessions, panels of industry professionals and invaluable networking opportunities with other workforce development professionals.  Please join us! 

EVENT DETAILS
When: November 4th, 2010 from 8:30AM to 4:30PM
Where: The San Francisco LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market Street

We are very excited to offer presentations by these Featured Speakers:

Jeff Bell, Radio personality and author on mental health
Navigating Uncertainty and Managing Doubt

Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, President and CEO, SF Goodwill Industries
Workforce Development in San Francisco

Raquel Pinderhughes, Professor of Urban Studies, SFSU
Green Careers and Training Programs

Diana Maier, Employment Law Attorney, Law Offices of Diana Maier
Employment Law Basics

Larry Robbin, Executive Director, Robbin and Associates
From No Work, No Way To I’ve Got The Job: Job Retention Strategies For Job Loss Prone Populations

John Halpin, Sector Academies Manager, Office of Economic and Workforce Development
Sector Strategy and Sector Academies

Decker Ngongang, VP of Programs, Mobilize.org
Community College Completion Summit

You’ll also have the opportunity to attend panel discussions on 

• Green Careers including Carol McClelland, PhD, author of Green Careers for Dummies and founder of Green Career Central
• Re-Entry including members from the San Francisco Re-Entry Council
• Employer Perspectives including Kevin Koncsol from California Pacific Medical Center and Mountain Taylor from Allied Barton Security

Click here to register online.

For more detailed information, paper registration or questions, email Jackie Conrad.

This summit is organized by the Bay Area Coalition for Employment Development (BACED). We are employment professionals who work as a network of agencies to best serve our clients’ needs. Our goal is to substantially increase the hiring of individuals with barriers to employment by connecting qualified applicants with the employers who need them, while promoting disability awareness and diversity.

Using blogs for advocacy

Couple of weeks ago I did a guest post over at the terrific blog run by the Ohio Workforce Coalition, all about using blogs for advocacy work in our field. Here's the post in its entirety. They're running a series of posts by national workforce development experts - click over to the OWC blog to read much more. 

***

Let me start with a couple of facts I think we can all agree on:

1) What we do in workforce development is important. More important today than perhaps any time in recent history.

2) Far too few people know about workforce development.

3) We’re overworked and underpaid, and don’t have the time or staff to take on another task.

All that being true, how can you use blogs to support your workforce development advocacy efforts?

Here’s another fact of life in our modern world: You can’t do advocacy work without having an online component, but your advocacy work can’t take place only online. What you do online has to be coordinated and should build on what you’re doing in the real world, and vice versa.

I’ve been blogging since 2006 over at Workforce Developments and I’ve been teaching workshops about blogging and social media since 2007. In that time I’ve seen blogs go from “the hot new thing” to just another tool in your advocacy toolkit. 

Even though Twitter and Facebook have taken over the hot new social media tools, blogs still matter. They’re the place where you can create original content and go into issues in more detail than a quick status update will allow. They give you a platform where you can speak in an informal voice to a broad audience.

And right now, you have something important to say. 

Everyone knows employment in the US is a wreck. As a workforce development practitioner or advocate, you know unique details, trends and underlying causes about the current employment crisis. You also know about solutions that work. What’s more, you know that getting people back to work in this economy is hard work that just takes time to succeed.

If we’re going to get good policies and smart investments at the federal, state or local level rather than simplistic slogans and short-term infusions of cash, you need to educate policymakers. The general public needs to hear from you too if they’re going to support workforce development policies. This is why blogging remains an important tool for your advocacy work. You need to explain what you know to all those audiences. 

If you work for a government agency, you may not be able to engage in “advocacy” work, but you should be blogging too. You have access to data, and you have stories to tell about what’s working and what’s not in your programs or the ones you fund.

Government employees used to tell me that “we’re different – we can’t blog.” The Obama presidency ended that, ushering in a new era of government blogging. Check out this list of blogs from federal agencies. The Center for Technology in Government at SUNY-Albany recently did a nice overview of “eight essential elements” governments should consider when setting social media policies. Their report includes examples of policies from a wide range of agencies.

Whether you’ve been running a blog for a while or just getting started, here are a few suggestions to help you use blogging to support and build your advocacy work.

Create a blogging schedule that’s right for your organization and stick with it. If that means once a week, then post once a week. If it’s more or less than that based on your staff resources, that’s fine. Just be consistent. 

Keep it simple. One idea per post – that’s all you need. If you find yourself going into detail on background info to explain something, then you should probably save all that background content for a new post.

Seek blog content in the everyday. Every single day, your organization and your colleagues in workforce development and related fields are writing reports, issuing statements, creating web pages and otherwise generating information you can blog about. Next time an email hits your inbox with a report by a colleague, instead of marking it to read when I have time and never getting back to it, read it and write a quick blog post about what their findings mean for your community.   

Be strategic with your social media networks. That means getting links to your blog posts out via Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and other sites. Make it as easy for people find your content as you can.

Don’t forget the people.  Connect with other workforce development sites, blogs, Twitter feeds and so on. Link to them from your blog, but also connect with those people personally. At its heart, this social media phenomenon really is about people.

Do your homework. Stay up-to-date on how other nonprofits, government agencies and even businesses are using social media for advocacy work. Take a look at what your high-profile colleagues are doing. A few of my favorite social media resources these days are Heather Mansfield’s Nonprofit Tech 2.0 blog, the indispensable Beth Kanter’s blog and Mashable . But don’t stop there – follow their links to far more resources than I could ever list here.  

Advocate for our field. Workforce development matters and anything you can do to raise the profile of your work and that of your colleagues helps us all.

Required reading

From Hidden Costs to High Returns: Unlocking the Potential of the Lower-Wage Workforce
National Network of Sector Partners
August 2010

American companies tend to view their low-skill, low-wage workers as a disposable resource — necessary but transient, plentiful enough to hire and lose and hire again as needed. Like many forms of waste, this approach to human capital has the advantage of simplicity, but it’s loaded with hidden costs. Chief among these is the constant expense of recruiting and training new employees. But there are other costs, too, like the stunting of employees’ loyalty, ambition, and attention to quality. A culture of transiency, where paychecks don’t pay the bills and opportunities for advancement are few or nil, is one sure way to wipe out any incentive to perform above average, to push for excellence, to get the details right.

A growing number of companies, large and small, are investing in a different approach. These companies view the lower-skill workforce as a durable asset: a means of continually improving quality and a potential talent pool for higher-level positions.... Continue reading

Tuning In to Local Labor Markets: Findings From the Sectoral Employment Impact Study 
by Sheila Maguire, Joshua Freely, Carol Clymer, Maureen Conway and Deena Schwartz
Public/Private Ventures
July 2010

For American workers, having a high school or general equivalency diploma (GED) — which once represented a means of entrance to the middle class — is no longer adequate for finding steady employment. In fact, three quarters of low-wage workers have these qualifications but lack the relevant occupational skills and connections to employers needed to launch a career. At the same time, in some regions of the country there are persistent skills gaps clustered in particular industries, such as manufacturing and healthcare. Many of these jobs are expected to grow and require specific technical skills that can be gained only through focused training that is closely linked to the needs of local businesses.

Over the past two decades, an innovative approach to workforce development known as sectoral employment has emerged, resulting in the creation of industry-specific training programs that prepare unemployed and underskilled workers for skilled positions and connect them with employers seeking to fill such vacancies.... Continue reading

How to prepare for your next job interview (part 2)

In this post, I give away my biggest secret to job interviewing. In part 1 covered the simple stuff on the surface. Now we get down to the real nitty gritty.

Two or three days before the interview, you'll sit down with your resume and cover letter, plus a notebook and pen.

Step 1: The threes 
Make a list of the three most important things you want the interviewer(s) to remember about you. They should be about key knowledge areas, skills or work habits you have to offer, and they should be responsive to the job description. They should also reflect what's in your resume. 

For each of these three things, write down at least one example in your work history where you demonstrated that knowledge, skill or work habit. Hiring managers love specific examples.

Just about every job interview includes a vague question that boils down to Why should we hire you? or What are your strengths? Now you have an answer ready, beginning with, "There are three areas where I really think I'm a good fit for your needs." You can list those three areas, and give specific examples for when you've put those to work.

What you'll find is that this one set of answers will help you answer all sorts of questions in the interview. What's more, when you feel prepared, you're calm and will look much more confident.

Step 2: Your questions for them
If it's the first interview, don't ask about salary or benefits. I generally stick with questions about the substance of the job and the organization where I'm interviewing. My last question is about next steps in the hiring process. Write down your questions on that same pad of paper. Three or four questions is usually plenty. The important thing is to have them prepared before the interview. Don't add to the interview pressure by making yourself try to think up clever questions on the spur of the moment.  

You're going to take that notebook and a few pens with you to the interview so you can take notes on their answers. In fact, I take notes throughout the interview. Not too much, but at least to catch the important details. I want them to know I'm listening carefully.

Step 3: Practice 
Sit down with your notes and practice. You've given yourself a couple of days, so do it a few times. Get comfortable talking about your strengths and telling stories about how you've demonstrated those strengths in previous jobs. You want to be able to do this without looking at the notebook in front of you too much. But you'll have it there during the interview if you need it. If you're comfortable practicing in front of a friend, even better. They can tell you if you're making sense and if you look nervous.

If the interview goes well and the hiring manager is a skilled interviewer, this preparation will make a good process go even better for you.

If - as happens far too often - you have an unskilled interviewer who's never seen your resume, you have a plan in place to ensure that they remember the three things you want them to remember about you. They'll stick in the interviewer's mind as relevant and specific. You'll feel confident that you've shown the best you have to offer, even if they didn't make it easy for you.

How to prepare for your next job interview (part 1)

You sent in your resume and you got the call. They want to interview you for the job!

Here's how not to get ready for the interview: Wait until the morning of the interview, put on your best suit and walk in the door. No, you still have a lot to do. With the right preparation, you can increase your odds of getting the job significantly. Just looking like you invested time in getting ready can put you ahead of many competitors.

These tips and tricks for preparing for a job interview are ones I've developed for myself over many years. Including lessons learned from my own job interview mistakes. These tips work whether the interview is in person, on the phone or in Second Life. I've used them to prep for interviews for full-time jobs, part-time jobs, temp jobs and consulting gigs.

What's more, you should take this prep work equally seriously whether this is your dream job, or a just-to-pay-the-bills job. 

First up, some important things to know before you walk in the door:

The person doing the interviews may not have read your resume. Someone read it, but that might have been in another department. Heck, it might have been a machine. Or the interviewer might have already forgotten the most important details. You need to be prepared to summarize the key facts in your work history that make you the best candidate for the job. 

The interviewer may not be very good at interviewing. Yes, this has happened to me more than once. Your interviewer might be very good at his or her job, but interviewing is a skill that most hiring managers are never properly trained to do. You need to be prepared to present yourself and your skills effectively even if the interview questions are lame.

What are you going to take with you to the interview?

• At least two fresh copies of your resume (in case you need to leave one behind)
• A clean notepad and a couple of blue or black ink pens 
• Your questions for the interviewer (more on that in the next post)

Dress in appropriate business clothes. Not jeans, not that little black number you wear clubbing. Business clothes. If you're not sure what that means, ask a friend. 

Do you know how to get there and how long it will take you at the interview time? Whether you're driving, getting a lift or taking public transit, plan it out ahead of time and give yourself plenty of time. I'll never forget the job interview I was half an hour late for when I underestimated rush hour traffic. They, on the other hand, forgot me quickly. 

I often look up the nearest coffee shop to my interview location, in case all goes well and I get there too early. But order something without caffeine - you don't need to add to your jitters before the interview. 

Finally, turn off your cell phone, or at least set it to silent. Do not answer your phone or check messages during the interview! You don't even want it to go off and interrupt your conversation. Imagine if your ring tone just happens to be a song your potential new boss hates. What if it's the very song that was playing on the radio when she found out her husband was cheating on her? That could really kill the vibe. 

In part 2, I'll give you my tried-and-true tips for how to prepare for what you'll actually say in the interview.

Have any good job interview prep tips to offer? Add them in the comments below. 

Cartoon by Christophe Bauwens

How important is the Workforce Investment Act?

Take the poll!

Social media: expert or experimenter?

I recently spoke on a panel about publishing where I identified myself as a "social media experimenter" rather than an expert in the field.

Why? Doesn't everyone want to be a "social media expert?"

Here's why:

• Social media is changing too fast for anyone to be an "expert" on all of it. Seems like every time I feel like I've mastered a new application, it's already changed and a better one has come along.

• There are lots of people out there calling themselves experts. Each of them knows some important parts of the puzzle, but no one knows everything. And that's okay! It's a big field, and it's just not possible to know everything.

• "Expert" status can lead to complacency. I once heard of a physics professor who suggested to his younger colleagues that they photocopy their lecture notes every few years so the students wouldn't see how they were getting brown with age. That just won't fly in the social media world.

• I'd rather experiment and imagine new possibilities, instead of sitting back and doing the same old thing. We live in an age where the lines between personal and mass communication have been blurred. Where individuals with great ideas can do an end-run around the gatekeepers and get their work and their message to interested readers and listeners. Don't sit back and do what they expect with these social media tools - experiment and try them out in unexpected ways to meet your needs. 

My newest social media experiment is an ebook: The Streetwise Cycle. It's a series of short stories presented in text, images, audio, maps, word clouds and more. You can read it online, print it, or download it to your phone or e-reader. It's also an experiment in content, combining things I've learned from working in human services with the craft of storytelling.

I hope to continue adding content to the site. If you have ideas for more social media experimentation - with The Streetwise Cycle or otherwise - I'd love to hear from you.