Job Seekers, Be Creative and Flexible

In 2012, creativity and adaptability will be key to landing and keeping a job for many workers, as staff levels remain lean and employees are expected to respond to a wide variety of demands, experts say.

Economists don’t expect loads of job growth, but there could be opportunities in areas such as health care, professional services, retail and some manufacturing, says Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown University. Also, continuing churn in the labor market means that even in areas with few new jobs, there will still be openings when workers move around.

Technical knowledge and experience will be required for certain spots. “For professional services you usually need a professional degree. In health you usually need some training,” Mr. Holzer says. “Manufacturing needs some occupational training. Retail is different. It doesn’t require specific occupational training, but it does often require some interpersonal skills.”

In addition to the standard prerequisites, employers will be looking for workers who are able to quickly adapt to new responsibilities as companies respond to changing economic and industry trends. So workers should highlight their creative skills to differentiate themselves, says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

“Firms have so many job seekers per opening. They are going to want candidates with clear credentials, but also a little extra shine in interactive skills and creativity,” Mr. Katz says. “They are less willing in a weak labor market to take chances.”

Here are other skills experts recommend workers should pick up and enhance.

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What a great opportunity to get your hands dirty in an entrepreneurial venture. During this time of change in our economy this is a life changing opportunity.

Ivy League senior Ethan Carlson recently turned down a job with a global-energy consulting practice and instead pledged to spend two years working for an entrepreneur, perhaps with a focus on renewable energy, in a struggling U.S. city.

“I want to make an impact not only on myself, my career and my finances, but also society around me, and my local community,” the 21-year-old mechanical-engineering major at Yale University says.

The project he plans to join, Venture for America, was founded by Andrew Yang, the former chief executive of Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company acquired in 2009 by Kaplan, a Washington Post Co.

Venture for America says it was inspired by Teach for America, which places recent college graduates at schools in low-income communities for two years. This summer its first crop of about 50 “fellows” will be placed at small businesses such as Drop the Chalk, an education-software firm in New Orleans, and Andera Inc., an online-account-opening firm in Providence, R.I.

The companies will pay participants $32,000 to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits. The program includes a five-week program at Brown University that mimics training for consulting and investment banking.
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There is increasingly obvious evidence that slowing down to a quiet stop on a regular basis increases well being and even happiness. Do we really have to live life with such stress? I don’t think so. We just need to prioritize a little quiet into our days to realize this. Try it.

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
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Can’t find a job in LA? You might to look in another country…

Making a Play for Video Gamers

It took Abdulrahman al-Zanki, then 14, a few weeks to develop his first game, Yellow Taxi, and upload it to Apple iTunes in 2010, learning from written instructions between school hours and homework. Since then, the Kuwaiti teenager has created 22 more iPhone games in less than two years, including the highly popular Doodle Destroy.

“I really love making iPhone games, but I can’t wait to make some real video games for the Xbox, PlayStation 3 or Wii,” Abdulrahman said during an interview last month. “What I really liked about Doodle Destroy was that it had a lot of downloads. I hope that whenever I create a game, it reaches the top charts.”

Investors and game-making companies are counting on the talent and passion of young people like Abdulrahman to help build a vibrant Arab gaming industry and conquer a share of the potentially lucrative market.

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Daisy Swan – Career Coach
Guest Contributor for My L.A. Lifestyle

They’re inevitable, right? The five or six holiday functions that we feel we must attend, like it or not. Well this holiday season, why not look at those holiday happenings in a different light? Use them to your advantage, to further your business or your career. Look at these functions not only as networking opportunities, but as a way to focus in on what you might want to be doing – or doing differently – in the New Year.

Read the whole article here

We all need to be developing our talents, expanding our repertoire and acceptance that things won’t be going back to the old ‘normal’. Look for the opportunity and build toward new horizons.

It’s the Economy: The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

The 2012 presidential election can be seen as offering a choice between two visions of how to return us to this country’s golden age — from roughly 1945 to around 1973 — when working life was most secure for many Americans, particularly white, middle-class men. President Obama said his jobs plan was for people who believed “if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be rewarded.” Mitt Romney explained his goal was to restore hope for “folks who grew up believing that if they played by the rules . . . they would have the chance to build a good life.” But these days, many workers have lost a near guarantee on a decent wage and benefits — and their careers are likely to have much more volatility (great years; bad years; confusing, mediocre years) than their parents’ ever did. So when did the rules change?

It has been hard to keep track. Over the past four decades, we have experienced the oil embargo, Carter-era malaise and a few recessions. Mixed in were the thrills of the late 1990s and mid-aughts, when it seemed as if you were a sap if you weren’t getting rich or at least trying. But these dramas prevented many of us from realizing that the economic logic was changing fundamentally. Starting in the 1970s, labor was upended by a lot more than just formal government work rules. Increased global trade devastated workers in many industries, especially textiles, apparel, toys, furniture and electronics assembly. Computers and other technological innovations had an arguably greater impact. While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

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Good News About Hiring Trends for 2012!
Time to Re-Energize Your Job Search Activities

Large employers plan to increase their hiring of college graduates finishing their degrees in the 2011-12 academic year. The trend continues an uptick that began last year after hiring declined during the recession and the early part of the recovery, according to a new survey by Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute.

Big firms – those with more than 4,000 workers – plan to hire 6% more graduates than last year.

Smaller companies, with fewer than 500 employees, are hiring, but cautiously. Those firms said they plan to add an average of 11 workers each, essentially the same as last year, the study reported.

The weak spot in the hiring outlook for new grads is mid-sized organizations with 501 to 4,000 employees, especially state and local government agencies. Hiring for recent grads will decline by 3% for those employers.

“We’ve had a problem in the mid-sized group for quite a while,” said Phil Gardner, director of research at CERI and the study’s author. When the economic crisis hit in 2008 and 2009, he said, the vulnerability in the segment came from “second- and third-tier suppliers, consulting companies, firms that rely on big companies for contracts,” while local government hiring remained strong thanks to stimulus funds from Washington.

But the trend has reversed in the last year as stimulus dollars dried up. Private companies are starting to bounce back, but with parks closing, school districts’ budgets frozen and public agencies making cuts across the board, this once-robust source of jobs for young people is contracting.

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While millenials might frustrate some, they bring some beautiful gifts. Here are some wonderful words of wisdom for school and work environments. Let’s practice these.

Author Jean Twenge has reported that:

“…indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But what starts off as healthy self-esteem, at times quickly morphs into an inflated view of oneself-a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self esteem. Meanwhile rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandems with self-esteem? Why?”

As an educator who has taught for over 14 years, I have lamented this question. Year after year I have had some of the best individuals clamor for success. They have worked industriously to achieve grades indicating a certain level of success attained. I have seen students balance the many demands of a “successful” high school life: work, sports, clubs, theatre, dance, math school, friends, family, health, SAT prep, college prep. In doing so, I have also seen students become unbalanced as individuals.

On the surface, many of my students can be the nation’s future leaders. They are altruistic, they volunteer, they are fun, industrious, empathic, goal-oriented, ambitious, and they excel at athletics, music, mock-trial, debates, chess, math and many club endeavors. Unfortunately, at far too many points in the year, many of the students that I see also happen to be miserable. Over the last three years, graduation speeches contained the theme of “finding happiness” in college because it was certainly not attained during high school. This was a disturbing trend.
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He’s got good points here. What do you think? If you’re an entrepreneur, has your education helped you in your endeavors?

Michael Ellsberg is the author of “The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late.”

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”

Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups start small, we tend to conflate two variables — the size of a business and its age — and incorrectly assume the former was the relevant one, when in fact the latter is.)

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Years ago I met a young woman at a networking event and we exchanged phone numbers; she was just starting her new business and was interested in talking about what I was doing in my work, and what she was developing. We became fast friends and exchanged plenty of information about how our businesses were developing on and off line. Her name is Vanessa Van Petten and she has grown her new little business into an amazing online resource of services, teachings and now several books for parents all about what it’s like being a teenager from a teen perspective.  I recently spoke to Vanessa when she launched the sale of her new book Do I get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded?, about the growth of her business and her experiences publishing three books – one self-published with a self-publishing company, one entirely on her own, and most recently with a big name New York publisher. Have a listen to this candid conversation about growing a business, and the changing challenges and demands of book publishing.

Listen to the audio interview here:

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