Workforce Training Needs Survey

In his State of the Union address on January 27, 2010, President Barack Obama mentioned that he wants to revitalize the nation's Community College system.  Job creation and getting the unemployed back to work is a priority for President Obama's administration.  Community Colleges have long been working partners in community education, workforce development, and job training.

In July, 2009, I began a pilot project to administer a Workforce Training Needs Survey at the Kiswaukee Community College District in Northern Illinois.  I was not affiliated with any other organization in starting this project.  I earned my doctorate in adult education and human resource development from Florida International University in 1992 and have been involved in designing this type of needs survey and collecting and processing survey results for years.

I offered my services, free of charge, to several Chambers of Commerce and to city governments in the community college district and two people joined me in working on the first half of the survey.  After July, 2009, I no longer had the free time to support the project.  I continued to develop the survey and have now made it available for purchase on eBay.

Organizations which purchase and use the survey are entitled to preferred pricing on many of the DrM-Resources services I provide in support of this survey.

Job Search Filtering and Requirements--A Fish Story

Competing recruiters try to fill job requirements from Fortune 500 firms.  These firms send job requirements electronically to the recruiting firms.  Electronic databases then convert the requirements into postings which are fed to other databases such as Monster.com.   Search parameters set by job hunters then find these postings and e-mail them to the job hunters who respond to the "blind" ("company confidential" or recruiting firm) ads.

Because the recruiters are often not clear on the full detail of the job requirements and because the actual firms looking for contractors or employees make their requirements extremely detailed, excellent candidates are frequently missed due to "glitches" in the overall process.

To make matters worse, if one of the Fortune 500 firms receives two resumes for the same candidate, many automatically eliminate that candidate from consideration.  This is a "lose-lose" situation.

What are the remedies?  Let me get to the fish story first.  Different kinds of tropical fish get their food in different ways.  Some look for the food on the bottom of their tank .  Their food is usually distributed in the form of pellets which the fish find in the sand.  Others need food floating in the water.  Their food is usually distributed in the form of flakes which float around the fish.  These fish will starve if they are provided fish food in a form they are not looking for.

The Fortune 500 companies, the recruiting firms, and the job seekers are often starving as well, because the packaging is not effective in matching the best candidates with available jobs.

Job Training Contracts for the New Economy

Today Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn announced a jobs initiative to provide job training for veterans with a special emphasis on "green" jobs.  This initiative is aligned with President Barack Obama's