Training & Development

If you’re like many who can’t believe how time flies, it might come as a surprise that on March 14^th ASE will hold its 10^th People, Profit, Progress Conference and Workshops. Don’t feel surprised; most of the ASE staff cannot believe it either, and we’re the ones who put it on every year.

Lee Hecht Harrison, a national recruiting firm, recently published results of a study it commissioned on employee coaching. Coaching is a broadening field of employee development. We can define it as a professional engaging one-one-one with a key employee to further develop the latter’s leadership and management skills, or help overcome a weakness that is holding him or her back.

What do you do during a recession? Traditional wisdom says, stay in school.  Get an advanced degree while the job market is weak, and be ready for a more knowledge-driven economy as the job market begins to recover.  Like any long ride, you will eventually hear that inevitable and sometimes annoying question, “Are we there yet?” Unfortunately for a lot of MBA grads the answer is still “not yet,” even though the destination may not be too far off.

The skill base of the American workforce has been declining, with many employers unable to fill highly technical jobs.  One major cause of this meltdown is the cost of post-high school education.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 34 million Americans over 25 years old have some college credits but haven't received a diploma. That number has grown by roughly 700,000 people over the past three years. According to a 2010 report by Georgetown University, 63% of jobs offered by 2018 will require postsecondary education.

A recent study reports that the shortage of workers for high-skill manufacturing jobs may not be as large as initially thought right now, but specific gaps, if left unchanged, will lead to increased severity.

By the measure of one study, Michigan falls pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to how hard it is to get a license to work in any of 102 low- and middle-income professions. In other words, for Michiganders it seems ridiculously hard to get into some of those professions and maybe too easy to get into others. But Lansing is paying attention to the problem and better things may lie ahead.

Colleges and universities, like all enterprises, have customers. They are most certainly the students themselves and their parents. But they are also employers who provide educational assistance benefits to their employees. And they are all other employers as well, because they need well educated employees and they pay wages and salaries meant at least in part to help those employees send their kids to college.

For many years the U.S. was the destination of choice for immigrants.  With strict immigration laws, the inability to keep international student graduates here in the U.S., and the economy in a fragile state, a new trend has emerged: a brain drain from the U.S.  The emerging economies are the hot spots now.

It is not news to HR people. For all the hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Michigan, there are thousands of great job openings going unfilled, especially in engineering and other technical fields.

As everythingpeople.™ This Week! reported on October 5, the U.S. is suffering from a huge shortage of skilled workers, even as the unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.1%.