The nightmare that is plaguing many companies as the economy recovers is the lack of skilled workers. There is no one cause for the shortages but a significant driver is the loss of Baby Boomer brain power. But the good news is that there can be a happy ending. One company that is doing an exceptional job at managing their aging workforce is the National Rural Electric Co-operative Association (NRECA). I’m very proud to say that NRECA and many of their members have been clients of my company Success Performance Solutions for several years. So I was thrilled today when I turned the page in The Economist and saw their success story about how they are managing their aging workforce. The NRECA story isn’t only about well-deserved recognition but it serves as a model that other companies can use too. The shortage of skilled worker problem is already acute in many industries like healthcare, aerospace, energy, and even technology. It has been exacerbated by a failure to plan, despite ample warning, about the impact of aging Baby Boomers.
The article in The Economist cites The Sloan Centre on Ageing and Work at Boston College survey which found that 40% of ...
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Women have been beating the pants off the men for the better jobs. Here's 21 stats and facts why women are better educated, getting married later (or not at all), and having fewer children.
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Establishing a policy about the use of social media in the workplace, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is a complicated but necessary task for any employer.
Many companies are using social media in the workplace to their advantage. Sites like LinkedIn are invaluable tools for recruitment, lead development, and sales. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and Google+ are powerful marketing tools. Yammer and Salesforce.com are building employee engagement.
But social media doesn’t come without its problems. While the rewards are great, the path is littered with landmines.
Employers need to be concerned about employees using social media in the workplace for personal and other non-productive reasons. Some employers consider social media to be a complete waste of time and resources, an invitation for confidentiality leaks, and a recipe for PR disaster. This reasoning has led to bans on social media in the workplace. These bans are intended to keep employees focused and decrease the improper use of a company's technology resources. But while bans may lessen employee abuse and wasted bandwidth, a social media blockade has its drawbacks. The effect on morale, ...
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- Each year nearly four million kids begin ninth grade. Nearly 1 million of them don't make it to graduation. That’s nearly one out of every four students fail to graduate.
- A fifth of schools identified by the U.S. Department of Education are identified as "dropout factories," where no more than 50 percent of students graduate.
- The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.
- Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
- Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.
- Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison.
- Almost half a million black teenagers drop out of school each year. Most will end up unemployed by their mid-30s. Six out of 10 black male dropouts will spend time in prison.
- The single biggest reason why girls drop out of school is pregnancy. 41 percent of .. ...
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Sensationalism in the media and countless books (including my own) about differences between the generations paint a picture about the emerging Millennials that might be more myth than right. Today's workforce is comprised of Baby Boomers (born 1945-1965), Generation X (born 1965-1980) and Millennials. There are more than 80 million Millennials, also called Generation Y in the U.S. alone and while many of them are already in the workforce, the rest are on the verge of entering it.
For those of you who still get confused between Gen Y, Gen WHY, Generation Y, and the Millennials, here’s a reminder: These titles all describe the same group of young adults and teens born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. They have also been described aptly as the Digital Generation but not so kindly as the Trophy Kids. If you have read anything recently or managed these young workers, you might have learned that these Millennials expect preferential treatment and may be difficult to manage.
New York Post film critic Kyle Smith's recent review on the movie Final Destination 5 includes his opinion about this young generation. ...
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I'm introducing a new weekly feature with this blog post. Not a day goes by that I don't find a statistic, trend, or fact about workforce trends. Some are compelling, others are intriquing, and a few are just curious. Most...
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Caregivers often face difficult, stress-inducing decisions about how to allocate time, money, and resources. often it results in presenteeism.
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A recession, outsourcing, and foreign competition aren't the only reasons we're losing jobs. Dramatic advancements in technology and movements like lean manufacturing and 6 Sigma have more than doubled worker productivity since 1970. Our manufacturing industry has progressed from making simple household appliances, cars and textiles to producing cutting-edge medical technologies, life-saving medicines and light-speed computer processors with worldwide demand.
The result is an economy that has become leaner and meaner in order to become more competitive and efficient. Cutbacks and downsizings have been painful for millions of people. Unfortunately the pain will continue for the foreseeable future, especially for workers in 10 middle class jobs. These middle-class professions may soon face the fate of the milk man, the telegraph operator, the stagecoach driver and the switchboard operator, joining them in obsolete-job heaven. Machinists: Job vacancies for machinists will shrink by 5% but they will likely still exist, because they require a very specialized skillset to fill the position. Front-Line Supervisors/Managers of Production and Operators: Without ...
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The evidence that many forms of traditional work are getting automated and outsourced is mounting. Basically, jobs n the 21st century workplace are moving from simple and manual to complex and knowledge-based. Another way of putting it is based on what Gary Hamel describes as the Creative Economy. We have moved from: - Industrial Economy based on physical capital
- Information Economy based on information
- Creative Economy based on ideas
When dealing with work problems we can categorize the response as either known or new. Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management help us to map it. We can also create tools to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple knowledge gets automated. Any job that deals with the routine and repeatable is at risk for being replaced by software and offshoring. On the other hand, work that is valued, and therefore creates high-demand jobs, is in facing the complex and complicated, not in addressing problems that have already been solved. There will ...
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The first thing that comes to mind when you hear unemployment rates like 2.6%, 2.8%, and 3.8% must be memories of the good-old-days - pre-2007 recession. Well think again. While we continue to hear a lot of depressing stories these days about the loss of jobs and slow job creation, demand for executive and management level talent remains high. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for chief executives, including chief financial officers, is 2.6 percent, followed by HR managers at 2.8 percent, accountants and auditors at 3.5 percent, and financial analysts at 3.8 percent. In fact, the unemployment rate for adults 25 years and over with a bachelor’s degree and higher remains constant at 4.4%, below the baseline of full employment. That’s not to say we don’t have a problem. Actually we have a colossal crisis. Other segments of the population are undeniably in trouble. For adults over 25 with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate is 14.3; with only a high school diploma, the rate is 10% with not much light at the end of the tunnel. For teenagers between 16 and 19 years old, the rate ...
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