Nail Polish, Dumb Bankers, Ferguson and a Column with a Solution!

                                    
Nail Polish

If a cosmetics manufacturing company in Warsaw put out a line of nail polish for sale in the United States, how confusing would it be if they called it “Polish Polish”?

JL

                                                
                                                            

Thirty Days Hath September, April, June and November
If you're one of those people with a calendar watch that shows the date, you've probably forgotten that it needs adjusting (unless you have a really, really expensive one) four times a year ... on the first day of October, December, May and July.  Today is December 1, and not November 31, which doesn't exist.
JL


                                                         

Bankers are Dumb

Some years ago, I used to bank with a local savings bank (1) which was acquired by a Cleveland-based bank (2).  One of the first things the new bank did, along with charging for my previously free senior citizen checking account, was to impose an additional charge for sending me copies of checks.  Speaking to their representatives on the phone and in person got me nowhere.  I did advise the folks to whom I spoke to start looking for other jobs soon because their employer was certain to fail since it was clear that their management didn’t know what they were doing.  

How right  I was!!  A few months later, that bank failed and was forced into a merger with a stronger bank (3).  Meanwhile, the bank I had moved my account to (4) also experienced difficulty and was taken over by the bank I use today (5).  It seems that many bankers didn't know the difference between a sub sandwich and a sub prime mortgage, and wearing a suit, white shirt and tie didn't help them when crunch time (as opposed to lunch time) came.

                                                          

I cannot think of any other business in which most of the firms involved lack the stability to survive over long periods.  Other than the giants such as JPMorgan/Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, all of which are the culminations of many earlier mergers and acquisitions, very few banks in the United States have the management capabilities to stay in business on a long term basis.   

Money and credit are very important ingredients in our economy.  It is sad that those who are in the business of accumulating and lending out money aren’t very smart, or possibly not particularly ethical.  That’s why close Federal oversight of the banking business is important.  Farmers know much more about their business of growing crops than many bankers know about bringing funds into their institutions and investing them safely and properly.

(1)  First Federal Savings

(2)  City National Bank

(3)  PNC Bank

(4)  Wachovia Bank

(5)  Wells Fargo Bank

Jack Lippman

                                                                             
 

More on Ferguson

Well, a grand jury which was empaneled long before the Michael Brown shooting  by a police officer (so it couldn’t have been “fixed” ) has failed to indict that officer.   And just as they did not pass the matter on to a court for a trial because of the weakness of any case brought against the officer, no judge nor jury would have convicted him even if there had been an indictment.  That is the way our justice system works.  So what do the rabble rousers and trouble makers do?  Riot, loot and burn ... like a bunch of babies that can’t get their own way.  

As I pointed out in the previous posting, if young Black males like Michael Brown had received the kind of education which leads to good jobs, he probably would not have been walking the streets that evening, pilfering smokes from a convenience store and refusing a police officer’s request to walk on the sidewalk instead of in the middle of the roadway.   Protesters should be screaming about bettering the job prospects of young Black males and not castigating police officers who are only trying to do their job and stay alive.  And any misguided liberals in the media, government and politics who take the side of the protesters should be ashamed of themselves.  
JL

                                                             

Education for Employment

Peter Coy is the Economics Editor of BloombergBusinessweek, to which I subscribe. (If you had to choose one and only one magazine to read each week, BloombergBusinessweek should be your choice.)  This column by him fits in well with my thoughts in last week’s posting about education leading to good jobs being the solution to the problem of the unemployable young Black male and its effect upon Black family structure.  It’s a bit long, but worth reading!    
 JL

  Peter Coy

Janet Murumba wasn’t always handy with a power drill. The Kenyan immigrant arrived in Seattle at age 30 with a high school education and no skills to speak of. What she did have was ambition. After a couple of years toiling in nursing homes, she set her sights on Boeing. Last year she enrolled in a certificate program in industrial engineering at South Seattle College, which combines vocational education with academics. “In class,” she says, “I could drill for the first time, and it was like, ‘Oh God, it’s happening, it’s real.’ ”

Murumba was lucky to find her way to a college at the forefront of an important trend in American education—close collaboration with business. Employers, schools, and government agencies are learning to work together to fill jobs requiring “middle” skills—more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. The best community colleges and other training programs are preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow, not yesterday. They’re imparting education when and where students are most likely to absorb it, in keeping with a maxim of Lou Mobley, who started executive education at IBM: “Education is effective only at the time of felt need and clear relevance.” And employers are recognizing certificates like Murumba’s that attest to mastery of specific skills, sometimes in lieu of insisting on a two- or four-year diploma.

When it comes to getting people jobs, this isn’t the whole ball of wax, to be sure. Economic growth is essential. And career training is no substitute for general knowledge of the arts and sciences: cosmetology ain’t cosmology. But if this initiative succeeds, it will produce a stronger middle class and a more competitive U.S. economy. It could even help divided places such as Ferguson, Mo., which is seething over the Aug. 9 police shooting of an unarmed black teen. “There are very few problems in life that a good job can’t fix,” says Michael McMillan, chief executive officer of the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, which runs workforce development in Ferguson and other towns.

Shop Class Makes a Comeback

For now, the gulf between what companies need and what workers have to offer remains huge. In most fields, companies have steadily reduced the amount of on-the-job training they provide, says Chauncy Lennon, who leads a $250 million New Skills at Work project for the charitable arm of JPMorgan Chase. “We can’t turn the clock back on that,” he says. In 2011, an Accenture survey of U.S. employees found that only 21 percent had received employer-provided formal training in the previous five years. “A lot of small businesses have this fear that ‘If I train my people, I’ll lose them to ExxonMobil.’ Our research shows the opposite. If you don’t train people, you’re definitely going to lose them,” says Emad Rizkalla, founder and CEO of Bluedrop Performance Learning, an online education company.

Penny-pinching employers have been counting on schools to supply ready-to-go workers, but they’ve been disappointed. While 56 percent of college provosts say their schools are “very effective” at preparing students for work, just 11 percent of business leaders strongly agree that today’s college graduates have the skills and competencies that their companies need, according to separate Gallup polls last year for Inside Higher Ed and the Lumina Foundation. Government hasn’t been filling the gap, either. Inflation-adjusted federal spending on employment and training fell 14 percent over the past decade. The result is that Americans who are desperate for work aren’t equipped for the jobs that employers need to fill. In September there were close to 5 million unfilled job openings in the U.S., even though more than 9 million people were unemployed and looking for work.

There are inklings of progress. “I’m quite optimistic, and the reason I am is going to sound perverse,” says Joe Fuller, a Harvard Business School senior lecturer who co-led a recent project on the middle-skills gap. The reason, he says, is that the situation is intolerable. “There’s a real understanding that what’s happening in the labor market is not good for the country. We’ve got to try something new.”

Why Companies Don't Train Workers Anymore

A cause for optimism is that this summer Congress, after 11 years of bickering, reauthorized the Workforce Investment Act, which covers a range of federal job-training programs. Now called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, it takes effect next year and will reduce bureaucracy and smooth the way for collaboration. It encourages companies in a region to cooperate on developing a detailed list of skills they require so local colleges know what to teach. The list will evolve, of course, and requirements specific to one or two companies won’t be covered. The goal is to get students onto clearly marked “career pathways” that will lead to success, not pointless courses and indebted unemployment.

For companies that supply adjunct faculty, equipment, money, and the focus of management, collaboration with schools is costly yet indispensable. “In an earlier era, [employers] didn’t have to have a deep and sustained partnership to do pretty well,” says John Melville, president of Collaborative Economics, a consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif. “Now things are moving so quickly that there’s no substitute for having that continuous conversation, to work together and adapt.” 

The coolest new idea in workforce development is helping job applicants demonstrate their employability with something other than a bachelor’s degree. Too many employers insist on a four-year degree even when the job doesn’t demand it, using it “as a rough rule-of-thumb screening system to recruit better workers,” says a September report by Burning Glass Technologies, a Boston-based company that parses millions of job listings a week to help employers understand market conditions. For example, 65 percent of the listings it reviews for executive secretaries and executive assistants require a bachelor’s degree, even though only 19 percent of people in those jobs now have a bachelor’s. That overcautiousness hurts applicants and, in the long run, employers.

Burning Glass discovered that demands for unneeded degrees are less common in fields with strong certification or licensing standards, or some other clear measure of job readiness. One new way to demonstrate competence is with “stackable credentials,” which are promulgated by industry groups and granted by schools. Each skill level of the stack builds on what came before. Cisco Systems offers credentials through the Cisco Networking Academy, which takes on 1 million students a year through 9,000 academies in 170 countries.

Some of the Most Sought-After Tech Jobs Don't Require a College Degree

Using stackable credentials for career advancement is spreading from tech to health care, manufacturing, and logistics. Apprenticeships, which once were largely for union positions in construction, are coming to other fields and are no longer just for union jobs. The Obama administration says 87 percent of apprentices are employed after completing their programs, and the average starting wage for apprenticeship graduates is more than $50,000. In the community colleges that get it, there’s no shame in collaborating closely with local industries. Des Moines Area Community College may not boast of Rhodes Scholars, but it does produce Accumold Scholars and Vermeer Scholars, who, as the names suggest, are equipped to work at two leading Des Moines-area manufacturers. “I’m very excited about this,” says Rob Denson, president of the college. “It’s high maintenance and hard work, but the payoff is magnificent.”

I interviewed Murumba last spring shortly after she earned her industrial manufacturing certificate. In September, I got an e-mail from Leslie Haynes, director of the Seattle Colleges’ Pathways to Careers initiative. She wrote, “I’m thrilled to report that Janet Murumba completed a second certificate in composites and was just hired by Boeing to work on the Triple Seven at the plant here in Seattle: a dream realized.” That’s what the new wave of education has the potential to deliver.

Peter Coy

                                                           
                                                   

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