Archive for the ‘Industry-Specific’ Category

Baltimore Healthcare Jobs Added by Bravo

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

One organization is helping to create hundreds of Baltimore healthcare jobs.

Bravo Health Inc., a Medicare Advantage plan dedicated to providing beneficiaries to high-quality, cost-effective healthcare, recently announced that it will keep its headquarters and operations center in Southeast Baltimore.

“Bravo’s decision to stay in Baltimore and expand their operations is great news for the people of this city,” Mayor Sheila Dixon said . “As we are weathering this difficult economy, it is important to remind people that Baltimore is a business-friendly city, and a great place to work and raise a family.”

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AT&T Plans To Add 3000 Jobs In 2009

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

AT&T plans to invest $17 billion to $18 billion in 2009, in line with its 2007 capital expenditures of $17.7 billion and expected to exceed the planned investment of any other U.S. telecom company.

Approximately two-thirds of AT&T’s 2009 investment will extend and enhance the company’s wireless and wired broadband networks to provide more coverage, speed and capacity. To support increased customer demand in mobility, broadband and video, the company plans to add nearly 3,000 jobs in 2009. However, as previously announced, the company expects to reduce jobs in other areas — primarily wireline — due to economic pressures, a more streamlined organizational structure and continued shift among residential customers from wired voice services to wireless and broadband.

“Demand for broadband continues to grow as new applications emerge and customers embrace them, leading to data traffic on our network growing more than 50 percent year over year on average,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and chief executive officer. “We expect demand will only escalate when the larger economy rebounds, and AT&T’s continued strong network investment will help ensure that we’re fully ready to support the next wave of economic growth. We recognize the continuing importance of investing in critical network infrastructure, which plays a key role in driving commerce, innovation and job growth.”

As providers and developers increasingly focus on tapping the potential of the mobile Internet, AT&T’s broadband investment priorities include multiple projects designed to enhance its 3G network. With 3G services now available in nearly 350 U.S. metropolitan areas, the company will focus in 2009 on enhancing coverage and reliability across this footprint, including the planned addition of more than 2,100 new cell sites across the country. Additionally, AT&T will expand 3G service to 20 new markets this year.

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Obama May Create Higher Demand for Heavy Equipment Operators

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

President Barack Obama’s proposed Stimulus Plan is expected to create over four million new jobs in the United States if passed by Congress, and that’s good news for people who want to move into the construction industry in 2009.

According to The New York Times, the Obama proposal states that nearly 400,000 jobs could be created by building and repairing roads, schools and bridges. That means there will be a demand for heavy equipment operators and Heavy Equipment Training, creating a need for training programs such as those offered by the National Heavy Equipment Operators School.

“President Obama has hinted that the entire USA infrastructure will be rebuilt. This will cause a tremendous demand for heavy equipment careers,” says David Rose, spokesman for National Training Schools.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, about three out of four heavy equipment operators worked in the construction industry. Many equipment operators worked in heavy construction, building highways, bridges, or railroads in every section of the United States.

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Education jobs on the rise in Texas

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Anyone seeking a career in education may find jobs in Texas.

Texas teacher jobs and other education-related jobs are on the rise. The Texas Workforce Informer states the educational services sector employed 1,043,500 people in 2004, and is expected to employ 1,389,650 by 2014, an increase of 33.2 percent.

According to the Texas Industry Profiles Web site, industries in the education services sector provide instruction and training in a variety of subjects. The instruction and training is provided by specialized establishments, such as schools, colleges, universities and training centers.

The industry is structured according to the level and type of educational services, for example, elementary and secondary schools, junior colleges and colleges, universities and professional schools provide individuals with diplomas, associate degrees and degrees. The other industry groups are based on the type of instruction or training offered, and the levels are usually not as formal. The establishments are often specialized, and may offer instruction for a limited subject matter.

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the wrong tool for the wrong job

Monday, November 6th, 2006

Maybe it’s because DC is such a lawyer-heavy town, or maybe it’s a reflection of how some people who used Frontpage to build a website once want to hang out their shingles as web developers but we’re experiencing sort of an odd but more frequently recurring issue here at the MISF.

My office, as you know, focuses on Creative and Interactive professionals- designers, web developers, information architects, etc. Our talent often have their hands in some of the most critical products of our clients- clients which include PR and communications firms, design studios, and web shops. As such, it is of course vitally important to the clients that the work be of high quality. (That’s not to say that it’s not important to the clients of my colleagues who focus on administrative talent, but there’s often more riding, in both a legal and a profit sense, on the work of our talent.)

As the specialty has grown and as more and more staffing firms have gotten into this space, it stands to reason that there would be occasional screwups from the talent placed. Code doesn’t work, files not placed where they should be, confidential work leaked out all over town, and worst of all, flat-out dishonest talent who misrepresent the work they do for the client. It’s an unwelcome fact that those of us in staffing hesitate to talk about in public- some people are temps for a reason.

In response, we’re noticing a marked upswing in the number of clients who want us to sign detailed and complex contracts. Fair enough, but the contracts always read like Professional Services Agreements, of the type that the client might itself have had to sign for one of its own clients.

The problem is that this approach doesn’t work for a staffing situation. I understand that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for the screwdriver anyway. A professional services agreement is fine for when you are contracting the services of a web development studio (whether that studio is comprised of one more more people) that will work independently of your own staff, and who is accountable to a list of deliverables.

A temporary web developer brought in through a staffing agency, however, is much more like the web developers on your own staff, who work under supervision of your own project managers and tech leads, and who can be fired for incompetence much more easily than a vendor with whom you have a contract.

A rule of thumb: if you want your staffing firm to sign a contract that warrants that there will be no “trojan horses or back doors” in the code the talent write because you don’t have anyone on staff who can read the code for him or herself, what you need is not a staffing firm, it’s a web development studio.

But meanwhile, I’m wondering if anyone else is experiencing this trend. I’m looking at you, Aquent and TalentZoo bloggers, I’m looking at you in particular. Does this happen to you, and if so, how do you handle it?

Posted in For Employers, Industry-Specific | No Comments »

social media? like, over beer?

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

I went to the inaugural meeting of the DC Chapter of the Social Media Club last night, hosted at the local offices of Fleishman Hillard. Those of you who have been following for a while already know about my frustration with going to these events which purport to discuss the impact of social media (whatever that is) and then turn into Blogging 101, in which some old fogey has to be taught what a trackback is, or that it is indeed possible for a company blog to link to a company press release.

So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I went in to this thing, hoping against hope that it would be valuable and interesting to someone like me, who has been blogging for several years in one form or another, and who is interested in the applications of it from some perspective other than, “You mean people WRITE? On the INTERNET?”

I was not disappointed. It was a roomful of people who “get it,” to, I suspect, varying degrees, but who nonetheless could contribute meaningfully to the conversation, whether from the individual blogger perspective, a marketing perspective, or a public relations perspective. Refreshing. I’ve been saying for quite some time that it’s as if DC woke up 8 months ago and figured out that the Internet was useful, so it’s nice to see that DC has been a quick study.

I work most commonly with the kinds of clients who were represented in that room, so it was also helpful for me as a third-party-recruiter to learn more about a business that I have otherwise only the barest of backgrounds in. Dinner afterward was equally educational- a couple of advertising/marketing/PR types sat around with beers in their hands, talking about their work. Very interesting, and I hope they weren’t too offended at my BLATANT listening-in.

My major food-for-thought from the evening’s conversation was this:

PR and marketing have a terrible reputation among people, and bloggers in particular. Fundamentally, however, they exist so that companies and public figures have the opportunity to have their side of issues heard, and to match the value of a product or service with the people who will benefit most from that value, respectively. These are intrinsically reasonable, and even beneficial goals. The problem is that so much of PR and marketing has become about “message control” and “driving the conversation,” when the whole joy of “social media” is that the conversation is much less controllable now. We’re people, we don’t LIKE having our conversations driven by others, after all.

But that said, what DO we want from PR? Are we prepared to stop freaking out every time someone in PR or marketing wants to engage with us? We don’t want control, but aside from that, we can’t really tell PR and marketing what we DO want. So maybe we ought to dial-down the knee-jerk hatred a little bit long enough to ask ourselves what we would prefer? If blogging is supposed to help companies engage their customers directly, we should, you know, figure out how to let them.

Posted in Industry-Specific, Meta | No Comments »

ZoomInfo = OldInfo

Friday, October 20th, 2006

I keep hearing all my recruitosphere buddies falling all over themselves to talk about how great ZoomInfo is and how much easier it make it for them to network and find candidates, and how if you say something on the Internet that you regret, ZoomInfo will surely find it.

Meh. So I go to check out my own summary a few months ago, and it’s wildly, woefully out of date. No worries, I say to myself, I’m sort of re-strategizing my personal brand and rearranging some web stuff, and I’m sure ZoomInfo will catch up.

Well, today, 6 months later, it hasn’t. It hasn’t found my new online resume. It hasn’t found my LinkedIn profile. It hasn’t found my name change, even though it’s on every one of my sites. If you look for Tiffany Bridge, you don’t find me. If you look for Tiffany Baxendell Bridge, it’ll find Tiffany Baxendell and ignore the Bridge.

People, I am all over the damn Internet. I am not difficult to find. I put that stuff out there so that it will BE FOUND. And yet the most recent information ZoomInfo had for me was a cached version of my MPOJ bio that’s at least 5 months old. One of the other references was from a staff listing at one of my old jobs. My name was taken off that staff listing three years ago when I left that job…

And yes, of course I can (and did) claim my summaries and update them (somewhat, haven’t finished yet), but surely ZoomInfo can’t seriously expect that everyone is going to take the time to do this, not when I’ve already had to take the time to fill out my profile on heaven-knows-how-many other profile-and-networking sites. It seems like it would be a lot easier to just not act like the Wayback Machine.

And then, even after I filled all that in, ZoomInfo has the same serious shortcoming that I’ve been taking LinkedIn to task for:

It has no way whatsoever to handle a person’s name change.

This is not rocket science. A significant portion of the population changes their names at least once, and then a significant portion of THAT population changes them again later.

Why is it so difficult for the makers of social software to add in a little extra functionality for “former names used” or “some people know me as?” Why, once I have claimed a summary at ZoomInfo and confirmed my identity, can I not change the name on that summary? My last name is not Baxendell anymore, and I’m working very hard to get that change reflected on all my various web identities, and yet LinkedIn and ZoomInfo refuse to add this one simple feature that would allow people who knew me at my previous jobs AND people who have met me recently to find the same information about me.

At least at LinkedIn I can include both names in the last name field and the search will find them both, but what about people who aren’t using their pre-married names anymore professionally? Should the people they knew earlier in their career or went to college with not be able to reconnect with them?

Maybe if the tools were better more people would, you know, USE them.

UPDATE: Lest anyone think I’m just pickin’ on ZoomInfo and LinkedIn, let me also point out that Jobster doesn’t accommodate former names that well, either. Hey JGo, can you do something about that?

Posted in Industry-Specific, Meta, Networking | 2 Comments »

I can’t even get cell reception in my house…

Monday, October 16th, 2006

When I was a kid, the agent who handled my parents’ (and my grandparents’, and my neighbors’) life insurance policies was the type of agent who still came around once every couple of months to pick up the premium payments from his customers. I remember one visit very distinctly, when he pulled out a laptop and mini printer and punched up a receipt for my parents right there, instead of handing them a handwritten carbon copy like usual. My mother commented on it, and I remember him saying, “Yeah, they just gave us all these things. It’s great, you just plug it into a phone line at night and it sends everything in to the company. I like it, because it’s technology that doesn’t eliminate anyone’s job. It just makes mine easier.”

I remembered this conversation because I read this article about how cellphones are revolutionizing the livelihoods of Indian fishermen, who are able to use them to increase competition between wholesalers, resulting in better prices, let the wholesalers know they’re coming, and even speed up the process of getting their boats fixed if they break down at sea.

I’ve always been a raging capitalist (I’m not sure you can be a recruiter if you aren’t proudly a capitalist pig), but also try to be conscious about the areas in which practicality prevents individuals from taking full benefit of the free market. Indian fisherman are an excellent example- it’s hard to take advantage of competition between wholesalers when your fish are going to spoil and you don’t have time to go from port to port, looking for the best price.

So it’s always fascinating to me to watch how technology alters the system in favor of empowering the little guy in the capitalist equation. Does it make a person’s job easier? Does it help them to make more money? Does it reduce their ties to a physical work location?

This is not to say that this is always the effect of technology- sometimes the efficiency it brings is by automating tasks that humans used to do- but it’s interesting to me, free market technophile that I am, to see it go the other way.

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Posted in Industry-Specific, Workplace Ephemera | No Comments »

Web 2.OH YEAH!

Monday, July 10th, 2006

Here’s a good crib sheet on Web 2.0 so you non-techies can have conversations about it at cocktail parties. As an added bonus, I’m cited on the last page of the article. Woo.

(Oh yeah, and welcome, Washington Business Journal readers.)

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In which Tiff’s eyes are opened.

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

Carly Lesser (who I had the distinct pleasure of meeting last week at Beyond Blogging 2006) blogs over at the CDG blog about Flash and its ramifications in client projects.

I found it particularly interesting because while Stephanie and I collectively specialize in both traditional IT positions (help desk, network engineers, sysadmins, etc.) and interactive media (web developers, project managers, information architects), she’s the one with the interactive agency experience and I’m the one with the traditional IT experience. So while I understand the technologies underlying interactive media, and I’ve worked in companies whose product was a web-based application, an agency environment is still pretty foreign to me.

I enjoyed Carly’s post because it gave me a glimpse into the inner workings of a diverse agency team- I understand the Google-friendliness issues of Flash, for example, but I’ve never given much thought to who on the team would be most opposed to using Flash for what reason, beyond the basic “designers don’t understand the technical ramifications of their ideas” and “programmers don’t understand design” stereotypes.

So thanks for the lesson, Carly, and I’ll enjoy reading more of the CDG blog. Aside from my personal interest in web development and design, things like this will make me a better recruiter for those clients and talent.

Posted in Industry-Specific | 1 Comment »