NoVa Workforce and Education Network

Friday, July 25, 2014

Clark Howard - Highest Paying Degrees

By Clark Howard - ClarkHoward.com

Two new reports provide ammunition to rebut the many complaints you hear these days that college isn't worth the cost.

Highest-paying 2-year degrees...

Monster.com has a report that details the highest paying two-year degrees. They are as follows:

Registered nurse
Dental hygienist
Respiratory therapist
Computer programmer
Telecom Installer
Industrial Engineering Technician
Police officer
HVAC mechanic
Paralegal

The reality is there are professions, at all levels of education, where the earning power is higher and the job possibilities are greater. We'd all do well to remember this the next time we hear somebody saying college isn't worth it.

If you're looking for the highest-paid college majors, here's the latest list (expressed as starting salaries) according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers:

Petroleum Engineering: $93,500
Computer Engineering: $71,700
Chemical Engineering: $67,600
Computer Science: $64,800
Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering: $64,400
Mechanical Engineering: $64,000
Electrical/Electronics and Communications Engineering: $63,400
Management Information Systems/Business: $63,100
Engineering Technology: $62,200
Finance: $57,400

So all those guys (and gals, to a lesser degree) in high school who were math and science nerds that you thought were such losers are the ones making all the dough!

As you can see, the basic idea here is to go with the hard sciences. If they interest you, the hard sciences will afford you career options, career mobility and the greatest earning power.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Government Career Guide

From GovLoop:

How to Find, Land, Keep and Leap in Your Government Career

In this guide you will find:

50+ tips on how to land your first government gig
Expert insights on getting your next promotion
Cut through the bureaucracy and become a senior executive

http://direct.govloop.com/careerguide

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Clark Howard: Highest Paying Degrees

Highest Paying 2-Year Degrees

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Innovations in Remote Digital Workforce

Several years ago, when Serge Knystautas was building his Web site business, PrestoSports, he faced a typical start-up dilemma: He badly needed software developers, and he was finding it hard to lure such in-demand workers when he couldn’t promise them a steady paycheck.

So Knystautas turned to oDesk, an online platform for hiring, managing and paying remote freelance workers of all kinds. From his Rockville, Md., headquarters, he scooped up developers based in Russia, China, Colombia and elsewhere to help PrestoSports build its system for hosting Web sites for hundreds of college teams.

“Telecommuting on steroids,” Knystautas calls it.

PrestoSports has grown since those early days, now working with some 700 colleges, but oDesk remains an important part of its business model. More than a dozen technologists in Latin America today work for PrestoSports via oDesk, collaborating among themselves and with workers in the Washington area.

Knystautas never meets oDesk workers before contracting with them, but the site has ways of reassuring him that he’ll get his money’s worth. It asks freelancers to pass tests to verify that they’re qualified for specific jobs. It shows reviews of their work for previous oDesk clients. And once freelancers are on the clock for Knystautas, an oDesk tool offers him screenshots and minute-by-minute logs of their progress, making it easy to ensure that they are on task.

Crampell: The Big Freeze on Hiring

I have some good news, and I have some bad news.

First, the good news: Employers have more job openings today than they’ve had at any time since the Great Recession began.

The bad news: Employers may be posting jobs, but they’re taking longer than ever before to fill them.

It now takes 24 working days for the average job opening to be filled. That’s the longest hiring delay since at least 2001, the first year for which numbers are available, according to a recent report from Dice Holdings based on research by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman and John C. Haltiwanger. To give you some context, when the recovery began five years ago, the average opening took about 16 days to fill.

This means employers are dragging their feet making hires, despite having 10 million jobless workers to choose from (not to mention many more already-employed applicants looking to job-hop). I’ve spoken to workers who have been called back for as many as nine or 10 interviews for a given position, only to be told at the end of the process that the firm had decided to hold off on making a decision “for now.”

Samuelson: The Jobs Mystery

With the government’s latest monthly employment report, the American job market has entered a bewildering good news/bad news phase. The good news is that May’s increase of 217,000 payroll jobs finally puts total employment above its pre-recession peak. There are 8.8 million more jobs than at the low point. Unemployment has dropped from 10 percent to 6.3 percent. Chief White House economist Jason Furman points outthat monthly job gains have averaged nearly 200,000 in the past year and are trending up.

And the bad news? There’s plenty of that too. Economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution notes that getting to the pre-recession employment level took six years and four months, far longer than the previous post-World War II record of four years after the 2001 recession. Not only has job creation been slow, but the number of people wanting more work remains discouragingly high. To the 9.8 million officially unemployed must be added another 7 million; they say they would like a job but — because they are not looking — are not counted in the labor force. Finally, there are 7.3 million part-time workers who would like longer hours.

Unemployment's Long-Term Problem: SHRM looks at LTU’s Causes/Solutions

For my first post on the NOVA STEM Blog, I am going to take "the easy way out" and present a link to a great article posted on SHRM’s website by Joseph Coombs, SHRM’s Senior Analyst for Workforce Trends.

This article takes a hard look at this issue (plus I am quoted in it!)

Click here:

http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/staffingmanagement/Articles/Pages/Unemployment-Long-Term-Problem.aspx