Group items tagged

Article by Pamela Mitchell for the New York Times Opinion Pages, 2.10.13 on creating employment and career growth opportunities for young and older workers. Excerpt below speaks to what older workers need to do to be more greatly valued. I do not think most middle to late career workers can afford to let go of the golden handcuffs (HI coverage) to take side trips into entrepreneurial ventures though. Nevertheless, the argument supports the need for WLStudio assisted learning online by women. Excerpt: "Conversely, older workers often need to develop the enhanced technology and communications skills necessary in today's marketplace. But the most important skill an older worker can learn from someone younger is that of continuous, conscious reinvention. Rather than fruitlessly searching for a "safe" job in a "safe" industry (neither of which exist), older workers must embrace the younger generation's flexible perspective. This means structuring their remaining working years as a latticework of skill-development opportunities with multiple employers, along with occasional side trips into entrepreneurship. "

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

Free Ebook from Jacob Morgan: 5 Ways People Over 50 Can Stay Relevant. How Older Workers Can Embrace the Coming Changes and Stay Relevant in the Future of Work. Has info on what does the future of work look like for the 50+ population; The 5 key trends shaping the future of work; Why you need to embrace the coming changes; The 5 ways older workers can embrace these changes and stay relevant in the changing world of work; Specific actions that you can take to help future-proof your career.

tips for older job seekers

call for descriptions of how technology innovations may help older Americans as they age. May 15, 2015 was the deadline.

Phyllis Korkki, NYT, September 26, 2015, not a particularly helpful article but does document that on average it takes longer for older workers to find new jobs.  

Interesting study on social media users by Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 2012, released February 2013, by Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner Summary Twitter attracted 16% of all internet users. They were more likely to be younger (18-29), African American, or Hispanic, and urban. Pinterest attracted 15% of all internet users. They were five times as likely to be women as men, more likely to be wealthier, and rural. Instagram users make up 13% of all internet users. They are more likely to be younger, African-American, Hispanic, and urban. Facebook has 67% of all internet users participating. They are more likely to be younger and more urban. Tumblr has only 6% of all internet users. They are 4x more likely to be younger than older.

Essay written by Heather Kenyon for the Tampa Bay Times, 2.13.13, on the shortage of people with the desired IT skills. Found this via the Encore LinkedIn group. What I find particularly interesting is the employers' desire for critical thinking, communication skills, and "professional curiosity" mentioned below. Nowhere here does it mention the middle aged or older worker; I guess they might have the critical thinking, communication, and curiosity, but not be able to master the IT skills through PD and DIY learning? Excerpt "Topping IT employers' wish lists were candidates who have at least 3-5 years of relevant work experience, bachelor's degrees and capabilities that go beyond the latest technical competencies to show an aptitude for continuous learning and multiple skill acquisition. These include critical thinking and communication skills as well as professional curiosity, which employers seem to find in short supply in the available talent pool. "

great quote on how creativity--following a passion will take you through losing memory, hearing, sight, etc. by Marna Clarke on Senior Planet

Interesting article published 1/6/2014 on Second Acts for baby boomers. Quotes Marc Freedman, Elizabeth Isele (who lived in ME for a long time), and mentions Bevan Rogel. The Boomerworks online service for matching BBs with work opportunities is very interesting--wonder how they are doing? And whether we should try to ally with them? "In 1998, living in Maine, Isele created CyberSeniors, a multilingual nonprofit computer training company that eventually trained more than 28,000 seniors in 24 states. She's led numerous nonprofits over the decades and is now pushing public policy changes and forging connections between organizations to create an "entrepreneur ecosystem." That ecosystem is flourishing in Sarasota. Sarasota's Institute for the Ages, established in 2009 to change the conversation about aging as one of deficit and decline to one about enhancing lives, is a lab for companies and services that want to tap into the needs of older adults. In late 2013, the Institute launched Boomerswork.com, a web-based network to connect freelancers with companies seeking seasoned professionals for project-based work. The program started in Canada and the Institute is the first organization to bring it to the U.S. When the Institute convenes a national convention here in February, entrepreneurship and encore careers will be a large part of the agenda. In addition to a keynote address by Freedman, Isele is leading a workshop on entrepreneurship with Bevon Rogel, who runs a Freedman-related Encore Academy in St. Petersburg to help seniors find meaningful work. For Southwest Florida, which has one of the highest concentrations of seniors in the nation, the idea of an "encore" seems natural. As the rest of the country and world grays, branding this life stage as one that brings years, or potentially decades, more productivity and meaning to life has become an imperative."

blog by Chuck Thompson, June 2009, in Men's Journal. To improve your athletic performance and to feel clearer all the time, start with the most fundamental act of life. Excerpt: "We all come into the world with the ability to take full, unencumbered breaths, but as we get older we forget how to breathe properly," says Don Campbell, a journalist turned wellness expert who champions a new movement among doctors and athletes known as "conscious breathing." A host of challenges conspire against our breathing well, Campbell says: "Poor posture, restrictive clothing, bad habits such as smoking, diets that lead to high blood pressure and racing hearts, increasingly rapid and emotionally stressful lives, lack of exercise, multitasking, polluted environments, and slouching in front of computers are just a few of the things that literally take our breath away, creating a lifestyle that's incongruent with proper breathing." Modern life causes the average person to use about a third of his natural lung capacity, while drawing about 15 breaths a minute." Breathing exercises: Relearn How To Breathe Do this exercise five times a day and you'll start thinking and performing better in no time: 1. Inhale deeply 2. Exhale with a short burst (as if blowing out a candle). This helps activate your diaphragm, which most people don't use. 3. Exhale with a long, slow finish to empty the lungs. Breathlessness comes from not expelling enough CO2. 4. Inhale, filling your lungs from the bottom to the top, instead of taking short sips. Most use a third of their lung capacity. 5. Hold for a moment to allow oxygen to saturate the cells. 6. Exhale slowly and completely. 7. Repeat steps 4 through 6 for five minutes. Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/you-re-breathing-all-wrong-20130227#ixzz2t8BfTHcj Follow us: @mensjournal on Twitter | MensJournal on Facebook

An article for BBC by Maggie Jackson, September 2009, about our inability to pay attention in an age driven by speed through technology "Still, I'm worried. These digital age wonders will be squandered if we can't think critically, research well, and evaluate the data-floods we now have at our fingertips - and these are precisely the skills alarmingly lacking among both digital natives and older generations. Half of college students can't judge the objectivity of a website. Workers now switch tasks every three minutes, half the time interrupting themselves. As David Nicholas points out, we spend our time online 'power-bouncing' from info-snippet to data-point. And this propensity to rely on point-and-click, first-up-on-Google answers, along with our growing unwillingness to wrestle uncomfortably with nuances or uncertainties, keeps us stuck on the surface of the 'information' age. We're too often sacrificing depth for breadth in the ways we make sense of the world. Yes, we've always had 'power bouncing' and distraction. And surfing or multitasking may have an important place in 21st-century society as strategies of learning. But going forward, we need to do much more than hopscotch across the web, split-focused and pulled this way and that by choice distractions. We cannot mistake fragmented, diffused attention as avenues of higher thought. Instead, we need to do better at cultivating - perhaps resuscitating? - deep focus, keen awareness and meta-cognitive 'executive' attention - the skills crucial to creativity and problem-solving. "

interesting take by Margaret Manning on boomers' and even older adults' reliance on technology, great comparison picture showing how many tools that we used to buy are now available in a smartphone.

entropy means everything in the world in a state of decay and decline except for human spirit--staircase of life bringing us into wisdom, contentment, etc. "we can feel unfinished" "task of third act is to finish ourselves" "what determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities" Neural pathways--It's not having experiences that makes us wise, it is reflecting on our experiences that make us wise." "older women are the largest demographic in the world"

Before go very far with elearning, it is important to take a look at what is out there. This is an older article that looks at elearning, which seems to focus on "delivering" content.

Interesting article on the age divide between new guard (Stripe) and old guard companies (Cisco) and why that is so, Yiren Lu, March 12, 2014

This writer, Ronni Bennett, affirms what I believe in the power of the internet for creating new relationships and social networks that help you age well online and off. Blog post on March 25, 2014. "You and I are lucky that our generation has a new tool for a new kind of friendship - the internet. Although it has been awhile since I've mentioned it, I have written a lot about the importance of online and blog friends. (These are several of those stories.) I wholeheartedly believe that the web is a boon for elders and these days, about half the people I hold most dear I have met as a result of this blog."

SeniorNet, an international(?) nonprofit organization run by volunteers out of Ft. Myers, FL to serve adults 55+. Hmmmm.

new study on impact of millennials in workforce--want to use technology for connecting, communicating, and collaborating in much greater numbers than baby boomers do

nice article