Okay, so I take a hiatus and they go and change the blogging tool on me!  Now we'll see how quick a learner I really am.

In case you haven't noticed, I have been away for a while. However, I recently stumbled across the blog of a good friend from High School, and it reminded me that I was way behind on my entries here.  Thank you Terry Heggy for re-inspiring me, you always seemed to have that impact on me in high schoo, too.

That and the Job Market is back at the top of the national news make this a good time for me to relaunch my efforts.  Election years almost make things go easy for a hack like me.

Speaking of the job market, the local (Tulsa, OK) market is pretty healthy.  Unemployment is below 5% and has been now for over six months.  Here ins Tulsa, we are now approaching what Lord William Beveridge   would call "full employment".  However, we still have record numbers of unemployed and underemployed workers in our community.  Unfortunately, the same can be said for most of the nation.

Young people are being advised and guided AWAY from the growing pool of high paying jobs in manufacturing and construction.

It seems what was pretty much an oil and gas manufacturing related problem five to six years ago has now become a national problem.  The pool of skills trades people (welders, machinists, mechanics, metal workers, and etc...) is aging and declining  At the same time, vocational education problems have shifted their focus away from industrial jobs to the technical and medical arenas.  If we can't reverse the trend then we have little hope of being able to pull back job that have been outsourced overseas

Not only are parents and high school guidance counselors directing young people away, but our entire education system is harnessed to the task.  Case in point, our local (County) Career Tech school district has built a beautiful new building entirely devoted to the health care professions and support.  At the same time the same school is having problems attracting students to their formerly first class program for training Machinist and other metal working trades.Topping it off but the school district in which I sometimes teach is putting finishing touches on a massive addition to it's High School complex in order to partner with the local Junior College to offer students a "University Academy" where high schoolers can take  college credit classes, on the high school campus-before they ever get a high school diploma!

Seven years ago I faced this issue, as did all Human Resources Executives in the local manufacturing sector. Some of us actually banded together with Oklahoma's federally funded Manufacturing Extension Service (the Oklahoma Alliance for Excellence in Manufacturing) to pilot a training problem to address this and an additional serious problem-youthful nonviolent offenders.  More about that effort in another entry.