Community Colleges - The Jobless Solution

The August 24, 2011 issue of Business Week has an upsetting article titled The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man. Here's some details from the piece: 

The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009.

These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. 

Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. 

In 1969 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

Median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, putting them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s.

Both men and women have confronted job losses in the weak economy. In July, 68.9 percent of women aged 25-54 had jobs, vs. 72.8 percent in January 2008. 

Unemployed men are now more likely than women to be among the long-term jobless. 

The piece goes on to discuss how women (who currently account for 57% of jobs in the U.S.) have made up the majority of college students over the past 30 years and fit better into our data-driven economy. However, women continue to earn about 16 percent less than men and struggle against gender discrimination and career interruptions. 

All this going on while, at the same time, we've got companies struggling to hire workers with the right skills.     

President Obama will layout a new jobs plan shortly after Labor Day and community colleges must be a major part of the solution. They are the perfect place for long-term jobless women and men to go and get the education and training needed for stable and well-paying careers. 

If you are out of work and feel you have no prospects well..... you are 100% wrong. There is a ton of opportunity at your local community college. The fall semester has either just started or is starting soon. There is time right now to get yourself on track. The American Association of Community Colleges has a great interactive community college finder on their website - click here to link. 

Marshall Goldsmith on Change

Marshall Goldsmith has a new book out titled What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. He also had a short piece in the August 25, 2008 edition of Business Week Magazine titled We’re All Entrepreneurs – Advice for the young that transcends age.

Marshall discusses the current time of uncertainty and, if we are going to be successful, how we all need to think and work like entrepreneurs. In the Business Week piece he gives the following advice to young people who are just entering the workplace:

• It is tough out there and only going to get tougher.
• Forget about (job) security.
• Like it or not, even if you start out with a large corporation, you are going to be an entrepreneur.
• Make peace with this reality and your life is going to be a lot better.
  

He also discusses how the West originally believed globalization would create a world where we would market our products to a worldwide audience and, in turn, buy products from other parts of the world for less money. Well, those things have happened. Now we are realizing that globalization also means people from all over the world are competing for our jobs. Here's more from Marshall's Business Week piece:

In many of the top engineering and science programs, almost no one has English as their first language - and yet they speak it fluently: That’s global competition.

Marshall goes on:

In an era of uncertainty, nothing can be taken for granted. Young people are going to have to develop skills and talents that make them globally competitive. And they are going to have to keep upgrading and changing their skills and talents to fit the needs of an ever-changing marketplace.

Goldsmith’s book is a recommended read and also available in electronic form as an audio book. There is also a Kindle version. You can check him out on the web at http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com

Unified Communications: Changing the Way We Work and Learn

It's been more than a couple of days since my last post - I was in Philadelphia for the American Association of Community Colleges Annual Convention. Great convention and always so good to reconnect with community college friends from around the country. We had a large National Science Foundation ATE Center contingency there with representation from 14 Centers along with the National Science Foundation.

At the conference, there was a lot of conversation about Web 2.0 applications and how they can be used in the classroom and workplace. I found myself often indirectly referring to an excellent Marketwire post titled IBM Predicts Five Future Trends That Will Drive Unified Communications

The post lists five future trends predicted by IBM Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin in his VoiceCon 2008 Conference keynote address. Here's what Rhodin says will increase demand for the fast-growing unified communications market and reshape the way businesses and workers communicate and collaborate worldwide:

1) The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. No need to leave the office. Just bring it along. Desk phones and desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops, that take on traditional office capabilities. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being there in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green business initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home.

2) Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging (IM) as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel more rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications.

3) Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit.

4) Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability. Converged, aggregated, and rich presence will allow businesses and individuals to better find and reach the appropriate resources, removing inefficiencies from business processes and daily lives.

5) New meeting models will emerge. Hang up on routine, calendared conference calls. The definition of "meetings" will radically transform and become increasingly adhoc and instantaneous based on context and need. 3-D virtual world and gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences to deliver more life-like experiences demanded by the next generation workers who will operate more efficiently in this familiar environment.

It's happening - this is where work is going and we must keep pace in our classrooms to properly prepare our students.

You can watch Mike Rhodin's keynote by clicking here and get more information on what he and the IBM Lotus group are doing at: http://www.ibm.com/lotus/uc2