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The lifetime employment system in Japan offers employees a high degree of job security. The characteristics, foundations, extent and effects of the system are examined, as are some present strains upon it. The system's implications for education and for careers guidance in Japan are then explored. The structure of guidance services in schools, in employment offices, in universities and colleges, and for adults, are described, and are related both to the lifetime employment system and to other features of Japanese society.

Companies are finding it harder to hire and retain younger people, and applications at business schools are plunging. 70 MILLION STRONG.  Nick Hahn, a managing director at Vivaldi Partners, a New York consulting firm, remembers just a decade ago when he was looking for a job, how most college graduates would have given almost anything for a top-paying spot at a big-name investment bank or consulting firm. It was taken for granted that to climb the corporate ladder they would all work 80-plus-hour weeks. That's beginning to change. Increasingly, "today, college grads ask: 'what can your firm do for me' to help them lead a more purposeful and meaningful life," says Hahn.

Mine wasn't a particularly sociable apartment building, but wi-fi transcends urban alienation.

They've got the smarts and the confidence to get a job, but increasing numbers of the millennial generation — those in their mid-20s and younger — are deciding corporate America just doesn't fit their needs. So armed with a hefty dose of optimism, moxie and self-esteem, they are becoming entrepreneurs. "People are realizing they don't have to go to work in suits and ties and don't have to talk about budgets every day," says Ben Kaufman, 20, founder of a company that makes iPod accessories. "They can have a job they like. They can create a job for themselves."

"They want to create a custom life and create the kind of career that fits around the kind of life they want," says Bruce Tulgan, the founder of RainmakerThinking, a management training firm in New Haven, Conn., and an author specializing in generational diversity in the workplace. Experts say these children of the baby-boom generation, also known as Gen Y or echo boomers, are taking to heart a desire for the kind of work-life balance their parents didn't have. They see being their own boss as a way to resolve the conflict. So now they're pressing ahead with new products or services or finding a new twist on old-style careers. They're at the leading edge of a trend toward entrepreneurship that has bubbled for decades and now, thanks in large part to technology, is starting to surge. "It is a fun-loving generation," says Ellen Kossek, a Michigan State University professor in East Lansing who has spent 18 years researching workplace flexibility. "They view work as part of life, but they don't live to work the way we were socialized as boomers. There is a real mismatch between what the young generation wants and what employers are offering."

Those who have studied generations in the workplace, such as author David Stillman of Minneapolis, do have some insights. Stillman, who co-wrote the 2002 book When Generations Collide, say these young workers have very different ideas than earlier generations. "This generation has the group-think mentality," he says. "When you are raised to collaborate at home, then you are taught how to do that in middle school and practice it in college, you show up at work saying 'Where's my team?' They're just comfortable working with peers." Many go into business with friends.

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid. Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old  UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that.  talk and  finger became ICQ,  LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups,  ls became (the original) Yahoo!,  find and  grep became Google,  rn became Bloglines,  pine became Gmail,  mount is becoming S3, and  bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is  wall for the web. I love that.

This 'Introduction to Online Communities' has been written to give an overview of the different types of online community, what makes an online community, and the various community tools. Every community is unique and it is difficult to give a guaranteed recipe for success, but I will cover common factors found in every good online community. It is also worth remembering that as in real life communities take time to grow, and will continually evolve. This is the challenge of online Community Management.

K-Log guru and advocate John Robb presents the benefits of K-Logs as:1) Answers. K-Logs make it easy for people to find answers to problems they need to solve. A simple search of K-Log archives will quickly find an answer if available.2) Experts. Because K-Logs organize knowledge and information byindividual, it is easy to find people with the expertise you need. They can be found via search, cross linking from other K-Loggers, or community tools.3) Organized archive. K-Logs provide a permanent archive of all posted knowledge. Employees may come and go, but their knowledge remains.He sells the economic benefit of K-Logs as:1) Shorter time to find. Giving you faster, more accurate responses to customer inquiries, etc. 2) More accurate decision making. Use of experts, revealed by K-Logs, will improve the quality of corporate decision making. Improved knowledge transfer will expose wasteful projects and inaccurate assumptions. It will also unlock hidden knowledge resources within the company.3) Faster training for new employees. New employees can quickly find the information, context, and insight they need to become productive quickly. A new team member can synch up quickly with an ongoing project by reading the team's K-Logs.4) Simplified management and improved corporate control. The elimination of what is that person doing (?) or how is that project progressing (?) questions that plague managers.

K Log noun. See: Knowledge Log. Also: Klog, K-Blog. K-logs are usually internal blogs (i.e. on an intranet and not visible to the general public) and are used as highly effective knowledge management systems and/or internal company communication systems (such as project blogs, for example).

If you are blogging with your students, or you are thinking of blogging with your students, I encourage you to not think of blogs as a writing assignment, but instead to look at them as conversations. Conversations that can give you both feedback about a lesson, or continue a conversation well after a lesson has ended. Blogging brings a new dimension to the classroom. You cannot blog and not change the structure of your classroom.

Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organizations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. Lifelong learning throws the axiom "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" out the door. Lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts: at work, at home and through leisure activities, not just through formal channels such as school and higher education. Lifelong education is a form of pedagogy often accomplished through distance learning or e-learning, continuing education, homeschooling or correspondence courses. It also includes postgraduate programs for those who want to improve their qualification, bring their skills up to date or retrain for a new line of work. Internal corporate training has similar goals, with the concept of lifelong learning used by organisations to promote a more dynamic employee base, better able to react in an agile manner to a rapidly changing climate. In later life, especially in retirement, continued learning takes diverse forms, crossing traditional academic bounds and including recreational activities. One of the reasons why lifelong education has become so important is the acceleration of scientific and technological progress. Despite the increased duration of primary, secondary and university education (14-18 years depending on the country), the knowledge and skills acquired there are usually not sufficient for a professional career spanning three or four decades. Contents

A new open-source social networking software gains its power to be used in schools and other organizations. University of Brighton was the first to introduce Elgg, a social network to help teachers in their interaction with children and use social networks like MySpace, blogs and document.write(MLnkMk('=b!isfg>#iuuq;00efm/jdjp/vt#!!ubshfu>#`cmbol#?Efm/jdjp/vt=0b?'))Del.icio.us feeds for educational purposes. If earlier, the access to these sites were seen as a an obstacle and were banned, now many teachers see it a helpful tool as this attracts great interest among teenagers. Every participant taking part in the project will have a blog with profile page, and have an opportunity to share photos, ideas and communicate with friends in online communities.

"Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today's workforce," says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York. "They've grown up questioning their parents, and now they're questioning their employers. They don't know how to shut up, which is great, but that's aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, 'Do it and do it now.' " That speak-your-mind philosophy makes sense to Katie Patterson, an assistant account executive at Edelman Public Relations in Atlanta. The 23-year-old, who hails from Iowa and now lives with two roommates in a town home, likes to collaborate with others, and says many of her friends want to run their own businesses so they can be independent. "We are willing and not afraid to challenge the status quo," she says. "An environment where creativity and independent thinking are looked upon as a positive is appealing to people my age. We're very independent and tech savvy."

All of these programs link to myriad open APIs--advanced program interfaces that serve as building blocks for new applications--and data on the Web from Amazon (Research), Google (Research), and others. Thus can the information on your desktop be fused with the entire Web through a powerful and increasingly invisible bridge between the two.

It's been a long time -- all the way back to the dawn of desktop computing in the early 1980s -- since software coders have had as much fun as they're having right now. But today, browser-based applications are where the action is. A killer app no longer requires hundreds of drones slaving away on millions of lines of code. Three or four engineers and a steady supply of Red Bull is all it takes to rapidly turn a midnight brainstorm into a website so hot it melts the servers.

n 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software be replaced by open source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world.[2] Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source software license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand how it works. Open source software generally allows anybody to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it. The aim of open source is to let the product be more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, reliable or simply accessible, while it is still marketable. The Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open-source philosophy, and further defines a boundary on the usage, modification and redistribution of open-source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright. These include rights on usage, modification and redistribution. Several open-source software licenses have qualified within the boundary of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent example is the popular GNU General Public License (GPL). While open source presents a way to broadly make the sources of a product publicly accessible, the open-source licenses allow the authors to fine tune such access.

Flexible manufacturing systems, team work with decentralisation of decision-making, integration of tasks and multiple allocation across functional barriers demand a skilled work force prepared for continuous learning and adaptation. It is common to see a younger, well-educated and trained work force as being required for such a production environment. A closer empirical look at most of the internal labour markets in this study shows that existing labour market structures do not match this image. Existing labour markets consist very often of an older (and ageing) labour force with relatively low skills and with resistance to continuous training. These structural features have, over the last ten years — despite the existence of costly early retirement measures and new entries into internal labour markets — not much improved, and in many cases have even deteriorated.