Manufacturing

A previous employer used to say, "we all can't flip burgers, somebody has to make something"...

And in old manufacturing towns throughout the U.S. it's not hard to find people complaining about NAFTA and Free-Trade, and economic development, community colleges and others working hard to hang on to those last manufacturing jobs with incentives, lean manufacturing training, six sigma, etc. This has been going on for the last 20 years. And what has been the result?

As this chart on MSNBC shows...
U.S. Manufactures Are Making One Thing - Profits

Which begs the question, if they're running lean and using advanced technologies to make record profits - What are the people they no longer need to make profits going to do?

Starbucks - Microloans

Starbucks - Venti Plans for Microloans

"The micro-lending revolution, which made it possible for community-based lending institutions to bundle together micro-donations of $25 into loans for entrepreneurs in emerging markets, is making its way to your local Starbucks. Starting November 1, if your local bank won’t give your small business a loan, you might just be able to receive financing from hundreds of thousands of everyday coffee-drinking Americans who care about bringing jobs back to their community. At over 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops around the nation, patrons will be able to submit micro-donations as small as $5, which will then be re-packaged into larger loans for worthy local businesses."

Interesting idea. I've argued for a while that helping the unemployed and underemployed develop basic small businesses and teaching the basic skills required to run them effectively is, perhaps, a more effective workforce development strategy than sending someone to school for two-years and/or getting them a certificate in hope they'll find a job. Very simple stuff, ebay stores, mowing lawns, cleaning homes, etc. Microloans would obviously be a piece to that puzzle. The other piece would be great tutoring and mentoring.

A better question to ask

Workforce professionals have been told for years to be more "demand driven" - that is to ask business and industry what skills they need in the workers they'll be hiring. This has always struck me as ridiculous. How many companies can see around the corner? I'd argue very few, they know what they need right this minute, but in this dynamic economy where knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly those same skills will be just as obsolete by the time it takes you to train the workforce. For that matter, that company itself will most likely be changed dramatically during the same period.

In an interesting post @ Huffington Post, Jeff Selingo suggest another question -

"At the same time, employers and politicians need to learn that if colleges provide training only for jobs that need to be filled now, those workers will probably be useless in about two years given the rapid pace of change in most industries.

Colleges need to reframe the question when asking employers what they need. Instead of asking about the jobs they need to fill tomorrow, colleges should ask employers to describe the valuable skills of their best-performing and longest-serving employees. It's likely the answer will be critical thinking, writing, team work, and problem solving -- all attributes of a classic liberal-arts education."

Doesn't that make more sense?

How to find great talent...

Good stuff from Dan Pink -

From his blog- Interesting interview with author George Anders

"George Anders is a top-shelf business journalist, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and now Bloomberg View. For the last couple of years, he’s tried to answer that question by hanging out with the best talent spotters in the world – the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, a squadron of basketball scouts, the folks at Facebook, and many more."...

 "Everybody should be searching for resilience, and hardly anyone does. Being able to bounce back from adversity is crucial in just about every field I examined. You need resilience to be a great CEO, a great teacher, soldier, investor, etc., etc. But when we hire, we’re taught to regard setbacks — regardless of what came next — as flaws in a candidate. So when we prepare our own resumes, we hide our stumbles. That’s wrong! We should cherish people who have extricated themselves from trouble in the past."

And Pink via a retweet - (what if every company had this philosophy?)
"RT @Sisarina: "We have no vacation policy. The best person to decide whether you should take the day off is you." - @TheMotleyFool #TEDxPQ"

Employee's Matter

A very good piece by SJF Institute - this is a conversation that is never had in workforce development circles.  If employee's matter to the businesses in your region, then you should share this piece with them, help facilitate regional conversations on the topic, and clear the path for implementation. If, on the other hand, the biggest workforce concern your businesses share with you is drug testing and basic skills then, frankly, their employee's don't mean much to them and thus the company shouldn't mean much to you.

Employee's Matter: Maximizing Company Value Through Workforce Engagement

"In recent years, the link between responsible business practices and competitive advantage has become increasingly clear. Successful profit-seeking firms that produce positive social and environmental outcomes have grown in number and acclaim. This growth in social ventures is meaningful and exciting, promising to promote greater economic opportunity for people at all economic levels as well as better stewardship of the world’s scarce resources – while proving that firms can indeed do well by doing good.

Although in the vast majority of businesses and at many business schools employees are still viewed merely as a cost, increasing numbers of businesses are taking a different approach. The Employees Matter report profiles 24 fast-growing entrepreneurial companies that clearly perceive a link between employee ownership and engagement strategies and improved business performance, including an improved ability to weather economic downturns."

Real Reform - Teaching What They Need to Know

Good piece by Steve Denning @ Forbes, he says:
"The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy."
The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education

This is especially true, when as this piece in the Atlantic points out -
The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time
"Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed."

The way we live, work, and learn has completely changed - why are we training people for jobs that no longer exist?

We hear so much about "education reform" but almost nobody is talking about real reform that teaches what our children need to know.  Great post at PersonalMBA which answers the question - "What Must an Educated Person Know?"

An excerpt:

"John Taylor Gatto, a renowned education historian and critic of modern industrial schooling, wrote an essay titled The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? Here’s how the essay begins:

"A few years back one of the schools at Harvard, perhaps the School of Government, issued some advice to its students on planning a career in the new international economy it believed was arriving. It warned sharply that academic classes and professional credentials would count for less and less when measured against real world training. Ten qualities were offered as essential to successfully adapting to the rapidly changing world of work. See how many of those you think are regularly taught in the schools of your city or state… Here’s Harvard University’s list of skills that make an “educated person”:

1. The ability to define problems without a guide.
2. The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3. The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information.
4. The ability to work in teams without guidance.
5. The ability to work absolutely alone.
6. The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
7. The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
8. The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.
9. The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.
10. The ability to attack problems heuristically. 

After listing these skills, Gatto continued: You might be able to come up with a better list than Harvard did without surrendering any of these fundamental ideas, and yet from where I sit, and I sat around schools for nearly 30 years, I don’t think we teach any of these things as a matter of school policy… None of the schools I ever worked for were able to provide any important parts of this vital curriculum for children. All the schools I worked for taught nonsense up front. And under the table, they taught young people how to be dumb, how to be slavish, how to be frightened, and how to be dependent."  

How many workers will we need?

Globalization and trade agreements get the blame, but technology is changing our work lives in ways we have yet to fully understand.  Agrarian societies gave us a new merchant class as technology allowed farmers to grow more food, industrialization then grew cities and the service sector... where will people work now?
See this story about Apples new "workforce"... here