Bored people are boring

What do your employment workshops look and sound like?

Here is a page with some example presentations for inspirational purposes: You are in the presentation business. I think the first one is the best use of design, and the voice is dramatic. Larry Lessig's delivery in #2 has good timing, but I don't find it interesting.

Here is my favorite TED video: Hans Rosling and "the best stats you've ever seen."

More slide shows: Slideshare.

I borrowed some style from "What teachers make" for a presentation on dressing during a job search (door to door visits). I took out the pictures for privacy reasons. You'll need to use your imagination.

Slides included photos of onestop employment specialists demonstrating the right and wrong ways to dress. Including staff made a huge impression on the audience, who commented that it was much better than generic pictures of models or strangers. For further involvement, ask job seekers to participate as models. As we went through the slideshow, we asked participants to critique the outfits.

Dressing for job search

View more presentations from employmentspecialist.

Rags to Riches in 15 days!

I recently read Get Hired Fast: Tap the Hidden Job Market in 15 Days by Brian Graham, which I acquired as an impulse buy at FedEx Office. I bought it after skimming through and seeing that it focused on cold calling, which is a common deficiency in job searches. It is taxing to make enough cold calls to get good at it, and people generally stay away from doing things they are not good at, which leads to few cold calls.

According to Get Hired Fast, it is a mistake to shy away from cold calls, and I agree. The book's strong suit is its support for cold calling as the focus of a job search strategy, from researching employers to developing a script for calls. It's all part of a regiment that prescribes a short (3 weeks) but concentrated (150 calls) calling campaign.

There are 2 things I've started to tell job seekers lately. The first is that job search is what they do outside of my cubicle (meaning that they need to be active outside of our visits). The second is that of all the job seekers who have found jobs while in our program over the last year, only 1 has gotten a job from online-only sources. All the others have used personal contacts (including job developed by employment specialists), walk-in visits (including in-person visits to employers advertising online), or cold-calls to find open positions that they've applied for and gotten.

Get Hired Fast corroborates this position that job seekers need to get away from the computer as much as possible. Unfortunately, cold calling is only the subject of half the book. The rest of the pages are repeats of standard job seeking advice about interviewing and responding to job offers. This highlights the difficulty with cold-calling; even a book about cold-calling needs a little sugar to help the medicine go down. Instead of this generic advice, I wish it would have included more about script writing and more about dealing with rejection. It honestly states that there will be a lot of rejection.

Get Hired Fast is also like a guide to losing 10 pounds or quitting smoking. It tells you what to do and it tells you how to do it. It doesn't make it easy or fun, though, and the hard work is up to you. If you're advocating for job seekers to make cold calls, I recommend checking it out from a library; it is not essential to have it permanently on your bookshelf.

As a bonus, it can help with job development, where cold calling skills are useful.

Labor Pains

"We have declared war on work..."

I watched this TED video featuring Mike Rowe ("Dirty Jobs" tv show host) a few weeks ago. As I was trying to come up with a way to fit it into a post, last Sunday's New York Times Magazine came out and featured a related story on blue collar work.

In the TED video, Rowe describes things he has learned from interviewing and working alongside blue collar workers. He also discusses the need to promote vocational training in order to supply the next generation of skilled labor. Be prepared for a story about sheep castration (dirty job); the story is told cleanly enough for the professional TED crowd.

The above quote is followed by 4 points from Rowe:
1. Hollywood and other media have a history of devaluing jobs such as plumbing
2. Advertising sells a leisure attitude that paints work as something to escape.
3. Government can promote/impede access or growth of industries
4. Tools (tech) are changing.

In the New York Times story, Matthew Crawford recounts his experiences as a Ph.D in political philosophy who works as a motorcycle mechanic. He also adds to his first person account a discussion of the decline in trades and vocational education.

Along with recent government pushes for infrastructure improvement projects and green manufacturing jobs, it is interesting to see media promotion turning to less glamourous jobs, which is what Rowe calls for.

Full Speed Ahead

Here are some visual aids to remind job seekers to conduct a full job search. They are meant to help those who:

1. Stay within a comfort zone (usually too much internet and newspaper...passive job search)
2. Take too many days off and miss good opportunities






This week is off to a great start. It's sunny, one of my customer's started a new job today, a friend announced a FOURTH Urban Design/Landscape Architecture graduate school acceptance (UPenn, Harvard, U-Washington, and U-British Columbia!), and a college classmate won a Pulitzer! This is the kind of day that keeps me keeping on.

2nd Opinions

Last month, we had a recruiter from Comcast speak to a group of jobseekers about HR's perspective in the job search process. The jobseekers gave their full attention as she spoke about many of the job search strategies we try to teach every day. The fresh voice, and the recruiter's power to hire, helped the lessons sink in.

An unemployed accountant I worked with (college degree plus 20 years of experience) was disillusioned with the lack of feedback from employers he interviewed with, so I pointed him to a book on "insider secrets" from an HR veteran.

Today, I was exploring online and found some more advice from the recruiting field. Punk Rock HR led me to Peopleshark, where Carmen Hudson wrote some Cold, Hard Truth for Jobseekers in January.

What struck me most: "If you don't have a real network of people you know, have lunch or drinks with, who know your work, you're up a creek without a paddle."
I've met many jobseekers with such poor ties to their job history that they can't remember supervisors' names for their applications, and they never stayed in a job long enough to form real relationships with coworkers.

Also, from the comments on that post: "Some jobs that are posted or advertised are destined to be filled internally; advertising was just for show and you never had a chance."

Rick Wagoner, Call Michigan Works!

This New York Times article over the weekend got me thinking about a couple of things. First, it raised an employment specialist crisis of faith. These happen occasionally when I read about millionaires who are younger than me or professionals who dropped everything to become rafting guides or, in this case, private career coaches who work with CEO's. One CEO's severance package included $40,000 towards job placement services. He could hire an employment specialist for a year at that price.

At first hearing, it sounds like an easy task: find work for someone who has years of prior success.

Thinking further, though, I looked at it from optimistic and pessimistic views in relation to working with "universal customers."

Quick brainstorming:

What CEO's bring that can help:
1. Networking contacts and references
2. Verifiable experience
3. Advanced education/training

What CEO's bring that can hurt:
1. High expectations (title, responsibility, salary, success)
2. Pride
3. Fewer options (narrow career fields, fewer openings)

In fact, the article argues, “The higher up you are,” said Dr. Madaus, whose company employs 6,000, “the longer it takes to find a new job.”

I also thought about what onestops would have to offer a CEO. The article mentions benefits to CEO's from their job search firms that sound very similar to the onestop benefits in last week's MSNBC article on Worksource Portland Metro East:

1. Social connections
2. Ongoing motivation
3. Sense of normalcy
4. Coaching

Workforce development serves a variety of populations that seem unique but frequently overlap and ultimately share attributes and needs: youth, adults, homeless, dislocated, transitioning, offenders, migrants, veterans, seniors, immigrants, etc.

Finally, contemplating how I would work with a CEO recalls a case management exercise I've used informally, Celebrity Job Search. Name a celebrity or fictional character and then complete an assessment and employment plan based on their known strengths and weaknesses.

And we're back: Self-Motivation and Employment Services

While on vacation and reading through old magazines, I found an article in a 2008 Men's Health about motivation that can be applied to onestop customers.

The article, The Psychology of Motivation, compares the techniques of a successful college football coach with self-determination theory first articulated and later refined by psychologists at the University of Rochester.

The article highlights three factors of self-determination theory that can be applied to program planning and case management:

1. Autonomy: "the choice to do it was made by you, not somebody else." Self-motivated individuals will do better than those who are simply serving a parole/probation officer, case manager, or fulfilling other requirements imposed on them by others. Part of assessment should be to gauge what motivates a customer. Is it external or internal, or a combination of both? Program language, materials, and activities should emphasize the personal benefits of employment and training.

2. Competence: "you know what you're doing, or at least are becoming better at it." Job-search is a challenging activity with many opportunities for feeling like a failure, such as rejection letters and tough interviews. Customers need to feel prepared for the challenge, and need practice that will build confidence. Verbal praise, achievable short-term goals, and other confidence boosters will help customers stay motivated.

3. Relatedness: "the activity connects you in some way to the other people." Unemployment and job-search are isolating activities. Self-directed work in a onestop can continue that feeling of being on one's own. Tools to combat this by providing interconnectedness include case management (with a consistent relationship between staff and customer) and group activities: workshops, networking, training, etc. Jobseekers who are part of a group will push each other to work harder and can create rewarding relationships that bring another motivation to continue in the group.

Another interesting item from self-determination theory is the idea that outside influences can undermine intrinsic motivation. Incentives and support services need to be carefully distributed in order to hold their value as tools for jobseeking.

Also, a major point of the article is that a person is more likely to do something if they consider it fun than if they find it to be a chore (makes sense, doesn't it?). The challenge for employment specialists is to turn job search into something fun.

A healthy workforce system

After writing about how hospital procedures can be transferred to case management, I thought about other ways that workforce development relates to healthcare. Here are some quick illustrations of the workforce-healthcare metaphor:



Onestop career centers see customers who need to regain work health, don't know their options, need intensive immediate assistance, or have suffered work "accidents," such as layoffs. Onestop staff direct customers to other parts of the workforce system after assessment.



Occupational skills training (community colleges, industry-developed training, vocational schools) is accessed by individuals with good work health who want to enhance their abilities or those who need to strengthen their skills.



Workforce investment boards provide direction and explore solutions based on their analysis of system health. Their leadership connects multiple stakeholders.



A healthy system yields productive workers, better business, and stronger communities.

Check, please.

A stack of clipped articles on my dresser includes The Checklist by Atul Gawande, a New Yorker article from December 2007 about the lives saved in hospitals that implemented checklists to follow for routine procedures.

It is a process similar to pilots' pre-flight checklists which have existed since the 1930's according to the article. The checklist did not start its jump to acceptance in hospital ICU's, however, until 2001, when Peter Provonost started a checklist to tackle a specific infection at Johns Hopkins. Buoyed by strong results (meaning lives saved), Peter has become a champion of checklists. In essence, they work because if you make sure to do all the little steps correctly, the larger goal is completed. Skip one step in a series, however minor, and the project is in jeopardy. Gawande writes:

"...you have a desperately sick patient, and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.”"

I kept the article for several reasons.

1. A case management checklist can ensure that staff complete their tasks while having the freedom to work without a supervisor looking over their shoulders. Think you can expect staff to do everything they need to with all their customers every time? In his first study, Provonost asked nurses to record doctors' actions in the ICU. They reported that "in more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one [step]."

2. Consistent case management is part of great customer service, and customers should receive equal access to services. Individualized service should be based on the needs and goals determined through standardized assessments and procedures.

3. Workforce development has high stakes. Onestops, community colleges, basic education programs, and other partners can make life-changing impacts on job seekers, employers, and communities.

Puns Wanted

Anyone hanging on in a dying industry can be encouraged by newspaper reporter Michael Precker's career change. The Wall Street Journal reports that when opportunity knocked on Michael's door, she was topless.

All career change stories involve risk and leaps of faith, and many times this leads to unexpected rewards.

"Reporter Faces the Naked Truth"