Sunday, March 14, 2010

“Job search tips offered March 30 in Bernards Township (The Bernardsville News)” plus 3 more

“Job search tips offered March 30 in Bernards Township (The Bernardsville News)” plus 3 more

Job search tips offered March 30 in Bernards Township (The Bernardsville News)

Posted: 14 Mar 2010 01:17 PM PDT

Ruth Lufkin, supervising reference librarian, will feature creative ways to find opportunities through mining the library's resources.  She will demonstrate online tools that allow discovery of useful magazine, journal and newspaper information on specific companies, key personnel and particular industries.

 Resources that are available remotely to every library cardholder in New Jersey will be highlighted, as well as those specifically available at Bernards Township Library. 

The meeting will be held in the Program Room located on the lower level.  All are welcome at this free program. 

Pre-registration is suggested but not required; those who register in advance using the Program Calendar at www.BernardsLibrary.org will receive an email reminder before the program.

 For more information call the Library at (908) 204-3031, ext. 4, or email rlufkin@bernards.org.

Members of the Career Forum and Career Networking Group are especially invited to attend these meetings.  Both of these local support groups offer programs of interest to those looking for work or contemplating transition and opportunities to network with other members of the group. 

The Career Forum meets at the Somerset Hills YMCA from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday evenings.

The Career Networking Group meets on the first and third Thursday evenings of each month at the Bernards Township Library. 

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Area residents get job search help (Livonia Observer)

Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:15 AM PDT

State Senator Glenn S. Anderson recently hosted a town hall meeting on jobs at the Don Hubert VFW hall in Redford. The meeting included presentations employment agencies and non-profits in an effort to help people look for work.

"Today's job market is extremely challenging and now more than ever folks need any help they can get maximizing their chances of finding work and getting back on their feet," said Anderson. "Sometimes knowing what resources are available can make the difference between being able to make it through a tough situation or not."

The town hall meeting included representatives from local and state agencies including: The Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, Michigan Works, the Michigan Department of Human Services and the United Way for Southeastern Michigan.

"The one on one experience provided us with some positive feedback for support resources, which we will now be able to follow up with," said Mara Daien of Livonia, who attended the town hall with her husband Gary Daien.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

If you want better results from job searches, change your behavior (Salem Statesman Journal)

Posted: 14 Mar 2010 03:21 AM PDT

When it comes to your job search, if you're doing what you've done in the past and it isn't working, stop.

It will only lead to frustration. But you already knew that.

Still, it's befuddling, isn't it? "I've always found work in the past," I hear job hunters — especially older ones — say daily.

And that's why so many people keep doing what they've done in past job searches. They call up "agencies." Read job boards. Answer online ads. Dwell on their extensive experience that should after all, speak for itself, right?

This, I'm told by experts of the human mind, is typical. People do what has worked for them in the past.

Even if it stops working, they keep trying, expecting it to work, says clinical psychologist Carolyn Kauffman.

Think of the person who sticks a key into a lock and it doesn't work. "Do they give up? No, they keep sticking the same key into the lock and trying," Kauffman says.

If what you've done before has worked at other times in your career, it's built into your "blueprint of how the world works. Once something has gone into that blueprint the person treats it as an Absolute Truth, and may not even realize that there could be another way to look at or do things," she adds.

You might also try the same thing over and over even though it consistently hasn't worked because something in you wants it to work out so badly, offers Kauffman. "We call that a 'repetition compulsion.'"

So here's a different way to look at your job search.

First, if you're still spending most of your time filling out online applications, why are you doing that? Have you gotten a job that way in the past? Or do you just want it to work out so badly you keep trying?

These days, you should assume your odds of hearing back from someone on the other end of the online process are as good as winning the lottery, which is estimated to be 120 million to 1 odds. You are more likely to be struck and killed by lightening.

I may be exaggerating a bit, but my point is that when you accept how things are, not the way you think they should be, you have no choice but to stop complaining that no one ever gets back to you. Then you can cut through this impersonal process and seek out people in your field and target individuals in companies you want to talk to.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Job search puts resolve to the test (The Fayetteville Observer)

Posted: 13 Mar 2010 09:53 PM PST


Usually, he never hears back.

Not a we've-received-and-are-reviewing-your-application. Not a thanks-but-no-thanks. Not a form letter or an e-mail or a phone call or anything that acknowledges that Maurice Richard has applied for a job selling insurance, driving a truck, working at a plant, pushing a broom.

It can be like operating in a void. Richard doesn't know why he's been rejected or if his application has even been read.

What he does know is that he has to keep trying, even though the days have turned into weeks and the weeks into months. Even though his savings have vanished and his debts keep mounting.

"I'm willing to do anything," he said.

The problem: So are too many other people.

In North Carolina, more than half a million workers - 11.1 percent of the work force - were unemployed in January, and nearly 15 million workers were unemployed throughout the country.

Nearly 60 percent of them had been unemployed for at least 15 weeks. And more than 40 percent had been without a paycheck for more than 27 weeks - the highest percentage since 1948, when the U.S. government began collecting such statistics.

Richard, a 30-year-old Fayetteville man with a wife and a young daughter, is among them. Richard has been without work since February 2009, when he was laid off from his job selling insurance at a credit union. He said he has submitted hundreds of job applications since then - to no avail.

"It's been very hard," he said.

Maurice Richard, whose surname is pronounced "Ree-shard," grew up in Fayetteville in a family that was fractured by divorce.

He said he wasn't much of a student, but he eked out a high school diploma and was offered small scholarships from two colleges impressed by a high SAT score that belied his poor grades. Richard said he took the test twice, the second time at the insistence of high school officials who thought he must have cheated his way to his first high score. He said he did even better the second time he took the test.

But his family scoffed at college. And he couldn't see signing up for more school work. So after loafing for a couple of months after graduation, he got a job at a Fayetteville supermarket bagging groceries.

Life, he figured, was fine.

Over the next several years, Richard held a succession of jobs. He worked in a supermarket, for Wal-Mart and for Cape Fear Valley Medical Center. He drove trucks, hauling water, beer, concrete, asphalt and soft drinks. He cleaned offices.

Always, Richard said, something would prompt him to move on. Almost always, he said, he'd have a new job lined up before he left. The longest he went between jobs was three weeks.

He began to think more seriously about his life after marrying in 2004. He said his wife, Fabian, who has worked at the same job for seven years, was a steadying influence. In 2006, the couple had a daughter.

Richard said he realized he needed to stick with a job and learn to deal with any problems instead of just quitting.

Still, he quit his job driving an asphalt truck because of the down time. He worked only when it was warm enough and dry enough to pour asphalt. With his wife's blessing, he went looking - again.

That's when he found the insurance-sales job and fell in love with his new career. He said he loved dealing with people and had a knack for selling. Twice, he said, he was named salesman of the month. He was earning good money, had benefits and worked regular business hours, which gave him nights and weekends with his family.

He told his daughter he was going to buy the family a house and a new car.

But storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. Fueled by problems in the financial, credit and housing industries, the once-booming national economy started to slide. Worried businesses and consumers stopped spending and started looking for ways to cut their expenses.

Richard saw the effects - his sales sank, though he says he still outsold others in his region.

By January 2009, following a disastrous fourth quarter, the national situation had become "an economic hurricane," according to one economist.

Employers responded. That month, more than 73,000 people were added to North Carolina's unemployment rolls - a jump of 20 percent.

The next month, another 52,000 North Carolina residents were unemployed - 490,095 in all. Among them: Richard.

In one key way, Maurice Richard is typical of those who've gone longest without a job during this recession. He never went to college.

Only 4.9 percent of workers with at least a four-year college degree were unemployed in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The rate rose as workers' education levels dropped - 8.5 percent for those with some college or an associate's degree; 10.1percent for those with high school diplomas only; and 15.2 percent for high school dropouts.

"The message that it sends just reinforces that in the kind of economy that we have today, you have to have skills clearly beyond high school and preferably a four-year college degree or at least a two-year college degree," said Mike Walden, an economist and professor at N.C. State University.

It's likely no coincidence that enrollment at Fayetteville Technical Community College set a record this semester - nearly 12,000 students. Enrollment is up nearly 12 percent from three years ago.

Still, a college education doesn't solve all of a job seeker's woes, said Glenn McQueen, director of the Cumberland County office of the N.C. Employment Security Commission.

It eliminates the education gap, he said. But it doesn't eliminate the experience gap.

Many of the unemployed worked in good-paying manufacturing or construction jobs that didn't require a college education. Now many of those jobs have vanished, some likely forever.

Jimmy Jackson of Linden and James Holder of Lillington spent "30-some" years building mobile homes for various manufacturers. Jackson said that when he started in the business a year out of high school, the work paid better than jobs at the tire-building factory owned by Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

But the mobile-home business collapsed. Jackson was laid off in October 2008 and Holder, in January 2009.

Neither has been able to find a job since.

"I never thought that at 56 I'd be out looking for a job," Jackson said recently at a job fair in Fayetteville.

In January, 43 percent of unemployed men were 45 or older, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage was slightly higher for women.

Jackson believes his age hurts his chances with employers.

But as with Richard, plenty of younger workers are having no better luck. At the same job fair, Milan Kepic, a 42-year-old Fayetteville man, looked glum as he talked about the 16 years he spent as a maintenance and machine operator at a factory in Laurinburg - and the 12 months he's spent looking for work following a mass layoff.

"I didn't expect it to take this long," he said.

Like Jackson, Holder and Richard, Kepic had grabbed an application for a job as a stock clerk at the Public Works Commission, with a starting hourly pay of $11.02 to $14.68.

But they likely all face long odds in landing that job.

Earlier this year, between 700 and 800 people applied for two customer-service jobs at PWC. About 200 met the advertised qualifications for the work, which had a starting hourly pay of $11.88 to $15.83.

Carolyn Hinson, a spokeswoman for the utility, said PWC's customer-service department now has "a lot more experience" than it once had. "So that's a plus," she said.

Applications for the stock clerk job were being accepted through Friday, so Hinson couldn't say how many had applied for it.

Maurice Richard has repeatedly had to lower his expectations as his joblessness drags on.

Initially, he looked only for insurance jobs because he loved the business. But he was always told he needed more licenses - so he could sell homeowners insurance, car insurance and securities. He hoped he'd be hired by an employer who would pay for that training. It didn't happen.

He got a single job offer early on - from an insurance man in Raleigh who said Richard would have to go up there and work seven days a week with low pay until he'd established himself. The insurance man said it would be worth Richard's while in the long run. Richard figured he could do better.

He eventually broadened his search to include truck-driving jobs, thinking his Class A driver's license would be a plus.

But the jobs he wanted required a special license endorsement that he lacks. The endorsement permits the driver to transport hazardous materials.

He broadened his search to anything that paid at least $12.50 an hour, the minimum he believed he needed to support his family - though he's been netting much less than that in unemployment benefits.

"People tend to not want to take a pay cut," said McQueen, the Employment Security Commission official. "They stay out and continually look for jobs that pay somewhere close to what they were making."

But many of those jobs are gone forever. And wages, he said, are dropping, not increasing.

Meanwhile, though unemployment benefits have been extended numerous times, that won't continue forever, McQueen said. What will those still waiting for better jobs do then?

"If you can get in there and produce or be able to walk into the building and work yourself back to where you were, that's probably the way you're going to have to do it," McQueen said.

Richard said that's now his outlook.

"It's a continually humbling experience," he said. "It's been such a draining experience. It's tested my ability."

In the past six months, he said, he has put in hundreds of applications for an array of jobs in a broad region in and around Fayetteville. Among them: Driving a truck that cleans portable toilets, working at the waste-treatment plant, sorting mail at a government office, counting people for the census and cleaning schools.

He's had nary a bite.

The family survives on Richard's unemployment benefits of about $200 a week, Fabian Richard's paycheck, food stamps and occasional help from her father. Their credit card is maxed out; their bank account is often overdrawn.

When Richard's unemployment was cut off briefly because of a delay in an extension bill in the U.S. Senate, it was scary.

"I need some income to bring in," he said.

The Richards' lifestyle has changed drastically. The family has only basic cable TV now and is considering dropping that. They keep the thermostat on 68. They hardly ever eat out. "Wendy's is eating out now," Richard said.

He has learned to cut coupons, to shop frugally at discount stores, to buy "filler" foods such as rice and beans to stretch meals. He spends more time with his wife and daughter doing free things - playing board games, going to the park and just talking together at the dinner table.

There's a hard-won upside to the situation. "It's allowed me to draw closer to my wife and daughter," he said.

Meanwhile, he keeps looking. He recently got a lead on a full-time job as a school janitor. It would pay $8.68 to $11.06 an hour to start and comes with benefits. That sounds fantastic to Richard.

The job isn't yet open, but Richard talked to the school's principal and said the man was encouraging. Richard is hopeful.

"I have a very positive feeling about this," he said.

Staff writer Catherine Pritchard can be reached at pritchardc@ fayobserver.com or 486-3517.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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