Career Trends

This resource is great for entrepreneurs. More specifically, check out the "Planning" section. Topics covered include: learning how to conduct market research, finding stats and analyses related to your chosen field, read up on economic trends in your industry, learn about where to find your target demographic audience across the country, and a site selection tool to help you find the best location for your business to start or grow.

In Gratton's chapters 5 through 7 this week I especially enjoyed the thoughts she expressed about innovation and how technology will facilitate creativity and innovation in and between workplaces. It reminded me of a Creativity/ Innovation conference that I attended for 2 years in 2011 & 2012 in Ontario. A group of over 100 creativity and innovation professionals from corporations like Disney, organizations like Facilitators without borders and entrepreneurs like those from FlipSkills & ThinkX come together for 4 days to share the latest and the greatest with each other. It's worth a look and I'd encourage you to register.

This website examines the Frasier Institute of Canada, it relates to the InnoCentive program Gratton speaks about in his book. They work to solve various problems in Canada and around the world by uniting people from various backgrounds.

Assessing our mental health is not as simple to do as measuring our physical health. There are no scales or endurance tests that rate mental fitness. But with the help of the Canadian Mental Health Association's Mental Health Meter, you can reflect on your unique strengths and identify areas where your level of mental fitness could be improved to help you cope with all of life's up and downs.

As a volunteer for the CMHA, I am an advocate for their website and useful resources! As part of this week's readings on what we are looking for in our working lives and what trade offs we will need to make, I feel that these resources are a helpful read. Take the time to see where you can make improvements to your mental fitness! I like to schedule "Christina time" every week :)

I found this article to be very interesting to read. It truly captures the idea that Generation Y is now having to reverse the impacts of capitalist greed on both the global community, as well as the global environment.

Of course an online quiz is no substitute for proper counselling, but this resource can help people to start thinking about whether their work/life balance in working for them or whether they should consider changes so they can get the most from their career. I chose this resource not only because of this week's discussion post topic, but also because of Chapter 6 of The Shift, where a healthy work/life balance is shown to be an essential part of the Crafted Future narrative.

If you go to work every week with the mantra "I hate my job!," this week's blog post is for you! This is the story of Amanda, one of 8 million people who have taken the MAPP career test. Amanda was working in a job she hated -- a retail job in an electronics store.

This website relates to this weeks readings about figuring out what you really want out of your career. Therefore, this career test will help people figure out what kind of trade-offs they can live with. For example, working with people as opposed to working with things.

Interesting article about trends among Generation Y workers

What to learn how to establish a career in this new economy? Look no further than the current generation of young people - that is, those age 20 and younger. To uncover some interesting revelations about the newest generation, Gen Z, I partnered with the third-largest staffing organization in the United States, Randstad US, on a global study analyzing how Gen Z's views of the workplace compared to Gen Y's.

Distributed Proofreaders is a website that anyone can join, relating to the idea of co-creation in Chapter 5. OCR software reads the text of old books. People compare the software's output with the image of the original text to correct errors and formatting. Many languages are represented and many regional or other types of communities exist. Link to annotated version: https://diigo.com/04ed2x

This is a great article that relates to Miguel in Gratton's book. Miguel and his colleagues from around the globe are intuitive about the world around them and want to save it! This article is saying that Generation Y want to save the world. They are the most educated generation, understand that global warming is real, and also want to learn and make a difference in the world.

This article takes an interesting look at how Nordic countries are reshaping their economies after the economic lows in 2007-08. Interestingly enough, much has been changing since Economics for Everyone was published in 2008. Very interesting read!

Every dog has its day, and the same applies to economic theory. Today's dog is neo-liberalism, a policy framework developed by economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, which found political expression under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

One of the main themes this week in the book "Economics For Everyone" is the term neoliberalism. Take a look at this article by the globe and mail. It talks extensively about how privatization, free trade and deregulation are changing society.

Average household expenditures in Ontario in 2012 was $78,495 whereas the total median income of Ontario census families in 2012 was $74,890. This can be seen in this second link: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil108a-eng.htm This relates to chapter 9 of Stanford's book as he states "most households spend essentially all their income on consumption, and hence their savings are non-existent" (114). This can be seen with the two figures above. If you take the two numbers, households are actually spending more than they are making.

Knowing who your competitors are, and what they are offering, can help you to make your products, services and marketing stand out. It will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your own initiatives.

I think this link relates to this weeks talk about competitiveness in the economy. It looks understanding who a companies competitors are as well as actions that can be taken to improve your own competitiveness.

This article describes ways in which small independent artisans can fight back against the competition of large megacompanies. Although in Chapter 9 Stanford mentions that independent businesses are negligible in the large scheme of things, I think it is interesting to look at competition from this point of view. Also, upon reading this article, I think that these kinds of more personal purchasing interactions may become more popular in the coming world as Etsy is another online marketplace, similar to ones mentioned by Gratton in The Shift.

In Chapter 8 of Economics for Everyone, Jim Stanford brings up on multiple occasions the need for labour extraction, and the use of the carrot and stick (reward and punishment) model in all businesses. As soon as I was reading this it made me think of a book I read last year by Alfie Kohn on Punishment and Reward. Kohn believes that punishments are just as bad as rewards, and that using either reduces happiness, and productivity. The first section of the book focuses on the research showing that the use of both punishments and rewards is detrimental to people's ability to do good work. In the second section he looks specifically at punishments and rewards in 3 places, the workplace, the school, and the home. In the third section he suggests new methods of motivation for all three places. When I origionally read this I was focused on his his ideas about school, however he his theories are equally important to the world of work!

This is a well-research and balanced article from the British magazine 'The Economist". It provides an accurate overview of the status of online learning. It's shortfall is that it is primarily focussed on US data.

Maclean's article describing some pitfalls of American capitalism and how the Canadian more socialized system differs (and how it makes for fewer inequalities and a stronger nation). Published at macleans.ca, but written from an American perspective, and covering everything from unemployment to quality of life to a brief introduction into why the States fear the word "socialism".