How to Prepare for More Green Jobs: Are you ready?

Going green means doing more than recycling, buying environmentally friendly products and supporting environmental activist groups.  With the dawn of a significantly more environmentally-friendly Obama administration, environmentalists finally have a real opportunity to turn green rhetoric into green action - on the job.  If you have been following the discussions about job stimulus legislation and programs, you already know that many people believe that the United States is in the position to be a world leader as a producer of green technology and alternative energy innovations. 

As a job seeker who cares about the long-term sustainability of the environment, there are many things you need to be doing right now that will position you to be able to participate in the development of this green technology revolution.  Not only do you need to filling any gaps in your education, you need to be able to demonstrate your commitment to energy efficiency in your current position.  Even if you do not land the perfect alternative energy job, you will have made a positive contribution to our economy and "mother earth."

Following are examples of actions you can take right now that will help to improve both your company's position and your own career security:

• Construction jobs - If you work in the building industry, you can take courses on the use of recycled materials in construction as well as ways to build structures to maximize energy efficiency.  Become an expert in compliance with environmental regulations and investigate ways that your company can promote itself as a green contractor. You can also help your employer institute company policies against such practices as leaving equipment idling for hours (burning gas and dollars) or paying to toss materials into landfills that may be used on other projects or donated to Habitat Restore.
• Transportation jobs - If you work for a trucking company, a city or state transportation department or any other organization that uses large numbers of motorized vehicles, you can become your organization's source for innovative, cost-saving, environmentally friendly proposals.  There is a huge amount of information online, in local libraries and at thousands of universities across the country.  The trouble is that much of the information, including cost studies, never make it to the "front lines."  If you use whatever position you have to help bring that information to your company, you will be saving money for your organization and probably positioning yourself for a promotion.
• Retail jobs - As a retailer, you can become a leader in promoting green ideas that reach out into the community.  Not only can you stock and promote eco-friendly products on your shelves, you can offer things like "bag credits" for the use of reusable bags or for customers who do not ask for a bag.  You can pass on the word to your suppliers that you will strongly favor products which make an effort to reduce packaging and pass on green ideas you receive from your customers.
• Office or accounting jobs - Financial statements and internal documents never need to be printed on unused paper.  Using the back side of paper, discouraging staples that make paper harder to re-use and placing recycling receptacles all over the building is only the beginning.  Most companies can realize huge savings by going paperless in many areas.  Not only do electronic files and PDFs save paper, they save dramatic amounts of storage space, since you can put the documents from an entire room full of file cabinets onto a significantly smaller computer disk.  Your task is to become the office expert in this area by studying, reading, attending online (green) conferences and preparing reports to demonstrate the significant cost savings to your organization.  As the office expert on green cost-saving policies, you will soon see how much more marketable you will be to other employers.  No matter what the state of the economy, making yourself more attractive to employers is never a bad move!

These are just a few examples of actions you can take now.  If you are currently unemployed, you can still use this knowledge to make yourself more employable.  No matter what you do, be sure to document your knowledge and accomplishments and add them in summary form to your resume.  This becomes the perfect win-win-win situation where you can help your employer help the environment and get paid to do it!

If anyone would like to contribute additional ideas for these professions or any others, I would enjoy hearing from you.

OK. Who Wants to Start Laying off Reporters?

I opened my email this morning to “Breaking News” emails from the New York Times, CNN, ABC News and a few others all sending me emails about the dramatic, huge, shocking and unexpected unemployment figures.  My question is: since the news media caused most of the layoffs with their constant barrage of sensationalist reporting, why are they surprised?  I am a huge fan of freedom of speech.  However, I do not admire irresponsible, commercialized reporting whose apparent goal is to simply sell more newspapers and more ads.

My “bones of contention” are as follows:

• Unemployment numbers are grossly misleading – The news reports headline the number of jobs lost, but fail to even mention the millions of current unfilled job openings throughout every single state in the country.  Where are the headlines that mention the fact that so many jobs are just waiting for a motivated employee to apply.  All you have to do is go to www.JobOpenings.net to get a very different view of the job market. 
  
  
• The 6.7% unemployment is barely 1% higher than the 5.5% normal unemployment that many consider to be “full employment” in a booming economy.  Since companies come and go in good and bad economies, there will always be people temporarily out of work.  There are also plenty of jobs for the gigantic 1% additional unemployed workers.  So why is this number all over the news?  Does bad news sells newspapers? Except for the significantly more responsible reporting on NPR (National Public Radio) reporters rarely mention the 25-30% unemployment of the Great Depression. 
  
  
• Banks are like most businesses in that some succeed and some fail on a regular basis as a result of good and bad management and financial decisions.  Bank failures occur every single year.  Even though the current headlines are making a huge fuss about the 22 failures this year, these stories and headlines typically fail to mention that this number is dwarfed by the thousands of bank failures during the recession years of the late 1980s and even by the hundreds of failures in the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  The problem is that a headline that said “Bank Failures 90% Fewer than in the 1988 Recession” would  just not a juicy enough story.  They would rather write things like “Bank Failures Reach 22!!!”, since that headline is sexier and so much more dramatic.
  
  
• In addition to bank failures, businesses fail or get gobbled up by larger businesses constantly.  It may be that this year is slightly more active, but much depends on how terms are defined and how statistics are gathered.  Reporters got all excited when Circuit City announced bankruptcy plans last month.  The failure was blamed on the credit crunch, but is that the whole story?  If memory serves, Circuit City has been on the verge of bankruptcy ever since Best Buy started giving them some serious competition about 10 years ago.  They laid off thousands of employees and closed hundreds of stores at least a year before there was any talk of a “credit crunch.”  The difficulty with Circuit City has much more to do with poor management than it does with a poor economy.  By the way, Best Buy is hiring!
  
  
• After the headlines about “Gas Prices Top $4 Per Gallon!!!” I have yet to see a headline stating “Gas Prices Drop Below $2 Per Gallon!!!”  I rest my case…
  
  

I have not decided if the best course of action is to stop listening to the news, start writing letters to the editor,  start an email campaign to make the news media realize we have had enough “doom and gloom” reporting for a lifetime or start boycotting companies who support this kind of irresponsible reporting with their advertising dollars.  Any ideas?

Job openings for Liberal Arts Majors: Better than Imagined

While reviewing the stats for this site and our jobs website (www.jobopenings.net), I am struck by how many searches I see for things like “Jobs for economics majors” or “careers for psychology majors” or “job openings for philosophy majors.”  When I see those and many similar searches, I realize that colleges have failed, at least in those cases, to convey the primary goal of a broadly based college education.  When Liberal Arts colleges are fulfilling their missions, they are creating the kinds of graduates that are prepared to do just about anything they wish to do in the workforce.  Although some more specialized fields will require additional training (professional degrees, master’s degrees, etc.), many career opportunities require only minimal on the job training.  How have colleges and college graduates become so confused about the value of a hugely valuable Liberal Arts education?

The confusion lies in three major areas:

Employer expectations – Employers often do not really know what they want or need.  They often do not understand that any person they hire will need some period of time to learn their way around a new job, no matter how much training or experience they have.  Rather than specific, highly related experience and training, what they often should be looking for is someone who has a good work ethic, creative ideas, enthusiasm, the ability to master new tasks, the ability to understand new concepts and the willingness to be an asset to this particular team.  Enter the Liberal arts majors (Political Science, Psychology, English, History, Music majors), who often possess all of these traits.  All they lack is the confidence in themselves needed to convince prospective employers of their worth.

Parental Expectations – Parents need to get past the lopsided notion that the payment of college tuition is a financial investment for which they should be able to calculate the same kind of ROI (return on investment) that they expect on all other financial investments (until recently).  They pressure their children to major in something “practical” like accounting, or business management or physical therapy so that there is a clear-cut career path on graduation day.  Such thinking is not only very short-sighted; it misses the entire point of a college education.  You see, all of that practical, technically specific training has an extremely short shelf life.  Often the knowledge is out-of-date within a few months or a few years after leaving the classroom.  What so many parents seem not to understand is that it’s all the other classes (general education, liberal arts, etc.) that are providing the true, long-lasting knowledge that will stay with the student for an entire lifetime.  Those much under-appreciated classes will teach young people how to reason, think creatively, appreciate subtle concepts, communicate with people from different cultures, research, question conventions, learn and survive in a rapidly changing world.  Armed with a solid background in history, philosophy, literature, sociology, sciences, mathematics, the arts, and sports along with the lasting friendships from college, the ROI from college will be so large and diverse that it will defy any conventional financial measurements.

College Graduate Expectations – Since employers rarely advertise job openings in terms of college majors, particularly for majors like History, English, Economics, Art History and Philosophy, job seekers would be wise to discontinue looking in that manner.  In many cases it will be the role of the job seeker to help the prospective employer understand how their particular abilities will be an asset to the company in the advertised position.  It may be of some help to know that there is almost never a perfect match between the set of skills an employer thinks they want and the set of skills possessed by the individual who actually lands the job.  If you don’t believe me, I invite you to ask anyone you know who is currently employed this question: “Did you have every skill your current employer wanted before you were hired for your first job with them?”  Follow this with the question, “How close were you to what they said they wanted?”  My bet is that you will not be able to find a single person who fit the job description perfectly – unless there were no expectations at all.  What that means for job seekers is that employers are almost always flexible.  All they really want is an employee who will do the job well and be an asset to their organization.

Having said all of that, what kinds of jobs can a history major find?  In certain communities where teaching positions are more difficult to fill, history majors can teach a variety of subjects without a teaching certificate.  To see what Teach for America looks for, click here. A history background would also be valuable in any situation that calls for the ability to put information in a long-term perspective, such as banking or politics or even long-range marketing.  In addition, non-profit management positions, government positions, or jobs with the hospitality of travel industry. 

English majors or, in fact, almost any college major would do well in a hospital administrative position, city or county management, publishing companies, educational support companies, retirement communities, universities, public relations, media, the entertainment industry or just about any industry that requires a high level of creative thinking or communication skills.  If none of that appeals to you, another exciting option is to take the reins and start your own company or organization.  There are many foundations or entrepreneurial groups available to provide funding and support for a particularly clever idea.  Also, many cities encourage new businesses by providing low-cost business incubation centers.  Thanks to the Internet, you can do almost all of your research right from your computer!

The possibilities for a well educated, creative college graduate are as diverse as they are exciting.  Luckily you have been trained to color outside of the lines!

 

Finding a Job is Not a “Numbers Game”

Everyone has heard the expression “numbers lie.”  As a former CPA with 25 years in the business community, I emphatically believe in the truth of that statement.  The current intentionally misleading unemployment numbers are a particularly damaging lie.  First, unemployment can never be zero because of a phenomenon the economists call “frictional unemployment.”  In simple terms, that means that because businesses are always moving, opening and closing and changing direction, there are always people temporarily out of the workforce.  There are five other types of normal unemployment that have the combined effect of creating roughly 5% unemployment continually. Second, the current 6.5% number is pathetic compared to the impressive 25% rate during height of the Great Depression.  Third, the number is so insignificant as to be meaningless unless the media succeeds in scaring enough people to actually cause a bigger problem.

In addition to the negative slant in the reporting of the unemployment numbers, there is another misleading headline story being told.  The media had a field day with the bankruptcy of Circuit City and the failure of several banks.  What they did not report is that Circuit City has been in the process of going out of business for about 20 years.  The fact that that conclusion happened this year is probably just a sad coincidence.  There are bank failures every year and business failures every year.  The numbers are not much larger this year than they are every year.  Of course, if the reporters added that bit of reality to their story, their headline would be much less dramatic and fewer people would listen to their story.  It’s always more fun to tell the BIG story, right?  Is it time to start calling reporters to task for all of these exaggerations?  Do you remember the hundreds of news stories about $4/gal gasoline?  How many stories have you heard about the $2/gal at many pumps today?

There is an important side of this unemployment number that the naysayers, the politicians and the media leave out.  If they were to tell you that there is an equally large number of jobs, career opportunities and creative employment ideas available at any time, they would take all the punch out of their headline news stories.  If you know where to look, there are millions of job openings in the job market right now.  In addition to the publicized jobs, there are many positions that are never listed.  On top of that there are jobs that you can essentially create for yourself by convincing an employer that you can make more money for them than you would cost.  If an employer can hire your services for x dollars and you can demonstrate that you would either be able to save or earn more than x dollars, you may have created a job for yourself!  In an economy as large as ours, there is always something that needs to be done.  In case you do not like the jobs that others have available, there is always the option of starting your own business on either a small scale or a large scale.

You do not need 100 jobs or even 10 jobs.  You need only one (or maybe two).  You may have to modify your approach, since throwing a bucket of resumes into the market in the hope that one will land on an employer may be less effective than in a sellers’ market.  However, that modification should be one you needed to make regardless of the type of market. 

My point is that the tiny 1.5% difference between the normal 5% unemployment and the touted 6.5% number is absolutely no reason to be discouraged.  There is only an unemployment problem, if you personally allow the naysayers to convince you that you cannot find a job. 

Incidentally, our country did survive the Great Depression – with flying colors!  We will survive this recession, too.

How Job Hunting is Like Dating

Although the goals of the two are typically quite different, the methods can be surprisingly similar.  This line of reasoning was inspired by a scene in the hit movie We are Marshall.  If you saw the movie, which I highly recommend, you will no doubt remember the important scene where the new head coach, played by Mathew McConaughey, asks the college president to consider why he might be having trouble getting the NCAA to make an exception for Marshall to allow them to play freshman on their football team.  The coach says to the college president [played by David Strathairn], who has just received his latest, final rejection letter from the NCAA, “I’ll bet that you did not ask your wife to marry you in a letter.” Pause. “And I’ll also bet that she did not say yes to you over the telephone.” [or words to that effect]

Jobs Openings are Down, so Scams are Up

Why is it that the opportunists seem to come out of the woodwork whenever times get a little tough and whenever people are feeling a little frightened?  It always happens, doesn't it?  The sad thing is that there are always people who are ready to believe that there is a simple solution to their troubles, so they are easy prey for the scam artists.  The best way to avoid being a victim is to keep a few simple rules in mind.

Super-Employees: What are they and where can I find one?

In my current position, finding jobs online for JobOpenings.net, I am constantly reading job descriptions on employer websites all over the Internet.  The more I read, the more I realize that there is a pattern emerging among many of the announcements of job openings.  No matter what other qualifications they want and no matter what salary they expect to pay, most employers want "Super Employees."    What are the characteristics of this super employee everyone wants?

Red Flags for Job Listing Websites

Important Red Flags for Job Listing Websites

1. The Job is with a US company but is written by someone for whom English is obviously not a native tongue.  This means it's automatically time to investigate further.  Humans should review all Job Postings.
2. The contact email is a Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com or Gmail.com or other free email account.
3. The Phone number given with the credit card does not agree with the address given when a reverse address lookup is performed or the credit card billing email does not produce a verifiable match when authorization is attempted.
4. The name on the credit card does not agree with a reverse lookup for the address.
5. WhoIs domain name lookup at DNSStuff.com on the domain name yields either a non-US business, a non-US address or a hosting company with a non-US address.  Also do a whois lookup on the name server address.
6. The Company hides their WhoIs contact information using a domain proxy service.  My rule of thumb is to refuse to do business online with a company whose physical address cannot be verified.
7. The Company uses a PO Box for resumes or only a PO Box for snail mail contacts.

8. The Company posts only a toll-free number or cell phone number with no land line.

9. The Company is not a Better Business Bureau member or member of any chamber of commerce or trade association that can be verified.

10. The Company does not own the most logical .com that matches their company name.  Many fraudulent listings use the .net, .biz or other TLD for a known company; they may also add a dash or an "inc" or make other changes to a well-known company website domain name - then they steal their logo and content and put it on their own website.  It is not possible for most companies to buy up every possible trick name a thief might deam up.

11. You cannot find the company in the Yellow Pages by exact the company name and address.

12. No website is listed at all.

13. The salary offer or earnings potential claimed in the ad is disproportionately high in relation to requirements for education or experience level.

14. You call the toll-free number provided and get an answering machine.

Why should you pay attention to these warning signs?

Rules for Leaving Your Job

Did you get fired?  Did you quit in a rage?  Did you sneak out the door?  The answers to those questions are not nearly as important as is the answer to this one:  Did you make the most of your transition from one job to another?

Ending a job is similar to ending a marriage or other long-term relationship in that there are always two sides to the story.  Employers know they are only hearing your side, so you need to be careful how you describe the departure.  Leaving a job is different in one important way: your next partner or spouse will probably not call your previous partner for a reference.  Your prospective employer probably will.

How can your handling of your departure from a job be the most beneficial to your career?

What Do Employers Want Anyway?

As I read through some of the thousands of resumes submitted to JobOpenings.net every day, I am struck by how many do not seem to have even the vaguest notion that potential employers will be reading their resumes.  If they did, they would not list as their employment objective “A job that will offer me the opportunity for advancement” or other similarly phrased career objectives.  The focus of both the cover letter and the résumé is on the needs and desires of the job seeker.