The Full Scope of America's Jobs Crisis in 17 Charts - The Atlantic

The Full Scope of America's Jobs Crisis in 17 Charts - The Atlantic

The series of charts here show the real scope of the job crisis we are in. Staggering!

Tuition Free tax preparation classes

Do you know of anyone who is looking for seasonal employment with the Tax system?

Last year folks working through our Tuition Free tax preparation classes (Book fees have to be paid separately) were subsequently hired on for the tax season.

The details and schedule for the 10 weeks of class for this can be found here
http://web.detma.org/JobQuest/JobDetails.aspx?jo=1153050

Thanks to Hari Narayanan
Business Service Representative
Workforce Central Career Center

"Emotional Challenges Resulting from a Lay Off"

Inviting Executives and Professionals to attend FREE workshop "Career Transitions of Greater Boston" Guest Speaker: Michael Parise, Tuesday, September 20; "Emotional Challenges Resulting from a Lay Off".

Tuesday September 20th 10 AM -12:30 PM, at the Burlington Public Library Michael Parise will be talking about the emotional challenges of a lay off. This is a workshop you won't want to miss! No matter the length of time you've been in transition, it's likely you have some head trash associated with it. This is open to all (and free!) please let others know about it! Here's more info:

"Loss and Gain on Main Street"

The loss of a job is listed among the primary stressors in life, along with the death of a loved one, moving to a new city, and serious illness. How do we deal emotionally with the loss of a job or the need to transition to a new career? What is to be gained in the transition? Why do we call grieving a "project"? Michael Parise, will guide us through the rough waters of job loss and how to best deal with the grief.

Michael Parise is a Life Coach and Counselor with over 25 years experience. He works with people from all walks of life who are in transition or who simply wish to discover their true life goals and the practical strategies that will empower them to move forward. Michael has recently made his own transition from 32 years of pastoral ministry to his new career as a coach, writer, and project assistant. His experience and skills have earned him a reputation as a compassionate listener and counselor.

Meetings are free and open to the public. No pre registration necessary. We encourage all professionals /executives to attend. Business casual attire. We cover a different topic every week:

Join our LinkedIn group "Career Transitions of Greater Boston" or Visit our website at http://CareerTransitionsofGreaterBoston.com or e-mail suzanne.gray@comcast.net for more info.


Suzanne Gray and Margie Pascetta co-facilitate these weekly workshops; they each own and operate independent offices of The Entrepreneur's Source, the leading self employment coaching organization in North America; they help their clients clarify their unique career and personal goals and vision. They educate clients about business ownership and help them to explore businesses that meet their specific criteria, using a step by step process.

Hopkinton Networking Group - Dan DeMaioNewton, Christal Dionne

Hello Everyone,
The agenda for this Friday's Hopkinton Networkers Group (HNG) meeting will be featured by our speakers, Dan DeMaioNewton and Christal Dionne. The facilitator for this week will be Sandra Lowther. We will devote the first hour, from 10 to 11 AM to the following agenda: Welcome, Landings, Announcements, New Member Intros, and Needs & Leads. Please arrive early, so we can make every effort to start on time. In the second hour, Dan and Christal will talk about, "Dealing with the Afflictive Emotions of Job Seeking" .

NOTE: This is my last time writing the Agenda for a little while because I have landed a six-month contract position. One of the other coordinators will continue to write the Agenda.

Dealing with the Afflictive Emotions of Job Seeking

In this session you will participate in 2 exercises (An Exercise in Gratitude and The Most Important Thing) designed to help you prevent afflictive emotions associated with job search, unemployment, and underemployment. These exercises are designed to not only help you cope in the down times, but will also help prevent the job seeker's blues from showing up in the first place.

About Dan DeMaioNewton:

As Director of Strategy and Business Development for Monster Worldwide, Dan leads Monster's largest efforts to help get job seekers better jobs faster, employers obtain the best talent more efficiently, and transform work around the globe. Dan is a recognized human capital revolutionary helping reshape recruitment in the 21st century. Leading some of the nation's largest workforce transformations, Dan's work has helped millions of job seekers getting better jobs and hundreds of thousands of employers hiring the right talent faster. Dan served as the chief architect re-engineering USAJOBS - the award-winning official job site for the U.S. Federal government. Under his leadership, USAJOBS became the 5th most visited job site on the Internet, and changed the way every American looks at a career with the Federal government.
He has built, managed, and driven high performance in several of the most influential career sites in the industry, including:

a.. STEMPower - Helping drive success for careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics for Central Massachusetts
b.. USAJOBS - The official job site for the US Federal Government
c.. BetterJobsFaster.org - The online community site for job seekers to find ways to help them get better jobs faster.
d.. StudentJobs - the official US Federal job site for Student Internships, Fellowships, Entry Level jobs with the US Federal Government.
e.. OhioMeansJobs - enabling every Ohio employer free access to 3.5M active job seekers through Monster.com's resume database
f.. Helmets to Hardhats - The Career Site for Veterans to obtain meaningful careers in construction. Strongly affiliated with the US Dept of Defense and all labor unions.
g.. Hurricane Relief - Monster partnered job site for those impacted by Hurricane Katrina for volunteer, survivor, and reconstruction workers.
h.. Democratic and Republican National Convention Volunteer Sites - coordinating the registration, background checks, training, and volunteer activities for the 2004 and 2008 conventions
i.. Extreme Hiring Makeover - Led year-long engagement to sustainably raise-the-bar for Federal government recruitment (www.extremehiringmakeover.org)
j.. Monster Evolutions - Chief Architect behind Monster's better outplacement solution to ease the departure and speed the arrival
k.. Kix.com - Kentucky Indiana Regional Exchange helping transform 26 counties and transform the regional economy.
l.. Pathways Out of Poverty - Helping develop new career opportunities for regions with a challenged workforce
Dan has 3 patents-pending relating to technologies that help job seekers get better jobs faster, and has introduced more than a dozen innovations into Monster.com to help it deliver greater value to employers and job seekers. His passionate work designing and building effective ways to help job seekers find, obtain, and advance their careers brings powerful insights and a unique perspective to help job seekers.

About Christal Dionne:

For nearly half a decade, Christal has been working to help job seekers across the US find jobs, get better jobs, and advance their careers. At Monster, she works with national, state, and local workforce development leaders and leading employers to improve their recruitment and hiring practices. She's been responsible for job seeker support services for USAJOBS, the award-winning career site for the US Federal government, Helmets to Hardhats - helping Veterans gain great careers in construction, and several other hiring programs. As a result of her work at Monster, with national customers, and with job seekers, Christal has a unique perspective on the changing labor market and how you can get an advantage to get hired.

Schedule for HNG Meetings:

October 7, 2011 Joellyn Schwerdlin "Network Your Way Into the Hidden Job Market"
October 21, 2011
November 4, 2011
November 18, 2011
December 2, 2011
December 16, 2011

General Information:

The networking group meets in Hopkinton, at St. John the Evangelist Church parish hall. The meeting occurs, from 10 to 12 noon, and will meet the first and third Friday of the month. The parish hall has a capacity for 250 people and there is plenty of parking spaces in the parking lot and on the street. Around the perimeter of the parish hall are rooms to allow us to have focused network groups or for any other purpose we need. We chose the first and third Friday to allow everyone to attend the Acton Networking Group or any other networking group, if they wanted, on the Friday we do not meet.

We will maintain our close affiliation with Acton Networkers by using the same list-server to share information between the groups. Any e-mails specific to the Hopkinton Networking Group (HNG) will be indicated in the subject line either by "Hopkinton Networking Group" or "HNG"; this way anyone attending these meetings will know the e-mail is intended for them.

We will follow the following agenda items:
Welcome
Landings (with doughnuts)
Announcements
New member introductions
Needs and Leads
Speaker(s), Workshop, or Focus Group
Cleanup

For those new members who give their introductions, this is what we would like to know:
Name
Skills and Value Statement
Where have you been?
Where are you going?
Your title
Your target companies
Geography of search
Name and e-mail address

If anyone wants to join our team, please let one of us know; we could always use the extra help and input for ideas.

Directions:
Take Rt. 495 North/South and get off Exit 21A. Go through three traffic lights. Colella's Supermarket is on the right at the third traffic light. The first street after the third traffic light is Church Street, take a right turn. The church is on the right. Go around to the left of the parking lot and go into the side entrance of the parish hall.

Depending upon where you live, perhaps you may want to use Mapquest for a more direct route. The address of the church is:
St. John the Evangelist
20 Church Street
Hopkinton, MA 01748

Regards,
Hopkinton Networkers Group (HNG) Coordinators:
Sandra Cipriani sandraopps@comcast.net
Gil Krispien g.krispien@verizon.net
Jim Lane jdlane58@hotmail.com
Sandra Lowther sandy_lowther@charter.net
Barbara McKee barb6635@comcast.net
Ralph Sabatino ralphsabatino@ymail.com
Salpi Sarafian ssarafian@rcn.com

Visualizing the Local Effects of Recovery Spending on Job Loss [Interactive ...

Sent to you by Steve Sherlock via Google Reader:

Visualizing the Local Effects of Recovery Spending on Job Loss [Interactive Map]

via ReadWriteWeb by Curt Hopkins on 9/9/11

In the wake of U.S. President Obama's speech on jobs last night, we present this mapping of Recovery Act spending. Development Seed, the same folks who mapped the famine in the Horn of Africa, have turned their attention on America.

Development Seed has mapped Recovery Act spending on a county-by-county basis and compared it with county unemployment figures over the same time period. So, does government spending have a positive effect in job recovery? That would be telling and we're going to abide by the doctor's prescription not to tell when you can show. The map is after the jump.

Sponsor

The change in unemployment over the last year is reflected in the colors, with red indicating an increase and green indicating a lower unemployment rate, or job growth. Counties that received under $10 million in recovery funds show a white hash pattern. The counties with the most spending - about a third - are shown in solid colors.
Dave Cole discussed the results of the mapping on Development Seed's blog.

"Overall, it's impossible to tell for sure how much recovery spending improved the economic situation, because we just don't know how bad things could have been. It may be the case that without spending, this map would have a lot more red. Or maybe not. What's interesting here is the local impact and information we are able to see from processing a few sets of open data."

If you liked this, you may also be interested in the data visualization mapping Audrey Watters covers in her post for O'Reilly's Radar. That one maps U.S. job losses by location since 2004.
Discuss

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JSJS3 - Financial Report

The financial report for the recent Job Search Jam Sessions 3 is available for review.




If there are any questions, please feel free to ask.

The net proceeds and anonymous donation amount (total $127.83) will be sent to St John the Evangelist Church as promised. The parish center they allow us to use for this event is just the right size.

So do you want to share your job search story?

If you want to do more to explore social media tools, there is an opportunity to blog!

In the session on "Exploring Social Media Tools", the discussion was lively and wide ranging. Blogs provide an opportunity to position yourself with content creation. Twitter provides a link for Google with only 140 characters. LinkedIn is for professional networking. Facebook is used more for family and friends. Google+ is the new kid on the block with opportunities to make an impact. This is a quick summary that does not do full justice to the discussion. It does provide an indication of the give and take. Most in the room participated in one or more of the tools mentioned.

This site serves a dual purpose. One it provides a publication vehicle for my 'job search notes'. Two, it provides a central base point for the Job Search Jam Session events.

To further your own exploration of social media, if you want to do a guest post on your job search efforts, to share a tip or two on what you have found, this is one place you can do so. You can dip your toe into the water and see if you like it. The site is already established, you won't have to worry about setting it up or anything related to getting started. You can focus on creating the post.

Send me an email expressing your interest and we can take it from there. If the guest post works well for you, you can consider becoming a regular contributor here, or going off and establishing your own site. Either way, I'll be able to provide support and help.

So do you want to share your story?

Session: I'm on LinkedIn - now what?

The presentation copy I used for one of the two LinkedIn sessions I lead at the recent Job Search Jam Sessions

I'm On LinkedIn: Now What?

For the second session, I brought up LinkedIn and we went page to page to answer the questions being asked.

Joanne Dustin's Presentation

Joanne Dustin shares the presentation she used on Friday for our recent Job Search Jam Sessions:

Building Relationships the Key to Successful Interviewing Presentation 09012011


The Guide to Successful Interviewing:

Guide to Successful Interviewing


How to build and use a Contact List

How to Build and Use a Contact Network for Job Search

Thanks Joanne!

A total of 49 learned and shared

At the end of the Job Search Jam Sessions 3, this is what the schedule board looked like.



Yes, the sticky notes didn't want to stay on the shiny white board and even with masking tape, they had trouble staying in place.

49 people participated, 31 of the 35 who pre-registered showed up along with 18 walk-ins. Everyone seemed to get what they needed. The sessions were interactive.

I'll have the full financial accounting available later along with other reflections and take-aways!

Alert: USAJobs website going dark for 1 week

If you have used the USAJobs website, you should be aware that due to an upcoming upgrade, it will go dark for about one week. 

While USAJobs goes dark, between October 6^th and 12^th, no new federal job postings will be put online and OPM officials are currently working with federal agencies to extend application deadlines for jobs posted on the site. According to the Washington Post, the site currently costs about $6 million a year to operate with the agency planning to invest an additional $6 million in improvements over the next year. Visitors to the new and improved USAJobs can expect a more streamlined experience, with periodic updates of application statuses and the eliminating of users having to enter their personal and professional data multiple times.

Read the full posting here: 
http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2011/09/01/usajobs-will-go-offline-in-anticipation-of-october-relaunch.aspx




If you haven't visited USAJobs, you should! http://www.usajobs.com/

Final prep

Friday is almost here. You have registered for Job Search Jam Sessions. What will the day be like?

This will be your time to find out what others know, get your questions answered from those who can answer them, and get to network with others to build your listing of valuable connections.

How should I prepare?
Come to the event prepared to share something you have learned along the way. Come prepared for learn. Come prepared to network (bring business cards).

How should I dress?
Dress as you would for any other networking event, business casual or business comfortable. You still want to make a good first impression but a suit or tux is not required.

What does the facility look like?
Check out the brief video of the facility recorded during May 2010:
http://jobsearchjamsessions.blogspot.com/2010/05/video-tour-of-job-search-jam-session.html

What will the schedule be?
Check out the overall schedule here:
http://jobsearchjamsessions.blogspot.com/p/schedule.html

When do the doors open?
The registration/welcome desk will be open at 8:30 AM.
You can check in, pay at the door (if you elected to do that), and make a name tag.

Beginning at 9:00 AM (or thereabouts) we'll provide an overview of an unconference using the open space technology.

If you want to read up on the unconference format, you can find info here
http://www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace
here
http://www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?WorkingInOpenSpace
and here:
http://podcamp.pbworks.com/ scroll down the page to view the section on how to "host a podcamp"

What is the registration fee being used for?
1 - We intentionally don't want to make money, we are all looking for work and recognize that funds are tight.
2 - We did want to charge something to ensure a reasonable headcount for planning purposes.

Hence, the $8 charge seems reasonable and allows us to plan a good event and to make a contribution to the church for the use of the facility.

Your registration fee ($8.00) paid via Eventbrite nets the organizing team approx. $6.50 (Eventbrite has a charge for processing the credit card).

From the $6.50 times however many people show up, we will plan for refreshments, lunch and will purchase accordingly.

All surplus funds will be donated to the St John the Evangelist Parish. The church has graciously allowed us use of the facility for free. A full accounting of the receipts and expenses will be provided to the attendees.

You can still talk about the event with your friends, neighbors and networked connections. Registrations will be taken at the door on Friday. You can share the event website http://jobsearchjamsessions.blogspot.com/

or have them go directly to the registration page http://jobsearchjamsessions2.eventbrite.com/


Thank you. See you soon!

The Job Search Jam Sessions organizing committee

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