KCSpeaks

Time flies when you are busy blogging. 2014 has been a busy year in workforce development. In workforce development news, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) passed and became law and suddenly we are getting ready for the next big thing in the industry. While you have been studying up on the newest changes, there may have been things you may have missed in the blogosphere. To wrap up 2014, I am going to catch you up on all the things you may have missed on KCSpeaks.   The Softest Hard Thing http://kcspeaksout.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-softest-hard-thing.html Back in March, I was bringing to light one of the hardest things for job seekers. It is not the hard job search skills like résumé development, but rather it is the thing that gets people in the door. The soft skill that is so hard for people is asking for help. Everyone knows people that have difficulty asking for help. It is not any different for job seekers. Anyone that has worked in workforce ...

Recently, I was unplugged. Not by choice, but by virtue of a sequence of mergers, acquisitions, poor customer service, and inexperienced talent that resulted in my life without the modern necessity of the internet. On top of this, my computer broke. Readers, you may find yourself laughing at this, thinking that I am crazy, but soon I found out how necessary these items are. I just want to make a disclaimer that I am completely aware that this is a first world problem and it does not compare to problems like finding clean drinking water or surviving in a country riddled with war, but our modern society now demands these items to function day to day. No sooner did I become “analog” or “acoustic,” but I immediately had a need for a computer and the internet. I suddenly found myself deciding how to access a computer, where to access the internet, and I started making decisions about my day to day based on this.   For me this experience was a moment in time, but to so many job...

During this time of the year, it is extremely important to take a moment to remind yourself why you are thankful and in workforce development, we get so many reminders. I am thankful for having a job, for it brings joys and blessings to my family. I am thankful that I get to help people achieve employment and get on their career path. A job is not just a job, but the path to so many other things in life. I am thankful. Are you? I can be reached at kcirincione@gmail.com. Thank you for reading. I am thankful you are reading this. ~ Karen Cirincione

    The newest addition to my exercise routine is Tai Chi. Unlike the other exercise classes I do, Tai Chi is not just something you do. It is deliberate. Without going into a long discourse on the subject, Tai Chi is slow. It is focused. Each movement the body makes flows into another one. Unlike a high-impact dance aerobics class, where the goal is to get faster and increase your heart rate, Tai Chi is the opposite. The goal is to learn the preciseness of the form at a slow pace in order to complete the move correctly. Also it’s sort of meditative.   This class gives me time to think and concentrate. I am developing my core muscles in a stress-free way. All this slow preciseness makes me wonder how I can take my Tai Chi and move it to my life in workforce development.   Don’t get me wrong. I am not ready to pack in my fast paced life just yet, but I can certainly apply some of the principles I have learned in Tai Chi to life in workforce development....

Like most people, I have had a good jobs and bad jobs. I was running an errand one day and I ran into a former colleague. She was telling me about her job. She was upset because the position she accepted was different than it was promoted to her during the hiring process. One of the biggest issues was that this former colleague was looking to grow and develop her skills in a certain area and it turned out that her current position will not allow her to do this. After a few minutes, she told me that she was looking for another job, after only being in this particular position for a short period of time.     Her story is not unique, so many of the job seekers that use the services of the One Stop can relate to her experience. I don’t foresee this problem going away any time soon because many employers are either dysfunctional or the people that do the hiring are delusional. There will always be “bad jobs.”   Before we parted, I told her that the lessons she learn...

I have decided that the cause of aggravation, stress, burn out, and all the other maladies that seem to come with living another day is that the problem with people is other people. The reason that people cause each other grief is that the most important thing they need to do is not done well, clear, and concise. People cannot communicate. If you are a living creature, you communicate. I have seen enough nature documentaries to know that communication is not only essential to humans, but to all the creatures- big and small. Why do people seem to screw it up so much?   Much like a contagious illness, poor communication is easily spread to the people we love at home and the people we love, hate, and everything in between at work. Since, this is a blog and not a 10,000 page book, I am going to limit my comments on communication to the world of workforce development. In workforce development, we need to think about how our poor communication affects us as professionals and ou...

  I have been a case manager, supervised case managers, and I have trained my fair share of them. My heart goes out to the case manager because for many workforce development programs and other human service programs, they are the front line of service.   The job title of case manager should say it all.   There is a person, the “manager,” that manages another person, or the “case.” Right? Wrong! Many rookie case managers find that the “case” is actually managing the “manager.” Forget program or demographics of the cases they are managing, all first time case managers run into the same thing. Usually within the first week of performing case management, they meet someone on the case load that “schools” them. This person is a professional case. He is demanding, and although, he has never been a case manager, he knows more about the job than the case manager does. Not only does he know the job, he is going to tell the rookie what to do, what he wants, and what to g...

The great recession may be over, but there are still remnants of the recession that will live with us. One of these things is the new category of people “the long term unemployed.” At this point, people are past 99 weeks of unemployment and are now just in that magical place they go where they are no longer counted in the labor market. Although these folks’ numbers are in some magical realm where the official data counters no longer search for them and where reporters no longer show the faces of the unemployed in the news, those in the day to day workforce development business know that they still exist. We see their faces daily, as “regulars” in our offices. Our offices have become like that sitcom bar where “everybody knows your name.” Whenever, I see people lingering, despite utilizing services on a regular basis, I try to analyze what is going on with a person. Why isn’t he employed? I have noticed that some people share some common experiences or demographics. Many of the lo...

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by my alma mater to a dinner where college students deciding on what major to pick would get the opportunity to hear from different people and about their chosen career paths.   I had never done anything like this before, but I decided that this is what workforce development is all about. At the dinner, students received an opportunity to sit with the professionals to hear about their careers and to ask questions. Before the dinner wrapped up, every alumni and alumna received the opportunity to speak to the group.   Thinking back to having been a college student, I remember that feeling that I knew that going to college had something to do with work, but I was not sure what exactly and how did this translate to a job in the real world.   I have decided to summarize that information given to the students from the alumnus for everyone in workforce development land.   Advice to College Students: The road is different for ...

When I am not doing workforce development or family stuff, I am busy in my community. My long time community activity has been my voluntary work with my community’s arts council. This not only gives me the opportunity to give back to the community, but to organize and contribute to the cultural arts in my area. For the second year, we just hosted our Artists with Disabilities Art Show. This art show featured artists from all over my state that had a disability.   People with any kind of disabilities are allowed to participate and this year we had a representation of a broad spectrum of disabilities.   We had people with visual disabilities, intellectual disabilities, people with physical disabilities, and people with mental illness. This was a juried art show. In the end, a team of judges, including myself decided on a first, second, and third place winner. There was a monetary award for each prize and each piece of art was judged on artistic merit and not on the artist’...

“ All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” ~ William Shakespeare When you are the parent of a teenager, you are constantly worried about your children. Not the same kind of worry you have with a young child, but the kind of worry you have as you watch a child become an adult.   As a workforce development professional and parent, you also worry that your child is learning the right skills for the world of work. I often wonder how we learn to work. Watching my son navigate the world and about to enter the world of work, I wonder if he has learned the right skills up until now. Sure when we get a job, an employer will teach us all the technical stuff necessary to do the job, but really it is all the experiences we have had in life, growing up that teach us how to work. This summer, my teenager participated in a musical theater program. ...

Recently the can of worms has been re-opened about women having it all. Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors said in an interview recently that it is possible to have it all, meaning being a CEO and a good mother, while Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, said it wasn’t possible.   These two interviews sparked another debate that is separate about why “having it all” is never an issue discussed for men.   Of course my mind is going 100 miles a minute with thoughts on this and I do have my own opinion on this matter, but ultimately the issue is work-life balance and that is an issue for everyone who works regardless of gender or family status. Why would this be an issue for everyone? The reason is that our 21 st century has more jobs that do not have a definitive starting and stopping point than it used to.   When I think about my parents and grandparents, there were many jobs that started at a certain time and ended at a certain time, such as in manufacturing j...

Many times when I coach job seekers and workforce development professionals, I like to make comparisons to help people better understand a concept better. These seem to keep people entertained and also works for me, so I wanted to share some of my workforce development analogies. Job Seekers look at the One-Stop Career Center (a.k.a American Job Center) like the menu at the Cheesecake Factory. If you have never dined at the Cheesecake Factory, this restaurant has a book for a menu! This is not an exaggeration. This restaurant has a book with a selection of anything they believe a person could want to eat, including multiple ethnic dishes. This extensive offering I am describing does not even include the multitude of cheesecake and non-cheesecake dessert options or beverages.   The first time a person eats at the restaurant the reaction is, “ What do I choose ?”   The same is true for people walking into a One- Stop. Just like the Cheesecake Factory, many job seekers ...

Workforce Development is like an industry of smoking doctors with high fat diets. We are busy preaching to job seekers and businesses about how to perform at maximum strength, but never actually take the lessons of high-performance coaching and apply it to our own industry.   I think that it is time to look at what success really looks like and bring it home. This means that workforce development “must drink the Kool-Aid.” It is time to examine success and its people to see how it fits into our workforce development world every day. §   Successful people are not “jack of all trades.”   If you examine Olympic athletes that won gold medals, you will find that they spent hours, days, and years perfecting their skill- and that is for one sport! You can be Michael Phelps in swimming, but cannot throw a javelin at all.   In another example, look at healthcare. If you go to your general practitioner and have any specific issue, you will be referred to a specialist ...

It is so important to have a laugh at ourselves every once in a while. To lighten up and not take ourselves so seriously. In the spirit of having a little fun, this week’s post is a fairy tale. Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, lived a grossly underemployed Princess named Ella. Princess Ella worked in a big castle as a Housekeeper for only minimum wage. Her hours were long, hard, and did not leave her much room to further her education or participate in professional development activities.   The job did not even pay enough money to maintain self-sufficiency and she received food assistance from the kingdom’s assistance office. On top of Ella’s frustration at the lack of opportunity her castle had, Ella’s boss was an evil queen named Elvira. The evil queen often yelled orders at Ella and did not show respect for her. Elvira was known for her notorious management style that did not use leadership principles to inspire and form a team environment amongst Ella and ...