Who Creates Jobs?

         

During this political season, we are, or we should be, hearing a lot of discussion about jobs and job creation. From what discussion there has been, it is obvious that the politicos have begun to believe their own positions papers on this subject. This post is just to set the record straight, POLITICIANS DO NOT CREATE JOBS!

Yep, I said it, and I will probably never get asked to even run for Dog Catcher after this. But it's true. The only jobs that a Politician can create are those on his or her own staff and they don't have any positive economic impact.

Real meaningful and economically valuable jobs are created by businesses, and history and research shows us that small businesses create the majority of new jobs in our economy.

So why do the politico's on both sides of the aisle seem to be so hostile to the small business man and woman? Why do we have a tax system that punishes rather than encourages entrepreneurial efforts? Why do we let any organization grow so big it is "too big to fail?"

How we get to what politicians can be good for. You knew there was something, didn't you? Elected officials, politicians, can create and political, legal and regulatory climate that is fair, stable, easily understood and navigated, and that rewards business, particularly small businesses, that invest in technologies and people to increase the size of our labor market.

Right now, the job market is not growing, because the politicians are so full of double talk and double crossing that business men and women have no idea what to expect. Will credit be available or hard to find. Are we going to be forced to execute Sequestration and destroy the federal budget (and the economy with it) or will they find a way to avoid disaster?

Who knows? And that is just the point. With so much uncertainty, why would a sane man or woman take the risk of investing hundreds of thousands, let alone millions of dollars, to start or grow a business for markets that could dry up and blow away in just six months?

And what do we get from the politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, brinksmanship. Is it any wonder that Iran and North Korea continue to defy our attempts to rain in their nuclear programs? All they are doing is copying the behavior of our own political parties in repeatedly taking Us and Them to the brink of destruction, only to pull back at the last second. The only problem is one of these days, somebody is going to misjudge which second is that "last" one, and the consequences are going to be more than devastating. I'm not sure which scenarior (the domestic political one or the international political one) would be the worst to have happen first. Either way, the results won't be good for the US job market.

 

 

 

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.

2012-The End Or Just The Beginning?

Today is my brother's birthday.  Happy Birthday Bobby!!!

I gave him a snarkey card with  Sarah Palin 2012 on the front, and a comment about the Mayan's predicting the end of the world in December 2012. I added the comment..."Coincidence?  I think not!!!"

Well, if you believe the Mayan's this year marks the end of it all.  2012, the end of the great cosmic cycle.  With some of the problems and conditions that exist in the world today, some might be glad to see they Mayan predictions to come true.  Me, personally I am more optomistic about the future and hope to see better things in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Job Search 101 - Getting Hired in Today's "New" Job Market

This series of posts discusses the life process of seeking employment.  If your situation is of an emergency nature (ie; you are unemployed, being hounded by bill collectors, and are about to be evicted) you should refer to the post title “Job Search ER”.  However, assuming this is not the case, please read on. – J. Lee Wiles

A lot gets written these days about the job market, and how to get hired.  Advice abounds from any number of sources and not all of it agrees.  So how do you decide what to do? 

Well, first you have to know what your true objective is, and to define your basic core values.  Without knowing what your objective is, you can find yourself flitting all over the map trying to cover as many bases, and as much ground, as possible in the hope something will happen for you.  Starting a job search without a clear objective is like starting a journey and not having a destination in mind-the trip might be interesting, but it can be tiring, expensive, and in the end you will wind up making little or no progress towards your real goal(s).

So what should your objective be?  No one can define that, but you.  There is no one “right” objective when it comes to jobs.  Your age, education, gender, experience, and current situation all come to play in defining what your objective will be.  Also, important will be your core, or basic values-what’s important to you and perhaps more importantly, what is not.  Only once you have defined these, can you get a clear picture of what your objective is, and where your destination lies.

The process begins with an honest self-evaluation.  Too many of us only learn who we really are, and what we really want late in life, often so late it is too late to do much of anything about it.  That said, it is never too late to engage in the self-evaluation process.  While you may not have enough time, or resources to achieve all of your goals, or perhaps your biggest goals, the sooner you stop wasting time, effort and resources on actions that run counter to your interests and objectives, the more satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment you will find in your life.