KCSpeaks

  This year has come and gone. Time flies when you are blogging. As you set to close out your year and take stock of the year past, let me give you the recap of some of the most popular posts based on page views. §   Résumé Review Like a Pro - reminds you that no matter how great the résumé is, the marker of a truly great one is how many interviews you get based on the information on it. Even if it is not pretty, it doesn’t matter if it works! (March 2013) §   Employment Plan: Tools for Success or Road Map to Failure? In this post, I called for an elimination of Employment Plans (EP) or Individual Employment Plans (IEP) as we use them, as one of the dinosaurs of workforce development, because they do not give the job seeker the tools to use once they get the job. Instead, I call for redefining the term and moving to the next century. Develop plans that help people not only obtain employment, but move to the next step.  (April 2013) §   Are you the...

If you are in the business of getting people jobs, you are certainly counseling job seekers about having an online presence. This means individual and group sessions about everything from establishing email to social media. There is an online alphabet soup out there, but are we doing people justice if we are not discussing with them what happens when you search for your name. Challenge: Search for your name. Try with quotation marks surrounding it, without quotation marks surrounding it. Try looking for the city and state you live in now and then all the places you lived in the past. Do you like what you see? I hope so because it is following you around. The “skeletons in your closet” are there good or bad. In the internet age, I can search for a job applicant I am considering hiring. I can search for my co-workers. I can search for family and friends. This means that secrets are not secrets anymore. Yes, there are legally things that employers can and can’t consider, but what...

Here we are at Thanksgiving week. If you live in the Northeast, the weather is getting colder and colder, leaves have fallen from the trees, and people are getting into the holiday spirit. This includes large festive meals, events with families and friends, and exchanging gifts. If you are anything like me, all this added stuff in my routine is overwhelming and stressful, even if it is festive and fun! I work full time and have a family, so adding anything seems like too much. Then, add a party or two and it is a formula for a breakdown. Although I work, I feel the added stress of  the holidays and the approaching winter on my finances. Now imagine adding the pressure of a holiday if you suddenly did not have a job. I find that the holiday season is one of the most stressful times in the One Stop Career Center.  The people that are using the centers want to provide festive meals, warm beds, and gifts to their loved ones like everyone else, but in many cases their sit...

This week another workforce development professional was case conferencing with me about a customer she had in her job readiness class for TANF customers. She was frustrated because the customer was disrupting the flow of the class with her flow of comments about her personal issues, therefore sucking up the time of and energy out of the class.  As a result of our conversation, the customer was referred for additional support services for barrier resolution. I could sense the frustration on her face. As a facilitator, you expect everyone to be open, willing, and ready to accept the information we are presenting, but the truth is that very little of the people that we work with are at that point.   So why are we frustrated?  We are expecting miracles from people. We are expecting people to Climb Mount Everest in bare feet. We are expecting people to have one conversation with us and the light bulb goes off in our head and they can do it. Sounds like a workforce de...

  This week, I have been thinking about my purpose. Why am I here? Not the big picture, but why in life do I work in workforce development, why bother doing this kind of work when there are more frustrations than achievements. When you start to really ask yourself this question, you see that the day to day is full of giving of yourself, helping people that need assistance in some way, or supporting those that do. Sounds rewarding, but it also leads to burnout. Why wouldn’t you be burnt out? All day long, people come to visit you because they are out of work, down on their luck, in need of resources, or because they have to. I want to tell you why I am here. Why do I get up every morning, when I could be working in some industry with big bonus, lavish perks, easier hours and, and less challenges that are out of your control. The truth is that I figured out early in my career that the best way to solve the problems of society, to really help people solve all the big issues tha...

We live in a world where your success is judged by dollars in your account, high ranking and influencing positions that are held, and the toys you have. This is true for everyone from professional athletes to the business world.   When you stop keeping up with the Jones’ for two minutes and start to really think about success and achievement it puts it in a different perspective. Those of us who work in workforce development world are torn between success measured in contractual benchmarks and the success that  doesn't  fit the numbers. Would you consider the following people successful? §   Youth that graduated from high school and recently obtained his first part time job at a clothing store in the mall making minimum wage. §   Single mother of three children under the age of five years old obtained a job that allowed her to leave TANF assistance, but still allows her to receive SNAP food assistance and Medicaid insurance. §   Dislocate...

Every day it seems that resources in workforce development get smaller and smaller. No sooner we adjust to one reduced way of doing business, than another wrinkle gets thrown in and the budget is reduced again. As I write this Congress is trying to figure out what to do to fix the finances in this country and how to avoid a government shutdown. What that means for workforce development as an industry is that we are going to have to cut coupons and collect cans to make ends meet, as we will be allocated less money in the future.  It’s the less is more thing theme that keeps popping up. One of the first things to go is professional development. Attending conferences and having staff training may be luxury in times like we are facing, but eliminating professional development is a dangerous path. Innovative ideas will be lost, burn-out will grow, and resentment will rear its ugly head. Rather than call it a day, it is time for some creativity. Below are some innovative solutions t...

What do job seekers, workforce development professionals, and vacationers have in common? It’s the success equation! Every day people approach projects such as finding a job, running a workforce development organization, or even taking a vacation using the below equation. VISION + STRATEGIC PLANNING  5  (ACTION)   +  COMMUNICATION  10  (ACTION) = SUCCESS Let’s take a look at this equation more in-depth.  Vision is the how it is going to look like, the imagination of the experience. It is the reason that humans have evolved from cavemen. It is our ideas and creativity all tidied up and organized.  Strategic Planning is a process. It is deciding on action steps. It’s deciphering all those pesky little details like how big our shampoo bottles should be to get on an airplane and figuring out those bumps in the road like what to do if I post my résumé online and I do not get any interest from employers. Strategic Planning...

    If you took a look at the state of workforce development in the past few years, there has been a change. Gone are the days of plentiful resources for staff and customers and plentiful job placements. It seems that those days are now a fairy tale that begins with “Once upon a time.” Now our story has fewer castles, less princesses and knights in shining armor, but rather more caves, moats, and fire breathing dragons. For the job seekers and ourselves it has become a “dog eat dog kind of world” with Olympic like competition daily. With this, I have noticed a disturbing decline that threatens our industry and ultimately any competitive rapidly changing industry … the decline of mentoring.      Maybe this is a cultural shift we have had due to competition in the industry, funding, and or just the bad economy, but we have gone from an industry where we grew our own to a cut throat “every man for himself” mentality.  In the past, I had been fortunate...

Ethics is a small word with big meaning and big implications. Every day as we go about our business of being workforce development professionals, we are being asked to make ethical decisions. We may not always know we are, but because of the day to day interaction with the public and the ever changing political and funding environment, our world can be a mine field of ethical decisions.   All that being said how does the average workforce development professional know what to do? How does the average person navigate the day to day? How can an organization prevent their organization from becoming an ethical garbage dump? Although I am not an ethics expert, I am recommending the following:   §   Organizations need to define clear ethical guidelines. These guidelines determine how an organization determines its business.   §   Organizations should look at national organizations’ ethical guidelines for guidance. In workforce development, the Na...